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Thanks Ipegiro...  My point exactly on saying "unless they are creating value within the url"...  as obviously "bunny-on-stool" has a completely different meaning than "bunny-stool"..

Cheers

-Jake

So, a series of questions to better understand:

1. Have you asked the affiliate to remove the sitewide link to see if your rankings pop back up?
2. Can we assume you did full troubleshooting to identify this one sitewide affiliate as being the root cause of the problem vs. a potential mass duplication problem from indexing all of the variations of the URL with the affiliate tags?
3. When you say it 302 redirects, is the 302 from  www.yoursite.com/product?afid=someaffiliate to www.yoursite.com/product?
4. How are you handling the query parameter in GSC?
5. Do you have a canonical tag in place pointing to the parameterless URL?
6. Do you noindex,nofollow pages that have the affiliate parameter on them?

For the record, please don't go implement all of these things above, as some would be conflicting ..e.g. the canonical and the noindex both could cause serious problems.

You could certainly disavow that specific affiliate directly in search console, but I would probably hesitate to disavow the entire affiliate network, as that may later have negative consequences on your affiliates (discrediting them, unnatural outbound links penalties, etc.) and would eliminate any authority you could be currently benefiting from... e.g. maybe you only ranked #12 because of your affiliate links?

Cheers,

Jake

This is actually more common than you might think, though you probably don't even realize it sometimes.  I've only seen this with forums, blogs, multi-language/geo sites, etc.. that are hosted with different technologies on different servers (Cart on IIS, Blog on LAMP, etc..) and the SEO/Dev team has agreed this is better than a subdomain path.

The biggest challenge will likely be in ensuring the load times aren't affected, but this can generally be easily overcome by hosting the different servers in the same datacenter, caching elements on the master server, etc..

Cheers,

Jake

Absolutely, I'm glad you got things squared!

I see the homepage in my results - https://www.google.com/#q=site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.hauteheadquarters.com

Homepage was also cached today: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://www.hauteheadquarters.com&bav=on.2,or.r_cp.&biw=1920&bih=955&dpr=1&ion=1&ech=1&psi=EYbEV6CLN8aweJDvktgD.1472497162096.3&ei=EYbEV6CLN8aweJDvktgD&emsg=NCSR&noj=1

I would leave this -   .. but remove the meta tag..

The language tag is not required to "rank well"..

I don't believe meta name="language" is even an HTML5 declaration... So you can probably lose that one..   If you are going to set the language you can do it on the html tag, or in the header... though I do believe you can also set the language of a specific div element if there is a section of the page in an alternate language.

If you have multiple language versions of your site, then you can use hreflang tag (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en) to reference those other pages, just be sure they canonical to themselves and not to the x-default version.

Hope this helps,

Jake Bohall

Hi Nizar,

Typically we encourage clients to consolidate subdomains onto the main site whenever possible to help consolidate authority. Subdomains are generally viewed as separate sites with regards to authority, so separating them would require each build its own independent authority.

That being said, there are often technical challenges with hosting everything on the same subdomain..e.g. Having a wordpress blog while running BigCommerce, etc.. when you have multiple platforms across different business aspects.  In those cases, we just encourage clients to interlink heavily when possible with things like shared navigation, consistency in design, etc...  to make sure that any opportunities for G to consider them as one and the same are met.

On the flip side, if you have sections like the forum, that may have a significant number of pages, but do not independently draw new backlinks with enough authority to contribute to overall domain authority, parsing this out can reduce the dispersion of authority on your main site (fewer pages), and eliminate crawl depth on unpopular pages.

To make the decision, I would ask myself the following:

1. Do I need to do this to create a better experience for my users?
2. Do these sections independently have significant authority that my main domain may lose by removing the content?
3. Will may main domain continue to attract new links/citations if these sections are removed?
4. Do those pages currently enjoy high rankings/traffic that contribute to specific KPIs that I wouldn't want to have negatively impacted (e.g. do forum visits often result in a product sale or service inquiry)

You could always take this effort in chunks and monitor the impacts, knowing you can roll back if needed.  For example, you could move a lesser popular section such as the directory to the subdomain and watch aggregate traffic changes over the course of a couple of months and see if any negative impact occurs, and if so, if it is small enough of a drop that you could stomach on other sections.

Hope this helps!

Best,

Jake Bohall

I don't think so.. I would let it be.

Sure thing.. glad to help!

Hi VCJ... I'm guessing someone may need to update that page to show the recent discovery that PageRank is passed...  However, I would suggest the following caveats:

1. It may take longer to pass that authority, as we assume Google has to determine that it is a 302 intended to be a 301 prior to passing it along.
2. John Mueller does specifically mention PageRank by name, but we do not know about other important signals in the algorithm with value that may not be passed along the same way in a 302 vs. a 301.

Cheers,

Jake Bohall

There should be any issue in using multiple methods as long as the data is consistent between them.

Cheers,

Jake Bohall

This will be difficult to troubleshoot without the site/page and an example phrase...  It may just be that Google hasn't mapped the query / answer .. or it may be that you haven't made the answer clear enough.

Best,

Jake Bohall

It looks like the page renders, but sends a 404 header to the browser.    Sounds like the developer may have left some code from a 404 page... don't worry, they are not alone - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4921211/404-header-response-but-page-displays-ok

Cheers,

Jake Bohall

My first thought would be to simply canonical the pages to the preferred version you would want a visitor to find in search results (I'm guessing the mini-site versions b/c of the UX benefit of someone searching a specific procedure/condition)..

This will tell Google that you know it is a copy, and indicate where all authority should be passed.

https://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization is a great resource you should check out on the topic.

Cheers,

Jake Bohall

We can assume this link redirects the user to your site through that URL?

If it is a 301 redirect and the original link is followed, then it likely would pass authority along with the redirect.    You can check the redirect type using any of the http headers browser plugins, URI Valet, or similar service.

Cheers,

Jake

Hi Patrick,

Did you recently do the switch from http://www.thepatrick...  to https://thepatrick....    ?   It looks like Google only has some chinese content for the www version of your site - https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=site:www.thepatrickmullin.com/&start=0

If this issue concerns you... I would probably suggest you update your htaccess file to do a redirect from http://www.thepatrick..  to https://thepatrick..  directly vs. letting wordpress push people around.  If you don't suspect having a lot of links to the www version of your site or many people visiting that way, I would just let it be...otherwise for this type of situation, it likely won't have any impact on your rankings.

If you are already doing these redirects in .htaccess, it would be helpful if you posted your htaccess file contents here so I can take a look.

Thanks,

Jake

Glad to help!

Hi Katherine,

If the user only visits a single page, this counts as a bounce.  In order for it to not be a bounce, the user would have to browse to another page on your site, or take some action that loads a new page.

If you are looking to separate bounce rate from engagement, you should set events and goals based on various actions on the page (scroll %, clicking on a link/button that expands a field, etc.)

Cheers,

Jake

Great questions...

If you feel the calls to action you are adding are relevant to the content and add value to the page, then there should not be any problem adding them in.  Do you currently have the sign-up forms in other locations on the page?

This is definitely something you could easily test by making the change on 1-2 posts and not others, and seeing if there appears to be any negative impact.   Considering this would be "supplemental" content to the page, I would definitely make a point to try and give them a non-intrusive call to action.

Cheers,

Jake