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Kirupa,

The syntax of your canonical tag is correct. However, there are a couple things you should know before you continue:

1- When Google says "Ensure that you specify the new host as canonical in all page links or sitemaps." it means they want to to update internal links and your XML sitemaps, so it's more involved than simply updating your canonical tag. Basically anywhere your URLs are referenced should be updated to reflect your new www-canonical URL structure.

2- You may have provided that one tag as an example, but DO NOT put that exact tag on every page of your site. Doing so would point search engines to the homepage of your site from any page they visit. Canonical tags are basically soft redirects that search engines follow, so when a bot sees a canonical tag on one page that points to another page, they leave and go to where the canonical is pointing them. Google will often de-index URLs that canonicalize to another URL, which I'm assuming you don't want

They're not saying there's no difference, a 301 is still a permanent redirect and a 302 is a temporary redirect. You should always differentiate between the 2 when choosing to redirect a page elsewhere. What Google is saying now is that they no longer discount a page's authority because of a redirect. However, take this with a grain of salt. This doesn't mean you should go around redirecting wherever and whenever. Your redirects still need to make sense, they need to be as relevant to the old page as possible, and they should always benefit the end-user.

David,

Everything John just said in Point 2 is exactly what was running through my mind as I read your question. As the person responsible for the SEO strength of your website, you should have full control over as much of your SEO activity as possible. If your blogging platform is concerning as described, you really need to reevaluate whether that's the best thing for your site.

No problem. Your best bet would be to avoid subdomains and have separate entities via ccTLD as you've mentioned is the plan. You could do a sub-directory structure (.com/au, .com/us, etc..) but honestly that gets pretty messy. I've got a client that has some countries on different ccTLDs and some that share a TLD, and the ones that share the .com are the messy ones.

Greg,

Have you tried creating multiple XML sitemaps by section of the site, like by folder or by product detail pages? 70,000 is a huge amount of URLs and even if you could get them all on one sitemap, I wouldn't recommend it. Nesting sitemaps into an index sitemap can help Google understand your site structure and make it easier for you to troubleshoot indexing problems should they arise.

You can specify English as the language for each one. The tag's main purpose is language, but it has deeper implications than that. The hreflang tags and Search Console specification will still help your .co.uk URLs in google.co.uk, your .com URLs in Google.com, and your .com.au URLs in google.com.au.

Regarding your .eu TLD, you might need to rethink that strategy. The primary language in Aus, UK, and US is English, so the plan you've laid out will be fine for those countries. But when you get into a .eu domain, there is no Google.eu and there's no single primary language spoken throughout. Serving up English content to everyone in Europe is sub-par UX since there's a plethora of languages in the region.

Having the markup only prevents them from dinging you for dupes, not necessarily from indexing.

From a UX point of view, it's a little deceiving that the link says 'Full Description', but then it's not any longer than the snippet up by the button. This could have a minor impact on SEO. I'd either shorten the snippet, or expand the description below in the tab. Overall though, from an SEO perspective, this isn't much different than you'd see on Amazon where they have the bulleted list up top, then a written out description below.

Happy to help!

Hi,

Google says they'll index paginated series properly and that they can usually interpret what the structure you've set, but as you're seeing, this is not always the case. The preferred method for pagination markup is to use rel prev/next, not to canonicalize the pages to the first or root version URL. The only place a canonical tag should live in a paginated series is on page=1 that points to the root URL. 

Hi Joe,

It's pretty what you've got going on here with the light box 'quick view'. You're exactly right with this statement: "My thoughts are that point 1 doesn't matter as the content isn't being shown from a dedicated URL and it relies on javascript." Not so much the JS part (Google can and will crawl JS), but the dedicated URL part.

As an extra precaution, I'd recommend block your search URLs from crawling via robots.txt Add this line and you should be all set:

Disallow: /search*

Hi,

There's a couple things you'll need to do. First is to set up a Search Console account for each TLD version of your domain. Once you've setup and verified, you'll want to specify the target country for each. To do this, go to Search Traffic on the left nav, then click International Targeting, then head to the Country tab. Set each for its respective domain.

Next, you'll need to implement hreflang tags. They work similar to canonical tags, but instead of telling search engines the preferential version of the content, these tags point them to the other country/language versions. Everything you need to know about this tag can be found here: https://moz.com/learn/seo/hreflang-tag.

These two actions will help the country-specific versions of Google serve up the appropriate versions of your content and avoid getting dinged for dupes.

Hope that's helpful!

Becky,

The best scenario would be to roll out secure to the whole site and then apply a 301 redirect rule directing all http to https. But since you can't do that, your next best bet is going to be canonical tags. Canonicals are 'soft 301 redirects' and search engines treat them very similarly to an actual 301 redirect. I would go that route in the meantime until you're able to go secure site-wide.

This guide that Cyrus Shepard put together will be helpful when you get to the point of fully integrating HTTPS: https://moz.com/blog/seo-tips-https-ssl

Ruben,

In my experience, it's a decent low-budget site search tool. However, it does have a few hangups. As you mentioned, it shows ads unless you pay for a higher tier of subscription. Also, the aesthetics of it are also somewhat limited. It's difficult to make it look good within the frame of the rest of your site.

And last, but most importantly, Google custom site search is exactly the same set of pages that are indexed for regular Google searches. While this isn't a problem for most, there are instances (for larger sites specifically) where you'd want to noindex or disallow certain types of content to not show in the SERPs, but you would want that content to be accessible via internal search. Think of a University site for example: TONS of URLs on a college's website, whether it's events or course catalogs, a lot of this doesn't need to be shown in SERPs. If you're using Google custom search, these same sets of pages will also be inaccessible there.

Hope that helps!

I cannot believe I'm answering this question in 2016. Do. Not. Buy. Links. Ever.

The idea of buying links goes against everything Google wants their search results to be. If good ranking is simply a matter of spending money, than any hack out there with deep enough pockets can get their garbage site to rank for anything.

Read this, commit this to memory, remember this when developing new link building strategies: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en

Jim,

I'd steer WAY clear of this tactic. That's a very deceptive trick (and definitely not the tag's intended use) that is almost guaranteed to get you dinged by the big G. Additionally, canonicalizing one URL to a completely different URL can get the original URL de-indexed, which wouldn't give you much value once removed.

No problem!

Optimize for the long-tail keyword in question. Going more generic with your on-page elements and content is likely to dilute your other pages. You can use generic terms in content, but treat those as opportunities for internal linking, pointing generic keywords towards the page you're targeting for that particular generic term.

Yes, it definitely is beneficial to attack long-tail keywords in your content strategy. This chart is my go-to point of reference any time this topic comes up. It very clearly illustrates the need for long-tail targeting in a comprehensive SEO strategy. Not to mention, your competitors are most likely NOT putting the time and effort into it, so you can get some pretty big wins in that regard.

Glad to help!

That's where you'll have to roll up your sleeves and start the real SEO work. If you're lost as to where to start, check out Moz's Beginner's Guide to SEO.