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Webicultors,

Read this thread on Google's Product Forums. Let us know if it answers your question. If not, at least you're not alone...

Upon reading several similar threads on various forums and Q&A sites, it appears this is a very common occurrence resulting from a disparity between what the two tools define as an "error". The testing tool seems to be limited to errors in syntax / markup while GSC may see missing elements as errors.

Hello Pascal,

Like Hillary Clinton, I have a public opinion and a private opinion when it comes to stuff like this. The public opinion is also Google's, and that is to use a rel="nofollow" attribute on widget links. They are considered links that webmasters use to manipulate the search engine rankings. Yes, that video is old, but the rule still stands as far as Google is concerned.

My private opinion is that widgets are a form of branding, and it is not a webmaster's responsibility to do anything other than get their brand discovered far and wide. You created a widget that, if people are using it, probably provides some value to them. Why should you get any less credit for this than you would get from someone linking to the widget on your site?

If you are going to keep the links followable, my advice is to keep the anchor text branded and the href pointing to your home page. This is the least likely to seem like link-graph manipulation. Avoid deep-links, unless they go to the widget download page, and avoid optimized anchor text. Use "YourDomain.com" or "Your Brand" instead.

I'll leave the question open for more input since this isn't a question that necessarily has a single "right" or "wrong" answer.

Hello Tom,

I think using RewriteRule is the way to go so no problem there. You may need to use a RewriteCond (condition) to exclude certain directories so you're not redirecting the entire site. You can read more here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4307780/whats-the-difference-between-rewriterule-and-redirect-301 .

I'll keep an eye on this and hopefully someone with more direct implementation experience with regex an help out.

Hello Becky,

Rest assured that your problem has been encountered by many other eCommerce merchants, some with much larger versions of this problem. Imagine a hardware store trying to figure out how to canonicalize a few hundred thousand nuts, bolts and screws.

Most of the time, the best thing to do is make it a product variant that you can select from the page. However, if there are a handful of variants that have significantly more search volume than the others, you may want to spin those off onto their own pages. So the best answer I can give is: It depends.

If you only have 80 of them, that's not at such a scale that you couldn't write unique content for all of them. But chances are you don't need 80 unique product detail pages for the same chair.

Does this help? I'm happy to provide more input if you share further details about the search-share and sales-share of each variant.

I like Logan's answer.

You may, however, consider allowing a single "endlessly scrolling" Reviews page for each product, which:

1. Would NOT have the first X reviews shown on the Product page (sorted in whatever way works best for you).

2. Would perform the role of Review Pagination, though without taking anyone off the product page unless they REALLY wanted to see more reviews by clicking the (see all reviews) link. I think this is pretty similar to how Amazon does it, and they know what they're doing when it comes to maximizing conversions.

3. Would be indexable and optimized for "Product Name Reviews".

4. Would never be "built" unless there are at least X-reviews for the product, necessitating pagination.

Hello Mat,

I don't think I'm seeing the same SERPs as you. Is there any way you could give me an example of one of these subdomains?

And yes, you're absolutely right that the same problem of keyword cannibalization would apply to subdirectories as well.

If it's the woltersk....lu domain I am getting non-secure warnings from Firefox when I try to access it.

How many different subdomains are there / will there be? Is it just shop.domain.lu and www.domain.lu or are there others? I didn't see any for "courses." or "software." in the SERP example you provided with the link. If it's just one, I think that's manageable. For example, maybe www. could focus on informational queries (e.g. JavaScript course) and shop. could focus on transactional ones (e.g. Buy Acme JavaScript course). Maybe one could focus on reviews and comparisons, or long-tail queries while the other focuses on short-tail queries. Without knowing more about the domains and your business, it is difficult for me to say.  If you have three or four subdomains all going after the same keywords, that's definitely a problem and I don't think you can avoid cannibalization. At that point, it would be best to choose the strongest domain/subdomain and focus your efforts on ranking one of them instead of watering down your efforts over several.

Hello Micey123,

That sounds good except you should put the sitemap reference for xyz.abcd.com within that subdomain's robots.txt file as well: xyz.abcd.com/robots.txt, as each subdomain should have its own robots.txt file.

1 and 2 are part of my keyword research process, which delivers to the client in the form of a "keyword matrix," that matches each major page to a set of keywords. This helps to avoid overlaps and ensures we're targeting all of the major terms and topics.

Number 3 is part of a technical SEO audit but is just one task among a long list of them. The way I start my audits is to do a series of [site:domain.com *] commands and go wherever that takes me. (_My whole approach to SEO is screwed if/when Google deprecates those types of queries. Remember when we could see all of their links with _link:domain.com ?) Only then do I go down the checklist.

I suggest reviewing all of the checklist templates out there and using whichever one works for you, or even combine them to get the best of all of them.

Technical SEO Checklists for eCommerce
https://goo.gl/76jm1P

If you can share the site I'll look to see if there is markup on the page that is causing this so you can identify what to remove.

The responses here are great. I think you should have all of the resources you need now. Although it doesn't show domains that link to you, I also like to see the ones that are hosted on the same server, which you can find here: https://viewdns.info/reverseip/ .

I agree that Google Search Console and Moz are great places to start.

Hello Amagard,

Your breadcrumb is generated based on the path taken to the product, not the canonical categorization or taxonomy. Is that correct?

It does affect SEO in that your internal link structure changes depending on the path a bot takes through the site. The best practice would be to have the breadcrumb on product pages use the taxonomy of their canonical category, as opposed to the path taken to get there. In your example that would be: Home > Sand > Sandpit sand > Bigbag Sandpit sand type xyz .

I have seen this many times. Sometimes it is very difficult to fix and would require a lot of development time due to the way an eCommerce platform is built. If that is the case with your situation, know that this is not something that will cripple your SEO. It isn't optimal, but your concern should be from a user's perspective. And, from a user's perspective, it can make sense to be able to see the path you took to get to a product.

However, if you can fix it so the breadcrumb always shows the canonical path, which includes category and sub-category, I would do so.

Hello SeobyKP,

That's a tough question. It's fairly easy for Google to see the other domains on any given server. It is not uncommon for shared hosting to have sites in all sorts of different industries, and all levels of quality.

My thought is that you should probably put your client's site on a different server, especially if you're going to be linking into it from other domains on that server.

I would personally not link to your client's sites from the other ones because they all appear to use the exact same template, and do not seem to be of very high quality. See these:

https://viewdns.info/reverseip/?host=alliedautotransport.com&t=1

Either way, try to avoid using keyword-rich anchor text. It is perfectly fine to interlink a network of sites. Many eCommerce brands do this. They tend to be linked to in the footer with the domain or brand name only.

Hello GhillC,

I think we need to agree on terminology first, but it sounds like you can safely limit some of Google's access. Some people call your "product listing pages" either "refinements", "facets", or "filters". When I read "product listing pages" I typically think of what is also called a "category" page, which is a page listing multiple products. A single product page is often referred to as a product detail page (PDP).

Now that we're on the same page (pun intended), let me know if this article answers your question. It is very dated (2011) but gets the point across, which is that you need to be strategic about which facets/refinements/filters you allow to be crawled and/or indexed: https://moz.com/blog/building-faceted-navigation-that-doesnt-suck .

One more thing: 5% - 9% of traffic going directly from organic search into a page type would be considered significant for most businesses. When I look at pruning out page types, they're typically responsible for less than 0.5% of traffic from organic search.

Hi Christian,

I don't see any evidence of the site being deindexed now. Here are some things I checked for you, along with a few observations:

• Nothing in the Robots.txt file, or robots meta tag, or X-robots HTTP header response that would keep these pages from being indexed by Google

• The rel= canonical tags appear to be functioning properly

• The home page is indexed and not duplicated by other indexed pages

• Google has about 86 pages indexd from your domain

• Hrefl Lang tags appear to be implemented properly

• There are only about 50 links going into the domain from other sites, and the ones from Moz are the best of what few aren't just random scraper sites (harmless, but annoying).

Sometimes Google ranks a brand higher when it first comes out because it's a chicken or egg situation. How else can they collect data for their machine to chew on unless some traffic is sent to a new site? We used to call this phenomenon "the Google sandbox" a long time ago, but it is essentially (in its effect) the same thing. We do it ourselves with A:B testing and paid advertising. You have to spend some budget to gain enough data to know what's working and what isn't.

I don't think you have a technical SEO problem here. I think you need to continue building a brand and producing useful, rich content. Good luck!

Hi Suarezventures,

I typically draw the subdomain vs top-level domain line at whether the two sites / experiences and purposes are vastly different. For example, a site like blogspot that hosts different websites on subdomains, or a brand that has a forum community on a subdomain because it runs on a different server and has a much different purpose than the main domain.

Ideally, if you're moving to Wordpress you'd have the content and the store on the same site (e.g. https://site.com). If this isn't possible for them, having one or the other on a subdomain would be better than having them on (Squarespace?).

What about having the new site on a subdomain so you don't have to deal with migrating the existing site? Can' t you leave it there and put up store.site.com on WP?

Thanks for the clarification on the platform Suarezventures.

I have worked with plenty of brands that have a similar setup on Shopify. They usually put the blog on a subdomain because Shopify's content management system - let's see, how do I say this nicely... sucks. These clients put up Wordpress on a subdomain. Some also put up a landing page platform like Hubspot or Unbounce to which they send paid traffic.

Your plan to put the eCommerce site on a subdomain has some benefits in that the content side won't be affected by future platform migrations on the eCommerce site. However, the content side will benefit the most from being at the main level with the homepage and most of the backlinks. Thus, organic search traffic to the eCommerce site could be harmed by this move. I normally wouldn't recommend it for that reason (because the business is eCommerce, which is what pays for the content) but in your case, it sounds like the eCommerce site doesn't bring in much traffic as it is.

Good luck. Let us know how it turns out.