Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hello Rutteger,

Regarding SiteSearch, this is from Google Support:

Exclude boilerplate content

"If your pages have regions containing boilerplate content that's not relevant to the main content of the page, you can identify it using the nocontent class attribute. When Google Custom Search sees this tag, we'll ignore any keywords it contains and won't take them into account when calculating ranking for your Custom Search engine... To use the nocontent class attribute, you'll need to tag the boilerplate content, and then modify your context file. This tells Google that you're using the nocontent class attribute."

Read the rest here:
http://support.google.com/customsearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2631036

I think it is a great idea for you to have members use that field to showcase their collections in this way. It keeps the signature content relevant (at least at the forum level, if not for the thread) and increases internal linking.

Additionally, I would do the following:

• Limit signature privileges to members with a certain number of posts and/or other metrics (e.g. Kudos, points...)
• Do not allow external linking from forum signatures

I will leave this question open as a discussion in case anyone else has first-hand experience with traffic / ranking changes before and after removing signatures from a forum - or with handling the situation in some other way.

Lastly, Google is pretty good at recognizing boilerplate content. They have been dealing with forum signatures for years, and since the area is highly-prone to spam I would imagine they know what the signatures are on most major forum platforms. Thus, I wouldn't fret over it too much unless it is clearly causing you problems in the SERPs.

Good luck!

Hello Kavit,

I would suggest putting unique Title tags, meta descriptions and content on those pages. They are very thin as it is, and all of the content is boilerplate.

There are 57,100,000 results on Bing for: "Search for an Australian Business, Government Department or Person" which is the content on the home page you shared.

There are 60,600 results on Bing for: ""There was a table set out under a tree in front of the house, and the March Hare and the Hatter were having tea at it" which is the content on this page: http://wp-seospike-weblbl.naws-sensis.com.au/bing-seo-control/no-metatag.html .

And so on. I can see why Bing wouldn't want to add yet another thin, duplicate, orphan page to their index. My advice would be to build out those test pages with a design template and to put original content, title tags and meta descriptions on all of them. Then repeat your test.

I love public Q&A because everyone gets to chip in, but nobody wants to share the domain in question (which is understandable) so that makes the job of answering a question really difficult.

Can you hide the actual domain name but provide some examples of URLs? For instance:

ourdomain.com/honolulu/four-seasons?rooms=4&view=0&page=1

Did you try any of Dr. Pete's suggestions? If not, I would implement one of those first, as they are still as relevant today as they were when he wrote them. Rel next/prev has received a bit more attention since then, but it only solves part of the problem if you're dealing with parameters beyond simple pagination (e.g. rooms, views, etc..).

From the information provided above I would probably go with a rel canonical tag to fix this issue.

I would not rely on a rel nofollow tag on links pointing to variants, as was suggested by Smarties, because Google is going to find those URLs regardless and a no follow tag on a link doesn't tell them not to index it.

Smarties #2 suggestion sounds good but I'd allow them to be followed. i.e. robots meta noindex,follow as opposed to noindex,nofollow. This allows pagerank from external links to flow through non-indexable URLs.

Good luck!

As answered in the other thread...

Here's what came back from Channel Advisor. They know about as much as anyone when it comes to Amazon and Ebay stores so I think this is about as good as we're going to get. I hope it helps!

Hi Everett--So we don't have any definite answer, but the consensus is that the name doesn't matter.  We've put out feelers to eBay and Amazon and will let you know what we find out. **Person A:**My initial gut response is if they change their name on Amazon it should pass through to Google as is, but I don't know where Amazon is getting the name of the seller for their GPS feed.  I'd have to investigate but again my gut says it is part of the name they pull from the listing itself which comes from the name the seller created.I'll see if I can get any more info from Amazon before we reply.  I'd imagine the others operate the same way.Person A, email 2:

Okay, I haven't gotten any answers from Amazon or eBay but I've done some random google searches myself and I cannot find a single ad from one of those sites that references the name of a seller.  The Amazon listing is the information from the product detail page with an amazon.com link, which when you click takes you to the direct page (with many sellers) on the page.  The eBay ones sometimes have listings but I am not finding any names anywhere.  I'm happy to keep investigating but am inclined to say this is a non-issue.

**Person B: **
I don't know the answer.  I would be pretty surprised if (marketplace X individual seller X product listing duration) is more than a small component of the GPS algorithm though I don't know.  The effect would decrease over time also.  It wouldn't factor into my decision for rebranding my site.

Best,Delisa

That's good to know. Thanks for the update Shawn.

Since the initial discussion took place several Google reps. have publicly stated that there is no PageRank loss between redirects and rel ="canonical" tags. This seems to substantiate their claim.

The biggest issue with these is when giving conflicting instructions to user agents, such as a redirect to a page that rel canonicals back to the URL from which it was redirected, thus closing an infinite loop. For example, if you redirected from HTTP to HTTPS, but then the HTTPS version had a rel ="canonical" tag that was hard-coded to the HTTP version.

The above issue doesn't apply because you're redirecting from HTTP to HTTPs, which shows a relative path rel canonical tag for the HTTPs domain.

Hello DogiDs,

I've used BazaarVoice and Power Reviews (now owned by BazaarVoice too) as well as a few others, but not the two you just mentioned. Their representative's reply below seems educated on the SEO-issues to look at when choosing a vendor. If all of the review content is only found in an indexable format on your product pages and they have good customer support, competitive pricing, agreeable contract terms...  then they may be worth checking out.

Maybe some others will provide some unbiased, experienced feedback on the service so this thread will be marked as a discussion question.

Hello Chris,

You pretty much hit the nail on the head, except that the Federal Trade Commision (FTC) in the United States says it's not enough to just make the disclosure on a single page. It also needs to appear on the blog / article itself. I've included some links below that you may want to check out.

https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/ftcs-endorsement-guides-what-people-are-asking

https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/attachments/press-releases/ftc-publishes-final-guides-governing-endorsements-testimonials/091005revisedendorsementguides.pdf

http://diannej.com/2012/new-ftc-rules-on-writing-reviews-affiliations-and-sponsored-posts/

Hello Fabrizo,

That I know of, having too many nofollow links will not harm your site - other than there being fewer followable links, and thus less pagerank.

These links have commercial intent. Someone is getting compensated for linking to you, which means they should be nofollowed if you wish to stay within Google's Webmaster Guidelines. Nobody can make the risk Vs reward decision for you, but it does seem that penalties are getting more and more difficult to come out of. It could ruin a business if the website was penalized or filtered for months - even years - as a result of an algorithm update designed to crack down on followable affiliate links.

With that being said, you could always approach your highest trusted affiliates (good website, great content, links mixed into the content in a natural way) and offer them a higher commission rate for being such good affiliates. Of course, that would be a good reason to provide them with new link code, at which point you could take Naku's excellent advice on running them (via 301) through another site that allows you to sever the redirect at any time in case you need to clean up your link profile. You would of course need to notify the affiliates if you ever decide to do that since they worked hard to produce the content and add the links, only to have them 404 some day.

Hello Oksana,

The context matters. So if the page Title, textual body Content and Images or other media are all about the same topic you should be fine. Additionally, you may want to make sure that the keyword for which you want the image to rank is on the page, preferably in the paragraph next to the image, and perhaps repeated in the image caption. This should help, when not overdone.

Other things might be whether anyone else is linking to that image file, or the page/s on which the image is used, including the domain/page authority from the linking site, as well as the text used in the link. Social shares like Pins and Tweets may help.

If you're using a content delivery network (CDN) to host the images there's an additional set of issues to think about.

I don't know of any further updates about Fred other than what is here:

https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change

However, over the last week (Mid May) there has been a lot of noise and fluctuation according to many sources.

Let us know if there is anything we can learn by what you find out. Happy to discuss further if you share some details, but it would not be uncommon for Google to decide to push thin eCommerce pages down.

SEOMoz does not crawl the web and return reports in real time. You may have to wait for the Mozscape index to refresh.

Hey, anyone remember when Google used to "dance" like that? Fun stuff. Popcorn-eating entertainment back then.

Hello James,

I would advise you to make the new pages as close to the old ones as you can, meaning that you would use the same content and try to keep a similar file structure, including product names. Then make sure every one of your old product URLs has a 301 redirect to the new one on the new site. Also redirect the home page, category pages, and other indexed pages of the old site to their corresponding pages on the new site. Follow that up with some sort of catch-all redirect that ensures every other possible URL someone might end up on from the old site goes to the new site.

How to do a successful domain migration is beyond the scope of this Q&A format. You should read the following, which will give you a better understanding of the process and things to look out for. And yes, despite what Kevin said, you can move rankings from one domain to another. I've done it many times. There will be a lag of a few weeks to a month, even if you do it right, but eventually Google figures out what has happened.

https://moz.com/blog/website-migration-guide

https://searchengineland.com/site-migration-seo-checklist-dont-lose-traffic-286880

http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/website-migration-seo-checklist/

I see you at #8 on Google for the first keyword phrase you mentioned. Be sure your results aren't being personalized.

I noticed in your robots.txt file all of the disallows statements are just for Googlebot. Is there a reason for that? Perhaps if you made those disallow statements for all spiders it might help.

Good luck!

Hello Ewanr,

Please see section five on this page: http://support.google.com/merchants/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=188494#US

I have pulled out the quote that I think answers your question. Although Google seems to cater their answer toward apparel and accessories, you can use variant attributes for other types of items:

"We define variants as a group of identical products that only differ by the attributes ‘color’, ‘material’, ‘pattern’, or ‘size’...

If you don't include variant attributes in your feed, you shouldn't submit several variants of the same product as separate listings (ex: the same product in different colors, sizes). These items will be considered as duplicates which is against our Program Policies."

That document goes on to explain how to submit variant data.

So what I would suggest is to submit them as variants each with a unique ID (e.g. SKU) and the same "Item group ID".

I hope this has answered your question. If not, please let me know.

Regards,

Everett

Hello Pedro,

I think you are making a very wise decision. If you have already been throttled by Panda this could be what you need to bring the site out of it. If not, this could be what you need to save you from a future update. In fact, Matt Cutts recently answered a question about this sort of thing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adocBLGQoYE

Note: The question is about "no results" pages but he discusses similar scenarios as well.

These sort of "stub pages" have been a thorn in Google's side for many years, and rest assured they will continue to find ways of keeping them out of the index - including punishing the good content on sites that use them.

As Infant Raj mentioned below, be sure the URLs return a 404 status code in the http header, which will ensure more prompt removal from the index than if they were to redirect or show a 200 status code. I'd ignore the first paragraph in his answer though.

Hello Shanaki,

I checked the http header response code for that URL and it returns a 301 redirect status code. In other words, the setting recommended above did work, but perhaps the SEOMoz crawler hasn't seen it yet.

Jim the key to link building is diversity. It might still be worth doing a distribution now and then, but - like everyone below has said - your time is usually better spent in other ways, including putting high quality content onto your own website, doing exclusive guest posts on higher-quality sites, etc...

I would have endorsed someone's answer instead of posting my own, but have to disagree that there is no danger in building massive amounts of links using article distribution, as you describe. I have seen sites get hit with algorithmic penalties for having overoptimized anchor text in their links. So if you have thousands of such articles all pointing with the same, highly optimized text, and your link profile leans heavily toward these types of links from article distribution, you could trip a filter and end up with a penalty that sets you back anywhere from a few spots to a few pages - or even a +950 penalty if some of those links are suspected as being paid for.

Long story short: If you diversify and focus your efforts on the highest quality links you can get - you'll be fine.

Hello Darin,

Typically search engines do a very good job of figuring out this particular issue. However, you may have a problem because the rel canonical tags are "self referencing". This means that the lower case version says "I'm the canonical!" and the upper case version says "No, I'm the canonical!"

If your developers can force the rel canonical tags to be all lower case URLs (assuming that's what you want to go with as the canonical version) it should take care of any potential issues here. If they want to go ahead and update all internal links to make them lower-case as well it wouldn't hurt. Keep in mind their time and if they could be using it for more important matters that would have a better ROI.

Summary: Fix the rel canonical tag issue by choosing one case or the other for that tag. Consider fixing internal links, as you suggested, if it isn't too time intensive verse other current projects, or at least add it to their plates as something to do in the future when they have time.

Hello Sean,

Nathan is offering some good advice below about spreading out the review source, though I'd like to give you a few links as well to ensure your question is answered.

First of all, this is from Google Merchant Center Help:
"Google Shopping seller ratings consist of an aggregate ratings score with snippets of customer reviews from third party sites and from Google Checkout which are based on your store name and the registered domain."

I've bolded the part I wanted to point out.

If you are concerned specifically with Google Checkout reviews I think you may find your answer on how to format the URL to which you would send shoppers here: http://support.google.com/wallet/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=98919 . Specifically, this part:

"Leave a review for a seller by entering https://wallet.google.com/reviews/merchant/rateMerchant?t= into your internet browser. Before going to this URL, please enter your order number associated with that seller after = in the URL name.

Note: You'll be prompted to sign in to your Google Account."

Here are some of those "third party" sites where you can send them to leave the review:

Bizrate
Epinions
Google Wallet Reviews
PriceGrabber.com
PriceSpider.com
ResellerRatings.com
Review Centre
TRUSTPILOT
Viewpoints
Yahoo!

You can find a few more in this post:
seomoz.org/blog/how-to-rank-well-in-google-products-search-a-big-list-of-places-to-get-reviews

The URL will change depending on the source. For example, here is where you would leave a merchant-agnostic review on epinions for a specific HP laptop:
http://www.epinions.com/content/write.html/dt_product_id_~138835465/page_type_~reviews

Here is where you would leave a merchant-specific review on epinions for Newegg.com:
http://www.epinions.com/content/write.html/tnode_~261998678913

If your clients work with specific review software/service vendors (e.g. BazaarVoice, Power Reviews...) they should be able to provide you with the URL from which the shopper can leave a review either for the merchant in general or a specific product. Otherwise check with each of the review platforms above, as they all have their own formats.

Did this answer your question?

I recommend using Shopify for the eCommerce portion of the site, but using Wordpress for the blog. Ask Shopify support if you can install Wordpress in a subdirectory /blog/ instead of a subdomain blog.yoursite.com. To Ruth's point, don't change any of the blog URLs if you don't have to.

I wouldn't use WooCommerce if you're going to have a serious online retail brand. Wordpress is about as good at eCommerce as Shopify is at blogging.