Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Danny,

Since product variants on the same detail page probably won't work for you, I think this is going to come down to how creative you can get. There are plenty of phone case manufacturers out there that all have different descriptions of their products which are essentially the same thing. Try to approach it from that angle, treat them as though they are different and start with a clean slate for every product.

You might want to have different people in your organization tackle similar products, so they're written from a different voice. When the same person writes all the descriptions, they end up using the same adjectives and thinking about the content in the same way, so it's hard to break the pattern on the 2nd, 3rd, etc. product descriptions.

Hi Gary,

Regarding SEO specifically:

The sites that you've been submitting too aren't going to move the needle much for you, if at all. You might even see some negative effects of doing so. Those sites are kind of like directories, no one submits anymore, and Google doesn't value them. So from an SEO perspective, they wouldn't be helpful even if you did get them posted.

You should look for industry-specific publications and build relationships with the owners of those sites. This gets your content in front of the right people and for the right reasons. You're also way more likely to get published on a site that's relevant to what your business does.

Take a look at the bounce rates for each page in the Landing Page report. Run this with the same date comparison so you can see if any specific pages had a jump in bounce rate.

There are a few good use-cases for subdomains; higher education sites use them frequently, and often have organizational need for it. Another instance I can think of is international websites that want to have different sites for each country in which they operate. This can help each division operate a site without having to go through HQ every time they need an update.

That being said, given the typical website, with SEO considerations, I always favor subdirectories for the simple reason of keep all domain metrics (links, authority, etc.) together, rather than splitting the metrics across subdomains.

Hi,

Your XML sitemap should only contain 'clean URLs'. By that I mean only 200 status URLs.

You should not have any redirects or error pages. You should also make sure you've got the preferred format; i.e. www vs. non-www and https vs. http.

It depends on how accessible they are to search engines. If you've recently updated your sitemap, and those posts are on the new one, but weren't on the old one, that could cause it. New internal/external links pointing to those pages could have helped as well.

Hi,

As long as that's not the bulk of your content, I don't see it being a problem. Thin content penalties are more common when short-form content is the majority of a site. I've mostly seen this with ecommerce sites where product detail pages make up about 95% of the page count and the product descriptions are thin or non-existent. It's hard to be viewed as authoritative or trustworthy when only 5% of your pages have a decent amount of content.

Hi Joshua,

You will need all 3 of those tags to properly markup your pagination, just not all at the same time.

Page=1 should have a canonical to the base URL (no page=X), and a rel="next" for page 2. Page 2 will have prev tag for the base level URL, and next for page 3. And so on.

Google says they don't index paginated URLs anymore, but I prefer to play it safe and implement these tags anyway.

Regarding this comment: "It's also my understanding that the search results should be noindexed as it does not provide much value as an entry point in search engines." There is some validity to this, but honestly, it's your preference. I lean on the side of preventing indexing of search results. I don't see much value in those pages being indexed, and if you're doing SEO properly, you're already providing solid entry points. Those pages will also use up a lot of your crawl budget, so that's something to consider too. Chances are, there are better sections of your site that you'd prefer bots spend their time on.

Hi,

By applying 301 redirects, you will certainly lose a small amount of authority for those pages, which will in-turn affect your rankings. Whenever possible, it's best to leave URLs as they are, especially if they're driving traffic. Is there a particular reason you want to remove the numbers?

When it comes to changing URLs, I always go by this mantra: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!"

From an SEO perspective, they will count as a link pointing to your site. But since they're essentially 301 redirects, you loose a bit of the link juice.

There's a lot of reasons people use them, mostly for social media from what I've seen. Since they're shorter, and you can hide UTM parameters in them, they display better on FB/LinkedIn and are much shorter in terms of characters which makes them Twitter friendly.

Good to know! Thanks!

Hi,

You might want to try the Google Adwords community: https://www.en.advertisercommunity.com/t5/Google-AdWords/ct-p/Google_AdWords

We tend to lean a little more towards SEO here on Moz

Hi Lauren,

This seems to be widespread across most news sites. I've reached out to many news sites before with the same request. The only theory I've been able to come up with is that they make money on the ads that plaster most news sites (even the big ones!), so if they link out to another site, they've just lost ad revenue.

*edit

Out of continued curiosity, I decided to see if I could corroborate my theory. While I couldn't do that (but really, they'd never admit it anyway), I did come across this article that points towards 'janky CMSs'.

To be honest, I'm not familiar enough with WooCommerce to provide any good feedback regarding those URLs.

I think you're absolutely right about link assets being the only value that would pass through. Essentially, everything else (content, on-page assets, etc.) is all gone, so it stands to reason that Domain B wouldn't get any value from those elements.

I should've mentioned that Domain B was previously not an active domain. It was purchased and then immediately replaced Domain A. So it's a slightly different situation than you asked about, but nonetheless, a situation that does happen and should be considered anytime domain migrations are on the table.

EGOL,

I was part of a domain migration like this about a year and a half ago. In this case, Domain A was very old, we're talkin late 90's, and Domain B was brand new. Needless to say, the results were not optimal.

Hi Jonas,

The plan you've laid out - to have product variants for widths - is exactly how you should be handling this situation.You're likely to see improvements from making this improvement. Since you're getting rid of some unnecessary dupes it helps your crawl efficiency and shows that you noticed the issue and handled it accordingly.

Also, be sure to update your XML sitemap and resubmit in Search Console to ensure Google notices your change ASAP.

Good luck!

Hi Melissa,

For your top pages, in Google Analytics go to: Behavior > Site Content > All Pages or Landing Pages

For your top organic search terms, you'll need to go to Google Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools) - then go to Search Traffic > Search Analytics > and choose 'Queries'

You can still see some search terms in Google Analytics, but they technically took away that feature when they went to secure search about 3 years ago. But you're better off using Search Console to view this information.

Here's a few links that'll help you learn the ropes:

https://moz.com/blog/absolute-beginners-guide-to-google-analytics

https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo

Not at all. Bookmarks are no indication of the quality of the content or a website as a whole.

If there were any truth to this, it'd be ridiculously easy to game the system - think of a large company with thousands of computers in their offices, they could have their IT team pre-install Chrome with any number of bookmarked links they want - way too easy.