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Hi! To answer your question—that's totally fine, as long as the canonical tags are pointing to non-trailing on product URLs and trailing on blog URLs, this shouldn't be a big deal.

There are other things to consider like internal linking (and making sure that's consistent across the site) and possibly choosing one version (like trailing slash) and force redirecting the rest (to ensure things are clean when it comes to URLs).

But as far as the direct question goes, as long as your canonicals are set accurately for those sections it shouldn't be a problem.

Hope that helps!

Thanks Steve!

In this scenario I would do the following:

1. Add a noindex tag to all of these PPC landing pages (will ensure the pages aren't indexed).
2. Make sure the URLs aren't in any sitemaps (good practice).
3. Once confirmed that they aren't indexed, add a disallow rule in robots.txt (this will preserve crawl budget).

Hope that helps and all the best.

Hey Steve,

To answer your question directly about whether or not Google will see these pages as duplicate content—if you use the same text on them all (for the most part), and don't offer anything else unique, then most likely.

I think a more important question to ask is whether or not Google will see these pages as too thin (which could result in some pretty negative results).

Can I ask a few questions to get some more information?

1. How many of these pages are you planning to create for your client?
2. Do you feel like there could potentially be some SEO benefits to having these pages in the index if there was an effort to improve them? In other words, is there search volume/opportunity around the topics the videos are about from an organic perspective?

No—Google won't penalize you for using the same image across different landing pages.

However, I would recommend using a unique image if you have an ecommerce site and are selling different products (or variations of the same product).

From a user experience, if the image looks good, is compressed for quick loading, and makes sense on your pages you should be good.

Hi there,

Great question.

The short answer:

• You can't control whether or not Google shows sitelinks for your site.
• If Google decides to show sitelinks for your site, you can't control which ones they show.
• The best you can do is optimize your site hierarchy, internal links, and on-page elements as best as possible to make it clear (and simple) for Google to crawl and understand seperate sections of your site.

Google used to have a "sitelink demotion" tool that let you submit links you wanted removed from sitelinks that were showing up for your domain. Google got rid of that function earlier this year. Either way, it was the opposite of what you are trying to achieve (get sitelinks showing for your domain).

Google's recommendation is to "...make sure you use anchor text and alt text that's informative, compact, and avoids repetition."

In other words, make sure your site has a clear hierarchy, that internal links are pointing to important sections of the site, that anchor text is descriptive, that pages are optimized clearly, and of course that your site being crawled accurately.

Hope that helps!

Hey Joseph,

Great question. Typically, the only two options I recommend are either YouTube or Wistia.

The short answer is either of these platforms are great, but depending on your goals one might be better than the other.

If your goal is to increase traffic to your website, Wistia is typically the better option. This is because your videos are optimized to rank with Wistia, and your pages will actually rank with the videos.

YouTube is great for brand awareness and pushing a specific video strategy out to the world. This is because it's already a great platform and many people use it.

The good news? You can totally use both.

I've seen many brands upload a video on their site using Wistia and then upload that same video to YouTube 2 weeks later in order to grab the best of both worlds. I personally don't think this is necessary (it might also be confusing to users having similar content in two completely seperate places), but it's totally doable and legitimate.

Hope that helps!

Hi,

Depending on how long ago the links were added, you might need to wait a bit before you start seeing links in tools. Also, I would try Majestic and Ahrefs to check for links since not every link gets picked up by one tool. Using Ahrefs I can see a pickup in links pointing to your domain recently. Another place to look would be Google Search Console under "links pointing to my site".

Oh and in regards to your second question, always check your main domain (it looks like for you it's the www version, non-secured).

Hope that helps!

Thanks for answering all of my questions!

It's interesting that when I do a simple site:search in Google none of the main pages of your website are appearing. Most of the search results are either archives or comments. Typically, I've seen this kind of thing happen when something goes wrong in the redirects or a site is penalized.

It looks like the big dip in indexation didn't occur until about August. I would think that if you pulled the trigger in June, pages would start dropping out of the index much sooner.

In this case, your theory about a possible penalization might be right. I'd be interested to see what happens once Google considers the disavow file (unfortunately, that will take some time).

Does anyone else have any input or possible reasons why pages on this site have dropped out of the index so quickly?

Hi there,

There's no standard format for online phone numbers although I've seen people recommending to stick with either dashes or periods, and to not use parenthesis.

The more important recommendation would be to make sure users can click to call directly on the phone number, as well as setting up tracking through analytics so you could see how many people called your business through your website.

Hope that helps!

Serge

Hi there,

There could be a lot of reasons why certain pages of your website are dropping out of your index. Could you answer the following questions to help us narrow down the possible cause?

• How long ago did you switch to https?
• Have you submitted both non-www and www versions of the https site to Google Search Console (GSC)?
• Have you kept the http versions of your website in GSC?
• From the looks of it, your sitemap has been updated to reflect the https pages. Have you submitted the updated sitemap to GSC?
• Are there any sitemap errors appearing in GSC? Any other errors?
• Could you attach a screenshot of the indexation rate on both https and http versions of the site from GSC?
• Could you confirm that all redirects were done 1-to-1 and properly redirected? (301s and not 302s)

Some things that we could rule out:

• It looks like the site isn't using noindex tags in a way that would cause deindexing
• It looks like the robots.txt file isn't disallowing any important paths that would cause deindexation
• The http version of the www and non-www pages redirects to the www, https version of the site which is good
• Canonicals seem to be updated and pointing to the https version of the site

Sorry for all of the questions, I just want to make sure and rule out possible causes to focus in on what the issue could be.

Thanks, Serge

Hi Zack,

Great question. First of all, I haven't gotten to play with the official AMP plugin for Wordpress yet, but I've been researching and reading about the implementation of AMP pages within Wordpress for a while now.

First of all — it's recommended that you utilize AMP pages if you are a publisher or push out content often. In other words, AMP is not ideal (yet) for ecommerce, casual bloggers, etc. You can definitely try it out, but AMP was specifically designed for publishers that churn out a lot of content.

To answer your question regarding duplicate content — From my understanding, the proper way of implementing AMP pages and avoiding duplicate content is to put a canonical tag on your main page that points to the AMP page (this way Google sees that you have an AMP version of this page), as well as adding a canonical tag on the AMP page that points to the regular page.

In other words, you would have something like this.

Main Page

AMP Page

Here's Google's take on this.

i'm assuming that the plugin will automatically add the correct code to the pages, but I have not tested it so I wouldn't know for sure. Please do let us know if you end up testing this out!

Also, you might want to check out Yoast's "Glue" plugin for editing and adjusting AMP pages. It seems like it could be helpful.

Cheers

Hi Brian,

Google can definitely crawl Javascript, although it is limited in a sense. Here is a great article addressing this.

I have seen many websites use the solution that you mention in your second paragraph. That is, creating a separate section of the domain (or creating a subdomain) for users who are logging in. GoogleBot will not be able to crawl anything that is beyond a login portal, so this is the most common solution. Of course you can also disallow the specific path or subdomain in robots.txt as well!

It comes down to how much content that you have behind the login portal. You want to figure out which part of your site you want to be crawled, and which parts you don't want. After that point it's a matter of figuring out the best solution for blocking that content from crawlers.

Hope that helps!

Please see my comment below.

Hi there,

It really depends on how similar your keywords are. For example, if you have 4-5 keywords that are very similar (e.g. "Seattle Landscaping", "Landscaping Seattle", and "Landscaping in Seattle") I would recommend creating one very strong landing page with the top keyword, and make sure to add variations of that keyword in your landing page.

However, if you have all of your top keywords and they are very different (e.g. "Lawn Care Seattle", "Flower Beds", and "Turf Renovation Seattle") I would create separate landing pages with unique content.

To answer your question about links — yes, you should have internal links that are relevant pointing to your landing pages. Additionally, having strong external links pointing to your landing pages is helpful as well.

Hope that helps!

Hi there,

It's definitely possible that you are blocking a folder or subfolder in your robots.txt file that is preventing Google from crawling some of your videos. Could you possibly share a link to the robots.txt file so I could look at it specifically? Also, Google Search Console should tell you which URLs are being blocked specifically so that could be useful as well.

Happy to help — just please send some more specific details. Thanks!

Hi Benjamin,

Although there is a possibility that your WordPress redirect plugin is causing this issue, it would be hard to tell without having access to the CMS. Often times a plugin will have a box that's checked somewhere that might cause something weird to occur. However, I doubt this is the case.

To answer your question, I would do this in the htaccess file although I would be cautious and test it first. Here is a write-up with someone who had a similar issues (he goes into details about his solution).

Hope that helps!

In that case I wouldn't worry

If you want to crawl a version of your site without those parameters Screaming Frog allows you to exclude any specific parameters by going to configuration > URL rewriting.

Best of luck!

Hello,

Alt tags are definitely important for on-page optimizations but they were originally created to literally help Google understand what your image is (since GoogleBot can't actually see the image). If you have 1000s of images across your site that don't have alt tags, I wouldn't be extremely worried.

I would recommend taking a look at other areas on your site and seeing if there are improvements to be made that could potentially have a bigger impact on your rankings or user behavior (i.e. h1 tags, internal linking structure, etc.) If everything else on your site looks ideal, then perhaps create a strategy for the top 50 landing pages that have images and add alt tags and measure to see if rankings improve at all. If they do, create a plan to add alt tags to the rest of the images across the site. If not, I would recommend simply adding alt tags to new images on new pages from now on.

In other words: don't worry, there are other changes you can probably make that will have a bigger impact. If you have the resources, go back and test out 50 or so pages by adding alt tags. If not, simply start adding alt tags to new images and pages when they are created from now on.

Oh and in regards to what your ALT tags should be, they should represent what the image is. For example, if you have an image of a man eating an apple, the alt tag could be "man-eating-apple".

Hope that helps!

Hi there!

Good question. First of all, it sounds like the 302 is necessary for the functionality of the site. If I'm understanding correctly, a user has the option to add an item on your site to a "compare" cart and if a user does that the page reloads (with the item in the "compare" cart) as a 302. Often times this is done with a parameter.

So it looks something like this?

/example-product/ > 302 > /example-product/?compare=list

If this is the case, I would try taking that parameter and letting Google know not to crawl pages that have it in. You can do this in Google Search Console. Here's a great guide from Google on parameters, exclusions, and what we can do with them.

Please let me know if I misunderstood the question. Hope that helps!

You are absolutely correct about AMP being geared towards news publishers (as of now). There are enormous benefits and opportunities for players within this space.

I have a feeling that AMP version 2 will include a lot of updates for other sites (such as ecommerce, etc.)

Also, I've heard that WordPress developers are building AMP plugins that will automatically convert pages to AMP if you want. Also, I saw someone mentioning that WordPress was actually going to build this into their CMS eventually.

Essentially, there are a lot of things up in there for sites that aren't news publishers. It will be interesting where AMP goes in the near future!