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Nigel_Carr

Hi Kevin

Yes, this is absolutely the right method. You won't rank for the video on the two pages with the canonical but I guess you have a reason for this but cross-domain rel-canonical is the correct way to do this,

I would also consider transcribing the video on the important page too for maximum SEO juice.

Regards

Nige

Nigel_Carr

Hi Harjodh

When something is found by site crawler it just means that the page is accessible, it does not mean that it is indexed in Google. There may be many reasons why a page is on the site but not indexed, Including

Duplicate content problem
Noindex tag or directive in robots.txt
Canonical to another page.
Skinny or low quality content

The code to a page title will be viewable if you right click, 'view source' - the page title will only be viewable in WP if you have Yoast or similar installed and is not in the text view of Wordpress.

So:

1. Check source code and search the page for the title tag - this will be the name of the article.
2. Install Yoast to add an alternate title and description if you need to. (definitely install Yoast!)
3. If the H1 is not visible on the page (and I would be surprised because most themes, as you say, make the post title the H1) then you will need to add it or update the theme so that the theme does it.

Screaming Frog is an excellent tool for scanning a site and has no limitations on daily use. It will help you see everything!

I hope this helps,

Regards

Nigel

Nigel_Carr

Hi Ryan

Disavowing a link doesn't take it away so they will still appear as backlinks to your site. The fact that Google disregards them in relation to your site does not take them off the sites they are on, so best practice is to approach the webmaster first and request the link be removed. If you get no response then disavow.

Remember also that the file you upload should be ALL the backlinks to want disavowing, don't remove any which have been previously uploaded as the links will then go back! rather, download what you have previously uploaded, and add newly found toxic links to the file, which must then be re-uploaded.

Google will date stamp each file. The file is not read be real people so don't bother making any notes on the file unless they are for you or your staff's benefit.

Regards

Nigel

Nigel_Carr

Hi Zack

There area number of ways of dealing with this problem all of which are covered here: https://moz.com/blog/seo-guide-to-google-webmaster-recommendations-for-pagination

For me when I have sort problems I go to parameters and specify exactly what Google should do with the result. It's reasonably simply to use parameters in search console and specify NO URLs for the parameter ?view

However, a word of warning - you have to be really careful doing this as you could end up blocking the whole site with the slightest slip. Like canonicals, no indexing and robots.txt - get a good SEO just to take a look.

Best Regards

Nigel - Carousel Projects

Nigel_Carr

Pleasure

Nigel_Carr

Hi KMCBRIDE

I work with a lot of UK eCommerce stores and find this a lot. Your 'shop by' pages are created by the shop-by tag. This ski version can be appended to any page so for examples you have:

https://www.dare2b.com/womens/shop-by/activity/ski/
https://www.dare2b.com/womens/shop-by/activity/ski/gender/womens/
https://www.dare2b.com/womens/shop-by/activity/ski/product_category/clothing/
https://www.dare2b.com/womens/shop-by/activity/ski/product_types/ski_jackets/
https://www.dare2b.com/womens/shop-by/activity/ski/gender/womens/product_types/ski_jackets/
https://www.dare2b.com/womens/shop-by/activity/ski/categories/dare2b_womensdare2b_womensjacketsdare2b/
https://www.dare2b.com/womens/shop-by/activity/ski/categories/dare2b_womensdare2b_womensfleecemidlayersdare2b/
https://www.dare2b.com/womens/shop-by/activity/ski/categories/dare2b_womensdare2b_womenstrousersdare2b/

Then you have

https://www.dare2b.com/womens/jackets-coats/

Which mentions the terms 'ski jackets', 'padded winter coats' and 'waterproof jackets'

The bottom line is that /activity/ski is carved down into

2 genders
3 Department
9 Categories
19 Product types - including ski jackets!

These can then be combined with colour of which there are 12

https://www.dare2b.com/womens/shop-by/activity/ski/colour_group/black/

And Price:

https://www.dare2b.com/womens/shop-by/activity/ski/size/m/

The size, colour & price pages don't seem to be ranking even though they have an index/follow on them. They are not being blocked in robots.txt either so you must be controlling them in htaccess or some other way. If they were they would create an even bigger mulit-dimensional matrix.

All of this low-quality content needs to be properly diagnosed and gone through. All tags inherit the highest category on-page content and meta too. You are doing really well to rank for Ski Jackets to be honest as Google has a big job knowing how to index your site.

It's not just activity/ski either - it is every tag combining with every other tag that is causing you serious headaches.

2420 pages of activity/ski alone.

Happy to chat if you would like to learn more.

Regards

Nigel - Carousel Projects UK

Nigel_Carr

Hi Catherine

The best way is to go to an incognito or private browsing window in either Chrome or Firefox and clear the history in both before proceeding.

Ignore any request to view your location and search. You will get a clear result devoid of location or browsing history.

Regards

Nigel

Nigel_Carr

Hi Steve

400 outbound links is very high, but the domain has a DA of 65 and the page a PA of 32 with a low spam score. They are all dofollow as well. As part of a balanced backlink strategy, it won't do you any harm. Can't see it doing you much good either to be honest.

Regards Nigel

Nigel_Carr

Hi Zack

If you have specified No URLs in search console or set to crawl only say, one, it's just a matter of time before they are dropped from the index. Just be patient and it should resolve itself.

There are ways to block them completely using robots.txt or a rewrite in htaccess but I haven't used them - maybe someone else can advise:

https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/86853/how-to-correctly-remove-parameters-from-the-google-index

https://www.hallaminternet.com/avoiding-the-seo-pitfalls-of-url-parameters/

Regards Nigel

Nigel_Carr

Hi Isabelle

I think may be look around at some existing retailers.

Halfords is one of the biggest in the UK where I am and they don't have a problem with either way.

Here they list with a colour swatch on the category page with a colour and frame size drop down on the product page.

http://www.halfords.com/cycling/bikes/mountain-bikes/carrera-vengeance-womens-mountain-bike

As long as the image changes then the UX is perfect in my honest opinion.

Good luck

NIgel

Nigel_Carr

Hi Varun

It makes the URL look cleaner, also no stop word is any use either in the URL or in the page title. Sometimes they are essential where for example a record by the band 'Cage The Elephant' would make no sense if you removed the 'The', but in general, they are of little use. It's for that reason they are discouraged. They can also make the URL overly long but no one seems to be able to decide what is too long.

Stick to succinct, punchy URLs that tell it as it is.

Regards

Nigel

Nigel_Carr

Hi Sorin

When you send your products to Google Merchant Centre you will have a parent product and children which will be listed as size and colour. The XML feed should have those all listed out separately, so that if someone is looking for a Black Widget size 9 then that will be an individual listing.

The parent title will be appended with the colour and size in search results.

So the answer is: do not include colour or size in the parent title as this will be appended to from the correct attribute data in your merchant feed.

Generally too, on your website, the title of the product, where products have variants or attributes is not to list them in the product title. It's fine to add them to the description, so in organics, they may be visible, but not the title.

I hope that helps,

Regards

Nigel

Nigel_Carr

Hi Marynau

Look on the right side of teh Moz bar and they give a rating out of 17. I'd say anything over 6/7 would be considered bad. Having said that I rely on SEMrush to tell me if it's toxic or not.

Best Regards

Nigel

Nigel_Carr

Hi Kate

I work with a lot of eCommerce companies and when a category is essentially in limbo - between seasons where stock may be re-bought then I keep it live. To simply redirect to another unrelated page is not, in my opinion the best result for the customer.

If a customer is searching for Levis (just an example) and you don't have any then why would he want to end up on a generic Jeans page or another brand? The best result is that they see you are out of stock. You could even just put a message on that page saying - Sold Out - stock arriving soon or something like that. (Get the buying plans off the buyers! - they know what is on order for the next 6-9 months!)

The page will remain and get repopulated once stock arrives. If the category is simply out of stock never to return then I would consider redirecting to a higher category - but if it was a brand I may still leave the page as being sold out. (The alternative here is to allow it to 404 so the page disappears all together from SERPs - but then style your 404 page so that they can follow a menu of alternatives).

The last thing you want is a potential customer going round in circles trying to find the brand because you have redirect them somewhere else. So a message like 'We are out of stock of Levis right now but check out these other awesome brands - with a menu' is perfectly fine and a better User Experience (UX)

By creating the best UX you are far more likely to please your buyers and frankly a few pages of skinny content is not going to kill you in SERPS - you have a perfectly valid reason.

Watch Rand's video on alternative methods but I would do this.

Regards

Nigel

Nigel_Carr

Apart from that, I can't see a single earth shattering problem that is causing your site to drop just a lot of things wrong with the site which combined, may be causing that effect.

I have scanned the site and:

1. Duplicate content 911 pages but most are 'order' pages and those related to Trip Advisor - they don't seem to be doing you any harm as most of the searches are high up, eg dog friendly B&B in Paignton

These pages are dominated by a huge hero graphic that takes the whole of the top of the page then a search box - I would consider removing the graphics and starting these pages at the listings. I would then add some descriptive content surrounding the themes.

I would check in Google - GSC how the site handles the 'order' parameter - as it narrows/sorts content - maybe adjust the setting to that.

You have a lot of listings which are incomplete - I'd remove the wording Awaiting Copy as it's on all of these:

Duplicate Description & Titles: You have quite a lot - some are from the sort/order others need separating out:

All of these have the same Description: 'you’ll find plenty of dog-friendly hotels and holiday accommodation here on the English Riviera, Devon’s Beautiful Bay'

With this title: 'Dog Friendly Hotels in Torbay, Pet Friendly Hotels - English Riviera'

Awaiting Further Details - duplication

https://www.englishriviera.co.uk/whats-on/babbacombe-model-village-easter-egg-trail-p1413873
https://www.englishriviera.co.uk/whats-on/super-summer-trail-bygones-p1491443
https://www.englishriviera.co.uk/whats-on/half-term-coin-mystery-bygones-p1826943
https://www.englishriviera.co.uk/whats-on/half-term-teddy-bear-picnic-bygones-p1491313
https://www.englishriviera.co.uk/whats-on/easter-holidays-egg-hunt-bygones-p1666163
https://www.englishriviera.co.uk/whats-on/halloween-hunt-bygones-p1449143

Finally, a lot of descriptions are too long - over 156 characters.(1252 including order pages)

A lot of titles too long - (474 including order pages)

You have no canonicalisation at all and best practice is to self-canonicalise.

Apart from that?

Little written content.

I'm guessing that a lot of this would have been on the previous site anyway - the overuse of large hero graphics is an irritation as you have to scroll to see content. There is no simple search - it's complicated and seems to appear on every page.

Missing

No Twitter cards
No Facebook OG
No Schema.org

So lots missing but nothing that a good SEO couldn't sort for you.

It is a combination of lots of things.

I hope this helps.

Regards

Nigel

Nigel_Carr

Miguel,

You are quite right that a redirect chain can be caused by moving to HTTPS. The problem comes when you have redirects already in place and then you move to HTTPS. So for example:

http://domain.com/location1 Redirects to http://domain.com/location2 because you have moved a piece of content.

If you then install an SSL and move to HTTPS then the route becomes:

http://domain.com/location1>http://domain.com/location2>https://domain.com/location2

So there are now 3 URLs involved.

This is a simple example with only 3 URLs - I have seen cases where there are 5 or 6 because someone left an HTTP link on the page. I have also seen redirect loops where there is an endless chain which cannot be resolved. In that case, the page just crashes.

Best practice is to scrap the first redirect and replace it with

http://domain.com/location1>https://domain.com/location2>

Depending on who you read there is a small loss of link juice when passing through a 301 (permanent redirect) and a 302 (temporary redirect) so it is important to have as few as possible. It also makes perfect sense to have as few calls to the server as possible.

Regards

Nigel

Nigel_Carr

If a product only has one colour then it's OK to have it in the title as it won't have a colour - child. Th description isn't used in PLA's

For the Dubarry Ultima - their title is just that: 'Dubarry Ultima'with the size being pulled in from the feed. Size is not in the title.

They only have one title and they come up multiple times because they send all the sizes to Google and are paying more than the next person for PPC.

The description is also being pulled in but it doesn't contain colour or size. The description is common to all sizes and colours. There is no way anyone could manage a different description for each size anyway - it's time-consuming enough coming up with one!

Regards

Nigel

Nigel_Carr

Hi Helen

I have checked your backlinks and they are growing over time, not falling - see the attachment from SEMrush.

Have you recently changed from http to https? if so make sure that both domains are in search console as you may be tracking an old one.

Whatever SEM is much more reliable.

Take a look at the screenshot - it shows 1700+ backlinks from 25 referring domains!

I hope that helps

Regards Nigel

hL9zJuV.jpg

Nigel_Carr

Hi

I would not noindex a "/" version because you will simply lose all of that traffic. I would make sure as Martin has said that here is a proper directive in the .htaccess.txt that automatically redirects "/" to the non "/2 version - knocking the "/" off.

Any competent web developer can do this for you.

If this is a shared server then you will need to ask Squarespace for help as you may not have access to an .htaccess.txt file.

Regards Nigel

Nigel_Carr

Hi Sagi

If you have a link from a completely unrelated website then I would politely ask them to remove it/them.

If you can't get it removed this way then add it to your disavow file.

Frankly, toxic links are damaging and they need to be dealt with.

If that was my affiliate it would quickly be an ex-affiliate. Warn them first - then take action.

I hope that helps,

Regards

Nigel

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