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Hi,

There's really no difference in the CSE index and the regular Google index. 301 redirects are the best way to ensure people will find your content and to get Google to update the index ASAP. It's a time consuming process to pair up old/new URLs, but it's really the best option for UX and indexing.

The OP was saying that Fetch/Render was only showing 2/3 of his page, he did confuse that with indexing, which is also why I'm trying to clarify this difference. Indexing partial content is not a thing, seeing partial content in Fetch/Render is a thing.

There is no content (as in on-page content) in SERPs, only a title tag, URL, and meta description. It's literally impossible for Google to index a portion of a page, because that content is what's on the URL. You click that link, and it's out of their control.

Jay,

This is pretty common, and as long as you follow international SEO best-practices, you'll be alright. Here's a couple resources that include everything you'll need to do this properly:

• Moz's Guide to International SEO
• Hreflang Tag Guide

The hreflang tag is basically a canonical tag that lets search engines know you have other versions of this content out there meant for different countries and/or languages.

I looked at your source code and searched for product names and couldn't find any. This tell me that your products are being pulled in with JavaScript, which I confirmed by disabling/enabling JS, products don't show with it disabled. Since JS is populating your product lists, and that's the only real difference on each page, Moz is flagging it as duplicate because the source code is more than 90% the same. In order to fix this, you'll have to either pull in products a different way, or figure out a way to create unique content for each page that isn't rendered via JS.

James,

Search Console's Fetch and Render tool is much different than indexing, it's simply a representation of how Google sees your page. Long-form content is not required for good rankings when the intent of the searcher justifies, I've seen plenty of top ranked pages with shorter content, especially on ecommerce sites.

Hi Kevin,

I noticed your site is very image-heavy (if we're talking about your agency's site). It's common to see this in the Fetch and Render tool, especially on pages with a lot of images. Anytime I run a F&R on an ecommerce site's product listing page, the images stop loading at a certain point. I wouldn't worry too much about it, it doesn't mean they're not indexing it (they can't index a portion of a URL), it just means they're not using resources to show you everything they see.

There's a problem with your strategy that you highlighted when you said "quality content to the bottom of the pages was not helping with rankings". If you're putting content in the bottom of pages simply for ranking purposes, your SEO strategy needs a second look. Content needs to be written for people, and in order for it to be useful to people, you need to not bury it in the bottom of a page. Google weighs content differently based on its location, if you put something at the bottom of the page, on a hidden tab, or behind an accordion, it's not going to be nearly as helpful for ranking boosts.

Hope that helps answer your question.

Hi Luke,

Martijn is correct, the source code of these pages is too similar. Moz's threshold for marking content as duplicate is 90%, meaning if the source code of any 2 pages is 90% the same, they flag it.

I also agree that there are better things you can spend your time on. But if you do want to address it, there are a few things you can do:

1. Custom review at the product level - user generated content is awesome because it helps build confidence for other users, but in this case, it also creates unique content
2. Q&A section - See Amazon for an example, the benefits are the same as above
3. Write unique product descriptions for each product - this one is obviously the most time consuming, but is also pretty simple compared to the others.

Luke,

Here's what I'd recommend doing:

1. Lose the canonical tags, that's not the appropriate way to handle pagination
2. Remove the disallow in the robots.txt file
3. Add rel next/prev tags if you can; since parameter'd URLs are not separate pages, some CMSs are weird about adding tags to only certain versions of parameter
4. Configure those parameters in Search Console ('the last item under the Crawl menu) - you can specific each parameter on the site and its purpose. You might find that some of these have already been established by Google, you can go in and edit those ones. You should configure your filtering parameters as well.
5. You don't want to noindex these pages, for the same reason that you might not be able to add rel next/prev. You could risk that noindex tag applying to the root version of the URL instead of just the parameter version.

Google has gotten really good at identifying types of duplicate content due to things like paginated parameters, so they don't generally ding you for this kind of dupe.

Hi,

I don't see this as an either or thing, if people find the website useful enough to go down to that next funnel stage, they're going to do their research and find those reviews regardless. If customer experience outweighs local SEO, there should be more effort at not having one star reviews, right? In lieu of improving custom service or whatever problems led to those reviews, they should be responded to and handled appropriately. People generally don't have a problem with bad reviews if the situation was handled well by the company. You could also work on increasing the number of reviews to over power the junk ones. Ask the client to reach out to their best customers and simply ask them to review. I've found it's very helpful when doing this to include detailed instructions to minimize confusion and make it as easy as possible for the reviewers.

I've never seen any domain limits and there's no mention of domain limits per subscription level on the Moz Pro details page.

I highly recommend buying the license for Screaming Frog, at $100/year, you won't find a more valuable SEO tool for the money. You won't find a free (and trustworthy) that will crawl a site that large.

Yep, just click the 'Request CSV' link right above the Spam Score column heading.

Correction on my earlier statement, reviews/ratings only apply to products.

However, you can use the organization markup if you've got that info on the homepage. This schema generator will build the code you'll need: https://webcode.tools/microdata-generator/organization.

Do you have reviews on your homepage? On most sites, reviews are relative to specific products or services rather than the whole company. You would need to have an aggregate review score displayed on your homepage in order to be able to mark it up with schema. Schema is meant to identify data types that are visible on the site, it's not like meta data where it runs in the background for search engines to see and not people.

Glad to help, Luke!

Hi,

What kind of schema are we talking about here? There are tons of different data types you can mark up, most of which would be better suited for interior pages.

Hi,

A big part of ranking for keywords with local intent (anytime a geographical qualifier is used in a query) is the geographical location of the business. In your case, it looks like you're about 100 miles outside of Houston, which means there's little to no value for the searcher to see results that far away (in the eyes of search engines).

The fact that you've got an exact match domain for a city in which you're not located is probably not helping either. Domains like that used to be a sure-fire way to get decent rankings, but nowadays, unless it's a logical fit, it's not going to help and could actually work against you.

I noticed a couple other things that could also be hurting your chances. Your canonical tags don't match the URL format that resolves in the URL bar; on the homepage, your canonical tag is http://www but the actual URL is https://www. To a search engine, this is a confusing signal and could hint at a low quality site. The other thing I noticed is when I pulled up MozBar, it says the target country is Romania, I couldn't find where that's specified in the source code, but MozBar is getting it from somewhere. This mismatch of country targeting could be working against you as well.

Hope that's helpful!

When Google overrides your title tag or meta description, it usually means they don't think what you've provided will be useful for the reader. It could be over-optimized, keyword stuffed, too long, too short, or not relevant to the content on the page. I'd recommend going back through your descriptions and making some adjustments to see if they'll update what shows in search results.

Hi,

Putting 3 city names in your title tags is going make them way longer than the recommended character count for titles. This will probably also look a bit spammy to search engines. I'd recommend reading through Moz's guide to local SEO, which can be found here: https://moz.com/learn/local. One thing to note though, it's very difficult to rank for local keywords in a city that you don't have a physical presence in. For location-based queries, search algorithms tend to show results for based on geographical proximity since it better matches the intent of the searcher.

Happy optimizing!

Always glad to help!