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Hi Gareth,

This is a pretty common issue.
Generally your homepage is always going to be your 'strongest' page for links etc so in most cases it makes sense to use it to target your highest level and most important keyword/phrases.

If you are ranking well with your homepage for this important phrase then you don't really want to be messing with it unless there is a good reason.

For the service page you could consider:

1. Leaving it as is since it serves its purpose for users and site navigation and conceivably supports the ranking of the homepage.

2. Consider slightly reworking to try target a relevant secondary phrase (ie bus rental instead of coach hire for example or private coach hire etc, etc) - assuming your homepage is not ranking as well for these type of searches and they are indeed relevant to your business.

The above assumes you ARE actually ranking well for "coach hire" with your homepage. If you are not ranking as well as you like then that might change your approach. Of course, if you did get the hire page to rank well then.... what phrase would you target with your homepage?

Hope it helps

Hey Dan,

Ah, didn't clue in to the FREE shopping ads part! Standards best practices still apply though, check out this checklist for a good rundown of technical setup points to keep in mind: https://feedarmy.com/kb/requirements-for-enhanced-listings-on-surfaces-across-google/

Hi Dan

I wouldn't think that the products not showing are because of categorisation but if the auto categories are not what you think they should be then it is always worth specifying. Not sure if there is an easy way to see what competitors are using but if the products are books I would definitely label them as such and not art supplies. Having a quick look at shopping results for 'colour palettes' shows a mix of books and colour samplers anyway so the overlap seems to be recognised by Google already.

In my experience one of the quickest wins in getting more impressions out of shopping ads are tweaking your product titles (and descriptions). If for example the title is just the title of the book, it can help if you prepend or append the title with something like 'Art Book' or 'Colour Guide' or similar. You can even do this through shopping feed rules if it is difficult to get it set up via your CMS. A bit of trial and error to see what works best is usually needed.

Hope it helps!

Hi!

A bit late but perhaps the following links help. Generally it seems the People Also Ask feature is often closely connected to FAQ and faq schema markup content on pages (not necessarily FAQ only pages!). If the questions you are looking at are related to your own brand  then I would try implementing some FAQ type content and see how that goes, you should have a good chance of grabbing some more results.

https://moz.com/blog/new-schema-types-to-create-interactive-rich-results https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2020/02/20/how-to-make-most-of-googles-people-also-ask-results/

Hope it helps!

HI,

I don't know if it would make a huge difference in how google will understand the site but it is not a 'normal' setup as per documentation: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

If the site does not have different regional variation pages of english (UK vs USA for example) then there is no need to double up hreflang markup with regional notation. You just need the hreflang='en' and it is good for all english language searches regardless of location. Same goes for all the languages.

Personally I would remove the extra regional tags to avoid confusion and keep things as simple as possible.

Is it just me or is it getting a bit silly in here??

HI,

Easiest way is to use UTM variables in the links you declare for each product and then check in google analytics.
For an overview of UTM see: https://neilpatel.com/blog/the-ultimate-guide-to-using-utm-parameters/

You could make urls for example like
https://example.com?utm_source=GMB&utm_medium=GMB&utm_campaign=Product1
https://example.com?utm_source=GMB&utm_medium=GMB&utm_campaign=Product2
https://example.com?utm_source=GMB&utm_medium=GMB&utm_campaign=Product3

Hope it helps!

Mario, hello from Athens

The keyword planner tool has some peculiar functionality when it comes to Greek as you describe. Do not get fooled though - even though the tool has some issues, the google search engine itself has no problem knowing that toned and non toned greek characters are the same that that an σ and an ς are the same character (used in different cases).

So to answer your question - go with properly spelled and toned words and if you prefer lowercase then that is fine, you will not be losing out on potential traffic because of which 's' is used on the end of the words, but in the kw planner tool you will want to try all potential combinations of tones and sigmas to make sure you have the best idea of traffic patterns.

Hope it helps!

Hi,

Not sure why an & would throw an error. Maybe try encoding it like &

Worth checking that the rest of the syntax is all correct and all tags are opened and closed properly in case it is not the & character that is actually causing the problem?

HI,

There are a couple of other articles worth having a look at that if you haven't already:

https://moz.com/blog/what-we-learned-analyzing-featured-snippets

https://moz.com/blog/game-of-featured-snippets-how-to-rank-in-position-0

Both mention what kind of content is likely to make itself 'snippable' for a variety of featured snippet 'types.
It depends to a large degree on what kind of results are showing for the queries you are looking at. I have found tabular and list structures to work well for some best/top type queries I have looked at in the past. In some instances google will interpret list type data from non html list structure so you could (for example) simply put numbers (1,2,3 etc) in front of your list of things without actually using an html list format. Your developer would be able to advise further on this, but most cms systems have lists and tables built in so if the content you have makes sense to be in a list or table format - try it out!

There is a tip in one of those articles to try updating your page and then submit it through google search console for immediate results. I am not sure if it works all the time but I have seen some cases where we updated content and had a featured snippet result 5 minutes after submitting through search console. I am not saying to redo content again if you do not see results so fast, but in some cases it can give you an idea that you are on the right track and that the content is in a format that triggers the snippet.

Hope that helps!

Wordpress and Joomla are both just tools at the end of the day and can both be effective depending on how you are using them. I personally have had negative experiences trying to optimise existing joomla sites (complicated templates, weird plugin functionality, slow load times etc) but I am sure those more experienced with it would say these things can be overcome.

The real questions are why you want to switch systems and how much effort it would require to do so? It looks like you have quite a bit of content in your site, so migrating to wordpress would likely need a bit of technical experience and time to complete. I am sure there are scripts around that will help in that process, but migrating a db from one system to another usually has a few gotcha moments along the way! You would also need to account for any changes in url structures and 301ing the old urls to the new. All in all not a decision to be taken lightly.

If there is not a specific reason you want to switch (ie something you are trying to do in joomla that is proving impossible for some reason) I would think that switching platforms might be more hassle than it is worth. As for one or the other being more customisable and/or secure than the other, I don't think there is really any difference between them, both are fully customisable and are as secure (or not secure) as you make them if following best practices.

Im pretty sure I did....

'wp-admin-bar-wpseo-kwdensity'  and 'class="ab-item"' indicate that this is code related with the wordpress admin bar. If you are logged into wordpress as an admin you will see this bar (black bar at the top of the page) when you view the site also. Did you try deselecting the  'show toolbar when viewing site' I mentioned above? When you do that do you still see the 'injected' code? I suspect not.....

Yoast and his seo plugin are both very welll known and respected, it doesn't just inject code into a site so that is why I say I think you are misinterpreting what you are seeing.

As for the a class="seomoz-highlight seomoz-highlight-nofollow", as Leslie says this is because you have the moz toolbar installed in your browser and have chosen to highlight no follow links in the options. Deselect this option and you will not see this code anymore. If you like, look at the google cache of any of your pages.... they will have neither of the code snippets you are worried about in them.

HI Dino,

Yes the links will still show in external link reports if they still exist. Assuming you have GWT access for the domain in question, you can go to the google disavow tool (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main), select the relevant domain and then click 'disavow links'. it will pop up a window where you can also download the last file that was uploaded to the disavow tool. You can then use this list to cross check against the links you are seeing in the reports to make sure nothing was missed.

Hi,

If you can do as recommended above and get rid of the page completely then this would be the way to go. Since it is on a national newspaper site and a couple of years old I am guessing this might be tough to do (although worth a shot).

Otherwise you can try to boost your own rankings and grab more real estate by:

1. Making sure all your on page data is branded (page titles, company schema etc).

2. Use verified social channels and link to them from your site (especially google+ but fb, twitter, linkedin, youtube are all good).

3. Get a few more branded links into the site (I assuming you are in 2nd position, it is a bit unusual for a branded search to not return the brand as the first option - you might just need a few more (honest) links).

5. Short term solution: Adwords on your brand's search. You should get a 4 pack of site links + descriptions in it also so should give a fair amount of real estate above the newspaper article and should be inexpensive.

Hi,

At first glance it seems you have a rel canonical issue. All of your blog posts have a rel canonical pointing to: <link <span class="webkit-html-attribute-name">rel="canonical" href="http://www.hilden.co.uk/bed-linen.html" /></link <span>

Probably not what you had in mind!

Hi David,

Personally I feel the value is debatable. If you are syndicating your own blog content then you are running the risk of either duplicate content and/or what looks quite a bit like mechanical link building, both of which are low value options.

If you are planning on creating unique content for the other blogs then you need to balance the amount of effort it will need to create something decent with the amount of time you have. I have also found that you can be in danger of competing with yourself, and the last thing you want is your offsite blog competing with your main site/blog. In my experience blogspot etc have proven to be more hassle than they are worth in upkeep and I would prefer to focus on the main blog creating good content and building strong links.

My two cents!

Hi,

I think this will do what you are after: http://pro.moz.com/tools/crawl-test, limited to 3000 pages but should give an idea if the fix is working as you expect.

HI Benoit,

If the site is very new and has no incoming links yet I would think that google is still trying to decide what it is all about and how best to present the data in the serps and that is why you are seeing the contact data in there (also the type of search you are doing - an exact match for the domain - could be influencing the type of data returned). Give it a bit of time and the description should change around and settle.

The date is mentioned in your source code (view source and search for 'vcard' and you will see a hidden div with author and date info in it). So google is likely thinking your site is a blog and adding date info to the serps. Getting this hidden code completely out of the template should help getting the date out of the description.

HI,

There was a recent WBF about syndicated content which runs down the various technical ways you can attribute your listings as the original source - check it out here. It would probably also help to make sure your listings are the first ones into the index which can be done by internally linking to the new jobs (obviously), quickly adding them to your sitemap, sharing them through social channels (especially twitter) - all of which should help make sure your content is indexed quickly and ideally before it is replicated on other sites.

If the other sites have stronger authority than yours you would still really want to get one of the 3 options discussed in the video implemented. It sounds like you already have the link back to your site (option 3 in the video) so perhaps the link is not 'clean' ie a straight text link that leads to the exact job on your site and is not no-followed?

It might also depend on what kind of long tail you are looking at ranking for. Individual job ads might not pull a lot of organic traffic by themselves if they are not aggregated by type or location for example - at which point the higher authority domains are likely to show an advantage (just a thought).

Hi,

Sometimes FB seems to get a bit stuck on urls, I find running them through the fb url debug tool (https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/) usually seems to unstick them. I plugged that url into the tool, it returns ok, does it post properly now also?