Hi,

Any thoughts, data or insights as which is better in a top navigation... click to reveal the nav links or rollover to reveal the nav links? Regular content in an accordion (click to reveal) is evidently not best practice. Does that apply to navigation as well?

Thanks! Best... Mike

Hi Chris & Nigel,

Thank you for the considered responses. Good points about canonicalizing. A part I find frustrating is that the shared title tag across dozens or hundreds of pages will be across many different products/groups of products. So, the title tag is not a solid way to group canonicals.

Since the url patterns vary, I don't see how I could group these by which dozens or hundreds canonicalize to which one page, let alone make the change in Shopify other than one page at a time. My understanding is that this title tag manipulation is the only handle Shopify gives for making these bulk changes.

Gah!

So, here are my follow up questions:

• How big of a negative is this in it's as-is state and how much better will noindexing most of the 90% make it Google Organic-wise? I ask because even the BS title tag to noindex project is a huge time suck.

• If more is ever revealed about how to more efficiently group and canonicalize in Shopify, would adding the canonical after noindexing capture that lost authority later or would the previous noindex have irretrievably lost that?

• Given all that, would you continue as I am?

Thanks! Best... Mike

Hi,

I'm working with a Shopify site that has about 10x more URLs in Google's index than it really ought to. This equals thousands of urls bloating the index. Shopify makes it super easy to make endless new collections of products, where none of the new collections has any new content... just a new mix of products. Over time, this makes for a ton of duplicate content.

My response, aside from making other new/unique content, is to select some choice collections with KW/topic opportunities in organic and add unique content to those pages. At the same time, noindexing the other 90% of excess collections pages.

The thing is there's evidently no method that I could find of just uploading a list of urls to Shopify to tag noindex. And, it's too time consuming to do this one url at a time, so I wrote a little script to add a noindex tag (not nofollow) to pages that share various identical title tags, since many of them do. This saves some time, but I have to be careful to not inadvertently noindex a page I want to keep.

Here are my questions:

• Is this what you would do? To me it seems a little crazy that I have to do this by title tag, although faster than one at a time.

• Would you follow it up with a deindex request (one url at a time) with Google or just let Google figure it out over time?

• Are there any potential negative side effects from noindexing 90% of what Google is already aware of?

• Any additional ideas?

Thanks! Best... Mike

That might be an YUGE number of urls. Do you think forwarding all those is really worth doing, since the the canonical is always the lower case version?

Hi,

Just started working with a site that has the occasional url with a capital, but then the url in the canonical as lower case. Neither, when entered in a browser, resolves to the other. It's a Shopify site. What do you think I should do?

Hi,

I have a U.S. client who is stuck on a name that he wants to get as a .io (British Indian Ocean) domain name for a new site.

Aside from the user confusion/weirdness, how much harder do you think this makes this sites organic in the U.S. in the future with a .io domain name?

FYI, the other part of the domain name he wants to use is short, meaningless and implies nothing in and of itself.

Thanks!

Hi Donna,

Thanks for all the help. I really appreciate it.

Best... Mike

Hi Donna,

Thanks for the speedy reply. Yes, the thing that makes me nervous about that recommendation from the article is how do I even begin to weigh the odds on it being a net gain and then convey it to management? I mean, it's one thing for me to think, "yeah, let's roll the dice" and another to convey the trade-offs to a very typical management in something like numbers.

Thank you for noticing my avatar portrait. I did it over a Summer in the south of France. It will probably be worth a fortune once I am gone and regarded as a giant of the early 21st century world of art.

I wrote Moz about the "Staff" thing and it looks like they deleted the title... all titles really.

Best... Mike

Hi Donna,

Thanks for the insight and resource. What do you think of while waiting for the next year mobile responsive site, to 301 the two existing mobile sites to the desktop site? How would one begin to estimate the effect of that? Thanks, again.

Best... Mike

Hi,

I have a call with a potential client tomorrow where all I know is that they are wigged-out about canonicalization, indexing and architecture for their three sites:

m.ExampleSite.com

mobile.ExampleSite.com

ExampleSite.com

The sites are pretty large... 350k for the mobiles and 5 million for the main site. They're a retailer with endless products. They're main site is not mobile-responsive, which is evidently why they have the m and mobile sites. Why two, I don't know.

This is how they currently hand this:

What would you suggest they do about this? The most comprehensive fix would be making the main site mobile responsive and 301 the old mobile sub domains to the main site. That's probably too much work for them. So, what more would you suggest and why?

Your thoughts? Best... Mike

P.S.,

Beneath my hand-drawn portrait avatar above it says "Staff" at this moment, which I am not. Some kind of bug I guess.

Hi Becky,

Beyond the hypothetical limit, would be the consideration of dividing the link authority of the page by a really large number of links and therefor decreasing the relative value of each of those links to the pages they link to.

Depending on the page holding all these links, user experience, purpose of linked-to pages, etcetera, this may or may not be a consideration, but worth thinking about.

Good luck!

• Mike

Hi,

I have a U.S. client who is stuck on a name that he wants to get as a .io (British Indian Ocean) domain name for a new site.

Aside from the user confusion/weirdness, how much harder do you think this makes this sites organic in the U.S. in the future with a .io domain name?

FYI, the other part of the domain name he wants to use is short, meaningless and implies nothing in and of itself.

Thanks!

It sounds like real progress after less than a year - congrats!

Alexa Rank is an approximation of site traffic rank based mostly on visits to your site by those with the Alexa toolbar. I've compared sites with very similar traffic and found very different rankings. Just out of curiosity, why do you care what your Alexa Rank is? As the site owner, you know what the actual traffic is vs their very approx ranking.

Google PageRank is another infrequently updated calculation that doesn't mean much, especially with so many other benchmarks available.

Best of luck! .... Mike

Hi,

Alexa has, for purposes of fictional number illustration, let's say one out of 10,000 web users using their toolbar. They then take that data and multiply it by 10,000 and say that represents web traffic in total. With that, they rank sites by estimated total.

They may have some other secret sauce, but that is basically it. So, if you have the tool bar and visit your site as much as you probably do while doing all that work, then it affects your Alexa rank.

It's kind of like why folks filter out your own office's web traffic from one's own Google Analytics data in order to get a clearer picture of pure traffic.

I hope that helps. Best... Mike

Do pages of vehicles that are in inventory for a short time actually deliver monetizable traffic?

If the answer is no, because they are up for such a short amount of time, you would have to weigh the value of having them indexable in the first place vs creating an ever-growing list of missing pages.

Having a lot of 404s or 422s is a bit of a negative. Is there really no way to add the step of 301ing to their removal?

Making the pages non-indexable via noindex once they are indexed will not remove them. You either have to 301 and/or request removal from the G's index. Is there a programmatic way to turn their removal into a 301 to the top inventory category page?

Good luck!

Thanks, guys.

I've adjusted alt images tags on pages that really matter to me for organic. The tens of thousands of other images/pages are just going to have to chillax.

Hi Donna,

Thanks for the speedy reply. Yes, the thing that makes me nervous about that recommendation from the article is how do I even begin to weigh the odds on it being a net gain and then convey it to management? I mean, it's one thing for me to think, "yeah, let's roll the dice" and another to convey the trade-offs to a very typical management in something like numbers.

Thank you for noticing my avatar portrait. I did it over a Summer in the south of France. It will probably be worth a fortune once I am gone and regarded as a giant of the early 21st century world of art.

I wrote Moz about the "Staff" thing and it looks like they deleted the title... all titles really.

Best... Mike

Hi Chris & Nigel,

Thank you for the considered responses. Good points about canonicalizing. A part I find frustrating is that the shared title tag across dozens or hundreds of pages will be across many different products/groups of products. So, the title tag is not a solid way to group canonicals.

Since the url patterns vary, I don't see how I could group these by which dozens or hundreds canonicalize to which one page, let alone make the change in Shopify other than one page at a time. My understanding is that this title tag manipulation is the only handle Shopify gives for making these bulk changes.

Gah!

So, here are my follow up questions:

• How big of a negative is this in it's as-is state and how much better will noindexing most of the 90% make it Google Organic-wise? I ask because even the BS title tag to noindex project is a huge time suck.

• If more is ever revealed about how to more efficiently group and canonicalize in Shopify, would adding the canonical after noindexing capture that lost authority later or would the previous noindex have irretrievably lost that?

• Given all that, would you continue as I am?

Thanks! Best... Mike