Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Jordan, Good to know I haven't posted something that's been seen time and time again! Thanks for the context.

Hi Thomas, You are correct that Mobile First is changing the game when it comes to tabbed / accordion content. Google's take on this now is that they will help usability by not having pages and pages of content on show. From a desktop point of view, will this help when visitors arrive? Will they know to find the answers they seek behind a tab? Can you have one design for desktop and another for mobile? Google haven't really said anything about using tabbed content on a desktop site once Mobile First hits, but based on the fact that it will be powering the desktop SERPs, I wouldn't have thought it was a big problem - as long as it enhances the page for a desktop user. One more thing - John Mueller did tell me in a recent Tweet that layout can affect ranking, so take the time to test what works well for your visitors - it could be the difference between a win and a loss. -Andy

Honestly i've been a bit inactive at the minute, however from what I can see the mozpoints is working fine. I do only see the staff badge when i'm logged in.

I just posted this for a user on a forum I am a moderator on so unfortunately I can't answer that question. This was his reply to your post: "Hi, Thomas I think the lady who replied last to your thread in Moz had hit the spot. backlink from Washington post must have bump up the DA ( Even though the change is too high ). I wonder why this link didn't show up in web master tools. Google mustn't have indexed this link thus far. and Moz not showing the link is also a question. [image: icon_eek.gif]"

If I have understood it correctly, you want: To redirect certain category pages to new category pages on a new domain. Redirect all other pages to the homepage on a new domain Not to redirect the homepage and for that to stay on the current domain. If so I think this should probably do what you want: RewriteRule ^$ - [L] RewriteRule categoryA/ http://www.newdomain.com/newcategoryA/ [R=301,L] RewriteRule (.+) http://www.newdomain.com/ [R=301,L] The first rule says "if this is the homepage stop evaluating rules". The second maps a category page over to the new version and stops evaluating rules; you'll need to duplicate this one for all the specific categories. The last rule is your catch-all rule for redirecting everything else to the homepage of the new domain. If you want to easily test/check then I highly recommend this .htaccess checker tool. Good luck!

Answered my own questions: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/control-crawl-index/docs/robots_txt?csw=1#file-format "A maximum file size may be enforced per crawler. Content which is after the maximum file size may be ignored. Google currently enforces a size limit of 500kb."

Hi Thomas, If a page doesn't have an equivalent on the other country version then you don't need to specify hreflangs really, you can just specify the one of the page that exist if you want, to keep the consistency, although if you see: the goal of the hreflang is to specify Google which is the "best" URL to show in their results when a search is done and there are many that could be relevant as they target the same queries, but should be targeted to different audiences, since in this case there will be only one, then it's not necessary to do it. Thanks, Aleyda

For those wondering, I haven't been able to find a solution and the people I have spoken to have agreed that we don't think this is possible (to warrant the amount of work we would need to do)

You're likely to see problems resulting from a few different factors: Search engines go through a limited number of pages on your site, known as a crawl budget. Around a third of that budget will go cataloguing duplicate products, which is a waste since those pages will be discarded since... If a search engine sees two pages with the same content only one will rank. This means there is no point from an SEO perspective to having those 4,000 extra pages, since nobody will land on them Because you're providing content that sin't high quality the rest of the site may well get hit by Panda, bringing the rest of your rankings down Customers will see the two identical products, spend a bit of time trying to figure out the difference between them, get frustrated, then buy from somebody else If you're looking at convincing your boss not to do this then here's the important bit: add those products and you risk getting fewer people to your site and fewer of those people turning into customers.

Yes, that should work just fine. As Logan mentioned, I recommend you test it in the robots.txt testing tool in Google Search Console.

Hi Thomas Unless I'm mistaken. If you list multiple user agents before a rule all the users agents are subjected to the rule. So what you have is a list of 3 user agents allowed "anything" disallowed 4 specific things. In the end the rules apply to all. Don

I'm on this same path since we too cannot use noindex / nofollow due to limited backend interaction with Bigcommerce. I like to block all cart related pages, which for ecommerce sites can be a boat load. /cart.php /checkout.php /finishorder.php /*login.php just to name a few, then you have the sorting and compare pages, they have to be blocked or a mess unfolds. Disallow: /*sort=newest Disallow: /*sort=bestselling Disallow: /*?page=       ( Big duplicate page issue if you don't block this one with a wildcard, and cannot access your .htaccess file or the backend properly to noindex / nofollow ) Just to name a few, in my case, I only want the meat of the site to be indexed and rank for. Otherwise one client's site was ranking terms that more related to web development than the niche industry they lived in. Plus with a limited index budget, why would you want google or anyone else to crawl pages on your site with no SEO value towards your niche? Unless you sold carts as in web developed carts for ecommerce sites you wouldn't want much of that indexed anyways, and even in that case, those pages aren't too useful for ranking. At least from what I've gathered in the niche industries.

Hi Ruth, Appreciate your response. Trying to get these sorted at a code level, but we currently have six different issues all providing various issues, along with a variety of other features not working correctly. (The joys of working with a 10 year old system that is behind in a few areas) You say the following: 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. Is it strange that the canonicals that are not the exact duplicates (category filters on ecommerce) are the main ones that are obeyed, the product canonicals (with exact duplicates, excluding changes to the breadcrumbs) are the ones being ignored. There are pages that are receiving search traffic, but not a massive amount (atleast compared to the true versions of these pages, some of these pages get 10s to 100s of clicks, the canonical pages get thousands/tens of thousands) Would a viable strategy to try and deal with these by redirecting these non-canonical urls to their canonical format? (short term until we can get issues sorted) Final query, if Google ignores the canonical is this potentially going to be penalising us? If the answer is believed to be yes then it'll be a higher priority item to deal with.

No prob, let me know how things turn out (professional curiosity) Like yourself my main project is dated in areas and a workaround is more cost effective than a rebuild, always interesting to see how people get around issues. GL!