The answer Google would like you to believe is that it's possible for the word ordering to imply different intents. In reality though, I think it's mainly an artefact of them not fully understanding meaning, or not being able to classify all pages and keywords perfectly.

My colleague Sam Nemzer wrote a post with research on this topic that you might find interesting.

Hi  Jeroen,

Many websites have category or listings pages that contain substantially different lists of links each time Google crawls them. This can be because they are rotating the top listings (like you describe) or simply because the velocity of content creation (and in some cases archiving / removal) is high enough that it appears to change dramatically (think e.g. the reddit "new" page).

As such, I don't think you need to do anything particularly special here - it should "just work" for the page in question - depending on the details, you might want to make sure that there is enough other content on the page that it is substantial enough in its own right.

The other thing I'd consider is whether you want to have more static crawl-paths available to make sure that googlebot always has a way of discovering and crawling all listings - whether you do this via categories, tags, or via some other means.

Unless I've misunderstood, I'm not sure that aria-hidden is going to be able to deliver what you are looking to do - I don't think you can use it to hide the alt attribute of the image without hiding the image as well.

If you mean adding non-alt-attribute text to the page so that it is visible to sighted users, I would expect that it would make sense to keep that accessible to screen readers as well - it should be useful to all kinds of site visitor, I would have thought.

In general, I would tend to suggest that alt attributes should primarily be used for their intended accessibility purpose, and that this should tend to include more valuable content on the page which the search engines may find useful. I found this guide to be one of the best I have seen on the subject.

As a sidenote, I tend to think alt attributes are over-rated for SEO purposes anyway. In our testing, we have not yet detected a statistically significant uplift from adding alt attributes to images that did not previously have them.

Good luck!

I don't know of an absolute / definitive answer. If it were my site, I think I would be happy to take the chance with Event markup since there is no perfect match, as you say.

Evidence in each direction:

1. Yes - this is OK - Google's schema page talks about "If the event happens across several streets, define the starting location and mention the full details in description.
2. No - this is not OK - the same page says "Don’t promote non-event products or services such as "Trip package: San Diego/LA, 7 nights" as events".

The reason I wouldn't be too concerned about the "no" side is that I think it is reasonable to read that as being about things like flights where the point is getting to the destination rather than things like cruises which are arguably events in their own right.

Good luck!

I think you know this, but there is no way of guaranteeing getting back to your prior traffic levels in short order (or +25%), nor keeping it steady. Algorithm updates can fundamentally change the winners and losers in a given segment, and there may be no quick win to return to old results as the underlying variables have changed.

Some ideas and thoughts though:

1. I don't know what kind of site you are running, but with ecommerce / lead gen sites, we have sometimes seen that this kind of core update can lead to a traffic drop without a drop in true performance (sales / leads) because the update was actually aligned with user expectations and dropped in areas where you weren't performing anyway (see e.g. slide 116 onwards in my colleague's presentation here). If you happened to find that you were in this situation, you may find that you can make the case to the business that the situation isn't as dire as it seemed at first
2. For practical ideas, I'd advise checking out Marie Hayne's work - see for example her presentation at our recent SearchLove conference in Boston on practical tips for improving EAT (Expertise Authoritativeness Trustworthiness)

Good luck!

Firstly (and I think you understand this, but for the benefit of others who find this page later): any user landing on the actual page will see its full content - robots.txt has no effect on their experience.

What I think you're asking about here is what happens if Google has previously indexed a page properly with crawling it and discovering content and then you block it in robots.txt, what will it look like in the SERPs?

My expectation is that:

1. It will appear in the SERPs as it used to - with meta information / title etc - at least until Google would have recrawled it anyway, and possibly for a bit longer and some failure of Google to recrawl it after the robots.txt is updated
2. Eventually, it will either drop out of the index or it may remain but with the "no information" message that shows up when a page is blocked in robots.txt from the outset yet it is indexed anyway

I think you could legitimately take either approach to be honest. There isn't a perfect solution that avoids all possible problems so I guess it's a combination of picking which risk you are more worried about (pages getting indexed when you don't want them to, or crawl budget -- probably depends on the size of your site) and possibly considering difficulty of implementation etc.

In light of the fact that we heard about noindex,follow becoming equivalent to noindex,nofollow eventually, that does dampen the benefits of that approach, but doesn't entirely negate it.

I'm not totally sold on the phrasing in the yoast article - I wouldn't call it google "ignoring" robots.txt - it just serves a different purpose. Google is respecting the "do not crawl" directive, but that has never guaranteed that they wouldn't index a page if it got external links.

I personally might lean towards the robots.txt solution on larger sites if crawl budget were the primary concern - just because it wouldn't be the end of the world if (some of) these pages got indexed if they had external links. The only reason we were trying to keep them out was for google's benefit, so if they want to index despite the robots block, it wouldn't keep me awake at night.

Whatever route you go down, good luck!

This is a good answer. I'd add two small additional notes:

1. Google is voracious in URL discovery even without any links to a page or any of the other mechanisms described here, we have seen instances of URLs being discovered from other sources (think: chrome usage data, crawling of common path patterns etc)
2. The description at the end of the answer about robots.txt : I wouldn't describe it as Google "ignoring" the no crawl directives - they will still obey that, and won't crawl the page - it's just that they can index pages that they haven't crawled. Note that this is why you shouldn't combine robots.txt block and noindex tags - Google won't be able to crawl to discover the tags and  so may still index the page.

Hi Sam. A correctly setup firewall or CDN should not have implications for SEO. If you can share the URL / domain then I can take a look at the specifics, but in principle, you should be fine.

Things to watch out for:

1. Site speed impacts - in theory a CDN should generally be good for site speed, but if you didn't select one primarily for this reason, it's something to check
2. HTTPS - ensure that you keep this consistent through the change
3. Avoid changing URLs in the process (if you have to, make sure you have redirects set up and treat it like a migration with associated risks)

Hi Kathleen,

I would think about this in a few phases (you may not do all of them):

1. "Pure" rebrand - affecting the design of pages on the site, but not which pages exist or their basic HTML structure - this is the safest from an SEO perspective, though you run the risk of damaging conversion rate etc and so it is worth testing as much as you can and rolling out cautiously if it is a large site (see my whiteboard Friday on this for example)
2. Website redesign / rebuild - affecting potentially anything on the site, but staying on the same domain - if as you indicate, you are going to roll the website into the acquirer's site, then I would do my best to avoid this stage - it's the riskiest without significant upside. If you can get away with #1 and #3 then I would do that. If you have to go through this stage, treat it as the serious SEO project that it is
3. Migration into acquirer's site - you described it as "absorb" the client's site - I would expect in most acquisitions that you would end up with some combination of existing pages on the acquirer's site that should be the target of redirects of your client's pages and the need for some new pages (based presumably on existing pages on the client's site). Scoping out this mapping is the most significant part of this step - everything else is a migration project to be handled with the normal care and attention to detail

One thing to mention: we have seen people make assumptions that if you combine websites A and B, that the combined website will have the traffic of A+B. This is rarely the case for reasons of overlap / cannibalisation even if the migration and redirects function perfectly. So you are right to be cautious. The more overlap there is between the acquirer's site and your client's, the lower I would forecast the combined traffic. The more distinct they are (and hence the more your client's site could eventually migrate into a subfolder of the acquirer's site for example) the closer you might get to A+B.

I hope that all helps.

Unfortunately it's going to be difficult to dig deeper into this without knowing the site - are you able to share the details?

I'm with Martijn that there should be no connection between these features. The only thing I have come up with that could plausibly cause anything like what you are seeing is something related to JavaScript execution (and this would not be a feature working as it's intended to work). We know that there is a delay between initial indexing and JavaScript indexing. It seems plausible to me that if there were a serious enough issue with the JS execution / indexing that either that step failed or that it made the site look spammy enough to get penalised that we could conceivably see the behaviour you describe - where it ranks until Google executes the JS.

I guess my first step to investigating this would be to look at the JS requirements on your site and consider the differences between with and without JS rendering (and if there is any issue with the chrome version that we know executes the JS render at Google's side).

Interested to hear if you discover anything more.

Hi there. Sorry for the slow follow-up on this - there was an issue that meant I didn't get the email alert when it was assigned to me.

There is increasing evidence that culling old / poor performing content from your site can have a positive effect, though I wouldn't be particularly confident that this would transfer across sub-domains to benefit the main site.

In general, I suspect that most effort expended here will be better-placed elsewhere, and so I would angle towards the least effort option.

I think that the "rightest" long-term answer though would be to move the best content to the main domain (with accompanying 301 redirects) and remove the remainder with 410 status codes. This should enable you to focus on the most valuable content and get the most benefit from the stuff that is valuable, while avoiding having to continue expending effort on the stuff that is no longer useful. The harder this is, though, the less I'd be inclined to do it - and would be more likely to consider just deindexing the lowest quality stuff and getting whatever benefit remains from the better content for as long as it is a net positive, with an eye to eventually removing it all.

Hope that helps - I don't think it's a super clear-cut situation unfortunately.

This doesn't ring true to me because:

1. There are all kinds of ways you can find links to your site (referring traffic in GA, link analysis sources like moz's own tools, ahrefs, majestic etc, and tools like Google Alerts)
2. You've already got the link in these cases, so you would have no incentive to "bother" the webmasters
3. In general, my experience has been that most providers want to tell you about as many placements as they can!

Add to this some of the phrasing (e.g. "webmasters we have" -- emphasis mine) suggests that there may be payments taking place or other schemes afoot that place these well outside the Google guidelines.

Per the conversation in the other comments - I would recommend that you get at least a statement of work in place to govern what you are expecting for the money you are paying even if you are not committing to a long-term contract. This could include agreements on any of the above (what information they will provide you with, what you will do with that information etc). At the very least, you should want to understand the techniques in use in order to make your own informed decisions about the risks and rewards.

Hope that helps.

Hi there. There are a number of ways in which this is a bad idea - as others have pointed out. But in particular:

1. What you are doing may manipulate the "bounce rate" you see in analytics, but won't affect the % of users who return immediately to the search results after landing on your page - which we know is one of the ways Google evaluates the quality of their own search results
2. Going via an interstitial page is on its own not great UX, but having a delay on that page just makes it more likely that a user will give up and leave immediately - and also have a greater chance of remembering your site as being a poor UX and be less likely to return

At an overarching level, there's nothing wrong with having external links off a page. This is normal and expected on any site.

I would say you should put all your efforts that are currently going into manipulating this behaviour and these metrics into improving the user experience of your site to make it better for the people who do find it.

I hope that helps.

Yeah - there is various speculation about how signals or authority traverse folder structures (see for example this whiteboard Friday ) but I haven't seen anything suggesting it's permanent - all of this may be an argument for adding /famous-dogs/ at some point, but I wouldn't personally stress about it not being there at launch.