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Hi Leszek,

In a Q&A session about duplicate content, John Mueller recently stated that "Duplicate manufacturer descriptions across sites is not a problem from Google's view".

Considering that, I wouldn't spend the time to write unique descriptions for all your products. There are many better ways you can spend your time improving organic results.

Hi Leszek,

Single page websites don't do very well in search results. The primary reason for this is that there's too many topics discussed on one page. It's important to be able to optimize different pages for different topics. For example, a site that reviews running shoes could have a page optimized for different brands of running shoes, or different styles (trail running, road running, minimalist running shoes, etc..). If this site was a single-page site, you'd be diluting all those topics by putting them on one page.

There are cases where a single-page site can be used without hurting SEO efforts, but since most sites target a number of different topics, it's rare to see.

Hi Harry,

I've done this a number of times when taking over campaigns for other 'agencies'. It's a pretty common task for most SEOs. It usually involves some de-optimization of the ranking page in order to shift that emphasis over to your preferred page. Check out Moz's on-page grader, that might give you some insight into why the homepage is overpowering the interior pages.

Rand did a really good Whiteboard Friday on this topic about a month ago. It's definitely worth watching if you haven't already, you might find the key to what you're looking for: https://moz.com/blog/wrong-page-ranks-for-keywords-whiteboard-friday

Hi Jeffrey,

Hreflang tags are intended to help isolate identical content meant for different versions of Google. Doing so will keep your .com content in the US version of Google, and your .co.uk content in the UK version of Google. So yes, the outcome of the hreflang tag is the proper handling of duplicates served to different geographies.

If you haven't already, I highly recommend checking out this guide: <a>https://moz.com/learn/seo/hreflang-tag</a>

To add to what Nicolas said, Search Console data tends to lag a a few days. I did a site:theinboundspot.com search for your site and found that 120 pages are indexed. I took a quick look and didn't see anything of concern. Give it a couple days and check back on it.

If having an informational URL as you've proposed is helpful for the user to understand the page, then by default, it's also going to be helpful for SEO. Google's goal is to provide the best results for people, so indirectly, it does help to have topic-indicating URLs.

Hi,

Here's a pretty recent list that HubSpot put together. Though I should warn you, directories in general, are not the best approach to acquiring high-quality links.

A good rule of thumb is this: If a link was obtained easily, especially if you have full control over it, it's probably not going to help too much.

http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/10322/The-Ultimate-List-50-Local-Business-Directories.aspx#sm.000i6lxxx2nmcze110f1lhnf2q08g

Hi,

That is a good use-case for using 302 redirects. I don't quite understand how it's causing soft 404 errors though. If you're redirecting pages to a 200 URL, then there shouldn't be any cause for soft 404. Sounds like there's something else in the mix contributing to these soft 404s.

Hi Anton,

You really only need to worry about having an actual address if your customers come to you, i.e. retail stores, restaurants, mechanics, etc.

I can't access the site you reference, but it looks like it's probably a courier service or something along those lines. In that case, your serving the customers at their location, in which case they don't really have a need to know your actual address, just what areas you service.

So no, you're not likely to see any affect on your SEO by providing an actual address as opposed to a P.O. Box.

I knew it that sounded like a Google A/B test protocol!

A good rule of thumb is to avoid changing URLs unless it's absolutely necessary. There's a lot going on with that URL in the background that Google knows about....internal and external links as I mentioned above, but also XML sitemaps and usage metrics. You don't want to point them elsewhere and have them re-learn a new URL structure and step through a redirect just to get there.

Google has put more emphasis on UX in the last couple years, so improving the usability of this page, as you've done by A/B testing, is likely to benefit you in the long run.

Hi,

You definitely want to avoid redirects where possible, so scratch option number 2. Redirection causes you to lose about 10% of the authority that page has built up. Google tends to prefer pages that they have known about for a while.

If you were to do option 2, you'd also have to update all of your internal links to point to the new page, as well as outreach to any external linking sites to have them update.

All you need to do is take the source code for the variation page and make it the source code for the original.

It sounds like you may have used Google Content Experiments. If that's the case, the additional URL created for your variation doesn't need to be excluded from crawls or disallowed, Google knows it's there and there's no other way to get to it other than the code snippet they utilize to send your sample to the variation.

Thanks for your input Casey. I'm dealing with about 4,000 URLs, so I think I'll go with the patience method!

One of the sites I manage was migrated to secure 2 months ago. XML sitemaps have been updated, canonical tags all have https:, and a redirect rule was applied. Despite all this, I'm still seeing non-secure URLs in Google's index. The weird thing is, when I click those links, they go to the secure version.

Has anyone else seen weird things with Google not properly indexing secure versions of URLs?

Try going to File > Default Conif > Clear Default Configuration. This happens to me sometimes as well as I've edited settings over time. Clearing it out and going back to default settings is usually quicker than clicking through the settings to identify which one is causing the problem.

Hi,

You can use hreflang tags to signal to search engines which domain should be indexed in which version of the search engines. For example, your U.S. site should only be indexed in Google.com whereas you'll only want your UK site indexed in Google.co.uk. The hreflang tag will help distinguish your two sites.

There are also settings in Search Console in which you can set your country target.

If you take care of these two items, you should be free of same/similar content risk.

I don't know why this didn't cross my mind until now, but having both versions can also mess up your Google Analytics data. Going from one to the other (can't remember which direction) creates a new session. You've probably got a lot of self-referring traffic showing up in your reports.

I agree with the others. I think you should pick a horse and ride it. Indecision is only causing more confusion on Google's part and is going to hurt you in the long run. Google says they prefer HTTPS and I've seen evidence of that. You're already paying for an SSL so you might as well use it to the max.

As Laura said, if you've got self-referring canonical tags on both secure and non-secure URLs, you're setting yourself up for some pretty big issues.

Hi Jacob,

Cyrus Shepard put together a great guide on HTTPS migrations. Since you've already got an SSL, you may as well apply it to the whole site and set your preferred domain as HTTPS (as Laura and Bas mentioned). In the guide, he details the best ways to ensure search engines index the version you want via 301 redirect rules, canonical tags, and XML sitemaps. Don't forget to set up Search Console properties for HTTPS - www and non-www versions and set your preferred domain there as well.

Run this query in Google to monitor what they've got in their index as the canonical domain: info:mountainjade.co.nz

Hi David,

You will lose indexation for the non-canonical URLs, so keep that in mind. If you don't get much organic traffic to the off-brand, than that's probably not a problem.

If that is the case though, I'm wondering why even build out a site for the off-brand?

If you've got that path anywhere in your navigation or other internal linking, you'd want to remove that or update it to /shop/necklaces/. The next step would be to 301 redirect /shop/necklaces/necklace/ to /shop/necklaces/ just in case you've got any links pointing to it - this will get your users where they want to go and also let search engines know you've relocated the page.