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Thank you.

Thanks for the great response.

For question 2)

If your CMS is Wordpress and you don't have development access, how do you add the script? I'm assuming that the page is a static page. You basically just paste it into the page?

For question 3)

Could you explain why you can't see the asynchronous script in the source code. I'm not overly sure about this part and I'd like to understand it a bit better. When I used Google Tag Manager I couldn't see the script and I don't understand why not. Are you able to explain technically what happens with injecting it via GTM versus on the page itself?

Thank you

Hi,

I was implementing JSON-LD via Google Tag Manager but have since read that it is better to place directly on the web page.

My questions are:

1. Where exactly do you add the JSON-LD - I mean physically?  This article by Moz says the head or body. Does it matter where in the head? At the end?

2. If you do not have development access- is there an easy way to insert?

3. Can you view the added JSON-LD directly on the web page after you have added it or is it not visible in the source once you have added it this way ? If you cannot see it, how do you view? Or it it just OK to use the Google Structured Testing tool as evidence that it is being seen by Google?

Thanks

Hello,

The canonical product URLS will be getting crawled just fine as they are not blocked in the robots.txt. Without understanding your problem completely, I think the guys before you were trying to stop all the duplicate URLS with parameters being crawled and just leaving Google to crawl the canonicals - which is what you want.

If you remove the parameter from robots.txt then Google will crawl everything including the parameter URLS. This will waste crawl budget. So better that Google is only crawling the canonicals.

Regarding the sitemap, being present on the sitemap will help Googlebot decide what to prioritise crawling but won't stop it finding other URLS if there is good internal linking.

This looks like the products are being appended by a parameter ?cgid - there may be other stuff attached to the end of each URL like this below:

e.g. www.example.com/product-category/ladies-shoes?cgid-product=19&controller=product  etc

but canonical URL is www.example.com/product-category/ladies-shoes

These products may have had a canonical to the base URL which means that there won't be any problem with duplicates being indexed. So all well and good.

Except.....Google has to crawl each of these parameter URLs to find the canonical. In a huge website this means that crawl budget is being consumed by unnecessary crawling of these parameterised URLs.

You can tell Google not to crawl the parameter URLs in search console (at least in the old version you can). But you can also stop Google crawling these URLS unnecessarily by blocking them in robots txt if you are sure that the parameters are not changing how the page is looking in search.

So long story short is that is why you may see that the URLS with parameters are being blocked in robots.txt. The canonical version URLS will be getting crawled just fine since they don't have any parameters and hence not being blocked.

Hope that makes sense?

Two websites is a big overhead in terms of managing content, SEO, hosting, NAP issues etc. I would stick to one website and create individual service pages for each of your services. Not having keywords in your domain is not a deal breaker. I think your domain name fits the services you offer. If you concentrate on other key aspects for ranking like onsite and links, citations mentions etc then you will rank just fine. If you do it correctly, not having "printing" in your domain will be of no consequence.

Many of the businesses I help have more than one service and their domain doesn't reflect all of their services but their individual service pages rank fine.

Good luck!

I can't really see any third party reviews of this software. Does anyone rate it?

I wonder if someone can help me understand clearly page rank flow.

If we have a website with a Home page, Services, About and Contact as a very basic website and the page rank will flow to each of those pages from the Home page (i'm not including internal linking between pages or anchor text from the home page content - this is a question purely about home page flow via the main navigation).

If the Services page had 3 drop down pages. Would the home page rank also flow to each of these or is it going to the Services page which then distributes it to the three drop down.

So instead of Home page rank flowing to 3 pages 33% each - it is flowing to 6 pages 16.6% each.

Or is it flowing to 3 pages - 33.3% then the Services pages get a third of 33.3% ->10.1%

I know this is simplifying it all a great deal- but it is the basic concept I am trying to grasp on this simple example.

Thanks

Hi,

First off it is my understanding that Penguin is operating in real time now - so it is part of the algorithm and as such it will be dealing with spammy links on an ongoing basis. Furthermore, the latest release of Penguin will devalue spammy links and not punish whole sites. So having a bunch of low value spam links is like having no links at all. This is worth reading: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history/penguin-update/

Regarding content over links, good content is always required to rank by search engines and your website users. But in a competitive market good content will also need some quality links to be able to do well.

Hi,

My client has a large website and has a navigation with main categories. However, they also have a hamburger type navigation in the top right. If you click it it opens to a massive menu with every category and page visible. Do you know if having a navigation like this bleeds page rank? So if all deep pages are visible from the hamburger navigation this means that page rank is not being conserved to the main categories. If you click a main category in the main navigation (not the hamburger) you can see the sub pages. I think this is the right structure but the client has installed this huge menu to make it easier for people to see what there is. From a technical SEO  is this not bad?

When  I run a wordpress blog through the structured data testing tool I see that there is @type hentry. Is this enough for blogs etc? Is this a result of Wordpress adding in this markup?

Do you recommend adding @blogposting type and if so why? What benefit to add a specific type of schema? How does it help in blogging?

Thanks

My client has received a bad review on Google and although has other good ones, wants to delete the current Google My Business page and open a new one. I disagree with this strategy but need some evidence to back it up. They are ranking well and so I don't want to upset the cart. I need reasons not to in terms of potentially harming rankings. Am I right that this could impact?

Ideally you don't want any duplicate pages on your site? So if you are asking do duplicates impact rankings, well it is certainly possible as that is why canonicals are deployed. If it is not malicious duplication i.e. you are not trying to dupe the search engines then it will have less of an impact. This article may help:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66359?hl=en

When you say that these links aren't showing as backlinks- where are you looking? Google search console? Moz? Ahrefs?

Not all the links you get will show up imediately or at all in some of the tools- it doesn't mean that you don't have the links. Some of the tools cannot crawl everything so that's why it's a good idea to use lots of tools to see backlinks for you or your competitors.

Footer links don't pass on a lot of SEO link juice anyway so I wouldn't expect a massive increase in your ranking by adding a link in the footer of your clients. The best place is in the body of the page but we know how hard that can be to get one there!

Best of luck.

Hi,

First off it is my understanding that Penguin is operating in real time now - so it is part of the algorithm and as such it will be dealing with spammy links on an ongoing basis. Furthermore, the latest release of Penguin will devalue spammy links and not punish whole sites. So having a bunch of low value spam links is like having no links at all. This is worth reading: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history/penguin-update/

Regarding content over links, good content is always required to rank by search engines and your website users. But in a competitive market good content will also need some quality links to be able to do well.

Thanks Tom

Two websites is a big overhead in terms of managing content, SEO, hosting, NAP issues etc. I would stick to one website and create individual service pages for each of your services. Not having keywords in your domain is not a deal breaker. I think your domain name fits the services you offer. If you concentrate on other key aspects for ranking like onsite and links, citations mentions etc then you will rank just fine. If you do it correctly, not having "printing" in your domain will be of no consequence.

Many of the businesses I help have more than one service and their domain doesn't reflect all of their services but their individual service pages rank fine.

Good luck!

Hi,

Thanks for replying.  I think the problem for me is when I copy the graphics onto a word document and it becomes unreadable.  Any suggestions to do this better would be great.

Ah ok. If it were a really spammy website, would you still recommend disavow even though you can't see a link?

Hello,

This is pretty frustrating. This is the third time Yelp has hidden a review for my business. I don't know why. I am trying to get lots of reviews on different platforms but I feel at the mercy of  Yelp as they decide what to show and what not. I think it was triggered when I actually replied to the reviewer on Yelp. I should have done nothing I think. Any hints or reasons why this might be happening?