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Hi Becky,

I'm surprised to hear that there aren't a lot of long tail searches. Is the problem that you can't make more sub-category pages, or that you can't find long tail keywords to figure out which pages to build?

Either way, here's what I recommend:

1. Use Google AdWords Keyword Planner or a 3rd party tool like Storybase to gather keywords for "lockers". I used Storybase and found: mudroom lockers, mudroom lockers with bench, school lockers, storage lockers, metal lockers, lockers for home, vintage lockers, wood lockers, cell phone lockers, wooden lockers, entry lockers, all with over 880 searches/month.
2. Export these and filter for keywords that describe the products you sell.
3. Group keywords into categories and subcategories both by logic and by search volume; for example "mudroom lockers" fit within "lockers for home" but "mudroom lockers" get more searches.
4. If you can, create category pages for every subcategory that, once grouped with similar keywords, gets at least 100 searches/month
5. Add these categories to product pages. How you do this will have to do with which other keywords you're targeting and how much control you have over the page. But you'll want both category pages AND product pages to have the right keywords to rank for the type of lockers they are.
6. Check out your competition with a product like Clearscope. It'll show you the keywords that your competitors are using for those target keywords you've identified, so you can get even more long tail searches.

Hopefully that's the sort of guidance you were looking for - let us know if you have any follow up questions!

Kristina

I would try to keep the same data, but organize it in a way that looks good on a screen the width of a mobile phone. HTML tables render the same way on a phone as they do on a desktop, they're just more likely to get smooshed.

I recommend playing around with your HTML using Google Chrome's Inspect option, and changing your device to a relatively small smartphone. Then build a table that looks good there.

If your table has too many columns, I'd recommend dividing the table into multiple tables, so you have the same data but in fewer columns for each table.

Good luck!

Kristina

Kevin's right - Google doesn't want to do this, but they're not perfect and they'll often let a site with a stronger link profile win when there are two sites with the same piece of content. Google doesn't take complaints like this, but you can go after the site itself legally.

Due to the nature of the internet, you can never completely stop scraping like this, but I would recommend repeatedly referencing your brand in each article, and linking back to your site from within your article. Then, when they scrape your article, they'll bring over your brand name and links to your site. Then you get free links and another site going on about how much great content you have.

If you want to have some fun, you may also want to try Ian Lurie's way of handling scrapers!

Canonicals can pass link juice (see Dr. Pete's comment here), but it's at Google's discretion. I've seen it go both ways.

The best way is to only link the one version you've chosen as the canonical. I'm not familiar with Magento - is that something that you can change easily? I think it'd be worth the time you'd invest in making that change.

Hey there,

The danger of having redirects to your old site, which then redirect to your new site, is that you could create long redirect strings, which pass less SEO value than one off redirects.

Ideally, you should redirect directly from what had inbound links. Say you have links to oldsite.com/awesome-article, which redirects to oldsite.com/awesome, which redirects to newsite.com/awesome. Add in a redirect directly from oldsite.com/awesome-article directly to newsite.com/awesome.

Hope this helps!

Kristina

Hi Lina,

This definitely could impact SEO. The key here is: what pages do you want to be in Google's index?

If you just want one blog homepage, the best strategy is canonicals, like Cesare said, plus telling Google that it should ignore the parameters that you use for the ESG and News blog. If you want the standard homepage, ESG, and News blog all to be  in Google's index, you'll want to canonical the homepage to it's URL with no parameters, then update the canonicals for the ESG and News blog once the filters are applied, so the canonicals include the parameters that make the ESG and News sections unique.

You can update which parameters Google pays attention to or ignores in Google Search Console, which we explained how to do in another Moz post here: https://moz.com/community/q/how-can-i-remove-parameters-from-the-gsc-url-blocking-tool

Good luck!

Kristina

Hi there,

This is a weird quirk of Google: sometimes, when their cached version of your page tries to execute some code and fails, the cached page looks blank. Here's the key: when you first load the cache, you'll get the gray banner at the top for about a second as the page tries to load, then everything will go white. In that second or so, if you quickly click on "Text Only Version," you'll see the text version of the cache, at least, and see that Google's reading and saving your content.

I tried this with the page you shared, and was able to get text (picture attached).

To my knowledge, this does not mean that Google isn't able to properly index your pages. But it may be worth looking closely at the text only version of the page to see if it's missing something that you load with a script.

Good luck!

Kristina

KPVGF

Whoa, this is a weird one.

I saw that you posted this on Google's forums as well, and they suggested that this might be the Japanese keyword hack. Did you look into that? If that's not it, did you try loading the URLs that are showing up on the Wayback Machine? It's possible that someone who owned this site before your client created these pages.

Either way, the answer is to double check that your 404 pages really are 404ing. If that doesn't remove them from the index fast enough, you can actually create all of those pages, with a noindex tag, add them all to a sitemap, and submit them to Google. But the 404ing is really your long term solution.

Good luck!

Hey there,

Sorry for the silence!

Okay, a few things here:

1. Yeah, you're going to run into duplicate content issues, since you're using English on all sites.

• You only need www.website.com for the US. Don't create us.website.com.
• For the UK and EU domain, localize with different currency, standard shipping, and legal information. (What's your plan, since the UK and EU use different currencies, to have them on the same site section?)
• If you have any content that's universal, like a blog post, keep that part of the site on the www.website.com section and don't duplicate it on the UK / EU site (unless you translate it).

3. If at all possible, don't use subdomains for different countries. Subdomains split your domain value (which weakens your site) and also makes it clear that you're not a truly localized site, since you're using a .com instead of the right ccTLD for the country (not bad for SEO, but not great for click through rates). Better options are:

• Get the ccTLD for each country you're operating in. This is much more expensive, but better for localizing long term.
• Put each site section on a subdirectory, like www.website.com/uk/

5. Link between the different country versions of your site, so you can be sure Googlebot will find it.

Moz has got a good article on this I recommend:https://moz.com/learn/seo/international-seo

I hope this helps! Let me know if you have any questions,

Kristina

Typically, if you 301 redirect one URL to another URL with the exact same content, you're going to get little to no reduction in link juice. Google's more likely to reduce link equity passed if the new page seems different from the old one.

So: be pretty specific about how you set up those redirects!

Hey James,

There's a pretty thorough list of things you should look for here. Moz has also had a couple of good discussions on this here and here.

Highlights of what you might miss:

• Make sure to change all internal links, so they're not all 301 redirecting
• Make sure to change all self-referring canonicals, so they're not pointing to the HTTP version
• Make sure to update all XML sitemaps that Google has in GSC

I can tell you of stories where SEOs did everything right and they still saw a drop in traffic; I can also tell you that when we migrated our site to HTTPS, we didn't see a drop. You're taking a bit of a risk here, but as long as you do it properly, it's a 15% temporary drop in traffic, max. Then you should be fine.

Good luck!

Kristina

Hey Srbello,

You should be fine, although if your domains are currently on different servers and are linking to each other, there's a chance that moving them to the same server will lower the value of those links.

This has been discussed more in depth here: https://moz.com/community/q/multiple-domains-on-1-ip-address

Now, as to your redirect question: do you want to merge all of these sites to one domain? Some of them? I'm not sure what your goal is, when you said you'd want to 301 redirect to the primary domain.

Best,

Kristina

Hey Adam,

There are a few tools out there:

http://smallseotools.com/code-to-text-ratio-checker/

http://tools.seochat.com/tools/code-to-text-ratio/

I've never used them, though: I think that the importance of code to text ratio is making sure your page doesn't take too long to load, or look like spam. I'd recommend you check out this other Moz Q&A to look into that:

https://moz.com/community/q/how-important-is-my-code-to-text-ratio-on-web-pages

Good luck!

Kristina

Not to toot my own horn, but I've written a whole blog post for this:

https://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/site-navigation-for-seo/

Give it a read and let me know if you have any questions!

Hi Allie,

Sounds like you've got two questions:

First, you'll need to use 301s if you have any inbound links to the pages that you're replacing.

Second, you can't use Regex in HTML. Do you have a CMS that can help you build the 301s?

Best,

Kristina

Hey Gavo,

Looks like ShedSafe.com is such a popular company, if you search for "www.shesafe.com.au", Google thinks that you just missed the "d" in "www.shedsafe.com.au". See the different messaging at the top? If you don't include "www", it asks, "Did you mean: shedsafe.com**.au**?" If you do include it, it says "Showing results for www.shedsafe.com.au."

My guess here is that when you include "www", Google thinks you're trying to use their search engine as a browser, so they're more likely to correct you. When you're not using "www", they're showing the results as you searched for them.

I think the key here is more Domain Authority, time, and branding. The more Google sees that your site is respected, they'll be less likely to recommend ShedSafe.

Good luck!

Kristina

Hey Ryzippy,

Google really doesn't want to penalize site owners for making web design decisions without taking their crawler into account, so I don't think there will be a problem. That said, I'd recommend that you upload the new design to a test group first, just in case.

This is not a risk-free solution, though, so I'd also recommend that you push back on your web developer. Is there really no way to use the same H1 for both the mobile and desktop design? This is exactly what responsive design is for, to use the same HTML elements, but different CSS based on the screen width.

Anyway, good luck, and check back in here to let other SEOs know if using multiple H1s will cause a problem!

Best,

Kristina

It's not a good or bad thing if you have 27,000 pages that Google has indexed on your site. What's important is, how many of your pages has Google indexed, how many of those are duplicates, and how many of those are unimportant pages?

To find how many of your pages Google has indexed:

1. Make sure that you have an XML sitemap that includes EVERY PAGE on your site.
2. Submit that to Google Search Console.
3. Check back in a day or so, and Google Search Console will show you how many of the pages on your XML sitemap are in their index.

If you only have 5,000 pages on your site, but Google shows that you have 27,000, then you're probably dealing with duplicate pages, or tags that are built by your site and have gotten out of control.

To find out if Google has indexed duplicate versions of your pages:

1. Use Google Analytics' Search Channel report (Acquisition All Traffic Channels Organic, then change the Dimension to Landing Page) to download a list of all pages on your site Google or Bing has sent visitors to.
2. Create a new column, stripping out portions of the URL that can change without changing the content of the page. Some common offenders:

• Parameters
• Different categories earlier on in the URL
• www vs non-www
• https vs http

4. Now, find the duplicates in the "unique" column. I like using the countif function for this.
5. For any page that's got duplicates, find a way to fix those! It varies by the problem, but the answer is generally to 301 redirect all versions to one canonical version.

To find out if you have too many tags, because they're autogenerated

1. Use an internal tool, like an XML sitemap creator, to figure out how many tags you have
2. Compare that to the number of tags actually bringing you traffic
3. Check to see if you're creating tag pages that are the same content as your category pages
4. Check to see how many tag pages you have with fewer than five products matching - those probably aren't great pages!

Going through these steps should let you know if your site is well optimized - again, it's not the total count that matters!

Good luck!

Kristina

There's no magical number of internal links that you want to strive for, though in general, you want to maximize the number of internal links to your homepage and other important pages, and link to the most important pages on your site from your homepage.

I don't want to toot my own horn too much, but I did put together a guide on SEO internal linking (which is really site navigation) a couple of years ago: https://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/site-navigation-for-seo/ It still holds up, since site structure is forever.

In case you don't want to dive into that, here's what I'd recommend for internal linking for ecommerce sites:

• Put your logo in the upper right hand corner of every page on your site, and use that to link back to the homepage. It's a really common navigational tactic, and it tells Google what your homepage is (in case it's not simply www.yoursite.com)
• Use a top navigation bar that's on every page. In the top navigation bar, link to your shopping categories.
• Use a side navigation to list subcategories when a visitor is working within a category.
• Make sure to include breadcrumbs when you're on a product page.
• Limit the number of links on any given page to below 200 (bigger sites do more, but that's because they can get away with it)

Really, that should do 99% of the SEO organization you want to do within your site.

Good luck!

Kristina

It's hard to say how much traffic you'll lose from the merge. Like Logan said, you'll definitely lose a bit when you first move, but long term, you'll need to look at your competition to figure out if it's better to keep the pages separate or combine them.

I don't recommend keeping pages A, B, and C if you're going to hide them from the main structure of your site. Pages get most of their Page Authority from internal links (unless they're link bait), so they won't be able to rank anyway.

That said, here's how I'd estimate the loss of traffic from the move:

1. Use Google Search Console to determine the primary keyword/s for page A, B, and C
2. Use a tool like Open Site Explorer to determine the number of links A, B, and C have. (Bonus: look at the websites linking to A, B, or C. If those are resource pages, there's a good chance their webmaster will update their links to page D, which will help with the traffic dip. If they're from news articles, you'll probably have to rely on 301s.)
3. Search for each of those top keywords and look at your competition. Does the competition closely target the term? Will page D seem as relevant to the keyword as A, B, or C did?
4. Now, look at the Page Authorities of the competition for each keyword. Will page D, which will have a combo of links from A, B, and C, blow your competition out of the water? About match it? Still be a bit behind?
5. Here's the part that's really tough: for each keyword, estimate where page D would rank, given how well it targets the keyword and how many inbound links it has.
6. Estimate the % increase or drop in traffic based on adjusted click through rate. You can find this by playing around in Google Search Console to find a time when your site ranked in a different position, or by using average click through rates, like here.
7. Once you're done, put together your estimated percent increases or drops in traffic to estimate how the new page will perform. (I recommend you look at a percent change because adding up totals only for top keywords won't take long tail keywords into account, and you'll almost definitely come up with a much lower count than you're currently getting.)

Not the easiest process in the world, and your estimate will almost definitely be wrong, since you make a lot of assumptions along the way. But it should give you an idea of whether you'll eventually gain or lose traffic from the move, once that initial Googlebot confusion wears off.

Hope this makes sense! Let me know if you have any questions!

Kristina