Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey Hassan,

I can't see what you're seeing in GSC, but it looks like your logo is showing up on Google's actual search results. In my experience, GSC is still a little buggy, so if it's working fine in the wild, you're probably safe!

Best,

Kristina

What I've usually seen with canonicals is that Google either removes the noncanonical page from its index, or it ignores your canonical and treats them as two separate pages. I haven't seen an example where a canonical lets you get the best of both worlds.

I agree with Nozzle - you can tweak your existing content to target both phrases! Google understands synonyms, so if anything, you're just creating a more all around relevant page.

Good luck!

Kristina

Hey Unique Digital,

It's a good question, and I hear what you're saying. If Google is crawling everything as a mobile crawler only, desktop rankings should basically be the same, right?

It might get there eventually, but I can say that it's definitely not there now. For one, Google is crawling mobile first, but it's also keeping an eye on desktop versions of sites. At the very least, I'm pretty sure Google is separating mobile and desktop UX metrics.

Also, on queries for my company's site (international money transfers), I can tell you that 1) Google does not show the same rankings between desktop and mobile. Mobile has more answer boxes, and I've noticed that if a site has an answer box, they're less likely to also have the #1 organic result.

So, at least for now, yes, you should track both.

Best,

Kristina

Wow, yeah, this is weird! For what it's worth, your hreflang tags seem fine, so I'd be surprised if there are canonical issues. And Google has indexed your home page.

Here's what I'd dig into: does Google think visitors want to land on your /search/ page before your homepage? I work on a site that uses a search page as a paid and organic search landing page, and it has the best conversion rate of any page on our site. Is it possible that Google thinks your homepage offers a bad user experience, and your /search/ page offers a better one, so it's picking what it thinks is best?

To see if that could be the case, I'd look into:

• What's the bounce rate of the home  vs /search/ page?
• What's the time spent on page (if you can measure that properly) of each?
• How long do the pages take to load?
• How fresh is the content on the homepage vs search? (I assume the account page is the most boring.)

If this is the case, you may want to consider letting visitors search, then requiring a registration.

Good luck! And let us know what you find out!

Kristina

Hey Sebastian,

Checking in here - does a penalty still seem to be applied? What have you done so far?

Happy to help, once I've got an idea of where you're currently at.

Best,

Kristina

I would recommend setting up each country's subdirectory as separate properties in Google Search Console. Then, go to original Search Console, and click on Search Traffic > International Targeting, click the tab Country, and identify which country you're targeting users in.

That should give GSC enough information to not flag the content as duplicate.

Good luck!

It's for different regions as well. Check out the link I shared. Google lists the reasons for hreflang. The second reason is:

"If your content has small regional variations with similar content, in a single language. For example, you might have English-language content targeted to the US, GB, and Ireland."

Very weird! Have you looked at your log files to find the IP requesting those URLs?

For any duplicate content you have between countries, use hreflang to differentiate regions. Google lays out how to do that here.

Hope this helps!

You don't get that information by default. When users visit your site, you can see their browsing patterns as long as they stay within your site, but any web analytics platform is going to stop tracking them once they've moved on to another site.

You can find:

• Sites that users were on before they clicked on a link to get to your site (referring domains / pages)
• Demographic information that Google is willing to share with you
• If you have a Facebook page, demographic information that Facebook is willing to share with you

There are other third party tools that will give you more information, but still, you won't get the exact sites each of your visitors has visited, you'll get as much data as that tool has been able to collect.

Why do you want to learn about the other sites that your visitors are visiting? For ad targeting? Blog post ideas? I'd do some competitive research instead; look at the content your competitors have written, look through Quora questions, use Google Keyword Planner to see how many people search for your areas of interest.

Good luck!

It's best practice to redirect, but if that's not an option, the canonical route should help the problem a lot! You'll probably lose some link equity with this route, but it should clear up duplicate content issues from Google's side.

Hi Robert,

Just want to be clear: you're going from having the website lovelytraining.com and the blog lovelyblog.lovelytraining.com to having the website lovely.training and the blog lovelyblog.lovelytraining.com. Right?

If so - yup, you're going to lose that subdomain connection. There's no formal way you can tell Google that lovelyblog.lovelytraining.com is essentially part of the lovely.training site, but you can link to the blog in your header or footer so they're clearly partners.

Have you thought about migrating your blog to lovely.training/blog/? That's the best way to consolidate link equity.

Best,

Kristina

As Brett and Gaston said, this is not ideal, but also not the worst thing. You'll probably have both non-WWW and WWW versions rank for awhile, then Google will start ignoring your canonicals.

As Gaston said, it's pretty simple to change canonicals - I would recommend doing that. Otherwise, you're showing Google that your canonicals don't match your actual site, and they may start ignoring them in the future. It's worth keeping your site structure clean!

Best,

Kristina

Hi Eroc,

Yep, this is a super common issue for SEOs. My company's site has reviews load in JavaScript, and Google even crawls and indexes those as if they're separate pages.

Google wants to read everything it can, so you've got to figure out the cost/benefit of this situation. If you really do have all of the product information, I'd guess that visitors entering through page 2 of reviews wouldn't be the worst thing, especially since Google would probably choose the page with the reviews most relevant to the query.

The main issue from my perspective is wasting Google's crawl budget on your extra review pages. If that's an issue that will significantly help your site (likely if you have a lot of products), you'll want to noindex those reviews like Ikea. There's no other method that will stop Google from wasting it's crawl budget.

Hope this helps!

Kristina

Hi Jcobo,

A good way to check to see if Google understands your content is to use Google Search Console and fetch the page as Googlebot. Look at Googlebot's version of the page - does it see the content in the table?

Like Logopedia said, HTML tables are extremely SEO friendly, so I'd be surprised if Google can't read your content.

On the flip side, tables are often not particularly user friendly. Why do you have a page full of your products? How is that valuable for a visitor? If Google doesn't think a page is user friendly, it won't rank it well.

Hope this helps steer you in the right direction!

Kristina

First of all - don't stress out! You won't be penalized for broken links. Google penalizes for shady behavior, not honest mistakes.

Like Andrew said, make sure that you aren't linking to any of the pages you removed from your site, and that you've removed them from your XML sitemap.

Then you should be good!

Good luck,

Kristina

Sorry for disappearing on you - any updates here?

What a weird plugin!

Like Gaston said, Google can deal with pagination that's on separate pages, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was a period where they crawled/indexed too many pages.

Is there an option in your plugin to keep things the way they are?

Wait - so, the pages that Google says have been removed are still ranking?

You're right - this will lose you traffic! If Google says that a page is blocked, that means that Google will not list it on its results pages.

Have you checked to see if there's a noindex tag on the pages that Google says have been removed?