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Hello,

We've been following the best practices outlined in this Moz article for title tags for a long time, however I have a question about the spelling of the brand name when the brand name is composed of keywords.

For example, let's say your company is called FitnessGearUSA and your website url is www.FitnessGearUSA.com.

How would you spell the brand name in the title tag? In a single word 'FitnessGearUSA' or in 3 words 'Fitness Gear USA'.

We've been using the first approach for a long time, but I am starting to think that the second approach would be better, especially when the customer might include a single keyword that's part of the brane name in his search

For example, a product page title tag would then look like this:
Model ABC Weight Lifting Bar | Fitness Gear USA

I am inclined to think that this page would rank better for a search like:
"Model ABC Lifting Bar USA"

Thoughts?

Hello everyone,

We run a Magento store, and I have a general question about SEO-eCommerce.

We recently launched a new site where we've modified the menu navigation for product categories. So let's say in the past we had a main category called 'Jackets' in the top navigation bar, and once you were on the jackets page you had a few subcategories to choose from.

On the new site, we reworked the navigation bar in order to get our customers there in fewer clicks. So right away in the top bar, the customer can click 'Casual Jackets', 'Leather Jackets' and 'Winter Jackets'. We no longer have an internal link to the parent category 'Jackets'.

Now here's the question:
-Do I 301 redirect 'jackets' to one of the sub-categories of my choosing?
or
-Do I keep the main category 'jackets' even though we don't actually link to it internally?

I see pros and cons for both, and I'd like to proceed in the way that will be most beneficial from a rnakings point of view for all jackets categories.

Thanks!

Thanks  for the input! The move to https sitewide will be added to our re-platforming plan.

Hello mozzers,

We are currently running a Magento 1 store and in the planning phase of migrating to Magento 2. As an eCommerce website, it goes without saying that we use secure pages for all pages where exchange of sensitive information is required, however, we do not use https on all pages.

I recently read this Moz article stating that the adoption of sitewide https is at around 50% for top websites. I see Moz is also using it.

I know that at this time right now, Google states not giving an SEO bump for https pages, but part of me thinks the time might be right (while re-platforming to M2) to make the move if this is what the future is going to be.

Do you agree? Is this something that everyone will eventually have to do?
I am ambiguous about whether 301 redirects would be needed for http -> https ?
Also, is there a how-to or checklist to making the switch to sitewide https in order not to inadvertently cause an SEO drop?

Thanks!

Thanks to both of you. Will go forward and implement this.

Hello mozzers,

Currently in the process of setting up a new website for a new entity. I was wondering what your thoughts were on using different base urls for different languages. Example:

ABCgroup.com -> English
groupeABC.com -> French

I've never done this before; I've been one to prefer using a subfolder structure. However, for this case, the expected visitors are truly split between 2 languages, and therefore having a base url in the visitor's language is appealing.

Would this approach be detrimental if all pages have a proper hreflang tag?

Thanks!

Hi Eric,

I was at Step 3 of your 3 Step plan, looking for confirmation as to whether or not the 301 redirects were required in this situation.

Thanks!

Hello,

Some time ago, we accidentally made changes to our site which modified the way urls in links are generated. At once, trailing slashes were added to many urls (only in links).

Links that used to send to
example.com/webpage.html

Were now linking to
example.com/webpage.html/

Urls in the xml sitemap remained unchanged (no trailing slash).

We started noticing duplicate content (because our site renders the same page with or without the trailing shash). We corrected the problematic php url function so that now, all links on the site link to a url without trailing slash.

However, Google had time to index these pages. Is implementing 301 redirects required in this case?

For anybody that is interested in knowing, after 10 days of webmaster monitoring, here are our conclusions:

We have 2 sitemaps (2 languages). It took a few days for Google to re-download the mains sitemap, and a few more days to download the secondary sitemap, however, the new sitemaps were both picked up by Google with no intervention on our part.

Bing, however, has still no downloaded either of the updated sitemaps.

Because it's so easy and isn't seen as bad practice, we will be manually re-submitting sitemap updated to both search engines.

Thanks!

Hello Mozers,

Our sitemaps were submitted to Google and Bing, and are successfully indexed. Every time pages are added to our store (ecommerce), we re-generate the xml sitemap.

My question is: should we be resubmitting the sitemaps every time their content change, or since they were submitted once can we assume that the crawlers will re-download the sitemaps by themselves (I don't like to assume).

What are best practices here?

Thanks!

For anybody that is interested in knowing, after 10 days of webmaster monitoring, here are our conclusions:

We have 2 sitemaps (2 languages). It took a few days for Google to re-download the mains sitemap, and a few more days to download the secondary sitemap, however, the new sitemaps were both picked up by Google with no intervention on our part.

Bing, however, has still no downloaded either of the updated sitemaps.

Because it's so easy and isn't seen as bad practice, we will be manually re-submitting sitemap updated to both search engines.

Thanks!

Hello,

Some time ago, we accidentally made changes to our site which modified the way urls in links are generated. At once, trailing slashes were added to many urls (only in links).

Links that used to send to
example.com/webpage.html

Were now linking to
example.com/webpage.html/

Urls in the xml sitemap remained unchanged (no trailing slash).

We started noticing duplicate content (because our site renders the same page with or without the trailing shash). We corrected the problematic php url function so that now, all links on the site link to a url without trailing slash.

However, Google had time to index these pages. Is implementing 301 redirects required in this case?

Good catch Chiaryn! Totally didn't see this.

Essentially two URLs end up displaying the same content: 1 is the URL that's picked up by google from our XML sitemap, and the other is a dynamic URL with filtering parameters based on a one level higher category URL.

The canonical tags were set up in such a way that they point to the base category, which in this case, are different, even though the content is the same.

We will address this.

Thanks!