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OK Let's start again now that we know your hands are sort of tied - for now.

I would write some introductory copy for each category page and use it to help the visitor. For example:

Widgets Main Category
Add content to this page. Explain what to look for in a widget. How do I choose one? Should I shop by resolution, capacity, type? What are the differences between widget brands? Is one more "high end" and another more "entry level"? Where do I go from here?

- Widgets by Resolution
Add content to this page. Explain the differences between various resolutions. What sort of resolution should I be looking for if I want to do This type of thing Vs That type of thing? What resolution do I need for the types of things I want to do? How can I get the best resolution for my budget?

• 0.1 Resolution widgets
  Add content to this page. What are 0.1 Resolution Widgets best for? What do they not do well? When should I go up to a higher resolution widget? Are these more entry-level? Are they designed to provide me with all of the features I need to get started with widgeting at a lower cost point? Show me the "value" of 0.1 widgets without making them sound "cheap". At the same time, if I need a higher resolution widget, point me to the next level up.
• 0.2 resolution widgets
  Add content to this page. What are the 0.2 resolution widgets good for? Why should I buy one of these instead of a less expensive 0.1 resolution widget? Do I need a 0.3 resolution widget, or will a 0.2 give me what I need? Should I be concerned with capacity and other options too?

- Widgets by Capacity So on and So Forth...
---- About 20 subcategories
eg. 1 capacity widgets
     2 capacity widgets
- Widgets by Type
---- About 12 subcategories

So in the end you'll need to write about 55 pages of content for those three categories and their subcategories. You can probably knock this out in a week if you focus on this project. Just don't fill it with useless "SEO copy". Try to anticipate and answer a visitor's questions so they know what to do next.

Rel canonical (rel next prev doesn't seem to work well, though in theory it's supposed to) the paginated pages of each category or subcategory back to first page in that cat/sub-cat.

It is quite alright if the products listed in different categories overlap. Make sure that products which exist in multiple categories don't have multiple URLs going to them. This tends to happen when categories are put into the product page URL. If that is the case, we can discuss different ways to handle it, but I'll assume it's not an issue for now.

Hello Li Chu,

Did the display on the page change? For example, are people now seeing the product name in a different place / font? It's really difficult to predict what can happen to conversions when major changes are made across an entire site. It could be a conversion rate optimization issue if your traffic has stayed about the same but sales / conversions have dropped.

If traffic dropped it could be something entirely different, as discussed by others.

Generally speaking, yes the H1 on product pages should be the product name. The H1 on category pages should be the category name - those both of these can be optimized.

Hello Warren,

The more you think about this the more likely you are to get yourself in trouble with Google. Just write informatively and naturally, with the goal of converting the visitor, and you should be fine.

I know this advice sounds like it's brushing off the question, but it's not. If you start putting keywords like "los angeles widget" and "strong green widget florida" into the copy you're going to ruin your chances of ranking well in the long-term... Likewise if you start creating geographic targeted doorway pages. Both of these tactics are against Google's Webmaster Guidelines and are pretty easy for them to spot.

I would take these "long tail" keywords and group them by topic. For example:

Widgets (size)
Widgets (strength)
Widgets (location)

Then I would total up the search volume for each "set" of long tail keywords. If it looks like it might be worthwhile to create content, then put up a page for each set and use the variations naturally. Don't worry if you can't use them all exactly. Google gave you the data so you can assume they already know the semantic relationships between the phrases - thus, you don't need to put them all in there. Search for "Cheap Widget" and you'll see results for "Inexpensive Widgets".  Make sense?

If you do create these topical pages just be sure that they are valuable to the visitor. If they're not you could harm your site.

Hello Maarten,

I think you should consider using the rel alternate hreflang tags, as discussed here. If you need more background here is another great resource. And start following Aleyda Solis.

Hello Shawn,

Please see http://www.goinflow.com/mobile-optimization/ .

It sounds like you need to do two things:

1. Use the VARY HTTP Header response.

2. Apply a rel canonical tag on the mobile version, which points to the desktop version.

The cross-domain rel canonical tag is a "hint" to Google, not a "directive". They can and do ignore it when other signals overwhelmingly indicate that a different page is the canonical one.

My advice would be to write new content for NEWSCHOOL.

If you can't do that, consider all of the different signals that Google can use besides the rel canonical tag:

• Initial publish date of the content
• Initial indexation date
• External links pointing to the content
• Internal links pointing to the content
• Domain authority (including domain-wide links)
• Age of the domain
• How the two pages are linking to each other

Last but not least you could noindex the BIGSCHOOL version, but not the NEWSCHOOL version and leave your cross-domain rel canonical tag up.

Again, it would be best to have unique content on both sites.

Lesley, the only problem with that otherwise good plan would be that those bolded pages don't seem to make good categories in-and-of themselves. For example, what's the difference between the "Widget" category landing page and the "Widgets by Resolution" landing page before any filters have been set?

ATP could you drastically reduce the amount of category pages by putting them into: Low, Medium, High Resolution options? Thus:

Widgets

• Widgets by Capacity (not a page, but a drop-down to select one of the below)
• • High Resolution Widgets
• • Medium Resolution Widgets
• • Low Resolution Widgets

Then you could apply filters like price, color, rating... and use rel canonical tags to keep the filter URLs from being indexed on their own.

In addition to setting up eCommerce tracking in Google Analytics (which may require some custom code placed on your checkout page in order to pass certain data back to Google), and the other plug-ins and systems mentioned, I would look into a marketing automation platform or robust email platform like Hatchbuck, Bronto, Silverpop, Infusionsoft, and others.

A lot of this is going to boil down to which different systems integrate with each other, including your shopping cart.

I look forward to hearing more about the tools that Lesley's team is building.

Hello Cornelius,

This should answer your question if it's about PPC: https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2453991?hl=en

For organic (and PPC) traffic you can try Call Rail in order to track conversions that began online and ended up over the phone:

Here's a post that walks you through most of it: http://www.goinflow.com/website-call-tracking-for-your-clients/

Hello Elodie,

The only characters I've ever had trouble with on page-to-page redirects are equal signs (because = is an operator) and question marks (because ? typically indicate a query string). The equal signs have to be escaped out, and the question marks require use of mod_rewrite.

I don't see either of those things in your URL. Have you tried a simple redirect yet? Like this...

Redirect 301 /stages-points/">http://www.legipermis.com/stages-points/</a></p> http://www.legipermis.com/stages-points/

If that doesn't work my advice would be to hire a developer. You can probably find one who can implement the redirects for under $50 on a site like Rent-a-Coder or Freelancer.

Hello John,

I don't understand how blocking /wp-admin/ would keep /wp-content/ from being accessed and rendered by Google.

Google doesn't need to see anything in the /wp-admin/ folder so you should keep it blocked. They do need to see the /wp-content/ folder though.

Referrer Spam has been on the rise lately. See if this helps:

https://moz.com/blog/how-to-stop-spam-bots-from-ruining-your-analytics-referral-data

Hello John,

I wouldn't assume that modernizr actually created a page. More likely, the relative path to the minified javascript file was found by Google in your source code, and Google tried to access it. Perhaps the path was wrong (e.g. /js/ exists off the root, not within that "/accidents..." folder) so when Google tried to access that resource it could not be found.

I would leave it as-is if the URL produces a 404 status code. However, I would also find the code on that page and see whether it uses the correct path or not. You don't want to block those files, but you don't want Google wasting crawl budget on pages that don't exist either.

If you can't figure out what's causing it I would contact the folks at modernizr. You can see their Twitter profiles at the bottom of this page: http://modernizr.com/ .

WOW, this is an interesting thread. In theory, rel next prev is what Google wants you to go with. In practice, however, I haven't not seen this work as advertised by Google, and end up going to rel canonical in most cases. Here's one way to think about it:

Allow non-filtered pagination for top-level categories to be followed, but NOT indexed. Give them their own rel canonicals (self referencing) and ensure the intro content (or any other static content on the page) only shows on the first page (which should rel canonical to / instead of /?page=1). This will ensure your product pages all have a path going to them. Use rel next prev here, which "may" help the main/first page rank better by consolidating ranking signals from the paginated set.

For sub-categories and/or filters/facets use rel canonical pointing to the canonical version of that category page.

None of this, however, takes care of the crawl budget issue on enterprise eCommerce sites with crawlable filtered URLs. Therefore, I also use the robot.txt file, or nofollow attributes in links to handle this. I don't often use the nofollow robots meta tag for a variety of reasons.

Again, in the real world rel next/prev doesn't seem to be working very well. I haven't tried it in awhile, but it just doesn't seem to do what Google says it's supposed to do. This is why you see a lot of sites using rel canonical instead. I think we should think about this in terms of where you are in the architecture instead of trying to fit all pages into a single scheme. For example, some sites may even want to allow the first facet/filter to be indexable - such as "Filter by Brand" - because people are searching for it. If that's the case, I'll often advise they turn that into a real category instead of a filter. Another example, if you sell kitchenware and Pots & Pans is a category but Material is a filter you're missing out on a lot of searches for things like "Copper Pots & Pans" or "Stainless Steel Pans". It all depends on the situation, and has to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.

Hello aquaspressovending,

A good person for you to follow would be Aleyda Solis. To answer your question, it is relatively safe to repurpose content across different pages, subdomains or even domains if done properly for different countries.

You can choose a canonical version (e.g. the US version or UK version...) and connect the rest using a rel alternate href lang tag, which is explained in the checklist Patrick linked to above.

Hello Texture Media Inc,

It's tough to keep up on what the various parts of different SERPs are these days. They're constantly expanding and changing. The only person I know who can keep up is Dr. Pete, and that's just barely.

I think what you're wanting to do is get content in the Answers Box, as opposed to the Knowledge Graph. This should answer your questions: http://cognitiveseo.com/blog/6121/total-serp-domination-using-the-new-google-answer-box-technique/

SameAs should be used for connecting various pages about the entity, including social but also Wikipedia pages and other official "About" pages. It's a good idea to use this tag, but isn't going to help with what you're trying to do, specifically.

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.

Hello,

I'm not entirely sure I understand your question so please let me know if this answers it or not.

You have two domains and would like to combine them into one domain. If one domain is much more "brandable" than the other you should probably go with that one. If they're about equally brandable you should probably go with the one that has the highest domain authority (DA Score).

Once you have decided which domain to keep, and which one to redirect you will need to plan how to redirect the old site. A migration strategy is beyond the scope of a Q&A post, but generally speaking you'll redirect every page from the old domain to its most equivalent / similar page on the new domain. This redirect should be a "301, Permanent" type of redirect, often - but not always - achieved with a line of code in the site's HT Access file. Sometimes this needs to be a new line of code for every page and sometimes a "regular expression" can be written, which allows one line of code to redirect many pages at once to their corresponding page on the new domain.

The .htaccess file may be hidden on the server, and will require you to show all files. Speak to your host if you need help. I highly recommend getting a professional SEO consultant to help you out on this one.

Resubmitting the old website's XML sitemap to Google once again can help speed up their discovery of all of the redirects.

In that case I would say a phased approach would be fine. It is an issue that should be addressed, but I wouldn't classify it as "critical".

Hello Geoff,

It looks like you've installed the Yoast plug-in now and the category pages have a noindex,follow robots meta tag. That might do the trick, but you should make sure the posts are in an XML sitemap that you list in your robots.txt file and submit to Google Webmaster Tools - or whatever they're calling it this week.

I checked several things and it looks fine:

• No robots meta tag blocking on posts.

• No robots.txt blocking of posts.

• Followable Read More links from category pages

• Mostly unique content on posts (though they may be seen as thin affiliate pages in some cases).

At this point you should focus on getting your posts into an XML sitemap and also look into the following:

• Lots of pages that shouldn't be indexed, such as /contact pages with various parameters and redirect.php with various parameters: http://tinyurl.com/qdne3g2

• Security errors. I see several popping up in Firefox, including "This website does not supply identify information". I'm assuming you have a valid SSL Cert?