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,

Well, depending on the level of training/knowledge, you could have them find the answer to various questions in a G/A account. So, things like:

• of organic visitors to a given page

• of conversions by a channel

• Navigation summary to a given page or goal.

You could ask less absolute questions, such as "what's wrong with the user signals on this page by x channel?"

You could have them create a working goal or segment or recurring report.

You could have them look over a G/A account and find three insights (opportunities, problems, etc) and be prepared to discuss them.

The possibilities are endless. Is that what you're getting at? Please let me know.

Best... Mike

HI David,

Wow, that is better than I would have imagined. If I may ask, what was the PA/DA of these pages and the appr avg moz difficulty of the kws?

This site is like 45 DA 20 PA and usually does okay with kws under 40 difficulty.

Best... Mike

Hi Charles,

I would suggest fetching it in Google Search Console and selecting the option to render the page. You'll then see what Google sees.

I looked at it in Google Page Speed Tool and the results are not encouraging:: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Famericasinstantsigns.com%2F&tab=desktop  0 out of 100

Otherwise, there could still be another kind of a bank shot where this issue affects search. That is that if enough people come and it doesn't load for them you will generating some bad user signals, such as visitors bouncing back to the SERPs. That would then hurt search.

I'd consider all of the above.

Best of luck! Mike

Hi David,

Thanks for the insight.Are you saying that two to three weeks later the new site was producing in organic search and if so to what extent compared to the pages on the original site?

Thanks, again! Best... Mike

Okay, working with a large site that, for business reasons beyond organic search, wants to split an existing site in two. So, the old domain name stays and a new one is born with some of the content from the old site, along with some new content of its own.

The general idea, for more than just search reasons, is that it makes both the old site and new sites more purely about their respective subject matter.  The existing content on the old site that is becoming part of the new site will be 301'd to the new site's domain. So, the old site will have a lot of 301s and links to the new site. No links coming back from the new site to the old site anticipated at this time.

Would like any and all insights into any potential pitfalls and best practices for this to come off as well as it can under the circumstances.

For instance, should all those links from the old site to the new site be nofollowed, kind of like a non-editorial link to an affiliate or advertiser? Is there weirdness for Google in 301ing to a new domain from some, but not all, content of the old site. Would you individually submit requests to remove from index for the hundreds and hundreds of old site pages moving to the new site or just figure that the 301 will eventually take care of that? Is there substantial organic search risk of any kind to the old site, beyond the obvious of just not having those pages to produce any more? Anything else? Any ideas about how long the new site can expect to wander the wilderness of no organic search traffic? The old site has a 45 domain authority.

Thanks!