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I vote for #2. Having brand and model category pages with all the product listings can be more beneficial for SEO, and they can use breadcrumbs with schema markup, which will look nicely in the SERP.

• brand

• model 1

• product 1

• product 2

• ...

• model 2

• ...

Hi Will

I use Google Tag Manager to add structured data to the website. With GTM, the structured markup won't be in the source code and won't be seen in the browser.

The Google Structured Data Testing Tool picks up the local markup from GTM nicely.

I was referring to the navigation breadcrumbs that use can mark up with structured data. Like this: https://developers.google.com/structured-data/breadcrumbs?hl=en

I agree with Logan.

If the ratio of redirected or broken URLs is too high in your sitemap XML, there is a chance that Google won't crawl it as frequently as it should because the search robot doesn't want to waste resources on these URLs.

The only time when redirected URLs are useful in the sitemap XML is when you're migrating the domain or make IA changes and you want to make sure that the search engine discovers the 301 redirections as quickly as possible.

Hi,

We will have pages on the website that will display different page copy and images for different user personas. The main content (copy, headings, images) will be supplied dynamically and I'm not sure how Google will index the B and C variations of these pages.

As far as I know, the page URL won't change and won't have parameters.

Google will crawl and index the page content that comes from JavaScript but I don't know which version of the page copy the search robot will index. If we set user agent filters and serve the default page copy to search robots, we might risk having a cloak penalty because users get different content than search robots.

Is it better to have URL parameters for version B and C of the content? For example:

• /page for the default content
• /page?id=2 for the B version
• /page?id=3 for the C version

The dynamic content comes from the server side, so not all pages copy variations are in the default HTML.

I hope my questions make sense. I couldn't find recommendations for this kind of SEO issue.

Hi Joshua

subcategory.htm pages will perform just as well as subcategory/ and having .htm in the URL doesn't affect link juice flow at all. .htm or .html are perfectly valid HTML files; however, some prefer having shorter, "nicer" looking URLs. If this is the case and the website is still in the early stages of SEO, then 301 redirect the .htm URLs and make sure every navigation elements links to the non-htm URLs in the future.

In some cases, the slash ending URLs can be considered duplicate pages (even though I'm pretty sure Google will understand the honest mistake), so it's one of the basic SEO recommendations to set redirections and make sure the website navigation doesn't mix the two. Also, SEO tools will keep sending you duplicate page title warnings, so it's better to clean it up as soon as possible.

Hope it helps.

Hi Endre

It's difficult to give you insights without seeing the actual pages, their backlink profile and the keywords the pages are targeting.

Maybe a previous SEO agency link built the hell out of the empty search page and Google hasn't noticed that it has no valuable content and has bad user experience. Maybe that search page had good content previous and Google hasn't noticed.

Check the empty page with the Wayback Machine (archive.org) and see what it looked like in the past. Check the link profile of the empty page with more than one tool to find all the links it has (Moz, Majestic, Ahrefs).