Welcome to the Q&A Forum

First off, am I correct in thinking that a 'child' sitemap is a sitemap of a subfolder and everything that sits under it, i.e.

www.example.com/example

If so, can someone give me a good recommendation for generation a free child sitemap please?

Many thanks,

Rhys

What a brilliant response. Thanks, Roman!

Hey all,

Bit of a novice here, so bare with me. We have a page that has a lot of content in a tabular format that struggles to rank. I created a similar page, without the tabular format, which vastly outranks it, despite having a miniscule backlink profile in comparison.

Now, I've always been under the impression that anything interactive on a website, like tabs, are the result of JS. However, I can't see any JS in the code (but as mentioned, I'm far from an expert). Code below.

Description

insert copy here, click on [insert anchor text](/media/MODULES AVAILABLE 2017-18.xlsx)
more copy here.

Anyone able to shed any light?

Cheers,

Rhys

Thanks, Dan. Yeah I'm hoping to attend BrightonSEO this year, and I did attend one course about advanced OnPage SEO but found the very technical stuff (like log analysis and JS) a bit too complicated. I feel like my knowledge extends as far as 'I know what you should/shouldn't do, but I don't necessarily know why'.

Any book recommendations?

Hi all,

I'm looking to learn more about technical SEO. My background was digital marketing/PR where I learned the importance of links, of anchor text, of page speed, of improving UX signals, of SSL, utilising things like Google My Business etc.

However, I find I am chasing my tail when it comes to things like understanding JS/CSS/log file analysis etc. I've tried reading so many articles on the subjects and I just find it so damn confusing. AnugalarJS/BackboneJS. Fetching & rendering, URL parameters...etc. I know from my own experiments that JS pages struggle to rank and I've created two very similar pages, one without JS, one with JS (which had far more links) and the non-JS page ranked far higher.

So, I suppose I'm asking for some help with how to begin learning this stuff. I find the articles on Moz, Search Engine Land etc to be a bit confusing...maybe I'm not technically minded enough!

Cheers,

Rhys

Hey Michael,

Thanks for your response. The question is, I suppose, why does it not rank as well? Does Google not value it as highly? Or does it struggle to fetch and render it because it's tabbed? It does seem to be the biggest factor, in my opinion, in the difference between the two pages.

Cheers,

Rhys

Hey folks,

So, I got two pages. Page A has a lot more content but in a tabular format which uses javascript and a Title Tag which is a synonym for our keyword, but not the actual keyword.  Page B has less content, and the title tag is the exact keyword phrase we want to rank for. Page A has a bigger backlink profile (though not enormous by any extent).

Page A ranks in 30th. Page B ranks in 7th.

Importance of Title tag? Importance of JS? Both?

Discuss!

Cheers,

Rhys

Hey all,

Glad this has generated a lively discussion! For clarity, my UTM URLs are exclusively external (primarily from social or AdWords).

Based on the advice above, because the canonical page is self-canonicalising, I don't think I'll bother with canonicalising the UTM URLs.

Also, for what it's worth, I'm not a huge fan of event tracking, always found it rather clunky. I tend to use Next Page Path in analytics, or even heatmapping.

Cheers,

Rhys

Hi Logan,

Sorry, not the homepage. I meant canonicalise all UTM URLs, like

http://www.yoursite.com/some-page?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social

to

http://www.yoursite.com/some-page

Hi Eric,

Thanks for your help.

I don't quite follow; how can you add a canonical from http://www.yoursite.com/some-page?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social

to

http://www.yoursite.com/some-page

If the former doesn't actually exist as a page, but only as a referrer, like a bit.ly?

All of our pages are automatically self-canonicalised, but I've read that it's best practice to canonicalise all URLs back to the main.

Cheers,

Rhys

Hey all,

We generate a lot of UTM-coded URLs for general advertising purposes. I read the other day that these should be canonicalised back to the main URL but, obviously, the utm URL redirects you to the main page, so I wouldn't really see how you could canonicalise this.

Any thoughts?

Cheers,

Rhys

Hi Nicholas,

Thanks for such a detailed response, very helpful!

One question, regarding file size, what would be the largest that you would recommend?

Cheers,

Rhys

Hi everyone,

One of my pages has an optimisation score of 93, but ranks in 50+ place. What on earth can I do to address this? It's a course page so I've added the 'course' schema. I've added all the alt tags to say the keyword, UX signals aren't bad. Keyword is in the title tag. It has a meta description. Added an extra 7 internal, anchor-rich links pointing at the page this week. Nothing seems to address it. Any ideas?

Cheers,

Rhys

Thanks, Kristen!

Thanks, both!

Once this has been added, would you submit the page to Google to ensure the schema gets picked up?

Cheers,

Rhys

Hey all,

I'm looking to use some schema to publicise an upcoming event. I can't make any sense of the Schema website for this section (http://schema.org/event). Can anyone help with drafting some schema? Or point me to an illustration of an example?

Cheers,

Rhys

Hey all,

We have two different websites, one is a Chinese version of the site with a different URL (.com.cn). The language is all Chinese however, I've noticed there's nohreflang tag on the html. Is this an issue? Presumably, if they type in our Chinese website URL then it should be fine, but if they just search our company name, will the lack of hreflang cause issues?

Cheers,

Rhys

Thanks, all. Regarding trying to guess what our customers are looking for, I've found from previous jobs that attempting to surmise a searcher's language can be tricky. I used to do digital marketing for a cookware company and we'd have a word for a saucepan, for example, whereas we found that searchers were using different language and terms.

Google Trends I like but doesn't it just give you an idea for the search volume over a defined period, and allow you to filter down geographically etc? I want to make sure that there is significant call/traffic to justify the pages that I'll be creating.

Cheers,

Rhys

Buzzsumo charge and not sure it's worth it. didn't find Quora helpful. Any others?

Hi both,

Cheers for your responses. Links do seem to be the route of the problem, but it's a hard area to link build for. I know people discuss Google 'devaluing' links, but this does seem to show that they are still central to algorithm.