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Hi there,

We have a good-sized eCommerce client that is gearing up for a relaunch. At this point, the staging site follows the previous best practice for pagination (self-referencing canonical tags on each page; rel=next & prev tags referencing the last and next page within the category).

Knowing that Google does not support rel=next/prev tags, does that change your thoughts for how to set up canonical tags within a paginated product category? We have some categories that have 500-600 products so creating and canonicalizing to a 'view all' page is not ideal for us. That leaves us with the following options (feel it is worth noting that we are leaving rel=next / prev tags in place):

1. Leave canonical tags as-is, page 2 of the product category will have a canonical tag referencing ?page=2 URL
2. Reference Page 1 of product category on all pages within the category series, page 2 of product category would have canonical tag referencing page 1 (/category/) - this is admittedly what I am leaning toward.

Any and all thoughts are appreciated! If this were in relation to an existing website that is not experiencing indexing issues, I wouldn't worry about these. Given we are launching a new site, now is the time to make such a change.

Thank you!

Joe

Hi all,

Thank you for taking the time to read this post. If you are interested in helping out, feel free to direct message me for more information.

Earlier this week I received a call from a very pleasant women named Martha. Her son owns a small site dedicated to his work as a pianist (can see the site here). They are having issues gaining traction in Google, they are not tech/search savvy and are looking for SEO help. They really do not have much to spend so partnering with an agency or hiring an SEO is not really an option.

The part that is eating me up is the fact that Martha recently lost her husband and that left both of them in a very tough spot emotionally and financially. They are trying to build up visibility for the site with the hopes of finding more work for her son to help support them.

Frankly, the site needs a good amount of work. It is a small one-page squarespace website. New pages need to be created, the site needs to be optimized and backlinks need to be acquired.

If anyone is willing or able to help, please let me know. I am trying to help them where I can (guidance for how to optimize, they provided me the squarespace login so I may start going in and making changes for them) but unfortunately I do not have the time to give this project the attention that it deserves. Even if it is something as small as throwing a link their way, it would be very much appreciated.

It doesn't have to be SEO specific either, if you can help them on social I'm sure that would be appreciated as well. Again, I appreciate you taking the time to read this. If you are interested in helping or just learning more, feel free to message me. Thank you!

Hi Jeremy,

Sounds frustrating, have you submitted feedback for this result? If you do so, you can specify that the name is not correct and provide the accurate name. I've just submitted that feedback myself for you, I recommend you and DK Pittsburgh Sports provide the same feedback.

At this point, there just seem to be a lot of signals indicating this is the brand name. Anchor text of links to the site (including the old domain which is redirecting here), online mentions using "DK on Pittsburgh Sports" (example #1) and company listings that still say "DK On Pittsburgh Sports (example). There are several years worth of content and links out there that indicate the brand is DK on Pittsburgh Sports.

I think this is going to take time but you should focus on acquiring quality links using the current brand name as anchor text, seek out online company listings using the old name to update and even request that old articles be updated with the new brand name. Claim and verify your location in Google My Business and make sure that links to the current website (using the correct company name).

I also suggest modifying your 'organization' schema to include the name field (current markup does not include that) and update the 'name' field in your website schema to "DK Pittsburgh Sports" as it currently reads "DKPittsburghSports.com".

Hope this helps!

Hi Jorge,

Backing up Gaston here, submitting that to the 'Remove URLs' tool in Google Search Console should do the trick and the Noindex tag will keep it out of the index in the future.

It is possible this page is still in the index because Google has not recrawled it since you added the tag. Have you checked the latest cache? You can do so using the "cache:" (without quotes) search command infront of the URL you want to check (example). If you ever do need Google to recrawl (or index) a page, you can request they recrawl your URL using the 'Fetch as Google Tool' in Search Console.

Hope this helps!

Hi there,

You can use this pagination testing tool to test the mark up on a single page.

Other than that, you can use a web crawler like Screaming Frog to pull all your rel= next/prev tags and check those manually. If you are unsure if these were implemented correctly, feel free to leave an example in this post and I will happily take a look. Alternatively, you can direct message me if you prefer.

I would also recommend checking out Search Console Help's article on paginated content, it will show you how to properly set up these tags.

Hope this helps!

Hi there,

Sounds frustrating, when did this migration occur?

I'm sure you've double checked but you implemented a 301 redirect from http://www. -----> https://www. correct? And URLs were 1 to 1 mapped out, no bulk redirect to the homepage or anything like that?

The site's internal navigation was updated to link directly to https://www. URLs, correct? If you are forcing each link in the site's navigation to redirect, you may be diluting homepage link equity and slow site performance. This could potentially be part of the issue.

This article discusses some potential reasons that rankings can drop after migrating from http ----> https, I would recommend reviewing these.

Hope this helps!

Hi Katarina,

I would recommend giving Grammarly a shot: https://www.grammarly.com/

Hope this helps!

Hi there,

It is not a bad signal if you are in fact deleting low-value content that does not drive traffic or back links. Content is becoming more of a 'quality over quantity' game (thankfully). If you are making your site more efficient for Google to crawl and condensing SEO authority (link juice) and pointing more of that your more 'important' pages, you could actually see an uptick in business from organic search. I will note that you should look at your blog posts to see if there are opportunities to update them to make them more informative and/or more current.

If any of the posts you are removing have inbound links or rankings, you will want to properly 301 redirect them. Take a look at these resources where sites removed old pages and maintained site performance or even saw an uptick. The content audit portion of your analysis is going to be crucial, you must be sure you are not deleting content that is driving traffic.

• How Deleting Bad Blog Post Content Can Increase Traffic

- Why We Deleted 900 Blog Posts And What Happened Next

• Why Deleting Old Blog Posts Help My Website Grow

Hope this helps!

Hi there,

There are a lot of things to consider here. For instance, do you want to be available to customers worldwide or do you only care to operate within Spain? A .es TLD will be a strong international targeting signal for Google and non-Spain rankings are likely to drop.

Secondly, moving domains can resolve link based penalties, however, many people speculate that Fred was a quality update that targeted excessive ads and low-value/quality content sites that put revenue before their users (Search Engine Land article). If that is what caused your site to get penalized, popping the same site up on a different domain will not change anything. Your best bet would be to resolve the onpage/content issues on the current domain in order to maintain that link equity that would be lost by moving domains (302 redirects do not pass link value).

Do you have reason to believe you are being penalized for links? Have you engaged in link building practices that could cause a penalty? Have you reviewed the back link profile? If there is a link-based penalty, 301 redirecting to the new domain could pass that penalty along. At the same time, providing a single link or using a 302 redirect will not pass your SEO authority.

I recommend taking action based on the recommendations in QuickSprout's 'Actions for those affected by Google Fred Update' article. Hopefully this will help you find a solution that will not involve moving domains.

Hope this helps!

You're welcome!

Hi Klemens,

Do not create individual pages for both variations of keywords, this is an old school tactic and hasn't worked well in years. You'll just be creating near duplicate content that does not provide additional value.

I'd optimize for whichever is grammatically correct. Google has come a long way and will understand that people searching for "webhosting" are also looking for the same results as those searching for "web hosting".

Search Results for "Webhosting" - https://www.screencast.com/t/AAEv5f4B6EN

Search Results for "Web hosting" - https://www.screencast.com/t/t3ztacXDCM

Hope this helps!

Hi there,

To be honest, I don't even think this is an option for them. Deleting/removing the Google My Business account does not actually delete the page, it just removes you as the manager/owner but that will still be returned in local search results (see this Google Help Forum Post).

The only way I've seen people have any success with this was to mark the location as permanently closed (which I would not recommend here) or to contact Google Business support and ask them to delete the listing. The problem here is I don't think the Google Business support team is going to delete this listing for bad reviews, they are likely going to suggest (as SEOman suggested) you focus on building up positive reviews and responding to the negative reviews currently associated with the page.

I do not think this is a ranking anomaly, I just think the results are being personalized despite the common belief associated with Incognito mode. Check out the link below which will take you to the Google Chrome Forum post 'Does Incognito Mode Remove Personalized Search Results'. The top answer provides a great explanation as to why these results are not always as unpersonalized as one might think.

https://support.google.com/chrome/forum/AAAAP1KN0B0Zaq9rFwdLWg/?hl=en

"When using Incognito Mode, you’re most definitely not anonymous; you are exactly as identifiable, trackable, followable, and recordable as a Normal Chrome window.  All browser info, system, plugins, IP connection, location details, etc. are provided exactly the same in Incognito, and the websites and webservices you go to are provided all the same info as a Normal window.  Incognito effectively provides a very quick way to start an empty session; but if you keep using Incognito without ever closing the last Incognito window, you are just as identifiable and trackable as using a Normal window, and you gain nothing by using Incognito. (If you want true web anonymity, you need to use proxy servers or proxy services.)"

?hl=en

Hi there,

IMO, no, I don't think this will hurt their local SEO. The NAP information has been structured under dedicated header tags and marked up with localBusiness schema. Google should be able to differentiate the information for Haverhill and Bury St. Edmunds based on this page structure.

Homepage Screenshot - Structured under dedicated H3 tags

Contact Us Screenshot - Structured under dedicated H2 tags

Hope this helps!

Hi there,

You will want to inject this tag into the section of http://www.domain.com/default.html

(or https://www. if your site is secure).

Additionally, you can 301 redirect www.domain.com/default.html to www.domain.com/ and that will also resolve the issue.

Hope that helps!

Hi there,

Yes, if you are using hreflang tags search engines should be able to deliver the correct page based on the users language. I recommend reviewing Moz's hreflang attributes guide, very helpful for setting this up.

Here is how you will want to set up the tagging for the homepage, do not forget to include self-referencing canonical tags for both sites.

Hope this helps!

Hi Justin!

Yes, I have seen this with multiple clients before. One of my older clients (about 4 years ago now) actually received a manual action as a result. We were working with product reviewers at the time that would include a disclaimer and occasionally leave a link dofollow but we decided to focus on the low quality spam links first. Let the Web Spam team know that these were not our work and that we had no way to contact the webmasters to have them removed. The manual action was lifted a few days later.

I have a client now that also gets links such as these, someone is building thousands of spam links to their site using generic prescription 'pill' anchor text ("buy hydrocodone online", "generic viagra" etc). I have no idea who is doing it. I don't think it is having an impact and frankly shouldn't according to Google's claims with Penguin 4.0 being able to devalue such links. I do still add them to the disavow file to cover all bases though.

Do you feel this is impacting your organic performance?

Hi Joseph,

I found Moz's Hreflang attribute guide to be very helpful when I first set up international targeting and multi-language tagging. I would recommend checking that out. You are close but you need to also include a self-referencing hreflang tag on each page so it should look like this:

I will note that hreflang tags do not consolidate link authority, they are meant to ensures that the correct pages will be shown to the correct users based on their language and/or location. You can see Twitter screenshots here where this same topic was discussed.

Hope this helps!

Hi Community!

We have been having an ongoing internal discussion on user behavior data as a ranking signal. We found this Moz article discussing the topic and it leaves us asking questions such as:

• What onsite user behavior metrics are being used (if any)?
• How exactly is Google collecting this information - Chrome? Google Analytics (which they have already claimed GA is not used for ranking purposes)?
• With privacy policies in place, how exactly is Google able to utilize this information?

The article discusses Google patents for collecting this information (The Monitoring Engine), Chrome's MetricsService which is "a system in charge of the acquisition and transmission of user log data", as well as the Reasonable Surfer model. Some highlights from the article include:

• "Google has designed and patented a system in charge of collecting and processing of user behaviour data. They call it "the monitoring engine"

• "Google's client behavior data processor can retrieve client-side behavior data associated with a web page. This client-side behavior data can then be used to help formulate a ranking score for the article."

• The monitoring engine can:

• Distinguish whether the user is actually viewing an article, such as a web page, or whether the web page has merely been left active on the client device while the user is away from the client.

• Monitor a plurality of articles associated with one or more applications and create client-side behavior data associated with each article individually.

• Determine client-side behavior data for multiple user articles and ensure that the client-side behavior data associated with an article can be identified with that particular article.

• Transmit the client-side behavior data, together with identifying information that associates the data with a particular article to which it relates, to the data store for storage in a manner that preserves associations between the article and the client behaviors.

• MetricsService: "Chrome's MetricsService is a system in charge of the acquisition and transmission of user log data. Transmitted histograms contain very detailed records of user activities, including opened/closed tabs, fetched URLs, maximized windows, et cetera."
• “Reasonable surfer” is the random surfer's successor. The PageRank dampening factor reflects the original assumption that after each followed link, our imaginary surfer is less likely to click on another random link, resulting in an eventual abandonment of the surfing path. Most search engines today work with a more refined model encompassing a wider variety of influencing factors.
• In addition to perceived importance from on-page signals, a search engine may judge link popularity by observing common user choices. A link on which users click more within a page can carry more weight than the one with less clicks. Google in particular mentions user click behaviour monitoring in the context of balancing out traditional, more manipulative signals (e.g. links).

I do not expect a concrete answer here, I know there is a lot of uncertainty on the topic but I am very interested to hear your thoughts. Thank you!

I can confirm that Andy is correct here, implementing that 301 redirect is best practice for this scenario.