Welcome to the Q&A Forum

For a proper hreflang implementation, the canonical of each page has to point to itself in addition to referencing the other pages that have the same content in a different language. Otherwise, the implementation would be wrong

Really interested to see that others have been receiving this too, we have been having this flagged on a couple of sites / accounts over the past month or two Basically, Google Data Studio's schema error view is 'richer' than that of Google's schema tool (stand-alone) which has been left behind a bit in terms of changing standards. Quite often you can put the pages highlighted by GSC (Google Search Console) into Google's schema tool,  and they will show as having warnings only (no errors) yet GSC says there are errors (very confusing for a lot of people) Let's look at an example: https://d.pr/i/xEqlJj.png (screenshot step 1) https://d.pr/i/tK9jVB.png (screenshot step 2) https://d.pr/i/dVriHh.png (screenshot step 3) https://d.pr/i/X60nRi.png (screenshot step 4) ... basically the schema tool separates issues into two categories, errors and warnings But Google Search Console's view of schema errors, is now richer and more advanced than that (so adhere to GSC specs, not schema tool specs - if they ever contradict each other!) What GSC is basically saying is this: "Offers, review and aggregateRating are recommended only and usually cause a warning rather than an error if omitted.  However, now we are taking a more complex view. If any one of these fields / properties is omitted, that's okay but one of the three MUST now be present - or it will change from an warning to an error. SO to be clear, if one or two of these is missing, it's not a big deal - but if all three are missing, to us at Google - the product no longer constitutes as a valid product" So what are the implications of having schema which generates erroneous, invalid products in Google's eyes? This was the key statement I found from Google: Google have this document on the Merchant Center (all about Google Shopping paid activity): https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/6069143?hl=en-GB They say: "Valid structured markup allows us to read your product data and enable two features: (1) Automatic item updates: Automatic item updates reduce the risk of account suspension and temporary item disapproval due to price and availability mismatches. (2) Google Sheets Merchant Center add-on: The Merchant Center add-on in Google Sheets can crawl your website and uses structured data to populate and update many attributes in your feed. Learn more about using Google sheets to submit your product data. Prevent temporary disapprovals due to mismatched price and availability information with automatic item updates. This tool allows Merchant Center to update your items based on the structured data on your website instead of using feed-based product data that may be out of date." So basically, without 'valid' schema mark-up, your Google Shopping (paid results) are much more likely to get rejected at a higher frequency, as Google's organic crawler passes data to Google Shopping through schema (and assumedly, they will only do this if the schema is marked as non-erroneous). Since you don't (well, you haven't said anything about this) use Google Shopping (PLA - Product Listing Ads), this 'primary risk' is mostly mitigated It's likely that without valid product schema, your products will not appear as 'product' results within Google's normal, organic results. As you know, occasionally product results make it into Google's normal results. I'm not sure if this can be achieved without paying Google for a PLA (Product Listings Ad) for the hypothetical product in question. If webmasters can occasionally achieve proper product listings in Google's SERPs without PLA, e.g like this: https://d.pr/i/XmXq6b.png (screenshot) ... then be assured that, if your products have schema errors - you're much less likely to get them listed in such a way for for free. In the screenshot I just gave, they are clearly labelled as sponsored (meaning that they were paid for). As such, not sure how much of an issue this would be For product URLs which rank in Google's SERPs which do not render 'as' products: https://d.pr/i/aW0sfD.png (screenshot) ... I don't think that such results would be impacted 'as' highly. You'll see that even with the plain-text / link results, sometimes you get schema embedded like those aggregate product review ratings. Obviously if the schema had errors, the richness of the SERP may be impacted (the little stars might disappear or something) Personally I think that this is going to be a tough one that we're all going to have to come together and solve collectively. Google are basically saying, if a product has no individual review they can read, or no aggregate star rating from a collection of reviews, or it's not on offer (a product must have at least one of these three things) - then to Google it doesn't count as a product any more. That's how it is now, there's no arguing or getting away from it (though personally I think it's pretty steep, they may even back-track on this one at some point due to it being relatively infeasible for most companies to adopt for all their thousands of products) You could take the line of re-assigning all your products as services, but IMO that's a very bad idea. I think Google will cotton on to such 'clever' tricks pretty quickly and undo them all. A product is a product, a service is a service (everyone knows that) Plus, if your items are listed as services they're no longer products and may not be eligible for some types of SERP deployment as a result of that The real question for me is, why is Google doing this? I think it's because, marketers and SEOs have known for a long time that any type of SERP injection (universal search results, e.g: video results, news results, product results injected into Google's 'normal' results) are more attractive to users and because people 'just trust' Google they get a lot of clicks As such, PLA (Google Shopping) has been relatively saturated for some time now and maybe Google feel that the quality of their product-based results, has dropped or lowered in some way. It would make sense to pick 2-3 things that really define the contents of a trustworthy site which is being more transparent with its user-base, and then to re-define 'what a product is' based around those things In this way, Google will be able to reduce the amount of PLA results, reduce the amount of 'noise' they are generating and just keep the extrusions (the nice product boxes in Google's SERPs) for the sites that they feel really deserve them. You might say, well if this could result in their PLA revenue decreasing - why do it? Seems crazy Not really though, as Google make all their revenue from the ads that they show. If it becomes widely known that Google's product-related search results suck, people will move away from Google (in-fact, they have often quoted Amazon as being their leading competitor, not another search engine directly) People don't want to search for website links any more. They want to search for 'things'. Bits of info that pop out (like how you can use Google as a calculator or dictionary now, if you type your queries correctly). They want to search for products, items, things that are useful to them IMO this is just another step towards that goal Thank you for posting this question as it's helped me get some of my own thoughts down on this matter

Thank you!

You're welcome! Have a nice afternoon.

CleverPhd, Really since to see a detailed yet to the point answer. Thanks for contributing, and being in the Moz community. Regards, Vijay

Thanks for your answer. Some of our clients are some of the biggest insurers in the US. It still won't affect them?

Hello, Since you are talking video files, Google has a tough time identifying what they are about. The main concern is not the file itself but the textual titles and metadata surrounding the video. First video published with keywords etc. will be featured first, but a Youtube video has a natural bonus given it is Google's domain and Google likes Google. I would say this is probably a low-concern issue - if you have it on a Youtube channel and have access to a domain, I would incorporate it into an iframe on your site so it gets canonicalized with your domain rather than through a 3rd party video hosting service - this also gives you greater access to SEO options (both on-site and off-site) than video hosting domains do. Hope this helps and fire any follow up questions my way if you like - I'll help as best I can. Cheers, Rob

Wow! Thanks for the info! I have just been doing the Usertesting myself at varying locations until I find a good replacement or supplement.

If you are concerned with the 301 redirects no passing all the juice you do have the option to contact the site and ask them to update the link. This can be time consuming if you have a high number of links. Your best option is to review all your links in Webmaster tools and remove any poor links through contacting the site, or disavow, then redirect the site. Ideally, you would want all content on one site, mostly because you don't want to be competing against yourself for rankings.

Hello Rox, I hate the idea of you going away unsatisfied with unanswered questions. Let's try to work through this. Let me approach it from a different way, as I may have misunderstood what you were asking. https://sub.domain.com/quote/?affiliate_id=xxx https://aff_xxx_affname.domain.com/quote/ The first URL is the one I'd go with because it's easy to rel canonical back to the base URL and you're keeping it all on one subdomain. The second version creates a new subdomain for every affiliate, which I don't think would be a good thing. Please let me know if I have understood your question this time. Thanks!

Thank you! I will look into it.

If the content is going to be the same, keep them merged, don't separate. If you have sufficient content to produce truly valuable pages then you can segment them. It really is that simple.

To be honest - if it is only putting one letter in capitals most of your customers/visitors will hardly notice. If this is the only change - it will not make a difference in terms of usability. Google changed it logo recently and there was a big buzz about it. When I asked at home - nobody had even noticed the change (4 frequent Google users). Dirk

Like Miriam mentioned - use the real number on citation sources and major offsite areas. The only ways I would suggest using a vanity number on your site is through javascript swapping (think CallRail phone tracking), or by using it in an image with the alt text being the real (non-vanity) number. I would A/B test with the javascript method on your site. That solution would use a find & replace function depending on the click source (organic, direct, ppc, social, forum, etc), and swap in the tracking number/Vanity number. Test that for a while and compare phone call volumes. I think if you are a local business that would hurt NAP consistency, so that would need to be monitored pretty closely as well to make sure that vanity number doesn't cause damage.

Just disallow in Robots. No need to do anything else. -Andy

This seems like something that's a little beyond the scale of an app. SitePoint did a great breakdown of the whole ecosystem of page rending here: http://www.sitepoint.com/optimizing-critical-rendering-path/ that details the steps to go through regarding loading pages as quickly as possible. That said, a CDN like Cloudflare would be better suited to the task: https://www.cloudflare.com/features-optimizer. Cheers!

Yup.

If you know what is happening to pages with this session_id I would always add/ change the purpose of the URL parameter in Google Webmaster Tools. I would never let Googlebot decide what to do with the URL parameters as I never will know how they exactly interpreted the data.

Hi Rox, Good for you for going straight to Google with this. That was just what I was going to suggest after reading your initial post but before I saw your follow-up. And thanks for generously share what you've learned. This may be of future help to other community members:)