Welcome to the Q&A Forum

iCourse,

That's unfortunate. I tested the humidor product page in Google's Structured Data Testing Tool and the product schema does include the aggregate rating markup.

Google doesn't always show rich snippets just because you have the right code. Other factors come into play, including the relative trust they have in the website as a whole, and the page specifically. However, you had them for the review markup before so I would advise adding the review markup to the page, and putting the aggregate rating Schema markup in the HTML header area using JSON-LD, as described here:

https://builtvisible.com/micro-data-schema-org-guide-generating-rich-snippets/

It would look something like this:

There appears to be two errors in your video markup related to a missing video thumbnail and upload date, but that's a separate issue.

Hello 94501,

First of all, congratulations for being on top of this right now. It's unfortunate that most businesses are just trying to keep their heads above water on the basics. You are a very forward-thinking marketer.

a) Is this a good idea?
Yes, I do think this is a good idea. I've been experimenting with it myself.

b) What might help achieve the intended search result?
1. Domain Authority overall, as well as the Page Authority of these pages.
2. Being on the first page of Google, the higher the better (though they do use content from results lower on the page too)
3. Formatting on the page using easy-to-understand markup like header tags and lists, which it sounds like you're aware of already.
4. Formatting of the question and the answer to make that Q&A relationship obvious.

c) Does it matter that the box answers are summarized from a variety of folks forum posts, so not just one author?
1. I don't think the author, or mixture of authors, matters. However, it may be difficult to format it in such a way as to give multiple answers. Maybe choose the best one, or write your own based on an amalgamation of them all.

d) Might it drive up bounce rate on the actual page?
1. Not if it answers the question.
2. You risk someone not even coming to the page because they have their answer already, but I think this is what Google wants to happen so that wouldn't be a negative ranking signal. And if you're in spot #8 with a #1 Answer Box that's definitely a net gain for traffic.

e) Other considerations?
1. Have you looked into SEMRush yet? They have a feature in Beta right now that lets you see all of the enhanced search results (including Answer Box, Knowledge Graph and others) for which a site ranks.

You need to do both.

The reverse proxy isn't about SEO so much as the ability to use subdirectories instead of subdomains, even though the subdirectories are hosted on different servers. You have to use a reverse proxy for the technological requirements of using a subdirectory (folder) instead of a subdomain when you're hosting sites on different servers but want to combine them on the same domain.

The 301 Redirects will ensure the users (including search engines) that visit the old URL on the subdomain get forwarded on to the new URL in the subdirectory. This is what preserves pagerank, and provides a good user experience. Do not keep the content available at the old URLs; Do not allow those URLs to return a 404 Status. 301 Redirect them.

I hope that clarifies your situation.

Hello CHolidays,

I don't see the pop-ups. Has this been changed since your post?

Often times on eCommerce sites you'll have a "quick view" window to see the item in a larger photo, and possibly read the product description. There is no single answer as to how this affects SEO because there are many ways to implement it. If I could see an example I would have more feedback.

I noticed while checking out the site that you have a broken link in the main navigation. It's the one that goes to the Island-Escapes page (Vacations).

Hello French_soc,

If this were my site I'd have all three model versions Rel Canonical to a single page featuring all three of them and explaining the difference between the features to help the shopper decide which one to buy. It would be like a mini-category page, or more appropriately a Product Grouping or custom landing page.

Does that make sense? Sounds like it was what you planned to do.

I think you will have the best search result features if you put the appropriate script on the matching page for each of those functions. The home page can be just Organization, or the most important @type, such as Hotel, if that's the case.

Hello SO_UK,

That is a tough question to answer without more details. Is there more than one URL for each job posting, or category page? If not, you can probably do without the canonical tags. If you want me to have a quick look, feel free to send me the link in a private message. Otherwise, I can only give the general advice that any time you have multiple URLs for the same page you should use a Rel="canonical" tag.

Chances are you're going to lose with a lesser-known brand If you have the very same content as Amazon, eBay and Walmart. If you can customize the PDP content, I suggest choosing your top products and making those pages unique. If not, you may have to stick with optimizing category pages and picking up the crumbs for PDPs, as Billy alluded to.

Having unique reviews on your site for those products makes a huge difference.

I'm not sure what you mean by "real = author juice" since, as far as anyone knows, there is not currently any ranking boost associated with "author rank" though it is a likelyhood in the near future.

If you mean that in terms of whether you will get the author thumbnail next to the post the best way to find out is to do a Google search.

Of course I may not be understanding the question correctly. My advice first would be to reconsider the tactic of having that many closely-related sites and instead put them all, or mostly, on one site. That aside, you would have one Authorship profile and would link to that from each site, though each site could also have its own rel = publisher tag, and associated G+ profile and thumbnail image.

If each post links to the author bio page on the same domain that the post is on, and each author bio page links to your G+ profile you should be set up correctly, as you do not need to link to your G+ profile from every post so long as every post links to the author's page, which links to the G+ profile.

Hello Caroline,

This really depends on the scale of the problem. If we're talking thousands of product pages or more then that's an issue we'll have to discuss in more depth to see what options there are (noindexing some of them, making them the same sku and offering them as a variant so you can put all on one product page like clothing stores do with colors and sizes, etc...).

However, if you're talking about a few hundred or less my advice would be to take the time to get creative and write unique titles and descriptions for each variant that has its own page. It will be worth the effort in the long run. To Naghirniac's point, you could think of this as an opportunity to target more types of keywords.

Please let me know if I can further elaborate, in which case I'd need to know how many products we're talking about here.

Thanks!

Nwhite1,

To my knowledge there hasn't been any published study regarding the first-order effect of improved rankings after the inclusion of ratings on a product page.

My guess, and that's all it is, would be that the mere presence of them in-and-of itself would not improve rankings, but there would be several second-order effects, such as those you and the other responses have mentioned. Attempting to game the system by putting up empty reviews or fake reviews just to have something on the page could land you in hot water. Google has been working on the empty review page problem for awhile.

Local business page listings and Google Shopping results are totally different animals though, and the above statement does not apply there:
http://www.davidmihm.com/local-search-ranking-factors.shtml http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-rank-well-in-google-products-search-a-big-list-of-places-to-get-reviews

I had half a rant on here about machine learning algorithms and how anything from the color of your background to the placement of your home button in the nav could theoretically affect rankings these days, but it seems like you may be after more factual, tested information, not more theories and ideas. The "fact" is I have never seen nor heard of a study that proves the mere existence of product reviews on a product page in-and-of themselves improves rankings, nor can I think of a way to test this without involving a myriad of second-order effects.

Not all links are created equally. This includes many factors, but one of them would be links that are contained within the site template, such as global navigation elements, whether in the header, sidebar or footer. It has been my experience that a link in the navigation does send the message that the page is important, but may not necessarily trump an in-content link with good anchor text.

So to answer your question, no I wouldn't say the in-page links are "pointless". But I would say you can use some more in-content links (as opposed to relying on the catalog and navigation links to pass anchor text), and that your below-the-fold content seems very over-optimized to me.

Rather than listing out links like on this page, you might try to weave them into some content: http://www.coolpooltables.com/categories/Darts/

Also, I would focus less on this kind of stuff and more on getting some useful intro copy on all category pages. I see that you have it for most of the top level categories, but I'd expand that strategy to the next level, such as http://www.coolpooltables.com/categories/foosball/foosball-tables/shelti-foosball-tables.html or http://www.coolpooltables.com/brands/InStroke.html .

Good luck!

When you're dealing with hundreds of thousands of 301 redirects you're going to probably notice some serverside performance issues. It is certainly an option, and if you don't see the site slowing down I'd use Chris's recommendation, including the messaging if possible.

But if you notice the site slows down significantly you could just leave the page up but dynamically add a follow,noindex meta tag in the header area, and show the message suggested by Chris on the original page instead of the old add. The message, of course, would link to the appropriate category to help them find what they're looking for. Users will no longer be able to get to that page from the search results, and I assume you'll keep those pages from showing up in internal search results too. The only way anyone would get to them would be a direct link, bookmark or some similar direct method.

This method would allow you to keep from having to do so many redirects, and would provide a good user experience. It would also solve the problem of having all of that old, thin content in Google's index and risking a lot of back-clicks or "block this site" clicks, which could bring on the wrath of Panda.

If you find that your old ads DO have a lot of links going into them it may be worth redirecting them so your category pages benefit from those links. Or you could use a combination. For instance, use my suggestion for most of them, but if you find some that have lots of external links you could redirect those on a one-by-one basis.

I noticed your rel publisher links have "follow us on Facebook" as the link title. That probably wouldn't cause the issue, but I'd fix it anyway.

I noticed on your About page on G+ for your personal author profile you link under the "links" and "other profiles" section. The link to the websites you write on should go under "Contributor To".

I noticed you put the rel author link in the header, sort of like a rel canonical tag. This is probably done by a plugin. I recommend putting the link where your name is after the post so it is an actual href link around your name instead of a header tag.

If you fix those three things and are still having sporadic success  just keep building the trust/authority of your websites and your G+ profiles. Just because you put the tags on your pages correctly doesn't guarantee a thumbnail, but building a good following and high-quality links/content should get you there eventually if the links are set up correctly.

I would continue to build up your authority as a golf writer on your sites and others. Eventually I think this will have a positive  impact on your rankings. Right now it could help your click-through rate, but I don't think it directly impacts rankings. It is worth doing, in my opinion.

Good luck!

Ergoback,

You have two sections of code on each page for Title tags and meta descriptions. You only need one. As Vancity Stacks suggested, one is probably added by Magento and the other is probably added by the theme. The theme's versions of title and meta description would probably be the easiest and safest to remove. Yes, you can delete it.

Hello Oleh,

It could be that you just started ranking for that term in that country (for any number of reasons), and therefore the spammers took notice and started emailing you. It really is hard to say without knowing the page, but Roman has some good advice. I'm not entirely sold on Disavow files, but you should definitely look to see if you have new links from domains in the Philippines.

You can also block traffic from that country if you don't think you'll ever get any customers from there.

Grumpy C,

Though this is new to you I can assure you that it is a VERY common issue we find in the SEO world. In other words, get used to it.

A cross-domain rel canonical tag should fix you right up, but in the long run I'd look into 301 redirecting or just removing those other domains:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions

We used to call these "mirrored domains" which may help you when searching for more information on them. One thing I find useful in locating mirrors is called a "Reverse IP Lookup". You can find free tools all over the place for this. Here's one: http://www.yougetsignal.com/tools/web-sites-on-web-server/ . Before you get all freaked out when using this tool remember that shared hosting is very common so having multiple sites on the same IP is fine. What is not fine is if there are several of the SAME sites out there, as you are now dealing with.

Good luck!

Hello John,

I have used several enterprise solutions like BazaarVoice, and solutions for open source content management systems like Drupal and Wordpress (there are plenty of those around, mostly free) but without knowing what platform you're on it's tough to come up with a recommended solution.

Since I haven't personally tested them out I don't want to list them specifically for fear that people will assume that is an endorsement, here is what I suggest: You may find what you're looking for by reading the following thread:
http://www.hotscripts.com/forums/script-requests/165-looking-good-review-management-script.html

And by looking into some of the solutions discussed on this page:
http://www.hotscripts.com/category/scripts/php/scripts-programs/reviews-ratings/

I hope that helps! And I'm pretty sure lots of people see this as a problem that requires a solution, thus I'm pretty sure there are some solutions available to you depending on what platform you are using.

Good luck!

Everett

Here are a few ideas:

1. Create a nice landing page and drive traffic to it from native ad platforms on Facebook, Twitter, Linked-In....

2. Partner with "groups" on Facebook, Linked-In and G+ to offer their members free business cards

3. e.g. https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/104764329569377268904/stream/7596df91-7935-400c-9e8c-479f3b0a403b?hl=en

4. Write guest by-line articles for small business sites about how to go off on your own and start a design business on a budget, and include references to your landing page for free business cards

All of this assumes that the landing page has some sort of pre-qualifying questions since you mentioned "select" graphic designers and illustrators.

I think partnering with design groups to offer their members free cards would be a good way to go. You can find groups of designers on just about very major social media / networking platform on the web. You can even try local groups from Meetup.com and elsewhere. You could partner with a design conference, or a graduate school... You could buy placement in a design-related newsletter, etc...

Planner Guy,

Martijn has experience in this area directly and gives solid advice. I would just add that I always approach this by asking what the possible intents are. In this case, the "intent" of someone looking for "training" could be to get in-house training, like someone to come out and teach a team. It could be on-site training, like a school or workshop they can attend. Someone searching for "online course" can only be looking for one thing. Thus, I think having two pages is appropriate here. Maybe the "training" page could at some point discuss the benefits of taking an "online course" (insert link) over in-house or on-site training.