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I'm going to have to disagree with 411. According to Google's Search Raters Guidelines document that was released last year, they're taking into account your site/company's overall reputation. This means they're not only looking at Google Reviews, but third party review/reputation sites as well. It's part of their initiative to improve the quality of results. It doesn't matter how many links you have or how good your site structure and on-page SEO is if the service or product you provide is terrible and gets bad reviews everywhere you look.

For a summary of what's in these guidelines, check out this summary: https://moz.com/blog/google-search-quality-raters-guidelines. The whole guidelines document is worth reading, but be sure to check out the Reputation section and the 5 clues of what makes a page low quality in this post.

Hi,

It's ideal if your XML sitemap is an accurate representation of URLs you want indexed, i.e. the canonical versions. If you're using Screaming Frog to manually build your sitemaps, you make sure the 'Include Canonicals' button is unchecked. Doing so will trigger Screaming Frog to automatically leave out any URLs that canonicalize towards another URL, thus solving your problem.

Hi Neil,

Earlier this year, Google announced they will not discount a page's value due to a HTTP>HTTPS redirect. You can read more on that Q&A with John Mueller here.

I'd also recommend reading this post that covers everything you need to know about a secure migration as it pertains to SEO: https://moz.com/blog/seo-tips-https-ssl

Google will crawl that content, but it will be devalued greatly. Any content that you find valuable to your visitors should be readily available, and preferably above the fold (which of course is not always viable). Amazon and REI both do a great job with this, the content appears to be tabbed (for reviews, descriptions, Q&A, etc), but when you click the link, it takes you further down the page via anchors.

Are you talking about the incentives for Mozpoints? If so, they can be found here: https://moz.com/community/mozpoints

Yes, a canonical tag will fix that. You might also want to check with your developer to see if they can redirect the /default page to / without it creating a redirect loop.

Always glad to help! I figured you had a good reason, but just wanted to throw that out there in case.

When you configure your goal, choose Destination, then in the dropdown, choose Regular Expression and enter this: /product|/service|/offer

That will trigger a conversion for any pageview of either of the 3 examples you mentioned.

In honesty though, I have to question why you would want to track a conversion for a standard pageview? Typically goals would be reserved for actions on the site beyond viewing a page. I also can't help but wonder why you would want to track 3 presumably very different actions in one goal - it's muddying the waters to the point of not being able to conduct proper analysis and measurement.

According to a recent comment by John Muller, duplicate content due to product descriptions isn't going to affect your ranking. I would leave the descriptions sent by the publisher and put your efforts into more needle-moving tasks.

You can use Screaming Frog to pinpoint where your 404s are coming from. Here's a great write-up with a few different ways to use SF for this: https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/broken-link-checker/

Another option is Google Analytics.

• First, navigate to your All Pages report, then set primary dimension to Page Title.
• Next, go to your site and trigger a 404, take note of the page title, it should be something like 'Page Not Found'.
• Whatever that page title is on your 404 page, enter that in the inline filtering and it'll narrow the reporting down to just 404 pages.
• Then drill down into that result and see a full list of URLs that are throwing a 404.
• Set the secondary dimension to Previous Page Path to see the page that linked to the broken page.

Hope that's helpful!

Check out this screenshot for details on how to find the landing page report

You can dig further into pages contributing to bounce rate issues in Google Analytics. Use the Landing Page report under Behavior. From there you can filter for pages with a bounce rate over a certain threshold, or simply do a descending sort in the bounce rate column.

Good question, one that I don't feel like gets addressed enough.

Yes, you should always include self-referring canonical tags. There's a few reasons for this, but primary it helps one version of your URLs get indexed. Here's a handful of cases where they're helpful:

1. Some CMSs create URLs that are case-sensitive - i.e. URLs will resolve at /Some-page, /some-page, and /Some-Page
2. HTTP vs. HTTPS - if you've gone secure, self-referring canonical tags can help search engines learn your new structure and drop HTTP URLs from the index quicker, or at least prevent both secure and non-secure from being indexed
3. Absolute/Relative links - some development teams prefer to use relative URLs in links when working in Dev and Test environments, this is helpful for preventing unwanted Dev/Test URLs from getting indexed, but isn't ideal for SEO. This is where self-referring canonicals come in.
4. WWW vs. Non-WWW - another safeguard to prevent indexing of both versions, even with redirects in place, it doesn't hurt to have a fall back
5. URLs with Parameters - If your site appends parameters to URLs for any reason, self-referring canonicals will prevent indexation of /this-page?q=123

There's probably other reasons to add to this list, but these should be compelling enough to go ahead and add them.

Exactly what Thomas said.

There is no value or authority lost with the redirects from non-secure to secure. Google gives slightly more weight to sites that go secure, so the trade off is they don't ding those types of redirects anymore.

Gary Illyes also recently stated that any type of 3xx redirect no longer loses PageRank - take that with a grain of salt though, I only provided this bit of info to put you at ease about redirects for HTTP > HTTPS.

You're welcome and good luck! Hope you don't find any dupes!

A site I manage has all their blog posts scraped and republished on a trash website. We've sent requests to the site a handful of times, and submitted a DMCA takedown request, but nothing has ever been resolved.

Your best bet is to disavow those domains scraping the original content. I'd also recommend more investigation into the sites publishing content and links that point to your site. It seems some sites are more prone to being scraped than others, haven't figured out any rhyme or reason to when it happens yet though. Definitely interested to see if anyone else chimes in with some insights on preventative methods.

Anytime I have third-party writers producing content for me, I always check for duplication within Google's index. The easiest way to do this is to take a few sections of the content and search Google wrapping it in double quotes, like so:

"Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat."

This will show you any results that contain that exact string of words in the body content of a page. This is the most fool-proof method I've found for identifying already existing content when you're reviewing content that hasn't yet been published on your site.

Your objective is to provide unique content to Google, so search their index.

Thanks for that clarification CleverPhD, forgot to mention that.