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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.

Google is a corporation whose sole purpose in the universe is to make money. I would never think of anyone as a "hater" for legitimate criticisms of an entity that has all the rights of a human being, but none of the responsibilities or risks of one.

Kevin,

Have you tried updating the local listing aggregators? Tools that help with that are Moz Local, Bright Local and Whitespark. Yes, this is a problem with Google local and it should be their responsibility to keep their information updated, but I'm sure you can imagine what a massive effort that is for every location of every business in nearly the entire world. The easier you can make it for them the better.

Tim,

It is tough to say where to start on that page if you're going to provide recommendations on how to get the review to show up. I guess I'd start by marking up the single review / rating itself on the page in JSON-LD, as well as the aggregateRating. The review should be about that specific guide, not the company as a whole. Make sure that the review and rating are both viewable on the page, definitely not a thousand pixels off-screen, and preferably without JavaScript rendering. If JS has to be rendered client-side (as is the case of everything but the Facebook pixel in the Noscript tag) then make sure the page can be rendered by Google. As of now, it does not appear to be (see cache link below), but the "Fetch and Render" tool in Search Console is a better way to know for sure.

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:GVg0uOtMoUQJ:https://gydeandseek.com/budapest/gabriella+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-b-1-ab

Also, don't forget to use Google Search Console's "Property Set" feature. However, I think they're about to start auto-created property sets by aggregating subdomains soon anyway: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-console-domain-property-26645.html

The short answer to your question is: Yes, you should know what keywords each of your subdomains rank for and should adjust strategy accordingly.

The long answer is that I want to see this website because it doesn't sound like something I'd recommend doing in the first place. It used to be that subdomains were treated completely differently from the parent domain and you could, theoretically, take up the entire first page of results with your subdomains. Content mills like About.com took this to the extreme and Google responded so you don't tend to see that happen much anymore. As I understand it, Google also attempts to make a determination as to whether this is the same "site" or multiple, unrelated sites, such as site.blogspot.com subdomains and treats them accordingly.

These days, the general consensus is that you should be using subdirectories/folders instead of subdomains for a variety of reasons, unless the subdomain is for a different site, or something you don't really need to have indexed, like a closed app.

Using display:non and positioning an element 9999 pixels off the page is a pretty old-school tactic to hide content from users, but to show it to Google.

type="radio" name="rating" id="rating_1" value="1"

When you say you have "other clients" who use this markup, are they using the same site template and code? The page doesn't pre-render for Googlebot, and even when it does render there is that spammy-looking positioning of the star ratings.

The JSON-LD may be valid, but it seems confusing to me. The aggregate rating is based on a single rating, but I don't see the single rating. Further, the rating is supposed to be for the Guide, Gabriella, but the review description is about the website/brand. I think those two entities need to be marked up separately. Typically, the "brand/organization" entity is marked up on the homepage, about page, press, etc... and other pages that are specifically about the brand, as opposed to repeating Organization schema on every page.

My advice: Hire a new web developer.

{"@context":"http://schema.org","@type":"Service","url":

"https://gydeandseek.com/budapest/gabriella","aggregateRating":

{"@type":"AggregateRating","ratingValue":5,"reviewCount":1},

"name":"Gabriella Andronyi","brand":{"@type":"Brand","name":"Gyde & Seek","logo":

"https://gydeandseek.com/static/img/favicon.png"},"areaServed":"Budapest","description":

"Looking for a brilliant guide with a delightful sense of humor? Meet Gabriella...

","serviceType":"guide"}

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.

The following page returns a 410 status code in the HTTP header:

https://www.seattlesouthside.com/event/poverty-bay-blues-brews-festival/42/

That would be a very likely reason. You should check your other pages as well.

Hello Brickbatmove,

Have you done a complete content and URL inventory yet? You need a list of every URL on the current site with columns for traffic by source, count of internal links and count of backlinks, at minimum. Anything with an external link does need to be redirected to the new URL. Even if you don't keep the content, redirect the URL to something similar on the new site.

How to do a site migration safely is beyond the scope of Q&A. I suggest you read some guides like the ones below, if you haven't already:

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

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

https://www.brightedge.com/blog/a-step-by-step-guide-to-nailing-your-next-site-migration/

You will also have to get those URLs out of the index once you fix the rel next/prev issue. In order to do that effectively, they should return a 404 or 410 status code in the HTTP header so Google knows that they no longer exist (even though they never really did in the first place). Otherwise, it's what is known as a "soft 404" in which the page doesn't really exist, but returns a 200 (OK) status code, which is confusing to Google if you don't want them indexed.

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/

Hello Kevin,

I assume you've already tried the "suggest an edit" feature on the maps?
If not, that would be a good place to start.

Do you have a Google MyBusiness listing?
If not, you should set one up. This may help.

Do you have your address clearly marked on your website?
The more you associate your business with that exact address, as typed, the more you help Google figure this mess out.

Do you have your address marked-up using Schema or JSON-LD on your website?
See above.

Are you the custom signs and displays company or another company?

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.

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 Yosepgr,

Are these reviews unique to your website, or are they from a review aggregator like epinions?

Are they reviewing products, or a business?

Generally speaking, I would show the best ones on the page you want to rank, and show the rest either after an event (like Load more), or even on another page, like Amazon does. It all depends on the situation though, so the more info you can provide the better.

Hello Kingalan1,

I did not see a screenshot. Has it been removed?

If Google is unable to access the old URLs (i.e. URL Not Allowed) they will be unable to see the redirect to the new one. I'd like to help you with this. Can I see the screenshot or can you give me some examples of old URLs?

Hello Andrew,

If you you send me a link I'll go check it out. In the meantime, I tend to ignore error warnings for stuff like this if I know I'm doing it the right way. Technically, you should not canonicalized paginated URLs to the non-paginated one. It sounds like you are doing the right thing, but I'd like to check to make sure.

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 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.