Best Strategy for FAQ & Canonical?
-
I have an FAQ database setup on my site and there's about 30 questions in 6 categories so 5 questions per category which is a pretty good page size for one category. I'm trying to determine the best strategy for publishing them from both a user and SEO standpoint.
From a user standpoint, I want to have one page per category. Dumping them into a page with all 30 questions is not user-friendly and some categories are very unrelated to others. I should note that Google did already index a page that does have all the questions on it, but I was just planning on changing that page to just have 6 links to each of the category pages so then I don't have to bother with 301 redirect or removing the pages in the site's Search Console.
There's also an option to to link the questions for the entire FAQ or from the category list to one page with just that question and answer.
So my thinking at this point is to as I said, just change the page that has all 30 questions to a list of the categories and link to category pages having the questions for that category and disable the individual question pages.
Or would it be beneficial from an SEO page to have google index the individual question pages and link back to the category page and put a canonical tag on the category pages? In other words the question then becomes, index the category pages or index the individual question pages?
The other issue is the answers for some of the questions are lengthy, multiple paragraphs, and the FAQ has the option to have a hide/unhide feature on the answers so you can easily see all the questions first then expand the answers on the ones you are interested in. However I thought I heard Google discounts (doesn't ignore) content that is by default hidden on page load. I guess this would then give a reason for going with the indexing of the individual question pages. But it seems to me, you can't put the canonical tag on the category pages and point it to the individual question page. And if you put the canonical tag on the individual question page linking it to the category page, then the individual page won't necessarily get indexed will it?
-
I think I've come to the same conclusion. On many blog sites you may have multiple recent posts on the home page and then individual post pages for those same posts. Similar to FAQs. Google is smart enough to see, oh this is just another type of organization of this content that exists on individual pages.
It appears even though pages higher in the hierarchy are supposed to carry more weight, that Google favors indexing the individual pages deeper down than the "category" pages higher up.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Whats the best practice for internal links?
Hi our site is set up typically for a key product (money page) with 6 to 12 cluster pages, with a few more associated blog pages. If for example the key product was "funeral plans" what percentage of the internal anchor text links should be an exact match? Will the prominence of those links eg higher up the page have an impact on the amount of juice flowing? And do links in buttons count in the same way as on page anchor text eg "compare funeral plans"? Many thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AshShep1
Ash1 -
AMP for WordPress: To Do Or Not To Do
Hello SEO's, Recently some of my VIPs (Very Important Pages) have slipped, and all the pages above them are AMP. I've been waiting to switch to AMP for as long as possible bc I've heard it's a very mixed bag. As of Oct 2018, what do people think? Is it worth doing? Is there a preferred plugin for wordpress? Are things more likely to go right than wrong? The page that has gotten hit the hardest is https://humanfoodbar.com/plant-paradox-diet/plant-paradox-diet-full-shopping-list-for-lectin-free-diet/. It used to bring in ~70% of organic traffic. It was #1 and is now often near the bottom of the page. 😞 Thanks all! Remy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | remytennant1 -
The Consequences & Best Practices In Changing Domains
Working with a long established/organic successful site that, for brand reasons I disagree with, is verging on changing its domain name. Other than 301ing individual pages to their new domain name equivalent, getting canonicals updated, updating SSL certificates, new Google Search Console with old settings, maintaining the old robots.txtetc what else is worth paying attention to? Assuming I do all of that, how bad a hit to organic over what period of time might this result in? 6 months ago we migrated to https and that was hardly felt, but this is really a brand new domain name altogether. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Best practice for site maps?
Is it necessary or good practice to list "static" site routes in the sitemap? I.e. /about, /faq, etc? Some large sites (e.g. Vimeo) only list the 'dynamic' URLs (in their case the actual videos). If there are urls NOT listed in a sitemap, will these continue to be indexed? What is the good practice for a sitemap index? When submitting a sitemap to e.g. Webmaster tools, can you just submit the index file (which links to secondary sitemaps)? Does it matter which order the individual sitemaps are listed in the index?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shawn810 -
What is the best process to move a wordpress website ?
Hello Seomoz community, Simple question , i am looking forward to move a word press website from blog.domain.com sub domain to domain.com/blog to increase my indexed link on the root domain indexed by search engine.The blog i want to move already have high PR ( 6 ) i , of course want to avoid broken link , already indexed in search engine. What would be the best way to process to prepare this move accordingly on a SEO perspective ??? Many thanks in advance. Yan Desjardins
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SherWeb0 -
Canonical Tag - Question
Hey, I will give a thumbs up and best answer to whoever answers my question correctly. The Canonical Tag is supposed to solve Duplication which is fine. My questions are: Does the Canonical Tag make the PR / Link Juice flow differently? If I have john.long.com/home and john.long.com but put a Canonical Tag on john.long.com/home reading john.long.com then what does this do? Does it flow the Link Equity back to john.long.com? Can you use the Canonical Tag to change PR flow in any means? If I had john.long.com/washing-machines and john.long.com/kids-toys... If I put a Canonical Tag on john.long.com/kids-toys reading john.long.com/washing-machines then would the PR from /kids-toys flow to /washing-machines or would Google just ignore this? (The pages are completely different in this example and content is completely different). Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdiRste0 -
Navigation - Balancing UX & SEO
I'm currently evaluating our navigation in the course of a site relaunch. From reading a number of articles and posts on seoMOZ, here are the elements I've found important to consider: Use CSS (not Javascript) for the primary drop-down navigation menu Get rid of two design elements from our earlier days: The 30 something site-wide category links in the footer, and many no-followed internal links (in an attempt to sculpt PR) Keep all pages within 3 clicks of the homepage, and have ample cross-links within internal pages. The one major problem I'm facing is how to balance UX and SEO in the primary navigation bar. To illustrate, let's assume I sell Tennis equipment. If one of the top-level categories on my navigation bar was "Rackets", if I was designing purely with SEO in mind the category names would be: Tennis Rackets -> Wilson Tennis Rackets Head Tennis Rackets Prince Tennis Rackets ....as the full, three word anchor text will be most specific and valuable to pass reputation to the category pages. However, from a UX perspective, writing "Tennis Rackets" after each category is unnecessary, and it would look MUCH cleaner to instead have: Tennis Rackets -> Wilson Head Prince ....but this would obviously be less beneficial from a SEO standpoint for each individual, manufacturer racquet page as the entire search term ("Wilson Tennis Rackets") is not in the anchor text. As these links will be on every page of the site, I'm struggling with which to choose - clean navigation or improved SEO. My Questions: I would love to hear the communities thoughts on how to weigh the balance of these two - clean UX navigation vs. SEO-rich specific anchor text - in navigation. Also, I'd appreciate hearing if any of my original 3 assumptions for the re-design are off-base or incorrect. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndrewY0 -
Canonical Tag and Affiliate Links
Hi! I am not very familiar with the canonical tag. The thing is that we are getting traffic and links from affiliates. The affiliates links add something like this to the code of our URL: www.mydomain.com/category/product-page?afl=XXXXXX At this moment we have almost 2,000 pages indexed with that code at the end of the URL. So they are all duplicated. My other concern is that I don't know if those affilate links are giving us some link juice or not. I mean, if an original product page has 30 links and the affiliates copies have 15 more... are all those links being counted together by Google? Or are we losing all the juice from the affiliates? Can I fix all this with the canonical tag? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jorgediaz0