Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Our customer reviews of products are mainly very short and many times not fully formulated sentences.

Would you recommend to just publish the longer comments?

I am concerned about googles evaluation of the quality of the page content.

In a travel related page I have city categories with city related information. 
Would you recommend for or against duplicating some relevant city related in subcategory pages.

For visitor it would be useful and google should have more context about the topic of our page.
But my main concern is how this may be perceived by google and especially whether it may make it more likely being penalized for thin content. We already were hit end of june by panda/phantom and we are working on adding also more unique content, but this would be something that we could do additionally and basically instantaneously. Just do not want to make things worse.

Hi Patrick, thanks these are very useful links for an audit. Also the Barracuda tool is great.
In our case we are already quite confident that our focus should be adding more content to our about 1000 city category pages.
My core doubt right now is really: Shall I as a quick first step add now to the city pages the mentioned data from external sources or may it rather hurt in the eyes of google. For visitors it would be useful.

We just lost over 20% traffic after google algo update at June 26. 
In SEO forums people guess that there was likely a Phantom update or maybe a Panda update.

The most common advice I found was adding more unique content. While we have already unique proprietary content on all our pages and we plan to add more, I was also considering to add some  content from external sources. Our site is travel related so I thought about adding for each city page external data such as weather, climate data, currency exchange data via APIs from external sources and also some data such as population from open source databases or some statistical info we would search on the web.

I believe this data would be useful to the visitors.  I understand that purely own content would be ideal and we will work on this as well.

Any thoughts? Do you think the external data may rather help or hurt how google perceives content quality?

Kate. The domain has  100.000 pages and will scale to over 1 million unique pages during the next couple of months. I do not want the Sorting URLs have any negative effect on the new indexing of the new 900.000 unique pages in the next months.

Regarding link equity. My simplified understanding of link equity is that if a page has 10 links then each link carries 10% of the total link juice of the page. If now 5 of the 10 links do link to a canonical version of the same page (=sorting URLs), I may be losing out on 50% of the potential link juice the page carries. This is my concern. Therefore my doubt is if I should rather try to hide these sorting URLs from google (same as was also recommended by Rand for facetted navigation pages that one does not consider important for being indexed).

Hi Kate, thanks lot. Yes canonical is something we should definetly do and we have implemented.

Still I had the experience in the past that google also indexed lots of canonicalized URLs with near identical content. Any additional step I could do to minimize indexing of these URLs further?

Wouldn't then the basically "self referencing" URLS of sorting links (going to canonicalized versions of the same page) be lost for link equity?

We are now introducing 5 links in all our category pages for different sorting options of category listings.
The site has about 100.000 pages and with this change the number of URLs may go up to over 350.000 pages.
Until now google is indexing well our site but I would like to prevent the "sorting URLS" leading to less complete crawling of our core pages, especially since we are planning further huge expansion of pages soon.

Apart from blocking the paramter in the search console (which did not really work well for me in the past to prevent indexing) what do you suggest to minimize indexing of these URLs also taking into consideration link juice optimization?

On a technical level the sorting is implemented in a way that the whole page is reloaded, for which may be better options as well.

Aleyda,  this is super useful , thanks a lot for this excellent advice. 
I will still need to do some research on how to best compile a comprehensive list of incoming links, as moz and search console data is still kind of limited for this purpose.

thanks Kristen. Good article. We will try to identify now what kind of CSS is absolutely necessary to put inline. I think the google apache module should help us to idntify this.

To optimize for googles page speed, our developer has moved the 72KB CSS code directly in the page header (not in external CCS file). This way the above the fold loading time was reduced. But may this affect indexing of the page or have any other negative side effects on rankings?

I made a quick test and google cache seems to have our full pages cached, but may it affect somehow negatively our rankings or that google indexes fewer of our pages (here we have some problems with google ignoring about 30% of our pages in our sitemap".)

The problem is: It is delaying server response time to 1,5 seconds on average and is increasing significantly server load. We are talking here about more than 19.ooo rows with hundreds of rewrite rules based on URL patterns. So we have a pressing need to take action.

Is there a way to easily identify those URLs that triggered a 301 in the last 2 months? Doing it based on the apache logs seems a bit daunting as I did not find a tool that filters from the apache logs the 301s. Can I get this information from analytics or any other way easily?

We have a huge httaccess file over several MB which seems to be the cause for slow server response time.

There are lots of 301 redirects related to site migration from 9 months ago where all old URLs were redirected to new URL and also lots of 301 redirects from URL changes accumulated over the last 15 years.

1. Is it safe to delete all 301 redirects which did not receive any traffic in last 2 months ?
2. Or would you apply another criteria for identifying those 301 that can be safely deleted?
3. Any way to get in google analytics or webmaster tools all 301 that received traffic in the last 2 months or any other easy way to identify those, apart from checking the apache log files ?

Capitalization of first letter of each word in meta description. Catches more attention, but may this lead to google ignoring the meta description then more frequently? Same for an occasional capitalized FREE in meta description.

Anybody had experience with this?

Currently I have a 301 redirect from 
https://www.mysite.com/
to 
https://www.mysite.com

And in my canonical and hreflang and also insite links I use consistently https://www.mysite.com without trailing slash. Is this OK? Or do I need to add a trailing slash?

Is it likely that google uses bookmarks(favorites) in chrome as a ranking signal?

genius

Peter, thanks a lot.

How did you get the 3 decimal ratings of the apps in itunes?

How does decimal rounding of reviews  to stars work in ios appstore?
Starting from which average review score to get full 5 star rating?

Duolingo has a 5 star rating, but I doubt that they really have an all time  review average larger than 4,75. In the google playstore their average of the android version is 4,6. Does anybody know how apple calculates the star ratings or has an URL reference where this is explained?

Hi Christy, not yet.

Thanks. Will post an update once we figured out this riddle.