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The head office happens to be the e-commerce store.  Then there are actual physical stores that sell the same products physically. So we do want visibility for 'HQ' as the main 'entity'.  Yes if anyone has a problem they contact the shop or HQ/e-commerce store.  So with that in mind I still need clarification of the schema to use.

If you had two different source codes served via user-agent (web-user vs googlebot) then you'd be more at risk of this. I can't categorically state that there is no risk in what you are doing, as Google operates multiple mathematical algorithms to determine when  'cloaked' content is being used - and guess what? Sometimes they go wrong That being said, I don't believe your risk of garnering a penalty is particularly high with this type of thing These are the guidelines: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66355?hl=en You're in a really gray area because, you aren't serving different URLs - but you _could _be serving different content (albeit only slightly). I say 'could' rather than 'are' as it entirely depends upon whether Google (on any particular crawl) decides to enable rendered crawling or not If Google uses rendered crawling, and they take the content from their headless-browser page-render (which they can do, but don't always choose to as it's a more intensive crawling technique) then your content is actually the same for users and search engines. If however they just do a base-source scrape (which they also do frequently) and they take the content from the source code (which doesn't contain the visual cut-off) then you are serving different content to users and search engines Because you've got right down into a granular area where the rules may or may not apply conditionally, I wouldn't think the risk was very high. If you ever get any problems, your main roadblock will be explaining the detail of the problem on Google's Webmaster Forums here. Support can be very hit and miss

I certainly don't think there's any harm in a self-referencing confirmation, if anything it gives a bit of a 'you are here' marker I found a Stack thread which might be handy: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29816633/breadcrumbs-on-current-page ... seems pretty relevant. Obviously they're using microdata and not JSON-LD, but the logic should be similar

Hi Michael, Can you post the site URL so I can review further? Thanks! John

A couple of other issues were uncovered with certain collections browser rendering.  Cleaned up menu duplication and these.  Monitoring.

Hey Michael, I've found some other threads about the same issue. You can check them, maybe it could help: https://moz.com/community/q/how-long-will-404-errors-show-in-webmaster-tools-search-console https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/hupstYVfBzo Best, Martin

Hi Michael, Yes, Google does say "whenever possible", so this is one of those things where you could possibly decide that there isn't a huge risk in the redirecting numbers, but it would make me a bit uneasy. For one thing, there have been numerous documented incidents of Google calling businesses. If the switchboard receptionist answers "Happy Sailboats" or "Happy Sailboats Marina" instead of "Happy Sailboats Shipyard" this can actually trigger a red flag about the accuracy with which you're representing the business name/s on the Google My Business listings. So, just so you know, there is some risk whenever you don't stick to Google stated preferences to the letter. How big a risk? Hard to say. The risk-free way would be for the business to change its phone system if having 3 GMB listings is deemed important enough, so that each department answers its own phone directly. I'd also build a really strong landing page for each of the 3 departments and link the GMB listings to them. Or, in the end, the business may decide to simply marketing itself with a single GMB listing, which is also risk-free but could miss out on the opportunity of ranking for the wider variety of categories the department approach can cover.

To make matters worse I can't remove any listings because I can't login to Central Index because the whole process is being managed by Moz Local.  I think i'll also talk to support over this.

Hi Andy, thanks for the reply.  Yes, each p=* is identical to the base category URL, the only differences are a small handful of products on each p=* which are not really offering anything to those pages in the way of uniqueness at all in the way they are presented.  So from that point of view the canonical makes sense.  However, I don't want to take Google's focus away from cleanly crawling all the products within p=* So rel=next & prev for me opens up duplication issues as there are no "parts" of content, it's going to be effectively the same category textual content. However if I implement &view-all and set the canonical to that version i'm then worried Google may be problematic and not play ball.

I'm trying to understand WHY they're using hidden H1s at all? I see no good reason to put H1s in a hidden class if it's not displayed on the page. Is there some sort of functionality mapped to the H1s? If so, it should be done some other way if you don't actually want it to show. I don't have the full context, but it really sounds like a bad attempt to get keywords on the page. It won't work, and it could do some harm.

Never look a gift horse in the mouth. Just kidding the legitimate Moz staff did a great job of letting you know it was an error with the system. Keep up the good work all the best, Tom

I got there in the end.  They have a Wistia video loading on the homepage, but Wistia robots blocks this resource.  When the resource is blocked the CSS is loading a holding image.  However, this is configured to fill the whole page.  So therefore when googlebot crawls it cannot render anything further than this image or this defined area in CSS.  Dev is fixing.

Hi Michael I don't think this is a concern in terms of a penalty or anything severe. But I would say, if you'd prefer the other breadcrumbs to show up, perhaps try some breadcrumb structured data (unless you have already?) - to get the preferred ones to show up. https://developers.google.com/structured-data/breadcrumbs

You could always test the link to see if it is really being used from the secondary navigation more so (or at all) than the main navigation link. Create a parameter and track it over a few months in analytics. That way you don't over-optimize in the interim but 3 months from now (or less, or more, really that's up to you) you can definitively say whether it is better to remove it or if leaving it alone was the correct move.

Hi Kristen,  I sent you a PM.

The only valid redirection is the one based on user browser, not IP, IMHO. However, if you want to use that kind of redirection for the home page (not the others pages), then that redirection should be working the first time, so that users can eventually choose to go to another version of the site they prefer (i.e.: I live in Spain and I go to domain.eu. When I travel in the US, I still want to go to domain.eu, not always being pushed to use domain.com). Moreover, doing that, you will let crawlers to discover also the others version even though they were redirected to the one corresponding to their IP the first time. In other words, Googlebot (Mountain View, USA, IP), the first time will go always to domain.com, but once there it will able to discover also domain.eu and domain.co.uk from the versions selector, and it won't be redirected again to domain.com. Said all this, the fact is that you want to target a political area (EU) with domain.eu, the world with domain.com and the UK with domain.co.uk. This desire to target three different kind of geographies complicates everything :-). The only solution I see is: Domain.com set up as "global" >> hreflang="en". All users using English will see it in the SERPs despite of their location but in these cases (see point 2 and 3); Domain.eu set up as the site for the European countries >> hreflang="en-ES" - hreflang="en-IT" - hreflang="en-DE" and so on. Domain.co.uk set up as the site for Great Britain >> hreflang="en-GB". Doing this and implementing the hreflang in the canonical URLs of the sites and referencing only canonical URLs of the others sites (apart having the self-referral hreflang), then you should be safe. However, remember that with those hreflang, people searching in another language than English will never (or almost never) see your sites but for brand name searches or very specific brand + product queries. Therefore, I am still of the idea that having only English websites for targeting the world means missing a huge business opportunity.

Hi Michael, Yes, this is a bit complicated. Ideally, you'd have just 1 website for the business, but if you have to have 2, be sure there is no connection between the two. No shared NAP, no shared content, etc. It would need to be run as a completely separate business to avoid the danger of NAP confusion.

Hey Michael I wouldn't be concerned, Google stated recently that blocked 3rd party images should not be an issue.

Thanks guys.  My feeling is also that it has been hooked onto from the organic side and not directly relevant.  I'm not getting any feedback that is going to make me want to test!  I'm in the process of getting a client to update their pages as the privacy policy is too thin deep within a T&C link and the question came up.

I take on all your points and would typically agree.  However, for some keywords only a menu link to poor content exists but there is the relationship with the overall content/theme.  What I would say is that the site was live some time before I began work so the pages were 'settled'.  I've just not seen the scenario where all those directories nose dive completely off the radar and for a period the homepage (against some stiff competition) instantly dominate so strongly, previously struggling page 2-3.  I've seen fluctuations but this was a bit whacky.