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Google's John Mueller has stated that exit intent pop-ups do not attract a Google penalty:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=746&v=gS4_JH-QqSg
"What we’re looking for is really interstitials that show up on the interaction between the search click and going through the page and seeing the content. So that’s kind of the place we’re looking for those interstitials. What you do afterwards like if someone clicks on stuff within your website or closes the tab or something like that then that’s kind of between you and the user."

Google won't be monitoring the user's full behaviour on your site beyond the initial bounce/non-bounce (at least as far as the search arm is considered, Analytics is, of course, different!), e.g. they won't see that x happened that caused (or appeared to cause) the user to leave.

Google makes the decision, and it can actually be pretty hard to convince them to use your description rather than a snippet on the page.

Google says "Google will sometimes use the description tag from a page to generate a search results snippet, if we think it gives users a more accurate description than would be possible purely from the on-page content." (Bold is mine) https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35624?hl=en

Their page above is a pretty good starting point to guide you on how to write good descriptions.

When you say migration, are you talking about moving the site to a new domain, or simply to a new platform while maintaining the current domain? To be fair, I don't think it makes too much difference either way, I was just trying to get it clear in my head.

I think you may be over thinking it.

• _What is the best way to make this transition without losing too much of our SEO value?  I understand there is nearly always traffic loss with URL changes but I'd like to at least minimize the damage as best I can.  We have backlinks and ranks for many product pages so I want to make sure we pass as much of this as we can. _

  I would simply redirect both the old URLs to the new URL with a 301, I don't see any issue with doing this as the new page will have all the relevant content.

• (And is this at all further complicated by the fact that URL A & B won't exist on the new site, and URL C doesn't exist on the current site?  Does this impact the use of the 301 redirects and if so, how?)
  No, not really. So long as the new page exists before you create the 301 (or at the same time) there is no issue there.

• Are we better off to approach this page consolidation after the site migration and treat it as a separate project?  This is something that is important to our user experience, and is definitely a change we want to make.
  I don't think so, I would definitely do it as a single project. Except from a "it's slightly less complicated if we break it into parts" point of view, the only benefit SEO-wise in breaking it into two projects would be from a monitoring angle, i.e. if something were to go wildly wrong with your rankings you would know which part of the transition had the impact and maybe be able to diagnose quicker.

Hope that helps!

Alex

I think one thing missing from your list is the impact of voice search. I think voice search will continue to grow everywhere, including in the local search area.

If your content is outranking the copied content, that's a fairly decent sign that Google assumes your content is the original and therefore you gain any benefits associated with that content.

Although Google is generally good at working out who the original content creator is and ranking that content higher, it's not always the case.

If you find that plagiarised content is ranking higher than your own (or you simply want to get the content removed from search), you can use the form here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dmca-notice It looks like a fairly chunky serious form, but if you work your way through it, you'll be fine.  They tend to take action within a week.

I like https://www.webpagetest.org/

Allows tests form lots of locations and provides a video of its experience too. The waterfalls allow you to diagnose problems quickly, and the suggested actions are usually good.

To be fair, GTMetrix and Pingdom offer similar features.

Pagespeed insights can sometimes get the true experience wrong, what areas is it marking you down in?

Hi,

The url with the parameter won't be indexed by Google. On that page you have (correctly) got the canonical tag set to "https://www.tansleyphotography.co.uk/farnham-castle-wedding-claire-chris/" so you're telling Google (and all the other search engines) which is the "master" page that you want indexing. Therefore, Google should be fine.

You can tell Moz to ignore them by using robots.txt to exclude them for rogerbot:

User-agent: rogerbot
Disallow: /*?reply-to

(Note, that will tell rogerbot to not crawl any URL with "?reply-to" in it, you could use "/*?" if you wanted to block all parameters, which may or may not be desirable)

In that case, you need to report it as webspam. https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreportform?hl=en

Unfortunately, outside of Google Ads, Google doesn't offer a solution that you can use across your marketing efforts. (Which is a shame, as they clearly have the infrastructure set up to support the functionality in Ads. I, for one, would be happy to pay to extend this across to Analytics for more general tracking)

There are a number of 3rd parties who offer services that will integrate with Google Analytics, Ads, etc. and, potentially, your CRM if you have one. There is a good article here that might be a good starting point: https://www.optimizesmart.com/phone-call-tracking-google-analytics-beyond/

Hi,

Your developer hasn't added it as a class, he has added the attribute to the paragraph tag, however, it still isn't right.

The "rel" attribute can only be used with a or link tags. It does not cascade down, i.e. you can't put it higher up to cover all child tags, which is what I think the developer is trying to do.

As you've suggested, he needs to go back and change it.

Google's Gary Illyes has specifically stated that it wouldn't be a problem when someone else asked the same question:

"Is there an issue (ie. spammy structured markup manual action) with marking up the same content using both JSON-LD & microdata?"

Gary Illyes (@methode)

"no, that shouldn't be a problem"

https://twitter.com/methode/status/793628458928578560

Is there an issue (ie. spammy structured markup manual action) with marking up the same content using both JSON-LD & microdata?17Gary "鯨理" Illyes@methodeReplying to@jenstarno, that shouldn't be a problem

A brilliant response EGOL, however, I would like to put to you, that each of your pages/articles would still be focussing on a single keyword (or keyword cluster) while bearing in mind the overall goals.

You wouldn't have two pages competing for "Stihl Chainsaw MS170 Maintenance" for example, but you might have multiple pages that are talking about "Stihl Chainsaw MS170" in various ways, all probably linking to the page where the customer could buy the actual product or parts, etc.

Of course, if a customer were to search "Stihl Chainsaw MS170" and not be showing any clear intent, then Google may well show multiple results from your site, which, I agree, would be great. (And you'd also likely show up in the SERP generated by clicking on the various, "People also search for", etc)

Are the pages linked elsewhere with follow links? And therefore, are those pages already indexed? (I would be surprised if they weren't, especially "About Us"). If so, changing the follow status won't have any impact on crawl budget but will demonstrate to Google that those pages are more important to you.

It seems to me that the pages you've listed would certainly be pages you would want to be indexed. And give the small number of pages you're talking about, it's not going to have any real impact on your crawl budget.

The fact that you're talking about less than 10 additional pages aside, if you're worried about crawl budget (as you might need to be if your e-commerce site is vast), then there is a good article here from Yoast: https://yoast.com/crawl-budget-optimization/
The pertinent section, and to work out if you really need to worry, is:

1. Determine how many pages you have on your site, the number of your URLs in your XML sitemaps might be a good start.
2. Go into Google Search Console.
3. Go to Crawl -> Crawl stats and take note of the average pages crawled per day.
4. Divide the number of pages by the “Average crawled per day” number.
5. If you end up with a number higher than ~10 (so you have 10x more pages than what Google crawls each day), you should optimize your crawl budget. If you end up with a number lower than 3, go read something else.

If I understand you correctly, you are trying to use the review structure data?

Google's Structured Data Testing Tool is showing an error in your structured data:
https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/u/0/#url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mashhoor.ir%2Fblog%2F%25D9%2585%25D8%25B1%25D8%25A7%25D8%25AD%25D9%2584-%25D8%25AB%25D8%25A8%25D8%25AA-%25D8%25A8%25D8%25B1%25D9%2586%25D8%25AF-%25D9%2588-%25D8%25AB%25D8%25A8%25D8%25AA-%25D8%25B9%25D9%2584%25D8%25A7%25D9%2585%25D8%25AA-%25D8%25AA%25D8%25AC%25D8%25A7%25D8%25B1%25DB%258C%2F

There seem to be two problems. One, you're not actually returning a reviewRating. And two, Google doesn't like your value for rating count, I think it's because you're outputting numbers in Punjabi, e.g. ۲۵۸ (Apologies if that's not the right term) I think they need to use latin characters, but I may be wrong, you may be able to "tell" Google that you are using a different system.

I'd suggest referencing https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/review-snippet

Hi,

Firstly, yes, that robots.txt is valid and would work for your purpose.

There's a great tool (https://technicalseo.com/tools/robots-txt/) that allows you to put in your proposed robots.txt file contents, the URL you want to test and even the robot you want to test against and it lets you know the result.

Do you mean to see if Google has indexed it (even if it isn't ranking)? If so, Search Console is the answer. https://search.google.com/search-console/about

If you mean rankings for specific keywords/phrases, you might consider signing up to Moz

1. Ideally, you want to set those "Review" links to nofollow, rather than the pages they link to noindex.

2. From a quick look, the problem seems to be that lots of your links are pointing to http, rather than https, which means the link gets followed and then your site redirects the client to the https version.
For example, in your breadcrumbs, you link to the homepage but at http. I would suggest using relative links to avoid this i.e "/"
Also, I assume your product descriptions were written before you moved to https, so any links in those are http too. (https://www.twowayradiosfor.com/Motorola-RMU2080D-p/rmu2080d.htm has a link at the bottom about a discontinued product that links to a http page). I would suggest using a find and replace tool to find any reference to http://www.twowayradiosfor.com/ and replace it with https://www.twowayradiosfor.com

Also, unlikely to be causing any issues, but the AddThis tool links are HTTP too, they don't get followed when you actually click them, but that would suggest to me that your site settings are still configured to HTTP rather than https. Perhaps Site Address (URL) is wrongly configured? (That would also explain the Home breadcrumb being wrong)

As an aside, I'd seriously consider dropping the www. given the already long url. It will make your SERPs a little better in my opinion.

This sounds like it might be an extension of your other post I've just replied to...

To expand on what I said in my other response, I would certainly be considering your site structure, if Google isn't finding and ranking the pages, how will your direct customers. Maybe some sub category pages might be a good idea? By location, by type, etc.

Also, have you checked your sitemaps are working correctly? Are the "obscure properties" actually not indexed, or is it just a ranking problem?

"Price" is not a property of "Product", but rather a property of "Offer" which in turn is an optional property of "Product".  I.e. a Product can optionally have an offer, which must have a price.

Therefore you could list a product without an offer which would be valid, but I'm not sure how Google would then treat it, it's not something I've tried.

On webpagetest.org you can emulate all sorts of settings.

If you click on the Advanced Settings dropdown you can throttle the connection to see how your site would load on 4G/3G (56k if you so wish). You can also, in the Chrome tab, set specific mobile phone emulation too, which will set the viewport.

I've never come across any issues with using a variety of TLD from a purely SEO point of view. I would argue that they can have some effect on CTR (which could indirectly affect your rankings) if you have competitors that use "more important" TLR with the same subdomain, e.g. yourdomain.co.uk vs yourdomain.com, but in your case, with a company name, this seems less likely to be an issue. While I would recommend getting hold of the other domains (if they haven't already) and redirecting, I would suggest migrating to a different TLD if they have used the original domain for a long period.

The short answer is no. A single knowledge panel listing cannot have multiple options, and you can't get a single listing to serve up different numbers based on the department inferred.

You can add additional numbers (https://support.google.com/business/answer/3370250?hl=en#addlphone) but they will not display. My opinion on this is so that Google does not get confused if other citations (and your website) list other numbers for your business.

Also, within Google's guidelines you can create separate listings for multiple departments (https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en-GB#departments) but I don't think that is really aimed at what you're doing, and I think it would upset Google, so I wouldn't recommend it.

I see you use Google Ads, so one (possibly costly) alternative, if you're very worried about customer experience, is to use Google Ads to offer up the phone number. The CPC should be relatively low as I don't think there'd be much competition for the specific keywords and your landing page/phone number would be super relevant.

Google will often make up its own mind what to put in your description, especially if it thinks that your provided description doesn't match what it thinks the page is about.

I'm afraid your developer hasn't fixed the issue. I was looking in the wrong place (your screenshot identified the issue), the malware isn't replacing the meta description, but actually inserting text at the top of the page, but only when it detects that it is the Mobile Googlebot visiting.

Using Google Chrome Developer Tools you can set your user agent and see the issue yourself (See my screenshot)

If I were you, I'd disable all the plugins and then reload the page in Chrome with your user agent set and see if that helps, if not, I would look at your theme's JS/source files.

oBUJqpm

You're the third person (that I've seen) reporting the issue here on the Moz Q&A.

SEO Round Table have an article about it: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-dropping-pages-out-of-the-search-index-27369.html

Bottom line, you're not alone, and there is no response from Google yet on what is going on!

I may have misunderstood, but I don't think 22Eighteen was asking about having multiple sites with different TLDs targetting multiple areas, I got the impression that this was a single site that happened to have a provincial TLD.

Have you considered the ongoing video series by Rand on Moz's Whiteboard Friday's? Up to date and a great format.

The first one is here: https://mza.bundledseo.com/blog/one-hour-seo-guide-part-1-seo-strategy

There are links to the others in the series so far at the bottom. (Apart from part 5, which hasn't been linked yet https://mza.bundledseo.com/blog/one-hour-guide-to-seo-technical-seo)

With that many pages, I assume you are already carefully managing structure and crawlability. I wouldn't think that about few thousand pages on a site of a million would make that much difference (Your new pages only make up 0.1% of your total site), if they're linked properly and included in the site map(s) correctly you shouldn't have much issue. I certainly wouldn't suggest drip feeding them in.

The issue is now being reported as fixed, with a response from Google’s John Mueller saying it was a technical issue their end. https://searchengineland.com/google-de-indexing-issue-now-fixed-result-of-technical-issues-315058

I don't think you'll have an issue, so long as you don't post thousands of spammy pieces all at once, make it look as natural as possible. To be fair, you usually get the most value if your pieces do offer genuine value.

I would normally suggest picking a few people within the company to post various categories of content depending on their role, but that is sometimes not appropriate or possible (e.g. one man band businesses)

An interesting question...

Directly, no, Google state that PPC spend won't affect rankings. However, it's an interesting concept, if Google knows that a term you are using as a PPC keyword is driving traffic with a low bounce rate, that would indicate the page is relevant... therefore should it not rank more highly organically... who knows... Even if it has an impact, I wouldn't expect it to high up the list, so I wouldn't include those pages/terms purely for that reason.

That said, Google Ads can give you some useful insight into Google's opinion of your pages for specific keywords. If your Ad Rank is low for a page/keyword combination, then it is unlikely to rank well organically. You can look at "Landing Page Experience" and to a lesser extent "Expected CTR" to get an idea of which areas to target, improving those metrics on Ads could, based on the actions you would have likely had to have taken, improve your chances organically too.

Hi Jim,

The key thing, as I'm sure you're aware, will be to manage all of your redirects! It looks to me that there will be quite a lot of duplicated/similar content from across the three existing domains that you'll want to combine, and then ensure that old pages redirect to the new content; this makes it quite complicated and will require lots of custom redirects rather than a simpler bulk https://blog.lucybee.com/* -> https://lucybee.com/blog/*

Depending upon the new structure for the shop element of your site, you might be able to use wildcard redirects (E.g. https://shop.lucybee.com/collections/* -> https://lucybee.com/products/*) but you'd obviously need to be very careful to make sure they all match up.

I'm not familiar with Shopify, but I would suggest getting in touch with them and explaining what you plan to do. If I were carrying out your project I would want to set up a dev site to make all the content and structure changes, and then prepare my redirects, before then putting the whole thing live.

A crawl of the existing three sites before you start and then a map of your redirects is probably best. You can then bulk check the old URLs once you go live to make sure you haven't missed anything. (https://httpstatus.io/)

I wouldn't block them. While it's unlikely to affect the rank of your other pages, it may result in a poorer user experience, e.g. if someone were to be searching for one of your policies in Google, it would not be returned.

I'm afraid I'm not an expert on Shopify at all, so I can't answer why they wouldn't have been blocked.

1. I don't think it will, Google has got very good at ignoring these spammy sites. Creating large disavow lists isn't technically that hard, but I don't think I would spend the time doing it seeing as you haven't seen any impact.

2. I don't think either of the response codes you're returning are appropriate.
403 for the indicates that the client doesn't have permissions and therefore it could be inferred that the file does actually exist and therefore the link is valid, which is definitely not something you would want Google to think.
While you have disavowed the links you are 302'ing, I still don't think 302 is the right response. For a start, 302 has been superceded now anyway, but 302 indicated moved temporarily. That is certainly not the case. The page doesn't exist and never has. The only reason to 302 is if you are expecting traffic from these links, but I think that also sends a bad message to Google.
I would definitely suggest 404 for both cases.

As I understand it, the way Moz crawls means it won't pick up HTML that is added dynamically. Without knowing which site you are talking about, I can't check, but I worked with a client who had a site that dynamically generated areas of the page after the first draw and that caused some issues with the Moz crawler correctly identifying issues on the site.

I would suggest checking with Search Console "Fetch as Google" tool just to make sure Google is "seeing" the page correctly, and, if so, ignore the alerts in Moz.

Someone else in the forum has posted a very similar question to you! My response there:

"It looks like you're not the only one: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-dropping-pages-out-of-the-search-index-27369.html

No response from Google yet."

1. That's just a terminology thing, Wordpress refers to the category pages as a type of archive. You can see that in the template hierarchy described here: https://codex.wordpress.org/Category_Templates. Is it causing you a specific problem?

2. My first thought is that this is a crawlability issue, either crawl depth, or maybe some errant no-follow, but without looking at your site it's difficult to do more than theorise. If you only have back/next links, getting to page 10 is going to be quite a few links to follow...

I would, however, consider your site structure if the only way to get to some of your products is on page 10+ of a category page... It certainly doesn't say to Google that you consider those pages to be important.

I disagree, but I know there are lots of people on both sides of the fence on this one!

"The globe is a known spam network", so one would assume Google is aware and just ignores it.

Google say (highlighting is me):
"Google works very hard to make sure that actions on third-party sites do not negatively affect a website. In some circumstances, incoming links can affect Google’s opinion of a page or site. For example, you or a search engine optimizer (SEO) you’ve hired may have built bad links to your site via paid links or other link schemes that violate our quality guidelines." - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en

And John Mueller said (highlighting is me):
"Random links collected over the years aren't necessarily harmful, we've seen them for a long time too and can ignore all of those weird pieces of web-graffiti from long ago. Disavow links that were really paid for (or otherwise actively unnaturally placed), don't fret the cruft." - https://twitter.com/JohnMu/status/1088929651593039872

If you didn't go out and generate those links, I wouldn't worry about them.

Disavowing a known spam link site does not help Google clear up

Hi,

For your more generic keywords, perhaps general industry or overall business, I would keep those throughout the site. For more focussed keywords, maybe individual products, services, content pieces; I would keep those to individual pages.

A very brief example, if you were a car servicing centre, I would be using terms like "car maintenance" and "car repair" across the site, but focussing specific pages on "Tyres", "Brakes", "MoTs", "Car Air Conditioning", etc.

Do you mean pages you initiate the search from, or the search results page? (I know these can be the same thing in some cases)

I would allow a page that you search from to be indexed, depending upon what it is used to search. Someone who has put a query into Google might find your search page useful in resolving their query.

I wouldn't allow search results pages to be indexed, for obvious reasons, even for specific searches links from other locations. You'd be better off creating category index pages or similar.

Hi,

It depends what you want to report. One of the most common violations (in my opinion) is link buying, and you can report that by following the links here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93713?hl=en

Many other types of violation are automatically picked up (and I suspect generally link buying is picked up eventually). What specifically do you need/want to report?

Alex

Firstly, I would definitely take the opportunity to switch to SSL. A migration to SSL shouldn't be something to worry about if you set up your redirects properly, but given that most of your pages aren't indexed at all, it is even less risky.

You will eventually get the traffic back, as far as how long, it's very difficult to say.

I would concentrate on crawlability, and make sure your structure makes sense, and that you aren't linking any 404's or worse. Given the size of your site, that wouldn't be a bad thing anyway.

From your description of your pages, I'm not sure there is any "importance hierarchy", so my suggestion may not help, but you could make use of Google's API to submit pages for crawling. Unfortunately, you can only submit in batches of 100 and you are limited to 200 a day. You could, of course, prioritise or cherry pick some important pages and "hub" pages, if such things exist within your site, and then start working through those.

Following the recent Google blunder where they deindexes huge swathes of the web and, in the short term, the only way to get them back in the index was to resubmit them, someone has provided a tool to interact with the API, which you can find here: https://github.com/steve-journey-further/google-indexing-api-bulk

I'm not sure I entirely understand what you're trying to achieve. Could you post a few examples of what you would like to redirect (and to what) and what you wouldn't want to redirect? Also, which web server are you using (nginx, Apache, IIS...)

I might not have understood your question, so apologies in advance if that's the case.

Your redirects won't be temporary, they'll be permanent (301). As far as the search engines (and anyone else) are concerned, the location has moved permanently.

You can't really set a redirect (temporary or permanent) as nofollow. The redirect is a response code from the server, it's not a link. To be fair, you wouldn't want to set it to nofollow even if you could, you want the search engines to follow the redirection to the new place and index that.

Hi,

1. You can exclude the Moz crawler (Rogerbot) from various pages: https://mza.bundledseo.com/help/moz-procedures/crawlers/rogerbot 
You need to use your robots.txt file, rather than trying to do it on page

2. Once you've done the above, you can request a recrawl and they should all disappear

Hi Davit,

This is a widely reported problem. Fortunately it is now being reported as fixed. https://searchengineland.com/google-de-indexing-issue-now-fixed-result-of-technical-issues-315058

Hope your site soon reappears!

Following the advice here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/80553?hl=en I can confirm that they are indeed Googlebot.

If you use Fetch as Google in Search Console, are you seeing errors?

Cloudflare has an article here on the subject:

https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200169806-I-m-getting-Google-Crawler-Errors-What-should-I-do-

I have never seen any impact on PPC when migrating a site to a new server relating to the IP/DNS changes.

If the migration didn't go as planned and the new server returned 404, 500 or similar, however, you would find Google may stop serving ads if it noticed. You would receive a notification in Google Ads if that was the case tho.

Why do you believe that your ads were being suppressed?

What would a user who wasn't logged in see if they visited it?

Depending upon your company, I would suggest exposing the knowledgebase, that could possibly rank for people looking to solve problems that your products would help with. Same with the forum. If you chose to do that, you might be better off simply moving that content to somewhere else in your site structure.

For everything else, Google wouldn't typically be able to login, and what would you actually show it? It's not a customer, so it would have any tickets or products to list serial numbers of. You could detect that it's GoogleBot and show something else, but that's very bad practice!