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Hello Tguide,

To get around the long load time you could use a view all page as the canonical page and rely on a script to load more content as the user scrolls down. Sites like Twitter and Pinterest do this almost infinitely. Look up infinite scrolling and lazy loading as good places to start. However, this may be difficult to implement for some sites.

If you are worried about load time for a view all page you can use rel next and rel prev tags on your paginated pages. This should work just fine in most cases.

Moz will continue to tell you about the duplicate titles and descriptions, but you can ignore that warning if you have set up rel next prev or view all canonical correctly.

All of those subdomains should have a robots.txt file that disallows the search engine from accessing them in the first place. In that sense, it doesn't matter which you choose for SEO. Or am I missing something?

Hello Nico.

I think I have some good news for you. Unless there is live link to those URLs (internal or external) there is no need to redirect them. In my experience more than 99% (an educated guess) of product pages do not have any external links. So assuming you have not cleaned up your internal linking (if you haven't, you should) there really is no need for the 301 and you can just let it resolve as a 404.

As long as the old URLs return a 404 status code they should be removed from the index within a matter of weeks. However, if they don't have any external or internal links - again, most of those pages probably do not - it may take months for Google to decide to recrawl an indexed page without any link paths to it. Googlebot couldn't just "crawl" its way there, but would have to retrieve the URL from a database just to check it, which would take longer. I have a tested and recommended solution to this issue, which can be found here on the Moz.com blog.

Hello Rox,

I hate the idea of you going away unsatisfied with unanswered questions. Let's try to work through this. Let me approach it from a different way, as I may have misunderstood what you were asking.

https://sub.domain.com/quote/?affiliate_id=xxx

https://aff_xxx_affname.domain.com/quote/

The first URL is the one I'd go with because it's easy to rel canonical back to the base URL and you're keeping it all on one subdomain. The second version creates a new subdomain for every affiliate, which I don't think would be a good thing.

Please let me know if I have understood your question this time.

Thanks!

Nico,

Great question. Technically speaking, a permanent 301 redirect should stay up indefinitely. However, I have heard more than one Google employee say publicly that they should stay up for "at least a year". At that point I think you can take them down and the destination page will retain the link juice from the old links since Google will have supposedly updated their link graph. However, I don't trust that most Google employees really know what's going on under the hood all the time, and recommend leaving any redirects from pages with external links in place for as long as you have control over it (e.g. you obviously couldn't leave them in place across domains if you sold the old domain).

If the page doesn't have any internal or external links pointing to it you can safely remove the 301 redirect at any time. A year would be plenty.

Hello Anirban,

I'm going to list a few resources below related to mobile site SEO and testing. However, I think your problem may have to do with the fact that your home page 302 (temporary) redirects to /NRI-Real-Estate.htm, which then has a Rel Canonical tag pointing to the / home page. Basically, this acts like an infinite redirect loop.

To see this for yourself use one of these HTTP status checkers:

https://httpstatus.io/
http://tools.seobook.com/server-header-checker/

My recommendation would be to use / as your home page. Keep the Rel Canonical tag the same, and 301 redirect the / page to /NRI-Real-Estate.htm.

Now for mobile... I noticed the HTTP header of the home page returns Vary: Accept-Encoding. This works for responsive design, but if you are truly doing "Dynamic Serving" you'll want to use Vary: User-Agent as discussed here.

For testing the design to see if it is being adjusted for mobile users I like to use my iPhone and iPad, as well as these emulators:

http://mobiletest.me/
http://www.mobilephoneemulator.com/
Or the one included in Chrome Developers Tools.

Hello Nicolas,

You're welcome! I am glad you found the answer helpful. I direct the SEO strategy for seOverflow, and yes we do work with small businesses. Fill out our contact form and we'll be in touch. You can also look into other reputable SEO agencies and freelancers listed here on Moz.com.

Nice site.

I didn't see anything about these links showing up in GSC. If that's the case, please let us know. I have seen links show up there before that first 302 redirect to another site. In theory, these shouldn't pass pagerank, but historically Google has had some trouble figuring out 302s.

Nicholas, I agree with Matt Antonio as well. If the link the href tag goes to a ShareaSale URL it should not pass pagerank.

However, it looks like instead of just going through a 302 redirect, affiliate links like the one below just go to a 200 (OK) status page, which uses javascript (window.location.replace) to send the user on to the merchant's site. It doesn't surprise me that this could become an issue now that Google is so good at crawling javascript. But they are still pretty terrible about figuring out what it "means" in terms of what should show in the search results.

Are merchants still getting good ROI from programs on massive affiliate networks? It's been awhile since I've seen that work in a brand's favor over the long term.

I hate to bring up an old thread, but here's the answer if you're still looking for it:

http://yoast.com/google-wordpress-and-trackback-urls/

Cheers.

I checked the source with my default user agent (in this case Firefox) and did NOT see an H1 tag.

I checked with my user agent set to GoogleBot and DID see an H1 tag, which did have that keyword phrase in it.

I checked again with a default user agent, but this time with JavaScript disabled, and could not see anything at all on the viewable page (blank white page), though the source code was there without the H1 tag.

So it seems to me like you're pre-rendering the page for GoogleBot, and are including the H1 (and other header tags) as part of a fully-rendered page for search engines. However, because that Header tag does not exist if you turn JavaScript off - or if you're not Google - there may be a risk of Google seeing this page as "cloaking".

Pre-rendering is good. It's not a "bad" type of cloaking if you serve the EXACT same page to search engines that you serve to everyone else. Unfortunately, this does not seem to be the case with the way this page is set up. Google sees one thing, other visitors (with or without JavaScript enabled) see something else.

I know developers are head-over-heels for single-page apps and JavaScrpt frameworks, but this stuff is starting to drive me nuts. It's like trying to optimize Flash sites all over again. On the one hand you have Google bragging about how great they are at crawling JavaScript, even going so far as to say pre-rendering is not necessary... And on the other hand there are clear, sustained, organic search traffic drops whenever developers start turning flat HTML/CSS pages into these single-page JavaScript framework applications.

My advice to you is that if you're going to Pre Render a page for Google, to A: make sure the page a user with JavaScript enabled sees is exactly the same as what Google sees, and B: See if you can pre-render pages for visitors without JavaScript enabled as well.

Hello Andrew,

If you are on Wordpress here is an article explaining how to disable trackbacks/pings, which I advise doing for most sites. It also shares how to remove trackbacks from previous posts by running a SQL query on your database.

Alternatively, if you want to get the pagerank to pass through those links (inadvisable since 99% of them will be spammy, in my experience) you can change the redirect to a 301. See this Yoast article for more info on how to do that. It was written in 2007, but Joose de Valk is ahead of his time and I think it still works.

Every CMS is different so if you're not on WP please let us know what you're using. Of course you can always just block the /trackbacks/ directory from being indexed or crawled via the robots.txt file. I wouldn't do that with the /feeds/ directory though, as I find them useful.

I think it may have to do, as you guessed, with the use of Product schema. You should try Organization schema. If you have an actual product landing page, with a price and Add to Cart button, that would be where you would put the Product schema, but only put reviews about the actual reverse mortgage product. Most of the reviews on the home page seem to be about the company as a whole.

Here is how you have it set up now:

http://www.over50choices.co.uk/ (200 but browser removes trailing slash)
http://www.over50choices.co.uk (200 and should be your canonical URL.)
http://over50choices.co.uk/ (301 redirects to http://www.over50choices.co.uk/ )
http://over50choices.co.uk (301 redirects to http://www.over50choices.co.uk/ )

You should be fine, but if you wanted to change something I'd make the redirect from the non-www. version go to the version of www. without the trailing slash (i.e. http://www.over50choices.co.uk ) instead of http://www.over50choices.co.uk/.

You must have just entered over50choices.co.uk into the Moz tool without www., which is why it is letting you know that the tool decided to show for www. instead - though you have the option to force it to look at non-www if you want.

I wouldn't worry too much about it, other than choosing between www. with or without trailing slash.

Ain't that the truth.

A good rule of thumb might be: If there's a BUY button that adds an item on that page to a shopping cart, use Product schema on that page. If that buy button is on every page of your site for the same product, it's going to seam suspicious coming from anyone but a household brand.

That is a debatable question. In my opinion, I seriously doubt Google would have a problem figuring out that this is the same page. I don't think it would cause you to lose any pagerank.

However, if you just put a rel canonical tag on that page it should take care of it without even needing to worry about the redirect.

I'm sorry to hear that and can understand your frustration. Sometimes the way Google treats legitimate businesses in certain hyper-competitive industries is unfortunate. You're guilty until proven innocent.

I did not see anything wrong with your code. Maybe the manual reviewer didn't clear their cache? Maybe they were looking at a different URL than me, which still had the product schema without a buy button. Aggregate rating is clearly documented as being compatible with the Organization Schema type, and is described as "The overall rating, based on a collection of reviews or ratings, of the item."

If this were my site the next thing I would try is removing the Schema from every page except your home page. Maybe someone else has experienced this first-hand and will respond with a more helpful answer.

John,

The googleoff and googleon tags are meant for Google's enterprise site search product, Google Search Appliance. They "shouldn't" have any effect on the public index. Do you have an example where you can prove they work in Google search?

No problem Cliff. I hope you found it helpful, and I'm happy to hear this has been cleared up for you. It's something I'll keep in mind if anyone else has a similar issue.

I haven't found standard shipping info text to be much of a problem in terms of duplicate content on product pages, but if you're concerned about it I would consider an iframe.

While hiding the content in a non-crawlable .js file might work, it isn't advisable. First, Google PreviewBot can parse javascript on the page and see the content in many cases, as is necessary to generate the site preview and visual cache of a page. Second, anything that keeps Google from being able to properly render the page may be considered suspect.

Please view this video by Matt Cutts: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9BWbruCiDc

Essentially, he says "Don't block Google bot from css or javascript".

If I understand the question correctly, it sounds similar to how most eCommerce sites deal with sub-category (e.g. Apparel/Clothing/Pants) and you're asking if you should put unique content on those pages.

There is no right or wrong answer here, but I have two guidelines for you to consider.

#1 Search Volume
Does the topic of the category / inventory page receive significant search volume? For example, if it is a landing page about a brand-specific product (e.g. Used Honda Accord) it probably deserves its own content. If nobody searches for the exact product assortment that page is about (e.g. blue used Honda Accord year 1989) then you may not need the content to rank for those long-tail queries.

#2 How Can You Help Your Visitors?

The primary goal of content on these pages should be to help the visitor. Improving your rank for searches should be a secondary concern, which will alleviate some of your trouble with pushing the listings further down on the page.

Think about what the user is trying to do on this page. Most of the time they're still not sure exactly WHICH product to choose, or they'd have landed on a product page, or a deeper category. Help them choose. For example: Brand X is for entry-level shoppers and provides the greatest value. Brand Y is for experienced shoppers and has the most features.

You can use drop-down divs and other display tactics to keep from pushing the listings down too far.

You can also prioritize these pages so you're not writing content for all of them at once. By focusing on the top performing 20% or so first, you'll find out if the investment is going to scale out well to the rest of the pages, or if you should just leave them alone.