Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi SoulSurer8

It all depends on how frequently your pages are crawled by Google. If you search for a page in Google and check when it was last cached then this will give you an indication of how long it may take. Under the result in SERPS there is a green down arrow next to the URL click that and hit cached. (see image attached) This will bring up a page with a date at the top which is the last time that Google cached the page. It will depend on how deep the structure is, so if a page s three clicks down then, of course, it will be indexed less frequently than the home page.

Check a few deep pages and compare them with the home page and you will see that in some cases it has been up to 6 weeks since the last indexing.You can speed this up a little with a Google fetch from Search Console on particular pages but that is the reality.

Regards

Nigel

P6kXBec

Hi John

What's the URL?

It's probably that the name of the town is in every title, some kind of duplication issue - let me see the site and I can tell you more.

Regards

Nigel

Hi vtmoz

You should definitely have pages that target brand related queries and this is not spam. I don't know what you sell. But you should have 'landing pages' I prefer to call them 'categories' for all the 'things' 'services' or 'product categories' your company covers.

Make sure that the pages are tight and succinct, have 300-1000 words content and are highly contextually targetted to the different categories you cover.

This is not spam, it is normal site structure and you will not be penalised.

Regards Nigel

Hi Mike

I see this a lot with sites that have a ton of tag groups. One site I am working on has 50,000 pages in Google caused by tags appending themselves to every version of a URL, the site only has 400 products. Example

Site/size-4
Site/womens/size-4
Site/womens/boots/size-4
Site/womens/boots/ankle/size-4
Site/womens/clarks/boots/size-4

Etc etc - If there are other tags like colour and features, this can cause a huge 3 dimensional matrix of additional pages that can slow down the crawl of the site - Google may not crawl all of the site as a result.

If it's possible to canonicalse then that is the best option as juice and follows are retained - very often it would be the page with the tag lopped off that the tag should cite.

In extreme circumstances I would consider noindexing the pages as they offer very skinny content and rubbish Meta because it's impossible to handle them individually. I have seen significant improvement in organics as a result.

Personally I don't think it's enough to simply leave Google to figure it out although I have seen some sites with very high DA get away with it.

To be honest I am pretty shocked that Shopify doesn't have a feature to cope with this

Regards

Nigel

Carousel Projects.

Hi Yael

I completely agree - it is pretty much what canonical tags were developed for.

Regards

Nigel

Hi vtmoz

I assume you mean in the content on the page. It is vitally important the content contained within in paragraphs contains contextually rich writing. If your subject is on for example, 'fish tanks' then the content of the page must contain all of the major keywords and phrases on the subject.

So take 'Fish Tanks'

Go to MOZ keyword explorer, Google AdWords tool and Google search bar and you will find:

Cold Water Fish Tanks
Fish Tanks For Sale
Fish Tanks UK (because I'm in the UK)
Fish Tank

So you can start to write compelling and interesting content surrounding the main key phrase. The trick is not to overstuff your content with the main key phrase. You must also remember to use 'child' key phrases or 'baby anchor text' to surround the main subject. So in this example, you would include:

Water filters
Water filter
Gravel
Bubble
Aquarium
Ornaments
Lights
Stand
Types of fish? guppy etc

All words that make for a more contextually rich piece of writing. A clever writer can incorporate all of these words and phrases using singular and plural versions to make the writing completely relevant to the subject.

Combine this style of writing with matching H1, H2 and possibly H3, broken up into relevant sections and the whole experience of being on the page is heightened. That combined with the correctly formatted META nails it for SEO.

I hope that helps.

Regards

Nigel

Hi Steve

Google has got really good at picking one page from two that are very similar to rank.

This page: /support.html?section=6 is a much richer resource for the term Sell Lego that this one /sell-lego.html despite the titles being obvious.

If you really want to downgrade the support page for the search term 'sell Lego' then you need to remove so many references to the terms 'Lego' and 'Selling' Sell' etc as these are all contextually very similar.

All of those H2 questions contain the term Lego as well.

What to do:

1. Beef up the contextual content of the page you want to rank for. Add some content about Lego usage, where it's made, blocks, storage, colours, size of blocks and anything you can think of to make a real story about the product. Use terms such as selling, seller to emphasises that as well.

2. Remove the keyword stuffing of the term Lego from the support page as well as the obvious 'Selling Lego' from the H1s and H2s - This is a support page so you don't need to repeat the phrases over and over.

Fetch Google (some people say this but I'm dubious as to how much faster it makes the crawl) and within a week or less you should see a difference. The cache is from 8th July so it may take 3 weeks.

Hope that helps

Nigel

Hi Tom

Moz will not reveal a 301 unless there is a nasty redirect chain. If you use Screaming Frog it will reveal all the directives for every page.

There must be a redirect but it might be worth checking if it's a 301 (permanent) or 302  (temporary) - it should be 301.

The good news is that it is redirecting.

As Martijn suggests you should add the preferred one to Search Console. It doesn't 'do' anything but you will be able to see both versions.

Regards Nigel

Hi Icourse

I would agree that having a link to all languages in the footer is spammy. Also, I guess that 99% of the time there is absolutely no need to see any of the other language versions let alone see a link to them. I would have no interest in say, a French version of MOZ and would never visit it. The fact that the French guy landed on the German site would say more about bad SEO than anything else, like why would it be ranking in a German search engine in the first place?

If it were me, I would create a page on each site with all of the different language version listed. Perfectly acceptable in every way, not spammy, very useful and completely satisfying user intent.

If there is a 'Global' version of the website - may be a .com then that could maybe be linked directly from the home page but not on every one.

Regards

Nigel

Hi James

Please, can you explain to vtmoz what LSI means as he may not be familiar with the acronym?

He was talking about paragraphs, not titles. That much was clear.

You have repeated exactly what I told him and it's not clearer.

Kind Regards

Nigel

Hi Bankable

It used to be that whenever I touched a page there would be a fall. I'd messed with it and Google didn't like it! Now I find that any changes that add value rise in Google and quite quickly too! Pages that I edit are picked up very quickly, literally as often as Google passes by and re-indexes a page. You can get an idea of how frequently that is for these pages by searching for them then clicking on the green arrow right of the URL to see when they were last cached (See Image). Could be up to 4 weeks, but I find that the higher the page is up the hierarchy, the more frequently it gets crawled.

When you say Domains I think you mean URLs?

For on page content I would recommend you stick to 300 words+ and make sure that the content you are adding is focused around a single keyword or a small group of contextually similar keywords and short phrases. Don't splurge content between different pages - make sure the writing is focused.

I see little difference in changing 10 pages in one day or 10 pages over 10 days so go ahead and if you can improve on what's there quickly then do it.

Regards Nigel

QEnwn

Hi Tom

If it redirects to www.domain.com then that must also be set up in GSC as that is now the preferred domain format. It looks better as well without the trailing slash.

Regards

Nigel

Hi Ewerton

You have two choices here.

1. Set up sub-folders for each country eg

website.com/es
webiste.com/co
website.com/mx

Then use the hreflang tag on each of the pages to tell Google which language and country you are targetting.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

That is OK if you believe there are language variations for each of those countries that would make each variation appeal to them. Particularly useful if you are talking about the countries as well. the hreflang tags will ensure that neither of them variations is regarded as duplicate content. This would allow you to talk about the different countries as well.

EG

You would use x for the default .com which would not be goe-targeted in search console.

2. You could just have the Spanish website as the .com and don't geotarget using sub-folders. Then don't target country in search console. This is if you believe that everyone in all those countries will be happy to view a Spanish version that is not tailored to each country.

These are the only two choices you have because you can't multi-target using hreflang or in search console - it's either specific or not at all.

There is also a great response from Kate Morris here. (ignore all the other bs) https://moz.com/community/q/can-you-target-the-same-site-with-multiple-regional-hreflang-entries 

I hope that helps.

Regards

Nigel

Hi vtmoz

There is not a problem if all the content is different and unique to the sub-domain.The problem only comes when you try and rank for content that you are already ranking for on the main website.

The best way is to pull all content on to the main website as it is far better for SEO.

I can understand your comment about other sites doing it but honestly, in my opinion, that is not a reason to follow them. You will get better ranking, more quickly if you combine the whole site together rather than try and promote subdomains. Which frankly just make for a lot more work.

Regards - happy to look at the site

Hi There

It's more beneficial for you to keep abc123.com.

You have 60,000 visitors a month to the main site. You will then move to be a directory of the main site - they keep the 60k and you are now banking on visitors clicking the link to the US site. Yet the main .com is a US site. You will only, therefore, get a fraction of the visitors you had before.

The other issue, of course, is that I would assume that the main site will be in US English? the same as yours? So yours will not only be a new subdirectory of the main site but now a 100% duplicate, which will kill both sites in search engines.Google will pick the main site as the primary and yours will never feature independently in search. Also the fact that yours duplicates theirs will impact badly in search for them.

If you have an option you must keep the original and let them set up separate country sites. Or you take the missive from above and do what they say - but populate your new site with vastly different content - if you want to rank.

Regards

Nigel

Just double check in a clean browser (with history cleared & F5) or in incognito mode to check the default.

Sounds good Tom!

I think if you properly implement the hreflang tags then yes you will.

Hi Will

The only problem I see here is why you are writing these articles in the first place. It's not uncommon for an eCommece site to write helpful articles about problem-solving then offer a solution by adding a link to one of their products or services.

If the article is well written and optimised then it makes sense that if ranked for a particular problem the addition is a link could drive traffic to your money pages.

However, equally valid is you building a reputation for problem-solving without trying to sell at every opportunity. We SEOs post on MOZ, in forums, in our own Facebook groups and other places, but very rarely will you see a direct contextual link back to our services. Building a reputation takes time and effort and it needs to be done gently without feeling the necessity to sell a product or service at any opportunity.

The upshot is that I would temper this activity. Produce genuinely interesting and useful content and your reputation will grow. People will then want to follow you because you offer sound advice. If one in four articles have internal links then cool, but presumably if they are on your site reading your stuff they are aware that you sell as well.

Retail sites can be really bad at this - blog post after blog post just sharing products - complete waste of time, they never rank and only work for email purposes, well you know what - stick them in an email - tell your acolytes but don't clog up the site with tosh.

Anyway that's my spin - if you try and oversell you can end up not selling - people get bored very quickly and a post with buy-me written all over it is doomed to fail.

Cheers Nigel

Hi imjonny

I'm glad you have asked around to be honest. Like I said, I would.

You are right that even if you canonicalize ultimately Google will decide whether to rank a page it deems to be important and can ignore the canonicalization. If the canonical isn't bona fide then it could call in to doubt the other canonicals on your site which would be a strong negative signal for SEO and lead to a drop in trust.

So - it depends on what you want to rank for.

Let's say you have Product A on site A and you then have an equivalent checkout page on site B. Then you can't try and rank for the term Product A because it just isn't going to happen. We've already said that we will need to canonicalize that page anyway to the equivalent page on site A.

The only thing you can hope to do is rank for 'Delivery Options', 'Branded Delivery' The Big 'Delivery Option Site'

What you can't do is try and rank for the product names, It will be impossible. But then why would you want to? Surely the important thing is to maintain rank for site A's products with site B being more of a slave site - solely functional.

Ultimately you would be canonicalizing the product pages not the whole site so maybe there are other pages that you can add. Maintenance, Technology, How to etc But frankly they would suit Site A anyway because if I am buying a product I want as much info as possible before purchase, not on the delivery page.

Oh and don't create branded content for site B because once again you will crave up site A.

I know it's a big conundrum but I haven't seen anything like you are trying to do so can only generalise on best practice.

I hope that helps!

Regards

Nigel