Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Now that our entire site is HTTPS, there does not seem to be any negative impact to our URL's by leaving off the HTTP protocol. If there was any traffic lost, it didn't seem significant as our reports did not indicate a decline. One year later, traffic through SEO is higher than before we implemented.

I personally agree with Everett, don't leave things to chance. I did require that the homepage did have HTTPS for the canonical though.  I felt massive panic attacks while we were going through the transition. However, if you are unable to convince your developers the importance of using an absolute path for canonical this did not seem to have a negative impact on our site.

I am glad that we didn't have any noticeable impact, but I am also glad that I didn't turn it into a bigger issue within our leadership team. Since we didn't see anything negative, it could've reduced my credibility within the business which would've had made it difficult for larger SEO problems.

BTW, we are still using relative canonical tags today. (except the homepage, that still has HTTPS)

My sitemap file has them but only because Screaming Frog and WordPress include that information when they generate the sitemap.

Reading the Google forum, there is a reply from John Mueller from 2014 that he specifically says change frequency and priority do not affect ranking of URL's once they are indexed

https://productforums.google.com/d/msg/webmasters/w9o8bTgqb9c/7hS7hog3ZIYJ

He also states that last mod date is good for Google to know.

We all know that you can take things said by Google with a grain of salt, but this is also an instance where it is specifically stated so I would tend to believe it to be true.

Those are optional lines in the Sitemap and are handled differently per SE.

Some great resources on best practice:

http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html

Reviewing Google's documentation they don't include them, which to me confirms what you've probably seen and that is they don't provide any value. Google's example does use image:captionthough which probably is treated similarly to alt text. </image:caption>

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/183668?hl=en#sitemapformat

Just like Chase said, noindex your dev site to let the search engines know that it should not show in search. I do this on my dev sites everytime.

Subdomain is better than separate domain if you cannot have a subdirectory.

https://mza.bundledseo.com/blog/subdomains-vs-subfolders-rel-canonical-vs-301-how-to-structure-links-optimally-for-seo-whiteboard-friday

As for the duplicate content, regardless of a separate domain, subdomain, or subdirectory, I would canonical any of the duplicate pages to the authoritative content. If it's the main site, then I would canonical the other domain to it. Not sure of a reason why you would prefer the other domain to be the authoritative source, but if that is the case, then you would canonical the main site to the other domain.

https://mza.bundledseo.com/blog/subdomains-vs-subfolders-rel-canonical-vs-301-how-to-structure-links-optimally-for-seo-whiteboard-friday

Agree with both Tim and Tymen. Another point I would like to call out is making sure the image has a relevant name as well. bird1.jpg isn't as valuable as blue-macaw-bird.jpg

I've used URL profiler to for a content audit on our own site. It helped us to identify the areas of our site that needed to get cleaned up, and more importantly, which pages had thin content. It was also helpful when trying to prioritize which sections to do first.

Craig's article highlights another useful way to utilize the tool, looking forward to trying it out.

This is a rather difficult question to provide a clear answer for. There is not one thing that will influence DA, rather several things done correctly over time may or may not influence your DA.

For more information, I strongly recommend reading this from Moz - https://mza.bundledseo.com/learn/seo/domain-authority

https://mza.bundledseo.com/learn/seo/domain-authority

Can one of the course pages be your main landing page for the topic? You could canonical the other URL's to this main page to inform Google that while all the pages have similar content, page A is the one that should be represented in the SERP's. This could help ensure that the other similar pages do not cannibalize each other. On page A, you can work to inform your visitors that you have the other courses.

I know, and that's what sucks. It appears to work, but goes against what seems to be best practice and since I cannot find other instances to state one or the other it's hard not to follow their logic.

I just hope it doesn't screw up everything in the end. Thanks for the discussion.

ALT tags are for accessibility, not SEO. Screen readers will look at those tags and read to those that have trouble with seeing the page what the image is.

As long as the ALT tags are accurate representations of what the image is, you should be okay. If you are attempting to stuff keywords into ALT tags and they do not accurately describe what the image is, then you may not receive any benefit and could potentially get some kind of penalty.

If you are talking about the links you created in your profile, those are all "nofollow" so there won't be any value. To get one of them to be a "follow" link you have to earn a minimum of 200 MozPoints.

http://moz.com/community/mozpoints

If you want to control your image in Social Media you need to include these tags, you don't need all of them if you are only interested in one platform

Once you have them on the page and filled out, you will need to tell Facebook or Twitter to update the markup with this tool

https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/

https://cards-dev.twitter.com/validator

| |
|   | itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Article"> |
|   | itemprop="name" content="Page Title"> |
|   | itemprop="description" content="Page Description"> |
|   | itemprop="image" content="Image URL"> |
|   |   |
|   | |
|   | name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image"> |
|   | name="twitter:site" content="@yourtwitterhandle"> |
|   | name="twitter:title" content=""> |
|   | name="twitter:description" content=""> |
|   | name="twitter:creator" content="@"> |
|   | |
|   | name="twitter:image:src" content=""> |
|   |   |
|   | |
|   | property="og:title" content="" /> |
|   | property="og:type" content="" /> |
|   | property="og:url" content="" /> |
|   | property="og:image" content="" /> |
|   | property="og:description" content="" /> |
|   | property="og:site_name" content="" /> |
|   |   |

|   |

I've used URL profiler to for a content audit on our own site. It helped us to identify the areas of our site that needed to get cleaned up, and more importantly, which pages had thin content. It was also helpful when trying to prioritize which sections to do first.

Craig's article highlights another useful way to utilize the tool, looking forward to trying it out.

A couple of things come to mind:

Why don't you want the product pages to be in the index?

Why is there concern of a penalty?

As to your question:

• Are you signed into Google when you are searching? Google will show you these types of results in the SERP's, but they are not necessarily shown to customers. If you have Google desktop installed it will also show you documents on your machine in SERPs if they find them relevant to what you are looking for.

* Do the URL's have parameters? If so you can set those in GWT and inform Google what they should do when they encounter them as they crawl the site.

*Canonical the pages you don't want in the index if possible to the static pages.

The underlying thing is that they are the few sites that are doing it, so in the absence of a better option, Google shows these sites instead. Think of ehow.com or ask.com, they don't provide a great experience to the user, but you will notice on those types of searches, there are not any better options out there.

When I say dynamic, I don't mean it as it is created on the fly. The URL has parameters that the server sees and knows to fetch the corresponding city from the server. I am not 100% positive, but from past experience I am willing to bet there is some kind of auto-fill tag like %CITY% that the server will plug in the city from the URL parameter. The rest of the copy never changes

Example: http://www.travelsite.com/flights-from-boston-to-new-york-bos-to-lga

Copy on page: blah blah blah Boston to New York blah blah blah. If you were to change either of the cities the copy would remain the same but the city would update.

Crawlers will crawl the page after it has loaded, so as long as the "dynamic" content is loaded prior to that the crawler doesn't know any different.

If my memory serves pages only need to be 5-10% different in copy to not be counted as duplicate content. So if your title, H1 and a few words in the sentence and some links are different that just about does it.

Now this doesn't make it a great user experience and as StreamMarket stated below, eventually Google will take notice of this and will move them down in ranking. Of course, this also means that other sites (Airlines) need to do a better job at creating pages like this but are user focused and not search engine focused.

Amen Amelia. I said the same, but not nearly as thorough as you did.

Have you done a Fetch as Google for the page? If I notice a page not getting picked up I do a fetch and render. This will tell you if there is something blocking Google from viewing the page.

Hi Rich,

If you have conversions set up you can see them in Real-Time or at least what GA considers it to be

In you GA dashboard click Real-Time > in that drop down towards the bottom there is Conversions. It will show Active Users that hit any of the goals that you have configured.

You can also see traffic sources, location of the visitor, any events set up and what pages they are viewing all in real time.

md54lew

Being in the travel industry these are the same observations that I've noticed.

My theory behind a few of them:

• EMD - they use "cheap" and "air" or "travel" in the domain. I know that this was to be less effective, but like you stated they still rank well.
• Content is scraped - I've come across some of these sites that have actually taken our content and then outrank us.
• Actual brands haven't done a good enough job trying to rank for similar terms. Think about Ask.com or e-how.com, they rank not because they do a great job, but because no one else has anything better so Google is forced to rank them.

For your second question, I know one online travel agency put in a lot of money and time to create dynamic style pages when searching for flights between city 1 and city 2. You can alter the URL by changing the airport code and city name and the copy within that page remains the same with the exception of the city names.  There are companies as well that will build out the actual pages with any desired URL structure you would want.