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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.

Thank you, hope it is of use to you.

For 'regular' SEO citation usually offer very little to no value. Most citations include a nofollow link and citation-website are often not niche specific.

Sure users might go to a local listing service like yelp and search for a business that performs the service they need or sells the product they need. But these searches are often for local businesses. If the business we're talking about is indeed a local business than they would benefit from this through Local SEO and the users searching for them through these platforms.

For a non-local business the value of citations is debatable. It doesn't hurt, but there might be better links to pursue.

Hello Rob,

Rich snippets are still in an early fase so i understand your pain about not being able to show your logo in the SERP's. The publisher markup is an option as Matt Antonino mentioned but this only shows up for brand queries so it might not be what you're looking for.

I do see that you have a YouTube video placed prominently on the homepage. Perhaps you could use a video sitemap to get a video rich snippet?
The process for this is described here: Video sitemap for vimeo and youtube

Other than that it's not possible as far as i know to get a good rich snippet for a business if you do not have a specific product or recipe to show.

As Travis stated before me it really depends on your business and which goals you are trying to achieve with social media. The major platforms are Facebook, Twitter and Google+.

But if your business does something with a lot of images then Instagram, Pinterest and WeHeartIt might be much more interesting for your business.

The link mentioned in Travis's answer is a great resource for learning more about the subject and you should give it a read.

You could add a canonical tag to link to the default page. This way Google will know that it should only index that.
The code for this would be:

This should be placed in the section of your HTML code.

Some more resources on the subject:

• Complete guide to rel canonical
• Learn about canonicalization and rel canonical

Citations are very important from a local business point perspective. Citations help increase your ranking in the local search results which can result in more customers.

As Kevin stated they do not directly impact your ranking.
The user experience might be harmed if the 404 page is not optimized for the user.

Using a custom 404 page you can assist the user to further explore the website on which they have arrived. If this is not done they might immediately leave the website and visit another one.

Google uses usage metrics in it's rankings now and therefor a lot of 404 pages might indirectly impact rankings.

These link exchanges should be beneficial to the user and relevant to the pages.
If this is not the case, then they should be no-followed like this:

[Friend link](http://www.frienddomain.com)

This way you won't have any SEO issues but you'll keep the links in place and any traffic that may come through those links.

Moving a complete website or merging one is always a difficult topic.

Redirecting one of them to the other is a good idea but make sure that people will always end up on the right pages. This is critical for your user experience and pagerank distribution.

If i go to example.com/bicycles/bike1.html i certainly do not want to be redirected to example2.com/
The blog content can be moved without a problem but make sure to redirect all the old articles to the proper new articles.

Having advertisements on your website with the no-follow attribute in place is a possible way of earning money indeed.
Other ways could be to use affiliate links or getting leads and sell these to other companies. For example you could have a form on your website where people will fill in their information and request a certain kind of service. You could sell this lead to a company who provides given service.

The blog posts in this case would bring in the traffic and if done well will make you an authority on the subject.
If the article has the rel="author" is in place and their is a link back from the person's Google+ profile contributor to section than the article will be tied to that author.

Not sure if you want to try and make money of Google Authorship though. Google has very strict rules about earning money with links and such and i'm pretty sure they have some rules concerning authorship as well.

Hope i answered your questions If not, please let me know where i can explain further or if i can assist you with any other questions.

Ah i had this same issue before. Perhaps you made the same mistake as me.
If you go to your campaign and click on the top right button 'Campaign Settings'. Here you should have a look at the page crawl limit. There is a 50.000 limit on this in the trial version and on my first campaign i selected 50.000.

If this is the problem for you as well you can just edit it and create another campaign

Okay, i have found the indexing problem. The noindex meta tag should be placed within the head section of your HTML. It is now in your body content so it's not getting used.

Are you sure you want to no-index product pages though? These are very important pages on your site and there are other ways to fix duplicate content issues.

Most duplicate content issues on pages comes from the fact that most CMS systems have the same product at different URL's. On your site i see http://yochic.co.uk/dress-267864/bodycon/black-cut-out-side-bodycon-dress.html and http://yochic.co.uk/black-cut-out-side-bodycon-dress.html

Same product, different URL. This could be fixed by adding a rel="canonical" on product pages which links back to the preferred version. Easiest would be to link back to www.domain.com/product.html

This would solve most duplicate content issues without having to deindex them.

Hope i was helpful, if you have any questions left, feel free to ask me.

Perhaps you could give us a link to your website using the following notation: domainname (dot) TLD It's difficult to tell you what the problem is without being able to take a look at your site.

Perhaps it would be useful for you to use robots.txt then?
The meta tag is always preferred but if that is too much work since it need to be done manually this could be your answer.

To answer your question:
You keep talking about a no follow. This just means that no PageRank will be passed to those pages or from these pages. As i understood the problem i thought you wanted to get them out of the search results completely. This would require a no index. You could use a function in Magento to add a meta tag with NoFollow to everything within folder.

As i said before, the meta tag is always preferred since search engines don't have to listen to a robots.txt file. But it might just work for you.

The rel="canonical" attribute should be used when there is a set of pages with the same or highly similar content.
This could be for example a category page which lists the products in different orders on different pages with for example URL parameters. (http://www.example.com/products.html?order=popular VS http://www.example.com/products.html?order=newest)

It could also be product pages appearing several times at different URL's (http://www.example.com/product1.html AND http://www.example.com/category1/product1.html AND http://www.example.com/brand1/product1.html)

In both of these cases Google would index all versions of the page and duplicate content issues will arise. Duplicate content can really harm your rankings. In situations like this you could use the to indicate to Google that they should index the page listed in the canonical tag and not the one they are currently viewing.

More information on canonicalization and the rel="canonical" attribute

• <address>Moz: Canonicalization</address>

• Complete guide to Rel Canonical - How to and why (not)

Hardley 111, NAP stands for name, address, phone number

As Martijn said before me it's very important that the anchor text is natural. Nowadays Google also looks at surrounding text so the actual anchor text has lost it's value. I would recommend that your bloggers link better than they do now. A click here link is indeed not the best approach.

The company name should be find if it's to the homepage, but for a product page it would be better to use the product name or something relevant. (Nimbus 2000 VS Broom for example)

Don't over optimize though. Google doesn't like manipulators, just let your reviewers make up the anchor texts. Most you can do is to ask them to place the link in a more appropriate sentence than 'click here'.

My preference goes to a seperate stylesheet. Many people will indeed not update their browser because they don't want too or because they can't. Depending on the niche you're in people might be visiting from their work computer a lot. Could be that they are stuck in an old browser from their. Therefor a link to a browser upgrade will only annoy them instead of helping them.

Using a stylesheet to fix the errors in older browsers (such as IE8) will give them a usable site which looks good too. This increases the user experience much more than an annoying pop-up.

If you want pages not to be indexed by search engines you should 'noindex' them.

This can be done by placing the following code snippet in the head of your HTML code:

Is this what you're searching for?

Google analytics isn't domain-specific. So you should be able to move domains without any trouble.

Hello khi5,

If you have "no index" on your site you should change it too "noindex"
Furthermore two weeks is a rather short time to wait between crawls. Low authority websites don't get crawled too often.

Perhaps page 2 has content that better matches the search query you are trying? Try it again from an incognito browser and see if it still ranks above page 1.

Yes, a citation is mention of your business on the web. It's usually accompanied by all of your NAP data. The more citations you have (with consistant information) the more Google can trust you with a good ranking. (Because it is an indication that the company which is listed is indeed doing what they say they do and they are located at the place where they say they do.)

Don't try to do it through Google Map Maker. Instead go to Google+ under your personal profile.

• On the left hand side in the sidebar you will find a link 'Pages'
• Click 'Pages' and then click 'Local business
• Type in your company name. It will show existing companies with that name. Choose your company.
• Follow the rest of the steps.

After some time a postcard will be send to your companies address with a pin-code. This pin-code can be used to verify you as the owner of this page. Then you will have full access to edit the content of the page.

Hello Rob,

In order to improve your local SEO you would need to claim (or create) your company's 'local listing' pages across platforms. A lot of websites out there list local businesses such as Google Places/Local, Yahoo local, Foursquare, Hotfrog, Yelp and much more.

Many of these platforms allow you to claim the page where they give out your company details so you can fill in the information about your company yourself. Once you've done this you need to make sure the information there is correct.

Enter your company name, address and contact details everywhere in the same way. For a computer it's very difficult to understand that avenue is the same as 'ave' in an address.

Fill in a good description, add photo's/video's if you have any and make sure the listing describes clearly what your company does and what it is all about.

The most important one of these is your listing on Google Places/Local. This page will actually rank in the search results as you described. Make sure you fill this in as good as you can. Google will use this information and compare it to other listings of your company. If they see that the information is consistant this would indicate to Google that the information is correct and they will trust you more and more. This would help you rank better in local SEO for related search queries.

Another good thing to remember is that reviews help you rank too. If you've got loyal and satisfied customers, ask them to write a review for you on your Google Places/Local page.

Note: Don't pay people for reviews or anything. It's against google's guidelines to buy or sell reviews just like links.

Some resources to get you started:

• The definitive guide to local SEO

• Free local SEO tools that belong in your toolkit

• Local SEO tips for 2014

Hope i answered your question. If anything was unclear or if you have any more questions please let me know and i will do my best to answer or explain more.

Think about the user experience when implementing a solution like this.
If your user expects to find a blog post about a certain topic make sure they are redirected to at least something which is connected to that.

On a webshop selling clothing articles it would make sense to redirect a deleted shoe article to the category page for shoes or to show them a custom 404 page which helps them on their way to find more content.

If redirecting them to something relevant is not possible i would suggest creating a custom 404 page which explains that the page has been deleted but that certain pieces of your content may be interesting for them. (Link to those pieces of content.)

Just redirecting users to the homepage or other pages which are not relevant only annoys the user and gives them a negative association with your website.

Going responsive is the way to go if you ask me and most other SEO's out there.
I'm not sure i fully understand your question though.

Responsive design doesn't have any issues with Javascript in most cases. It would depend a lot on what the Javascript would try to do. As Andy has stated above Google can now read and execute AJAX and Javascript which is great.

The only thing you should be careful is when implementing more Javascript is whether the website will still function as expected on devices/browsers that don't (fully) support Javascript. There are simple fallbacks and such so that all of your users get served great content and not just the ones with the most modern devices and browsers.

Excellent book for more information on this is: Designing with Progressive Enhancement.
Must read for any front-end web developer if you ask me.

Especially on Google+ you often see that people write a short enticing description which encourages people to read the post in the description. This is something you could do. A summary of the story however makes people not want to read the full story since they already read all the information in the summary.

Could you provide me with some keywords where you dropped in ranking? (If you don't feel comfortable sharing it here you can send me a private message.)

These links in the footer pass little to no SEO value anymore. I would stop doing this and encourage your client to spread the news about their new website to local media and have them write an article/press release which refers to you as the designer with a link. If the website contains a blog they could also place a blog post about the new site and give you credit themselves.

Well, the link building done in India is probably the reason. Directory links are not the way to go and in most cases the articles in which your brand gets linked from are bad quality articles on bad quality domains.
This form of link building is an old SEO 'trick' which is considered to be black-hat SEO nowadays.

I would assume that you got penalized by Google for having a unnatural link profile. You can read more information on that in this article. I took a really quick look at your site and couldn't find any on-page issues which would trigger such a ranking drop and i'm fairly certain it's in the link profile.

If you could verify that your link-profile is fine and the issue comes from something else i could do a more detailed site audit.

Hope my response will be useful to your. If you have any questions left please let me know.