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Hi here's some more background info on this situation that makes it even stranger. I can perform some pretty specific searches on Google where these indexed search result pages show up. And I can look in Google Search Console under the performance section and see that those pages receive impressions and clicks. However, if I inspect the URL, Search Console says it is not included in Google's index, and the reason it gives under indexing is because it says it is honoring the canonical URL. So search console is saying it isn't indexed because of the canonical, but I can do searches and find that exact URL in the index. Any ideas what this could be from?

Hi Gaston,

Thanks for the response. I can confirm that the example, /search and /search?q=foo are pretty much identical. However that may not always be the case, only when a user searches for something that would return no results. So, a website that sells widgets, /search and /search?q=widgets would not be identical, and in that case it would make sense that Google would not honor the canonical link. What's really strange is if I search google for the site: operator of the domain, the top pages are not user queries for things that make sense. The top indexed pages are random, non-relevant user searches.

I do not have a way with this system to control noindex tags on these search result pages. The only thing I could do is take the nuclear option and just block it all with robots.txt using wildcards. But that means no search result pages would get indexed, relevant or not.

I have a strange situation on a website, when I do a Google query of site:example.com all the top indexed results appear to be queries that users can perform on the website. So any random term the user searches for on the website for some reason is causing the search result page to get indexed - like example.com/search/query/random-keywords

However, the search results page has a canonical tag on it that points to example.com/search, but that doesn't seem to be doing anything. Any thoughts or ideas why this could be happening?

What is the current advice for displaying content based on a user's geolocation? On the one hand, I know the rule of thumb is that you are not supposed to treat googlebot any different than any other user to your site and shouldn't show different content than what you would show a regular user, however on the other hand, if we personalize the content based on the geography, it means that the content that is indexed would be specific to Mt. View, CA in Google's index, correct? I know I heard years ago that the best practice was to use javascript to personalize the content client side, and block the js with robots.txt so that google indexes a default page and not a geo-specific page. Any insights or advice appreciated.

Hello,

I recently upgraded Firefox and the Mozbar SERP overlay stopped working. I rely on that data so need to get it working. Are others experiencing this issue?

Hi,

Thanks for your responses. There are no issues with robots or canonical tags that are apparent. The 301 redirects are accessible by Googlebot, I checked in Webmaster Tools. And the page that the 301 redirects to on the other domain has a canonical tag set to the proper URL (itself).

A client website was moved about six months ago to a new domain. At the time of the move, 301 redirects were setup from the pages on the old domain to point to the same page on the new domain. New pages were setup on the old domain for a different purpose. Now almost six months later when I do a query in google on the old domain like site:example.com 80% of the pages returned are 301 redirects to the new domain. I would have expected this to go away by now. I tried removing these URLs in webmaster tools but the removal requests expire and the URLs come back. Is this something we should be concerned with?

Hi again,

On this issue, we don't have individual URLs for the images themselves, they pop up in a lightbox style overlay. However, I'm noticing that some of the URLs which Moz is flagging a duplicate are actually not the canonical version. Does the Moz crawler take the canonical tag value into account when flagging duplicate content?

I have a paginated gallery of images on one website. The images are all different across the pages, the titles of the pages are different and the captions on the photos are different. But Moz analytics flags these pages as having duplicate content?

Is the level of sensitivity around duplicate content in Moz Analytics the same as Google? What more could we do to make these pages not register as duplicate? Alternately, is there a way to mark these pages as not duplicate in Moz so that it stops reporting a high number of high priority issues which don't exist?

Here is the other aspect of this that is disturbing to me, Google's implication with this is that other people could claim the same trademarked brand name? So I guess I can go make a G+ page and call it +TacoBellCom and they wouldn't stop me from trying to pass off as the official brand.

I have several brands which I am managing G+ profile pages for. These range from established brands with large followings to just starting out. When I try to claim a custom URL for these on Google+, it says to add some extra characters after the brand names to make them unique. I can't find any example of established big brands who have G+ URLS like "+toyotausa24" "+tacobell3" or anything like that. This does not seem to be well documented anywhere. Can someone tell me what the deal is with this feature?

Also what is the best practice for large brands when claiming this? +BrandName1?

Yes actually you are correct. After I read this answer I tested it on my personal site by adding the tags around some nonsense words. Not only did Google index the pages with the nonsense words making it into their cache of the pages, but my site ranks for those nonsense words. So while it would be awesome if Googlebot honored those tags, they only work for the Google search appliance!

I do have some experience in this area. If you operate a highly measurable marketing program, some web marketing agencies will agree to a "pay per performance" model of compensation, but you will have to work with them for it to be clearly defined, and they will still want a flat rate compensation for their hours spent. At the end of the day, agencies want to get paid period. And they should be. You may end up paying more for their services going this route, so if saving money is your concern I wouldn't recommend it. If ensuring that your agency can deliver and that they have some "skin in the game" to keep them honest, then this could be a great direction.

A typical setup I've seen is the agency will give you their hours at "cost" or a very low rate as a baseline to cover their expenses and time, then if you have very good past historical performance reporting setup, and they are comfortable that they can do what they say they can, you can define a payout based on "results" such as website conversions from organic search sources. So comparing year-over-year, say you got 100 conversions in October 2012 from organic search, you could say for every conversion we get in October 2013 above 100 you get 25% of the revenue, or something like that.

Also keep in mind, the industry is somewhat in free fall right now in my opinion due to the increase of "not provided" keyword data. In the past, you would do a contract like I outlined above specifying that you would not count branded keywords. The last thing you want is to run a magazine ad which increases searches for your brand 2000% and have to pay the agency for the influx of organic search conversions that you would have gotten anyway! With all the organic search data lumped into one bucket now, I don't see how that will work anymore personally.

Actually I see a very similar breakdown of Google as a referrer and direct traffic for safari as a segment in my Google Analytics as I see for my total traffic so I do believe GA is reporting the referrer correctly for Safari. I have no idea if Safari specifically has more of an issue with "not provided" but I do know that Chrome has been particularly bad all year since it started treating any search made in the address bar as a secure search by default. Maybe Safari does too, I don't know. But the traffic is at least attributed back to Google organic as a referrer, not direct, in my analytics.

Just curious what analytics solution you use? I've been a long time Omniture user and just recently started using GA (not by choice). I was definitely seeing issues with the way Adobe was classifying and under reporting not provided searches from Chrome due to this issue!

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Have you tried looking in any of the other link graph tools like ahrefs.com or majestic SEO?