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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.

Hi, yes you are correct that I'm mainly looking at brands that are not specific to a geographic region. Thanks for your suggestion on branding the URL/domain as an option.

I'd be interested if anyone has any insight as to what drives this. I can find many examples of small companies and brands that were able to claim their brand name (+BrandName) and I have even found examples of companies that claimed keywords instead of their brand names? There doesn't seem to be any connection with company size, followers or online ad spend. The only thing I can figure is the rules used to be different and at some point in time they changed and some pages got in during the window of time when it was different.

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?

Thanks! Yes I see the top comments in the discussion are around that topic. Can't wait to see what the determination is on impact of Titles and/or description specs.

Has anyone noticed any fall out from the recent redesign of SERP pages by Google? I noticed that there appears to be one less organic result "above the fold" now, so if you were possibly in third or fourth position maybe slight dip in traffic?

Any noticeable shift in click through rate with the new bigger font?

Also, has anyone noticed if the new design has caused any shift in best practices for on-page meta data like Title tag and description tag counts? I know the Title tag was previously driven by the pixel width of the title in Google SERPS, just curious if that has changed with this redesign.

I'm looking to add some foreign language pages to a website and have a lot of international SEO questions. I think the overall question is can you do SEO yourself if you are a native English speaker for a language you don't speak (like Chinese)?

1. How do you go about doing keyword research for a foreign language? What tools are available?

2. How do you know what search engines you should optimize for in a different country? And where can you find the technical SEO requirements for each? I'm wondering things like title tag length for Baidu. Or is the Title length different for Yahoo Japan vs. US? Do you write titles and meta tags in Chinese/Japanese for respective countries? Etc.

There are hundreds of ranking factors, so essentially what you are asking is the entire process of SEO.

Do you have Google Webmaster Tools for your site? That might be a good starting point. It's not just the quantity of links but the quality as Google sees it. Open Site Explorer is a great tool but you should check to see if Google has any warnings or alerts in your account.

I also like to look at how Google indexes a site. You get interesting results when you type in site:surfaceoptics.com into Google. Is the order of the pages what you would expect? Are high value pages coming up above low value pages? If not maybe your own internal linking on the site needs to be rethought. Do the email servers need to be indexable by Google? (pop, smtp, mail, mx, etc.) That seems a little wonky to me. I don't see that too often. You should maybe block those with a robots.txt file or something?

To clarify, the thin content is on the linking website, not my website. So if anything that sounds like I would be heading into Penguin territory, not Panda. Right?

I was thinking about a service such as this
http://thecssgallerylist.com/

Thanks.

Playing devil's advocate, strictly speaking those sites are not topically relevant from and SEO perspective. Those sites are just collections of links to sites with cool design. No theme or topic, or at the very least the theme is about web design. If your site is about "widgets" it may not have any SEO value to get those links?

I am interested to hear people's opinions on this. We are launching a microsite that is for branding purposes only, no real SEO strategy beyond optimizing for branded terms on it. However the design of the site is strong in my opinion. I think it could get picked up by "sites of the day" websites, showcases, galleries, etc.

Would there be SEO benefit of in being featured on those sites since they tend to be curated lists of only the best sites and therefore editorial links? Or is there danger of those not being seen as quality links that could get you into trouble?

I'm not sure of the specific answer to your situation but it does seem that Google is kind of finicky when (and how) it comes to displaying authorship images in SERPS. I feel like it is still in a Beta phase and they are experimenting with it. Some things to check might be:

1. Were you logged into Google when you checked? Have you tried with different Google accounts? In other words what it shows when you are logged in as the author with the author's account might be different than a different Google user might see.

2. They seem to be very particular about what images are used. They don't want any logos or words. They want head shots specifically and seem to drop the image sometimes if the image isn't what they detect is appropriate. Try changing up the image on the authors account. I've heard even the cropping matters, if the head/face isn't a certain % of the whole image. They really seem to want a recognizable face in the small icon from what I've seen.