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Hi Nico,

Tim's example should get you what you need to mark up your aggregate ratings correctly. I wanted to take a minute to address your other questions.

Anything between the and tags in an example is something you should customize to your content. So in the example above, <spanproperty="name">Super Book, you would replace "Super Book" with whatever the name of the product being reviewed is. For any example of Schema markup, if the example includes information that isn't on your page, you can just delete those properties.</spanproperty="name">

For Publisher markup, the "publisher" isn't the person who wrote the review, it's the website as a whole (that's you) that is publishing the content.

In terms of whether or not Google will include the ratings snippet since it can't verify whether ratings are real, in my experience they will especially if you have a good volume of reviews.

Google can definitely choose to ignore the canonical tag, especially if they think that the page in question is a better solution to a query. I agree with the other respondents that the best possible solution would be to fix this at a code level, so the duplicate content isn't an issue on  your site anymore. In the meantime, some things to try:

• Make sure that your internal hierarchy makes the canonical versions more important than the duplicate versions, i.e. they appear farther up in your site nav and have more internal links pointing to them.
• Try building some external links to those pages as well, where you can.
• Make sure that the pages your canonical tags point to are very similar to the pages the tags are on - if they're too different, Google may decide they both need to be indexed.

Are any of the duplicate pages receiving organic search traffic? If not, it may be that Google has indexed them but understands they're not as important. Again, though, the best possible solution would be to fix this at a code level.

Hi Matt,

To clarify - these are internal links on your own site that have had the anchors go all weird? Or are they external links?

Google is adding and removing URLs from its index fairly slowly right now, and it's not uncommon for changes to take several weeks to filter up into the index, especially for site: searches. This is very annoying (even more so for people who are trying to launch brand-new sites), but not a huge deal since, to Laura's point, these URLs are most likely not showing up for any searches, they just haven't filtered out of the index. I would give it another week or two and see what happens. You may also want to do a Fetch+Submit in Search Console for a few of the subdirectory URLs, to make sure that Google revisits them and registers that they are 410s now - if they've been redirecting for 2 years, Google may just not be crawling them that frequently.

Hi Dan,

It's important to remember that Domain Authority is a Moz-specific metric, measuring the power that inbound links to a domain are passing to it. It's based on a lot of research and information about how Google measures links, but isn't necessarily a reflection of how Google is actually perceiving and rating the inbound links to your site (since no outside party knows for sure exactly how Google is measuring link signals at any given time). Since those links still point to the legacy domains, they are still coming up in the Moz tools as having high DA. It's probable that Google is interpreting those signals passing through your redirects correctly and passing that link value on to your main domain, but if those redirects go away, that may change.

URLs will often remain in the index when they have links pointing to them, because Google is indexing the presence of that link - but a URL showing up in a site: search doesn't necessarily mean that it's ever showing up for any query. Is your main domain still getting a lot/much/any traffic from your legacy domains through those redirects? How much traffic is still getting to those legacy domains (whether via organic search traffic to still-indexed pages or, more likely, from people clicking on inbound links to the old pages) will dictate whether or not you need to keep the redirects live.

One thing I would recommend doing, that I always recommend when a domain is moved, is reaching out to the sites that link to your old domain and seeing if you can get them to update the links to the new domain. You won't have anywhere close to a 100% success rate with this, but it can decrease the number of links that are passing value through redirects and increase the number that pass value directly.

If you do decide to decommission the server and not re-host the redirects elsewhere, I would recommend planning that move in conjunction with a link building and promotion campaign for the new site, to attract new links to make up for any link juice that is lost from the old domains' redirects. I hope that helps!

Hi Lawrence,

I do think RickRoll's advice was good, and the first thing I would say is that you should leave those 301 redirects in place, on a page-to-page level, for a good long while - don't change them again. It looks like there are still some pages from boston.renthop.com in the index, which indicates that Google may not fully understand that these pages have all moved. There are only a few still in there, though, so I don't think that's the only issue.

One thing that can happen when pages 404 for a while is that even if you 301 them later, the link equity of the original pages can disappear (it doesn't always, but it can). So you probably want to spend some time building links to these pages/site sections, and where you can, I also recommend reaching out to sites that linked to the old subdomains and asking them to update the links. I'd recommend trying to get new links from local-specific sites (i.e. sites about Boston or Chicago, vs. nationwide/non-local sites about apartment hunting), and here's why:

In my experience, Google usually treats "{keyword} in {location name}" searches differently depending on whether or not you're actually in the location you're searching for. If you're not in the location, it treats {location name} as a keyword, but if you are in the location, it treats {location name} as a location. So for example, if you search "apartments in Boston" and you're not in Boston, it will show you pages that rank for the term "apartments in Boston" - but if you are in the Boston area, it will show you pages that rank for the term "apartments" and that have strong local indicators that they are in Boston, or more specifically, are near to you.

So since you rank nationally but not locally for this term, it sounds like the signals you need to focus on improving are local signals. You can do this by building links from local sites, by adding e.g. "Boston, MA" to title tags on individual apartment listings, and by building out some unique, locally-focused content like neighborhood guides to add value to searchers from that area.

I hope that helps!

I meant the other way around - since the goal is to drive Google from the HTML file to the landing page, correct?

Hi Lindsay,

You'll want to apply a canonical tag to the PPC pages, pointing to the equivalent SEO page as the canonical version. You may also want to apply a self-referencing canonical tag to your SEO pages - this would be a canonical tag on the page that lists that same page as the canonical version, essentially saying "this page right here is the canonical page."

Tcope25 above is correct that, if you wanted to, you could noindex your PPC landing pages - and Gaston is correct that you would want to implement either a canonical tag or a noindex tag, but not both (there should be no impact on your PPC landing pages either way, it's very common for PPC landing pages to be noindexed). If you apply the canonical tag correctly, however, you shouldn't need to noindex the PPC landing pages. I hope that helps!