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You want to redirect them to the appropriate ccTLD for their location. How you handle language is up to you, there's no perfect solution. Someone in France searching on Google.fr is going to get websites in French 99 times out of 100.
How many countries and languages are you targeting?
Hi,
An IP-based redirect would be preferred. But before you get to that point, you should help visitors just land on the appropriate ccTLD to begin with. One primary way to do this is ensure each country's version of Google has the right ccTLD versions of your URLs indexed - see links below. Any other marketing you do should also serve the appropriate URLs. The IP-based redirect should really just be a fall-back in the event that they don't end up where you wanted.
Here's a couple resources that will help you through this process:
Hi,
You don't need the self-referring canonical tags on each of the paginated URLs. Other than that it looks good to go.
Hi,
Your 'page 1' URLs should canonicalize to the root level of that page. And your rel=prev tag for page 2 should point to the root, but beyond that, it's standard implementation. Beyond that, the pagination markup for rel=prev/next is pretty simple.
Thanks for the additional input Everett, we've done what we can to mitigate consumer clicks, but the search patterns and intent are so similar it's nearly impossible to weed out unqualified visits.
Jake,
Thanks for your response.
I had thought of the pogo effect as well, but it seems like something bigger is at play. There's no chance of publishing price at this time and also no add to cart button. There are some major changes coming to the site, but that's still about 8 months out. So I'm really on the search for causation and to have a plan of attack for minimizing the atrophy in the meantime.
Thanks again for your input and confirmation of my hunch. Will post back with updates when the site changes hit and what impact they have.
I've never used a CMS that does anchor links by default, so unfortunately I won't be of much help in offering a solution. I would try to fix this in the back-end of the CMS though, as it's not going to help SEO in anyway if all your content lives at the same root URL. You should aim for one (indexable) URL for each piece of content as recommended here by John Mueller.
You should avoid using anchor links (hash URLs) as primary navigation or URL structure. Google won't index them individually, since they're technically just another part of the same root page.
They can serve a purpose for usability, but this case isn't one of them.
I've got a client that only shows pricing if a user is logged in - they're B2B and only sell at a wholesale level. The site is massive, has been around for about a decade, and has had an active SEO campaign for years.
They've been losing ground on top ranked keywords, primarily in the 1-2 spots, rest of the first page remains strong and actually improves regularly.My hunch is that Google recognizes the inability for anyone to make a purchase on the site. As a result, they're realizing that the searcher intent doesn't match the actions that can be taken on the site and are bumping them down.
Has anyone seen a similar situation or have any evidence to suggest my hunch is correct?
Hi Patrick,
When did you submit? It takes a really long time for them to make additions, I've seen it take as long as 18 months.
Redirected URLs are generally removed from the index pretty quickly. I just checked and the /solutions URL is not indexed in Google, so you don't need to take additional measures to have that removed.
A good practice is to have no redirects in your sitemap. When I run new sitemaps, I use Screaming Frog and the first thing I do is remove everything that isn't a 200 status code. Keeping a clean XML sitemap helps your crawl budget and gets bots to focus on the more important parts of your site rather than having them step through unnecessary steps.
Hi,
It sounds like you should be using hreflang tags. These tags work similar to canonical tags, but help different country-specific versions of Google index content meant for searchers in those geographies. You can read up on the how/why here: https://moz.com/learn/seo/hreflang-tag
Hi Kevin,
I just ran that URL through Google's Structured Data Testing Tool and it threw one error for having 'Starting at' in your pricing data. I'm guessing the message you got was in regards to that.
I also noticed that the availability field was populated with the product URL, rather than 'In Stock' or another valid string. I'd recommend fixing this as well.
Hi,
It's difficult to tell without seeing the site, but the likely problem is related to those canonical tags. A canonical tag that doesn't point to the preferred version of a URL can cause indexation problems, but not resolving URL issues.
There could also be some pages that don't have that 301 redirect applied, therefore leaving some pages to resolve at HTTP.
Hi Cornelius,
You'll have to apply schema markup in order to get these to show up. You can read about how to implement this here: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/intro-structured-data
How long it takes will vary on how frequently Google crawls your site.
You'll definitely want to keep that canonical tag in place. Some tools don't recognize canonicals, so I wouldn't worry too much about duplicate notifications due to parameters like that. If you noindex that page, it will apply to the root of that URL, not strictly the parameter'd version.
Hi,
It's perfectly acceptable to leave the canonical tags in place. Self-referring canonical tags like this can often be helpful, but leaving them in place certainly isn't going to hurt anything. Here are a few instances where they come into play:
Hope that helps!
Hi Chris,
This is a common misconception about the robots.txt file. It's not intended to remove URLs from the index, only to prevent crawling of URLs/folders/parameters/etc.
Here's a quote straight from the Search Console Help site: "You should not use robots.txt as a means to hide your web pages from Google Search results."
You can temporarily remove that URL using Search Console. To permanently remove it, you'll need to add a meta robots noindex tag, the only sure-fire way to prevent indexation. Here's what that tag looks like:
I'd recommend pagination over scrolling. The primary reason being load time. If you've got 8 pages worth of content displaying on one page, it's going to take forever to load.
According to this article by Rand, you should not point a canonical back to the main page. If you're marking up pagination correctly, you do not need a canonical tag on the paginated URLs, only on page=1 pointing back to the main page since these are actually the same thing.