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Recently i got into a discussion with someone regarding the use of headings on an e-commerce website.

i had used headings whenever a heading was used in the design, they all marked the subject of the given section.

For example: The sidebar contains items for filtering products. Each filter had a

containing the name of the filter, like colors or brands.

The discussion i had was about whether the use of headings was appropiate because the words contained within the heading had nothing to do with the main subject of the page (Soccer in this case).

The advice from the SEO agency was to replace the headings with a different html element like a div or span and style this so it looks like tge heading in the design.

What do you guys think?

Hi Tom,

The php server request uri way would be a good option except that the URLs are different on the different domains.

For example:

• www.example.com/about-us/
• www.example.nl/over-ons/

Therefor i really need a way to define the correct url on a page by page basis. Manually doing this in Wordpress is going to be a pain.

Thanks for the response! Do you happen to know how to properly handle this in Wordpress? Can't find a good plugin for implementing this.

Hey there fellow Mozzers,

I'm currently performing some work for a webshop which is located at two different TLD's.
example.com and example.nl.

In the head of both websites the hreflang tags have been added to tell Search Engines which site is targeted at which country. That's good

However, the hreflang links are pointing to the homepages of both websites from every page on the websites. Isn't example.nl/blog/ not supposed to link the hreflang tag to example.com/blog/?

It is very difficult to tell you something if you don't tell us where to find your website.
If you could post the url here in the following format: domain (dot) com then we could give you an accurate answer.

My first guess is that you haven't set up a proper rel=canonical.
In the eyes of a computer the following URL's are all different pages.

www.domain.com
domain.com
www.domain.com/index.html
domain.com/index.html
www.domain.com?sessionid=1
etcetera...

If you're not canonicalizing your pages or redirecting them properly then a computer such as a search engine will see it as different pages with exactly the same content.

As i mentioned before, this is just a guess and i can't give a proper answer without knowing the URL of your website.

Hope my answer will be useful to you.

This should give you faster improvement than with a completely new domain.

If you only have a physical location in Suffold than your local search result efforts will be focussed on Suffold and the immediate area through your citations, reviews etcetera.

This does not mean that you can not rank in the normal search results for queries about other areas such as Cambs and Herts. Your website could state that these areas are part of your service area as well.

Hello Mark,

This could potentially lead to duplicate / thin content issues on your site which could harm your ranking.
At the end you mentioned that you choose three paragraphs like this to mention the keyword three times because the Moz Page Grader told you so. The tool is merely a helpful hint towards an optimized page.

You should always write the content for the user and not for the search engine. A good piece of text about a certain subject will naturally contain the keyword several times. Three is a good average which is indicated by the Page Grader.

Writing your own descriptions of the content is a good idea instead of the Amazon ones even though it sounds like it's gonna be a lot of work to do so. Whenever possible try to write a fully unique piece of text of 300 words or so for each product. This is a pain to do, but in terms of SEO it will do wonders above standard templates.

Redirecting the old URL with a 301 redirect will send the users to the new URL. All the link juice from links pointing towards the old URL will also be pointed towards your new URL.

Google will keep the old URL in the index for a while, but it will disappear from the search results in a matter of weeks.

One thing to not though, make sure that users searching for the old product end up on a page that is useful for them. If i'm looking for a blue bicycle and i get redirected to a red bicycle page than it might be a related product, but it's not what i'm searching for.

This harms the user experience and will give users a negative association to your brand.
For each product that you retire you should make a decision between

1. Redirecting the page to a different URL
2. Giving them a custom 404 page

By customizing a 404 page you can help users in a tremendous way if done right. Depending on the situation either of these two choices can be the best one.

Personally i prefer to go for the longer url because of the breadcrumbs and the easier url navigation structure. A lot of people delete part of the url to get back to a previous step in the website architecture. Your 1st way allows that to be done fairly easily and the url explains exactly where someone is on the site.
When someone sees your url in the SERP's this would also indicate that they are finding a product in the proper category.

The problem with this is that if the webshop has a product in several categories. I build a female clothing webshop a while back and they had categories for top-wear, bottom-wear, specific clothing articles(blouses, jeans, shoes etc) and for each brand. This meant that a product would be in at least 3 different categories within the site.

For this reason i chose to set the canonical to: http://www.domain.com/product/ in this particular case.

If your webshop does not have this problem and will not get this problem in the future i would recommend the longer url's.

First off you should go to webmaster tools and make sure that you have verified that you are the owner of both the www and non-www version. After this you can tell Google your preferred version of the page under the site settings within webmaster tools.

This by itself will tell Google that it should index the preferred version. Furthermore you said that the non-www redirects to the www version now. Google will pick this up in time and will start indexing the www version.

Your question about why only one got indexed is hard to answer like this. If it's not the robots.txt than it could be a link rel="canonical" pointing towards the non-www version?

Perhaps you could provide us with the url? It's difficult to help you without it

Think about how you want to see the information divided from a user perspective.
If the user wants to read about funeral plans and how everything works than the calculator perhaps does not belong on the page. If their is a pricing page, the calculator would fit right in.

Don't overthink the keyword optimization in a way that it harms the user experience on your website. When thinking about keyword optimization it's helpful to read these two awesome blogposts by Cyrus Shepard here on Moz about keyword optimization in themes/concepts instead of individual keywords.

• How to Rank
• Keywords to concepts

Oke, the question concerning rel="canonical" is which URL becomes the canonical version? Since there is no page on the website which would be appropiate (as far as i've seen) i recommended the meta robots tag.

I do agree that rel="canonical" is the preferred option, but in this situation i can't see a way to implement it properly. Which page would you highlight as the canonical?

Well, the link tag works a bit different than you are using it.

It should be:

http://www.website.com/property/Edinburgh/Southside-Newington/6CN99V">

Not ending in

Besides that it's difficult to see any other problems without having a look at the site. Could you provide me with the url here in the following format: domain (dot) com? or if you don't want to place it here you could send me a private message here on moz.

You could republish to blog posts wherein you use the new keyword in principle. What i think you should take a look at though are these two posts here on Moz by Cyrus Shephard.

They are about using keyword themes which is the way to go from now on. If you are thinking about editing blog posts this might be a good thing to start doing right away.

• How to Rank
• Keywords to Concepts

They are invaluable resources and define the modern and future best practices concerning keyword research and optimization.

PS: If you're going to update your blog posts you might also see if they could be made better in any way. Using rich media, is the content completely up to date, is there anything else that could be added to improve the article etcetera..

I do agree that a rel="canonical" is good option for the problem that's at hand.
As jeremy has stated however the link we are referring to in the href section redirects to the home page. http://www.careerbags.com/catalogsearch/result/index/

In my original answer i did not test this. I assumed there would be a list of all products here not filtered by search results. Since this is not the case and this page in fact does not exist it's hard to point at a url to be canonical.

Therefor i changed my answer to include the robots meta tag. This would indeed remove the search pages from the search index. I do think this is a positive thing though.

Look at the following url: http://www.careerbags.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=rolling+laptop+bags

Not really the type of URL i would click on in the search results. The following URL however is something i would want to click on: http://www.careerbags.com/laptop-bags/women-s/rolling-laptop-bags.html

Search result pages are too varied to be included in the index to my opinion.

Hope you agree with this, if not then i would like to hear your thoughts on this.

In this case you could add the meta robots tag on the search result pages like this:

content="noindex, follow">

Search results can indeed spawn an infinite amount of different URL's. This can be avoided by making sure they are not included in the index but are followed.

Hello Adam,

In my eyes there are two ways to approach placing authorship markup for a blog post.

1. A link to the author's google+ profile straight from the blog post's Author Bio. For this you could make the Author's name the link like this:

[rel="author">Author's name](Google+ profile URL)

2. Create an author page on your site for every author. Create a link from the blog post to the author page like this:

[rel="author">Author's name](Author page URL)

From the author page there should be a link to the Google+ profile like this:

[rel="me">Google+ profile](Google+ profile URL)

Hope this helps

This change won't give you a very good benefit over what you have now. URL changes are never a good idea unless you have a really good reason for it.

In your case the url structure looks good and i don't think you should alter it.