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I noticed that every link on my site is being flagged up as a 302 temp redirect in Moz. The reason is because we have a multi store and use GeoIP to redirect anyone coming from their respective country.
I'm guessing a 302 is the wrong way to do this - can anyone shed advice on the best practice for redirecting customers to geo-specific stores?
I run Magento 2 and have two stores, one intended for the EU and one for the US. 99% of the products available appear on both stores, there is an automatic redirect in place to either store depending on your location. But I think Google is seeing these as duplicate products/stores.
Should I add the Index,NoFollow tag to one of the two stores?
My issue is that I want both stores to rank in their geographical locations and I am concerned that by adding the NoFollow tag is will stop that dead in its tracks for one location.
Any advice would be helpful.
Hi Martijn,
The solution didn't work, I'm not sure if there is a conflict here but this is what my htaccess currently looks like:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]
#RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
#RewriteRule ^(.)$ https://thespacecollective.com/$1 [L,R=301]
#RewriteRule ^(.)$ https://www.thespacecollective.com/$1 [L,R=301]
<ifmodule pagespeed_module="">ModPagespeed off</ifmodule>
RewriteRule .* - [E=noabort:1]
RewriteRule .* - [E=noconntimeout:1]
<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^interstellarstore.com$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.interstellarstore.com$</ifmodule>
RewriteRule (.*)$ https://www.thespacecollective.com/$1 [R=301,L]
I use ScreamingFrog to generate sitemaps for my Magento 2 multistore, but I recently noticed two issues.
The URLs are canonicalised, but this is still a problem and I'm not sure exactly how to execute this in the htaccess file.
So I need to:
How do I do this en mass in the htaccess file?
So I recently switched from an Opencart website to a Magento 2 website and my rank has dropped by 35% two weeks later, this is bad news. My old Magento website was 5 years old and was in desperate need of an upgrade, hence the Magento 2 site.
I realised today that the canonical URLs on my stores were set to the individual stores as opposed to one store, thus I expect resulting in duplicate content issues (even though Google Webmaster Tools didn't show it).
I'm just wondering if anyone else can see something I may be missing? My sites are:
thespacecollective.com (primary)
thespacecollective.com/us/ (canonical to primary)
Thank you!
Thank you very much for taking the time to respond so eloquently.
If all the products would be visible in the base, non-modified source code (right click page, then click "view source" - is the data there?) then there is a high likelihood that Google will see and crawl it.
I can confirm that each product does in fact appear in the source data, so as you say, Google will crawl it which is somewhat of a relief.
Does this then mean that regardless of which page the products appear on, Google will simply ignore this factor and treat each product the same regardless?
The thing I am trying to avoid is products on page 2, 3 and so on from being valued less.
What with Google recently coming out and saying they're basically ignoring paginated pages, I'm considering the link structure of our new, sooner to launch ecommerce site (moving from an old site to a new one with identical URL structure less a few 404s).
Currently our new site shows 20 products per page but with this change by Google it means that any products on pages 2, 3 and so on will suffer because google treats it like an entirely separate page as opposed to an extension of the first.
The way I see it I have one option: Show every product in each category on page 1.
I have Lazy Load installed on our new website so it will only load the screen a user can see and as they scroll down it loads more products, but how will google interpret this? Will Google simply see all 50-300 products per category and give the site a bad page load score because it doesn't know the Lazy Load is in place? Or will it know and account for it?
Is there anything I'm missing?
This is quite technical but I'm hoping a Magento expert can clear this up for me. Currently my company has two websites on separate Opencart platforms. What I'm doing now is building a Magento website and using the multi store function as well as a few modules to combine the two sites, the aim being that the link juice is shared and I can focus my SEO efforts on the one site instead of two, thus reducing my workload while maintaining the benefits.
This is the intended layout:
I have created a sub-folder (not a subdomain) as this seems to be the best way to share link juice between the new, combined sites (as well as 301s from the old, redundant site).
At the moment I have created 2 separate websites, stores and store views (see attached) and have configured it according to the Magento guide, so I know that technically this is correct but I need to make sure that I have done it correctly in relation to SEO.
Is the sub-folder set up correctly for instance? Currently the only files to populate that sub-folder are a htaccess, error log and index.php (see attached). Also, is there anything I could be missing in relation to SEO within the parameters of what I am trying to achieve?
Additionally, only one store view appears in the "change store view" section of the home page. This is causing me to question if I have set it up correctly, because I had assumed both store views would appear even if they were under different websites (attached). OR do I simply use the same website and create two stores and store views?
Do I also need to create a separate database for each website/store/store view?
I would very much appreciate if someone could help out here. Thank you.
Meta keywords have not been a ranking factor in Google for quite some time. They also provide your competitors with a knowledge of the keywords you're targeting, so in essence by using them you're giving your game away. My advice is don't use them.
So I am merging two ecommerce brands together and have decided to do so either under a Subdirectory or gTLD.
My aim here is to increase the quality of my SEO for the weaker site (this would be the second italic domain shown in A and B below), thus taking domain authority from the dominant site, while 301 redirecting all pages from the old domain which will hopefully boost the authority and rank for the merged site).
My options for the merged site are:
A. www.website.com & www.website.com/hreflang=en
B. www.website.com & www.website.com/us
Or a combination of A & B (below):
C. www.website.com & www.website.com/us/hreflang=en
Factors:
Here are my questions:
I know this is quite an advanced series of questions, so I would appreciate the opinions of others so I can make the most informed choice.
Thank you
Hello D,
Option 2 would undoubtedly result in a change in rank. That change could be positive or negative depending on the content of the new pages, so if you're going to use this method you need to make sure that the content is on par.
As for Option 1, so long as you 301 redirect the old pages to the new ones and add copy, you shouldn't see a fall in rank. If anything, the added content may boost your rank depending on the quality.
Either way, so long as you do so carefully and correctly, both methods could work. Personally I would opt for Option 1 as it seems to be the least labour intensive and has a more predictable outcome on your rank.
I hope that helps!
Hi Kate,
Thanks for the reply.
We have a warehouse in the UK and USA and the products sold on each site vary, so we need to keep them seperate. We want our efforts to be pushed towards SEO best practice, that is to say that the hosting we want regionally and also to merge the brands together (they're currently under two different brand/domain names).
The site we have operating in the US currently isn't doing great and is taking a lot of effort in terms of SEO, effort we could be putting towards the .com. If we bring the US site under the flag of the .com our hope is that it will benefit from the .com's authority and receive a boost (we would also 301 redirect all traffic from the previous domain as not to lose any juice).
Hi Jeff,
So long as you compile the list of 301 redirects and add them into your htaccess file (or plugin) before making the Shopify site live you shouldn't have a problem. Google announced some time ago that they preferred https as opposed to http and it was hinted that https was a ranking factor (or would soon become one), so you're making the right decision in that respect.
Lastly, Moz actually has a pretty good site migration guide which I would suggest reading: https://moz.com/blog/website-migration-guide
If I have understood your question correctly, you have set up redirects from the old site to the new site, but old links are still appearing in Google search results. It is in my experience that old links tend to remain for some time, but when clicked and assuming a redirect is correctly set up, the user will be redirected to the new page. It can take some time for Google to update the old page to show the new one instead.
I hope that helps.
Richard
Hello Neik,
It is considered best practice to optimise the link structure as you propose, about-us as opposed to aboutus. But that is only a minor change and may not have all too much of an effect in terms of SEO. There is a wonderful Moz guide on URL best practice here: https://moz.com/learn/seo/url
It is also worth considering that 301 redirects in the htaccess file can potentially slow down the load speed of your website, albeit by a small amount, but this may negate any positive effect from the changes you're suggesting.
I hope that helps.
Richard
Also, if I am using hreflag tags, am I still able to have both sites on different servers with their own localised IPs? This is necessary for SEO.
Then when you click through to a product:
I have encountered no problems doing this in Opencart. No 301 redirects were needed because the plugin takes care of this itself.
I want to make sure that you're aware of the different internal structures in URL depth. That's probably why most people would advise you not to go this way.
I'm sorry, I'm not sure what you mean in respect to different internal structures or why the above would be an issue.