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Getting in the Answer Box has become more of a focus for me and my company in recent months, and one I'm really pushing for in 2017. I've done some work with our content team to help them understand what sorts of queries might have a greater chance to nab a #0 spot, as well as exploring what formats seem to work best in our niche. I haven't yet started down the road of experimenting with markup or other technical tactics, but would like to at some point.

We've managed to nearly double the queries we are ranking for in the last few months, from 60ish in August to just over 100 now. The search volume isn't particularly high for these terms, but it's exciting to be able to see if we can replicate these results elsewhere, with more impact.

Great topic, and timely for me and my efforts in the upcoming year!

R.

Hi all,

My company is in the fashion/jewelry industry and we regularly create short content describing the latest trends in jewelry. We do not include any sort of date reference on the content, which means that a searcher who gets to our site has no way of knowing if this is a trend from 2008 or 2016.

Does anyone have any experience with the best way to handle this? I want to remain relevant for our customers. It seems like a big disservice to our customers to show them a "trend" which trended 5 years ago. Is there a benefit to keeping this content around or would it be better to cycle it off the site after 6 months or so?

Thanks for any advice or experience you have!

R.

I did run a search on our old pages in the SERPs and found a large number of them are still showing. I also found most of our new pages, some where both the old and new were represented. I have also seen a lot of our positions go from page one to not in the top 100, these are all from pages which were 301ed to a nearly exact replica in the new version. I had originally thought Google had hit them, but not updated their listing to the new version. I am now thinking that they are just being ignored, and have not had their 301 picked up.

Case:

We are currently in the middle of a site migration from .asp to .net and Endeca PageBuilder, and from a homebrewed search provider to Endeca Search. We have migrated most of our primary landing pages and our entire e-commerce site to the new platforms. During the transition approximately 100 of our primary landing pages were inadvertently 302ed to the new version. Once this was caught they were immediately changed to 301s and submitted to the Google’s index through webmaster tools. We initially saw increases in visits to the new pages, but currently (approximately 3 weeks after the change from 301 to 302) are experiencing a significant decline in visits.

Issue:

My assumption is many of the internal links (from pages which are now 301ed as well) to these primary landing pages are still pointing to the old version of the primary landing page in Google’s cache, and  thus have not passed the importance and internal juice to the new versions. There are no navigational links or entry points to the old supporting pages left, and I believe this is what is driving the decline.

Proposed resolution:

I intend to create a series of HTML sitemaps of the old version (.asp) of all pages which have recently been 301ed. I will then submit these pages to Google’s index (not as sitemaps, just normal pages) with the selection to index all linked pages. My intention is to force Google to pick up all of the 301s, thus enforcing the authority channels we have set up.

Question 1:

Is the assumption that the decline could be because of missed authority signals reasonable?

Question 2:

Could the proposed solution be harmful?

Question 3:

Will the proposed solution be adequate to resolve the issue?

Any help would be sincerely appreciated.

Thank you in advance,

David

I had a similar question a few days ago and was directed to this resource which I found very helpful : http://www.ayima.com/seo-knowledge/conquering-pagination-guide.html. In regards to your concern about the tag aggregation page, it depends on which CMS (if any) you are using and how it is implemented. If you purchase the Advanced SEO Training videos Moz offers they cover this in the fist disk. In summary it is good to have tag aggregation pages to be indexed since the combination of the content in context of the targeted tag can provide value that the content does not provide by itself. To increase the value of this some CMS's allow for providing unique descriptions to be shown in aggregation so that it does not cannibalize the value of the content. I hope this helps.

This was exactly what I was looking for. Thank you very much you have really helped me out.

You are absolutely right about nofollow overuse being a trust factor. I had not thought about that aspect of this issue, and thank you for bringing it up. In regards to using canonical and rel prev / next, I am not sure what an implementation of this would look like. I added in rel canonical pointing to the www version of the page URL without any unnecessary parameters, and I am familiar with the idea of having a "Show All" page so as to avoid pagination (we added in our pagination parameters into Google Webmaster Tools instead). Would you recommend using canonical to roll up results pages to a category and parent refinement level, and if so how many refinements would you recommend before drawing the line?

Thank you again,

David

I am working with a company which uses Endeca to power the guided navigation for our e-commerce site. I am concerned that the duplicate content generated by having the same products served under numerous refinement levels is damaging the sites ability to rank well, and was hoping the Moz community could help me understand how much of an impact this type of duplicate content could be having. I also would love to know if there are any best practices for how to manage this type of navigation. Should I nofollow all of the URLs which have more than 1 refinement used on a category, or should I allow the search engines to go deeper than that to preserve the long tail? Any help would be appreciated. Thank you.

Hi all,

My company is in the fashion/jewelry industry and we regularly create short content describing the latest trends in jewelry. We do not include any sort of date reference on the content, which means that a searcher who gets to our site has no way of knowing if this is a trend from 2008 or 2016.

Does anyone have any experience with the best way to handle this? I want to remain relevant for our customers. It seems like a big disservice to our customers to show them a "trend" which trended 5 years ago. Is there a benefit to keeping this content around or would it be better to cycle it off the site after 6 months or so?

Thanks for any advice or experience you have!

R.

I had a similar question a few days ago and was directed to this resource which I found very helpful : http://www.ayima.com/seo-knowledge/conquering-pagination-guide.html. In regards to your concern about the tag aggregation page, it depends on which CMS (if any) you are using and how it is implemented. If you purchase the Advanced SEO Training videos Moz offers they cover this in the fist disk. In summary it is good to have tag aggregation pages to be indexed since the combination of the content in context of the targeted tag can provide value that the content does not provide by itself. To increase the value of this some CMS's allow for providing unique descriptions to be shown in aggregation so that it does not cannibalize the value of the content. I hope this helps.

Getting in the Answer Box has become more of a focus for me and my company in recent months, and one I'm really pushing for in 2017. I've done some work with our content team to help them understand what sorts of queries might have a greater chance to nab a #0 spot, as well as exploring what formats seem to work best in our niche. I haven't yet started down the road of experimenting with markup or other technical tactics, but would like to at some point.

We've managed to nearly double the queries we are ranking for in the last few months, from 60ish in August to just over 100 now. The search volume isn't particularly high for these terms, but it's exciting to be able to see if we can replicate these results elsewhere, with more impact.

Great topic, and timely for me and my efforts in the upcoming year!

R.