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In my opinion, I dont think it matters much. However, i do like my urls to have keyword placement in the same manner as they would be typed by users (so, basically keywords with more search volume or what you think people would be typing in)

To answer your question, I would ask what do you think people are going to type in Google for if they wanted any of these services? Will it be 'whitening treatment' or 'treatment whitening'?

As Logan said, its not going to make or break your SEO, I wouldnt be too worried about it but yes, when being in a situation like this, I would like to go with what I mentioned earlier.

Couple of things -

1. Have you redirected from original website to the BigCommerce site and also redirected the shopify links to BigCommerce? The last thing you want is a chain like this - original > Shopify > BigCommerce

2. How long ago was this change? If this wasnt long ago then its probably best to wait for it get back up to the same/similar rankings as your original website. If you have done your redirects well, it should take a few weeks and the rankings should get back to normal.

3. Was there a structural and content change to your pages? If the answer is yes then its not really a straightforward migration. This is a complete new website you have got now that is not just a changed platform but different architecture and structure and maybe content. In this situation, its fair to say that there will be a lot of ranking changes. Was your original ecommerce website was handcoded by you and with shopify you used their templates?

4. As for 404, if there is no organic traffic going to these pages then you dont have to redirect them. You may have to spend some time looking at Google Analytics

A lot of times this happens when you switch from one platform to another, there is an impact on the organic rankings. There would be something performing differently which can impact your sites visibility. Like Jordan mentioned, I would also suggest that you should focus on improving the site speed.

• Malika

In my opinion, you dont have to redirect if you have set the canonicals. Couple of things to keep in check (more best practice) with this approach -

1. All the internal links are lower case - just makes the website look cleaner by saving a lot of search engine bots time identifying the canonical urls. Less processing for search engine bots this way. Also, it will help with analytics tracking. If the internal links are uppercase then users will end up browsing upper case URLs. If lower case URLs are indexed and getting traffic but after reaching your website users start viewing upper case URLs too then it can cause your analytics data to be scattered between these two.

2. Monitor your organic results to see what URLs are indexed in SERPs. If the canonical tags are implemented well and search engines have crawled your website, your preferred URLs should show in organic SERPs.

you will have to redirect one URL to another in order to have them resolved the way you want.

If you have canonical tags implemented, then it wont redirect and resolve. The purpose of canonical tag is to let search engines know about your preferred URL. It doesnt redirect search engines or users to your preferred page.

Hope this makes sense.

• Malika

Hi Aviad,

The answer to this depends on the following or at least these should be kept in mind while making a decision on it -

1. Resources company is ready to allocate - Is company willing to spend more money buy having different websites on TLDs or just having one website is feasible?

2. What does the company want from brand point of view? This is bit of a vague question and maybe no one has the answer to it but its probably worth considering this.

Now, talking from SEO POV, different TLDs could potentially yield you better results as these are dedicated sites for different locations.

1. GEO TARGETING - You could host these sites on their local respective IP addresses.

2. LOCALISED CONTENT - Localise/customise the content of the website better since the websites are dedicated to specific countries.

3. USERS EXPECTATIONS/PREFERENCE - TLD might give you an added benefit as search engines tend to show few TLDs on first page (from my observation). Also, if you think about it from user perspective, they prefer browsing a website that seems more local. Buying a product from company.uk might be much more appealing than buying it from company.com or whatever the global website is.

Now talking about having a global website, its not that bad at all if you optimise it well.

1. GEO TARGETING - You dont need to host the website on separate ip addresses since its just one website. In order to have it load fast in different countries, you could use CDNs. CDNs are really good and if you get a good subscription, it could give your website a good SEO benefit.

2. LOCALISED CONTENT - In order to talk to the users from different geographic region, you could have specific dedicated pages sitting within the subfolders such as company.com/uk, company.com/jp etc. This way you will be able to speak to the users by customising these dedicated pages.

3. USERS EXPECTATIONS/PREFERENCE - I mentioned above that users prefer to shop from TLDs more. If you have subfolders on the website, then you that good however, users can still see that you are a global website. This is something that you might wanna think about.

Hope this gives you a bit of idea on the thought process for understanding what will be best for the company.

Malika

As Linda as pointed out as well, the title tags displayed in SERPs depend on your search query.

I can see that the word exists on the page. If you could share your search query then someone here might be able to help you

Hi Thomas,

Before I ask in the community to everybody, I thought I would ask you since you know great deal of technical stuff. You helped me with Screaming Frog couple of months away.

Sorry OP for putting my question here.

Thomas, is it possible/good to have CDNs for different cities within the country to improve speed of loading? I just used GA to find out if there is difference in loading speed in different cities in New Zealand for a website and it seems like some of the cities have massively high page loading time than the other cities.

I do understand that some cities dont have super fast connections. I would like to know can I have CDNs for different locations within a country? Or am I thinking way too much stupid?

Looking forward to your response.

Thanks

Malika

Thanks. I think the content on page is pretty good and strong as we have just done an upgrade of the website. Just recently Google decided to show this description from DMOZ.

awesome thanks!

Hi all,

I have come across the most weird situation ever in my SEO career.

Google is displaying description in organic results for brand term under the website URL that doesnt exist on the website ANYWHERE but this description does appear on some directory sites created back in 2002 or so.

Is there a possibility that Google is pulling info from directory sites and displaying as a description in the organic results?

I am super confused!

Help needed!

Thanks

I wouldnt say only backlinks were the reason as backlinks is only one part. I gained links from Wiki - as you know Google loves Wikipedia and pulls a lot of information from Wiki to knowledge graph. I build backlinks from Wiki and some other sources to our main page. After about 5-6 months, the answer box was showing.

I also remember one thing that I forgot to mention earlier. It can sometimes take a lot of time to kick competitor out of answer box and get yourself up there.

Food for thought - If you can build a click through relationship between searches and the webpage in question, I am sure Google can start giving you more favor if you increase click through rate for that particular keyword of yours. If you are already ranking higher then chances are that you are getting more clicks already but maybe from a different geographic location your competitor is getting more clicks and has a better click through rate.

Open Graph and Meta Titles act slightly different. Open Graph is for audience on social media such as Facebook and Meta Title information can be processed by search engine bots and display results in the organic listings on search engine page such as Google.

Meta title are usually crafted by keeping the keyword search volume, target market and user interest in mind. This help with the rankings on search engines like Google.

Open Graph are usually created to serve meta title that look 'appealing' to the users on social media (Facebook) so as to receive more clicks. There are no rankings involved here.

You can have meta titles and open graph titles as the same or different, it depends on what you are after.

A separate project should be undertaken to change the url from knightdoorservices.com to knightdoorsandwindows.com for all the old backlinks that have been acquired so far.

301 redirects only pass on some of the link equity. So it's very important that you fix the website url in those backlinks

By doing this, you should see some improvements soon.

Hi Takeshi,

I was able to get answer boxes for a client of mine in dental industry. From my observations and experience, you can get answer box only if your content has conversational lines in there. For example - how to, why, etc.

As I dont have a clear picture of your example I cant give you a lot of information but feel free to PM me if you wish to discuss it further.

Some of the things to keep in mind to appear in answer boxes -

1. Keep the titles very close to the search terms (ex. search query - What is the cost of _________. This should be included in your title and be good to make it appear in header tag too.

2. If the information you are trying to put in answer box can be put in a table on your content page, that would be great! The particular case where my client was able to get an answer box had some content displayed from the table. So in answer box, the whole table was showing.

3. Check your domain authority with your competitors. Is your competitor the one with higher domain authority? A lot has got to do with the sites that are linking to your competitor and the domain authority they have got.

4. Update your content frequently. This is another big factor as Google prefers to display content from sites that serves fresher content.

5. Backlinks - gain strong authority backlinks. I ran a campaign for this client where I worked on gaining strong links.

Hope this helps. Feel free to PM me. I would be happy to help.

• Malika

In my opinion, I dont think it matters much. However, i do like my urls to have keyword placement in the same manner as they would be typed by users (so, basically keywords with more search volume or what you think people would be typing in)

To answer your question, I would ask what do you think people are going to type in Google for if they wanted any of these services? Will it be 'whitening treatment' or 'treatment whitening'?

As Logan said, its not going to make or break your SEO, I wouldnt be too worried about it but yes, when being in a situation like this, I would like to go with what I mentioned earlier.

Schema is slowly picking up and would be very beneficial and will be deemed important by search engines as its a joint effort by Google, Bing and Yahoo!.

Meta tags on the other hand have always been important. Page Title being the most important here.

Hi Aviad,

The answer to this depends on the following or at least these should be kept in mind while making a decision on it -

1. Resources company is ready to allocate - Is company willing to spend more money buy having different websites on TLDs or just having one website is feasible?

2. What does the company want from brand point of view? This is bit of a vague question and maybe no one has the answer to it but its probably worth considering this.

Now, talking from SEO POV, different TLDs could potentially yield you better results as these are dedicated sites for different locations.

1. GEO TARGETING - You could host these sites on their local respective IP addresses.

2. LOCALISED CONTENT - Localise/customise the content of the website better since the websites are dedicated to specific countries.

3. USERS EXPECTATIONS/PREFERENCE - TLD might give you an added benefit as search engines tend to show few TLDs on first page (from my observation). Also, if you think about it from user perspective, they prefer browsing a website that seems more local. Buying a product from company.uk might be much more appealing than buying it from company.com or whatever the global website is.

Now talking about having a global website, its not that bad at all if you optimise it well.

1. GEO TARGETING - You dont need to host the website on separate ip addresses since its just one website. In order to have it load fast in different countries, you could use CDNs. CDNs are really good and if you get a good subscription, it could give your website a good SEO benefit.

2. LOCALISED CONTENT - In order to talk to the users from different geographic region, you could have specific dedicated pages sitting within the subfolders such as company.com/uk, company.com/jp etc. This way you will be able to speak to the users by customising these dedicated pages.

3. USERS EXPECTATIONS/PREFERENCE - I mentioned above that users prefer to shop from TLDs more. If you have subfolders on the website, then you that good however, users can still see that you are a global website. This is something that you might wanna think about.

Hope this gives you a bit of idea on the thought process for understanding what will be best for the company.

Malika

Hi MOZers,

This probably is a dumb question but I have a case where the robots.tags has an image url blocked but this image is used on a page (lets call it Page A) which can be indexed. If the image on Page A has an Alt tags, then how is this information digested by crawlers?

A) would Google totally ignore the image and the ALT tags information? OR

B) Google would consider the ALT tags information?

I am asking this because all the images on the website are blocked by robots.txt at the moment but I would really like website crawlers to crawl the alt tags information. Chances are that I will ask the webmaster to allow indexing of images too but I would like to understand what's happening currently.

Looking forward to all your responses

Malika

I am assuming that these pages don't hold any authority or backlinks at all. You can simply delete these pages (if the purposes of these pages has been solved.

Or if you still need these pages live, use Robots.txt file to make these pages (or the whole subdomain/directory they are sitting as disallowed, no-index)

Not an expert on this but Google will crawl and index these dynamic URLs if they are being used (generated by user query) a lot. Here are some methods you could use -

1. Link building for these dynamic URLs - You could do some link building for all the combinations of filters (dynamic URLs. This could be time consuming but well worth. Ideas for link building includes - press releases, blog posts (if you have a blog then can you do internal linking), business directories (if your business has got a physical store then you can create business listings and mention your products strategically (dynamic URLs) etc.

2. Update .htaccess file - Maybe there is a way to set canonical for some URLs to your preferred dynamic URLs. - Okay, as I said I am not an expert on this so I am just throwing this idea out there for if someone is aware of a way.