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Sorry, I don't know if I'm the only one but I found this really confusing to follow and visualise. I understand if not, but is it possible to share the link so we can have a look?

Multiple H2s is fine and whether there may be an issue or not depends on how similar they are and how many exactly. Obviously 50 duplicate H2s will potentially be seen as spammy. As for the invisible text, is this hidden to users with something like display:none so is still readable by crawlers? If so, Google doesn't approve of hiding content or making content inaccessible to users with the intention of manipulating rankings. It may be seen as you deliberately attempting to get your keywords in for SEO, without it being of value to the user. With the perspective that if it it had value to the user, then it wouldn't be hidden. So it must only be there to game the search engines.

Not OP, but hypothetically what would be your solution to the homepage and subpage cannibalising each other in search and jumping up and down replacing each other if homepage isn't even optimised for the subpage's target keyword?

More importantly... Wait, you have 100+ projects? What are these projects? 100+ SEO clients you report rankings to each month, or 100+ SEO clients you actively work on SEO campaigns for each month? That's mad....

Hmm... I'm getting this issue too. It's not just you.

For a handful of different locations, it's quite common to structure them as different subdirectories, as you said. site.com/weddings/miami/planners or /miami/weddings/planners - whichever makes the most sense for your customer base and how you're targeting the content.

Just ensure that these are not considered doorway pages or appear to be too templated. Make each landing page for each location unique, and tailored specifically to your customers in each location. If you have nothing unique to say, then you don't need separate pages. It would be best to target the different locations on the same landing pages. But you being the expert in the industry, I can imagine it'll be easy enough to cater toward each audience specifically. Especially when you're not dealing with tens if not hundreds or thousands of different towns.

If you are certain on expanding to different cities soon, then it might be best to begin the URL structuring with /washington-dc/ subdirectory somewhere, so you don't have to change this later.

Yah, I was thinking it would be something along the lines of improving the subpage's authority with topic-relevant backlinks and anchor text. The homepage having the highest page authority of the domain, I figured Google was choosing it for that reason even without mention of the keywords on the page. Been getting a little frustrating when one month it's homepage on 1st page with subpage nowhere to be found, then the next month it's the subpage that's ranking and the homepage doesn't appear at all for the query.

Thank you for your advice!

(Sorry, Jacob, for hijacking your thread!)

Seems you're on the right track, but I wouldn't pay too close attention to the PA and instead focus on culling the pages that offer no value to the user. The pages that are perhaps duplicate content, or can be merged with another page to create a stronger, more relevant page. Reducing or pruning the number of thin pages to maximise the value and quality of the pages you keep will help with the overall health of your website.

If you only look at PA, then you may end up getting rid of a potentially valuable page that simply didn't have the opportunity to perform well before.

I would begin by prioritising which pages are most valuable for that keyword ranking, and fixing up the content to emphasise what differentiates that product from the others, highlighting its unique features, etc, to reduce the amount of conflicting pages with "thin content". Ensure that you also work closely on the competing product pages of all the priority pages you are initially targeting. Take it one page at a time, and monitor the changes as you go.

**EDIT: **Sorry, I misread your reply. You have product pages ranking where you want category pages to be ranking. In that case, ensure that your category pages are not considered "thin", but avoid over-optimising product pages for the keywords that you want category pages to be ranking for. Maybe also naturally insert a link to the parent category page from the product page. Product pages should still highlight features that differentiate it from other products, don't be afraid to get specific, but think about how you can de-optimise the product page for its broader term that you are targeting with the category page. Product pages are perfect for long tail search terms.

This is an amazing answer (if there was an option to mark it as such, I would have). Thank you.

You, sir/madam, are a machine and I'm not surprised this has taken you years. Unfortunately, I don't work in-house for this particular ecommerce site so I only have a few hours a month to work on this. The site's been around for a few years, the physical department store itself over a century, and I've only been working on it for over a year. There's over 10,000 product pages split across hundreds of categories and there are hundreds of separate landing pages based on brand, range, designer, sets, etc (I've been culling a lot of these...).

The vast majority of products contain duplicate descriptions across the whole brand range, so I've mainly been getting rid of those to strengthen the category page so that there's not dozens to hundreds of duplicate paragraphs shared with the category page. But the product pages look so bare with what's left of the description.

I think I'll take a leaf from your book though and go through the most popular categories, aiming for 100 words per product. With smaller ecommerce sites, this would seem obvious to me, but I just wasn't sure whether time could be better spent elsewhere with a larger site.

I have a client who owns a cosmetic dermatology clinic. Recently he's been trying to work more on his Facebook page, and has been attempting to boost his posts but they keep getting declined for this, that and the other. "No before and after photos", "Ad is sensitive in nature", etc.

Nothing shady, he's a registered doctor and a member of the Royal College of Physicians in London and the Royal College of General Practitioners. Main treatments offered are things like Botox (which I know he can't legally advertise due to strict advertising standards in the UK), dermal fillers, lip fillers, non-surgical lifts. Just general non-surgical prescription-level cosmetic treatments.

I don't have much experience in Facebook advertising, but this line of work seems particularly challenging to advertise on Facebook. Does anyone who has experience in advertising this type of business on Facebook have any general advice on what sorts of posts/ads have worked with them before?

I would suggest performing a full audit report of your homepage to find all the little bits you may have missed, if you're really unsure. What have you done so far to optimise the homepage?

How similar is the content/subject of the page? For example, if the page used to be about Cats and the URL was website.com/cats, then if you needed to replace it to be about Dogs then obviously you'll have to change the URL to website.com/dogs. Even a 301 redirect from /cats to /dogs doesn't really make much sense, as they're both completely different subjects. You'd be better off 301ing the old /cats to the homepage instead.

However, if the two subjects are similar or related at all, ideally you don't want to change the URL at all. You can change all the content on the page and replace everything if you need to, but the best solution would be to keep the existing URL. Especially if the page has value in terms of page authority/traffic/backlinks. For example, if the page isn't about Cats anymore but specifically Cats' Accessories. You have to ask yourself whether /cats still makes sense in context, and you can optimise everything else on the page for "cats accessories".

Otherwise, go ahead and 301 that bad boy.

Edit: I should note that the decision you make on this will heavily depend on the subjects of the two pages and your existing URL and site structure. Without seeing your site and having some idea on the replacement page, it's hard to give specific advice. Hopefully this response is helpful in that it will give you something to think about though.

Fantastic resources, thank you so much.

I can understand Facebook's issue with ads that may be perceived as negatively portraying being a certain physical conditions (weight, facial features, complexions, etc). But it just seems a little overkill at times. I'll try your suggestion of a more medical/factual approach rather than promotional, and more "beautiful people" type imagery. If the "beautiful people" goes down better with Facebook, it would be kind of ironic as currently the imagery they're turning down is of real people. Real clients that have volunteered their photos to be used for marketing. Not models.

I foresee a lot of trial and error trying to satisfy Facebook's regulations and get a good CTR.

If trusted websites are linking to that page, the anchor text used to link to that page is a huge signal to Google that that page is relevant to those keywords being used in the anchor text. So Google will start to rank that page higher for those keywords, sometimes despite those keywords not even making a single appearance on the page.

If you have access to all the website's files, you could try finding all instances in the directory using something like Notepad++. Could even use find and replace.

This is how I tend to locate those one-liners among hundreds of files.

Good luck!

If the pages are HTML-heavy with not much text content on the category pages, this could be why. Otherwise it's hard to tell without seeing the actual pages.

If the <a></a><a>tag includes _target="blank" then the link will open in a new window/tab, if that helps at all.</a>

This shouldn't be too much of an issue at all really.

My recommendation would be to noindex these /page/2 etc pages if you're using Wordpress. Various Wordpress plugins are available that allow you to do this easily. My favourite is Yoast SEO - you can noindex those pages and tag pages too. If you use tags, this would be more of an SEO concern than the paginated pages.

Redirecting the 2nd link would probably be the best option, in my opinion. If the 2nd link has an integral part of the site structure and navigation, but you don't want users (or Google) to access that duplicate page, I don't see how you could do it any other way if your client insists that the 2nd page has to be created.

Although, depending on Craig's site structure, it could be a simple, one-time set up of the htaccess so all Link 2's 301 to the Link 1's.

For example, if when creating website.com/category1/product1, it also creates a duplicate page on /category2/product1, he could use regex so that all products under /category2/ redirect to the /category1/ product URL.

You're right that it's still not the most elegant of solutions, but it's a simple enough way to make sure users are where you want them to be without requiring any effort every time you create a new page - and it shouldn't upset Googlebot.