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Hi there, First of all, its a mistake to think that when searching with _site:  _operator, the first results are the most important nor the more relevant. Google has said a few times that we shouldn't rely that much on what that search in terms of what's being shown. Blocking search results with robots.txt wont be of help, as it will not remove already indexed pages and cant prevent for new pages to be indexed (if there's an external link to a robots.txt blocked page, google can still index it) it'll only prevent Googlebot from discovering new ones FROM YOUR SITE. Again, i'd try to dig deeper to understand where are the links to internal searches that google is finding. Googlebot will not do any search in your site. The thing with GSC, might be related to quite a few reasons. I cant say much because I don't know any more specifics, but from what you are telling me it looks like you are getting impressions in searches that you don't relate to your site and that land on pages that google is noindexing. Yeah im repeating the obvious, hehe.  In my experience, Google can have these strange behaviours. You know, there are cases when a page is canonicalized, but it can still be shown in SERPS. Dont ask me why, but it happens. It takes a little time to google fully replace it with the correct one. I'd wait a little longer to see how Google is handling them. I don't know if im helping you.  it kinda took me a few minutes to understand/process what you wrote and come up with an answer. Please, feel free ask again or comment on my reply if I misunderstood something. Best luck, Gaston

I am not that good with Javascript so I can't really comment on that part. I do understand that there can be many legitimate reasons to show people content that is relevant to users based on their location. I think it can be very useful and actually improve the user experience of the people that visit your site. I think it is worth a try and then just monitor the results. Maybe even do some A/B testing with different content to see which is the most productive and provides the best user experience.

Hello! I apologize for the issues you are experiencing with MozBar in Firefox. Mozilla is not accepting our updates to the tool and may not for a while so we are unable to deploy updates at this time. The Chrome version is the latest one and will be able to provide you with the SERP overlay and more. Hope this helps!

Hi, This is completely normal at the moment. Many 301 URLs stay in the index for 6-12 months. Case in point, google this: site:seomoz.org There isn't anything you can do. Verify your 301s are set-up correctly. Move on.

Hi there! Thanks for reaching out. My name is Erin, and I'm on the Moz Help Team. Campaigns have a 90% tolerance for duplicate content. This includes all the source code on the page and not just the viewable text. So if a URL is at least 90% similar in code to another URL, this warning will appear. Although the pages in question are may appear to be different on the front end, they are actually duplicates based on this percentage (at least the example URLs I checked in your campaigns.) You can run your own tests using this tool: http://www.webconfs.com/similar-page-checker.php We don't know what standard Google uses, but it's safe to say they are a bit more sophisticated than us - so you might be okay in this regard as long as you have a couple hundred words of unique text per page. Google won't say how much duplicate content is too much, so we like to be better safe than sorry. Our crawler does recognize canonicals, so this might be happening because of where your canonicals tags are pointing. Pages are considered duplicates if their canonical tags point to different URLs. For example, DUPLICATE1 is considered a duplicate of DUPLICATE2 if the canonical tag for the first page is CANON1 while the canonical for the second URL is CANON2. Since the canonical tags point to different pages it is assumed that CANON1 and CANON2 are likely to be duplicates themselves. Here is how our system interprets duplicate content vs. rel canonical: Assuming A, B, C, and D are all duplicates, If A references B as the canonical, then they are not considered duplicates If A and B both reference C as canonical, A and B are not considered duplicates of each other If A references C as a canonical, A and B are considered duplicated If A references C as canonical, B references D, then A and B are considered duplicates For more information on using canonical tags, check out this great post by our very own Dr. Pete: http://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions Whew! That was a lot of information! If you still have questions, feel free to email us at help@moz.com with examples of any URLs you have questions about. Happy Tuesday! Erin

Irvco, I checked with our head of Local, Amber, who I consider an expert and she states as follows: You don't have to add a special character. It just depends what vanity URL's have already been generated by Google and accepted by the listing manager. Sometimes you don't have the option of adding characters. You can either accept the vanity URL or keep what you have.I hope that helps you out, Best,Robert

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.

Hi! First of all I strongly suggest you to check this wonderful deck on Slideshare by Fernando Maciá. That deck will answer many questions your asking. Then: Can you do SEO yourself if you are a native English speaker for a language you don't speak (like Chinese)? No! You cannot. Consider to hire a native interpreter to help you, if not a good native SEO 2) How do you go about doing keyword research for a foreign language? What tools are available? As Lynn said, Adwords Keyword Planner and (Google Trends) are a good start. But I would use these tools by Baidu, which is the most used search engine in China: Baidu Keyword Tool ; Baidu Index (equivalent to Google Trends) The best is using all three... and for that you need a native Chinese speaking person. In this article you can find useful tips and links about keyword search in Chinese. 3) How do you know what search engines you should optimize for in a different country? Use StatCounter.com for understanding what search engines are used in a specific country. The short answer is: Google is worldwide used and substantially dominant in every country Baidu in China is dominant Yandex in Russia is dominant Seznam is not dominant in the Czech Republic as it was once, but it still owns about the 20% of the search market share Naver (47%) and Google (44%) dominate in South Korea In Japan the 35% of the Internet users search on Yahoo! About SEo for Baidu you can check this guide, which is not perfect but could be considered a good start (aka: do your homework too!). About SEO for Yandex, I suggest you to dig into this site by Anna Oshkalo. And don't forget to read everything of the Webmasters' Guidelines of Yandex itself. As far as SEO for Japan, this essential guide can be a considered a good primer. About Naver, check this great starter post on WebCertain.

Oh, I didn't realize how thin the linking site was.  I was picturing some design sites I'm aware of that have detailed write-ups with examples.  Analysis of your page is fine, a link among a sea of links I would shy away from.

I like your idea a lot!  I think as web and computer people we sometimes get too hung up on the historic teachings of our predecessors.  It's a good idea to change up the conventional wisdom sometimes.  Are you building the site with a CMS platform so if you decided the link structure didn't work for you, you could easily change it and it will auto 301 the old links? In general though I think your idea is awesome and I'm curious to hear if it helps SEO at all.  I know google does care about directionality.  For instance I rank higher for NBG Networks than for Networks NBG so your theory sounds like a winner to me. -Nick

Rand talks about this here http://moz.com/blog/white-hat-cloaking-it-exists-its-permitted-its-useful Key word is "may" be penalized.  If you follow Forbes example, you should be ok.  All due respect though, you are no Forbes and so while users may put up with it there, they may not like it on your site.  Watch your analytics as you may see users leaving your site more quickly.

What exactly are you trying to do? Maintain high rankings for that page or somehow capture the high rankings for your new landing page? If you change the contents of that page into a landing page, your rankings will fluctuate. If you don't redirect, you will lose all of the links pointing to the content you move. Why don't you just gate your content for members only and point your paid media to a new URL with the landing page?

Just make sure they're linking to your most important pages, and the link equity should flow to them. Otherwise I wouldn't worry about it.

I think the "avoids repetition" is in reference to anchor text or alt text to two different pages. For example, if Page A and Page B are both priority pages and both in the main navigation menu, their anchor text or alt text should be different. That way, when Google displays them as site links, they both won't display the same text in the site link.

Thanks!

Hey! We're clear. I was able to reproduce this on my end as well. Thanks for the follow-up and extra info though Sam Moz Helpster

Yes that makes perfect sense. I had no idea that Google would use its own discretion on whether to honor a canonical tag or not! Totally agree that noindex is the way to go then. Thanks!

Thanks for looking into this IrvCo, I am using clicky.com

Weird. We were having a problem where lots of our skill pages were getting our <noscript>text used as page descriptions on Google SERPS.  We added these comments, and Googlebot reverted to using our meta description as the page descriptions in SERPs.  It could have been a freak coincidence that Google stopped using our <noscript> text right after we implemented the tags, or possibly Google was (possibly accidentally) supporting them for web search awhile back when we originally did this, and now has stopped supporting it.  Anyways, our SERPS remain clean of our <noscript> text today (<a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.ixl.com/math/grade-5" target="_blank">example</a>).</p> <p>John Mueller recently commented on that Quora thread saying it won't do anything for web search, so IMO that puts this to rest.</p></noscript>

Irv_Co First, I wish I had more information to inspect to see if I could help. Given I do not, it is common for people to skip over the "7-pack" local listings and go to organic IMO. You are talking about a keyword and not a url which, again, gives less info. For the url that you have in the "pack" you won't see that url in the organic. You can have a different url in the organic however for the same keyword. Do you have any reviews showing for the url in the "pack"? That will draw attention to your listing. I hope this helps a bit. Robert