Thanks for sharing

Yes… that’s what I do in a pinch or if GSC is being stubborn.

very informative, thank you. Link removal through GSC says “only for pages/images that have already been modified, or removed from the web”. What would be the quickest way here – robot.txt >crawl >gsc?

Tnx in advance.
Katarina.

Given a choice, I’d prefer the latter. URL: singlesholidaysitaly.com/singles-holidays, and SEO title: Singles Holidays – Singles Holidays Italy sounds like old-school keyword stuffing, right?

Let’s say the client’s domain is singlesholidaysitaly.com. The problem is they are selling weekend holidays and long holidays (each named respectively – singles weekends and singles holidays).

Will they be penalized if my long holidays page has this URL: singlesholidaysitaly.com/singles-holidays, and SEO title is: Singles Holidays – Singles Holidays Italy?

And how in general should I approach site organization in this case – should I remove the keywords that are in the domain from each page that contains them?

E.g.

singlesholidaysitaly.com/singles-holidays-barcelona

or

singlesholidaysitaly.com/barcelona?

Nice to meet you BTW Im a fan.

For me #4 and #5 are super important.

Likely.

In this case, it did well… very well.

??

You definitely want links from Spanish content. As to what the golden ratio is… I have no idea.

We have a client that is running a Spanish language only site in the US. Do you see any issues with most of the links coming from sites that are in English? They don’t ever want an English version of the site because they are trying to position their brand as only serving the Hispanic community. Should I be looking for a certain ratio of Spanish language sites in their backlink profile? I’m thinking about keeping the pillow links in English so I don’t have to spend as much time tracking down Spanish link opportunities. Thoughts?

You’ll probably get away with it. But if the homepage somehow gets more relevance and authority on “dentist location” than you intend, they may compete.

Great content you provided here. I have a question about keyword cannibalism play a factor with inner pages as well? For example I have a dental client that doesn’t have dentist or his location in his domain, so I made him a xxxx.com/location-dentist page with other pages linking off of that. If I want to rank for the location and dentist am I hurting myself with this strategy?

Thanks!

I deindex tags, categories, authors, etc.

1) Never noticed it.
2) If they’re not indexed, they don’t exist. Try using the Video Sitemap trick.

Will do.

Please cover “Keyword Cannibalization” as soon as possible I think this help lot of webmaster over internet.

Great content as always. I have two questions.

1. In mobile search for some of the blog posts, the search result is with additionally added text (the name of the blog) at the end of the seo title. Have you seen that before and what may cause it?
2. Do the social accounts of the blog help for the ranking if they are not indexed even after months? If no how do you index them?

Thank you in advance. Have a great day.

“For indexing, we use our own proprietary tool…” What might such a tool be? I have considered the “onehourindexing” software, but not sure about the quality.

And funny thing, when I got your mail titled “What are the Most Common SEO Problems You’ll Encounter?” (which took me to this article ), I immediately though of the reporting issues and getting clients to understand the value of SEO. But maybe it’s just me, who have those problems 😉

For sure.

I keep the contact, about, privacy, etc indexed. No index all the other stuff you mentioned.

For no indexing with Yoast do you noindex all of the following pages : author, archive, categories, tags, images

Are there any pages you noindex or nofollow too such as contact page, privacy etc?

Thank you.

Not sure, man. Maybe historical indexing. Make Google recrawl.

What I used to do was blocking through robot file, but I removed it after I saw Google can’t see images this way.

How do you explain this problem occurs for some sites and not all? I mean I have another site with the exact same theme/setting and it just doesn’t happen.

The page still references the image, but Google doesn’t need to index the image itself.

No-index images at all?
Isn’t that risky?
I mean what about Google not finding any of the images in the page?
Or it wont matter?

I’m fairly certain I’ve seen far more instances of sites ranking highly without a category than with one.

Tell your plugin (All in One or Yoast) to no-index images.

What would you do about those?

Agreed. Should be very helpful.

Untested but I would go for the shorter one.

For example, they publish either:

“domain.com/garcinia-xyz” or “domain.com/weight-loss/garcinia-xyz”

I was wondering… Is one of the two more effective than the other?
My guess is that the shorter the url the better… But then, doesn’t adding that category part in the url help you with topic relevance for the review?

Which url format would be more effective for rankings?

Looking forward to it!

Great, thanks Matt. See you 3 November.

I don’t know what your target keyword is. But assuming its “buy house”.

URL
target
target

target
URL
target

If you’re talking about anchor text analysis, then I would simply move that glitch out of the data. Ignore that page in your averaging.

As I’m looking at competition in Ahrefs, some of the inner pages that are ranking have very low to almost no backlinks, which means the root is powering that page. In that case, where there are no backlinks to really analyze on the inner page, do you just move the analysis to data from the root?

Example 1
Domain is https://house.com/. How to label these anchors:
1.1 house.com
1.2 house
1.3 buy at house.com

Example 2
Domain is https://buyhouse.com/. How to label these anchors:
1.1 house
1.2 buyhouse.com
1.3 buy house

Yeah, that works too.

Thanks for the info, much appreciated.

I’ve thought about reducing the on page etc.

But I think ultimately, your solution to simply delete it and wait a month and see if I’m right or wrong is probably the best approach.

I guess 301’ing the child page(s) to the parent would also be acceptable?

Thanks for your take on the indexing. I’m glad someone mentioned it as it’s a very interesting topic!

You’re right, the “site:” operator doesn’t return all results. Google won’t show you everything it’s got indexed, as it wants to be the only one who knows everything… Cheeky cheeky!
We could literally create case study after case study of Google hiding URLs.

However, you can trick it into revealing more and more by adding the inurl: (or other) operators to your site: query, and then scrape specific sections of the website. That’s what we’re doing with the client websites.

Be aware though, Google will reveal the next batch of pages indexed under the section you’re querying only after the previous batch is removed. For a while this may cause a dance in what results you’re seeing under site: search.

However, if you search for any job / location specific keyword you will find indeed everywhere (e.g. Junior Graphic Designer jobs new york etc). They have probably dozens of millions of pages indexed. But you will only find a very small fraction with the site operator. But still of course, indexing problems is a major issue why a lot of sites are not performing well.

Thanks, looking forward to it 🙂

What Rowan said. ^^

I usually only index main pages and posts. Deindex everything else.

Let’s hold up for the coming article I’ll have on cannibalization.

Can do.

These situations are hard to diagnose, especially when there’s no flipping. The only way to figure it out is to delete the child page for about a month and see what happens to the parent.

I hope you follow up with an in-depth keyword cannibalization article.

I have often wondered if cannibalization affects rankings even when a page is obviously not flipping between other pages. This is often done unintentionally when “niching down”, or when building topical relevancy for example:

/best-blenders/ <= best blenders
/best-blenders/under-1000/ <= best blenders under 1000

In this case, the second page would have a similar amount of on page mentions of "best blenders" within the title, url, body copy etc.

My thought is by having fewer pages about a KW could help the primary page rank, by giving Google no doubt in which page it should rank for the keyword on your site. Then have related phrases to the niche that will in no way compete with the "money phrase" throughout the site or silo (for topic relevance).

If you or anyone else has experienced this before I would appreciate your thoughts.

When are you going to release content on Keyword canabalisation?? I think a few of my sites are stuck because of this. Can you create a walkthrough/ step by step on how you look and solve the issue of KC??

Thanks

Structure no1:
500-word homepage, 3×2500 word category pages and then 15×1200 word detail product reviews for each product.
This structure is awesome for user experience since you have a conversion focused homepage and a funnel for each product, but it sucks for Google since you can’t get a way from keyword cannibalization here (or can you??).

Structure no2:
3×6000 word mega category posts, and a 3000-word mega homepage summarizing your category pages. Use the leftover words for more supporting content.
This is the only way I see how to avoid cannibalization, and gives you 4 clear pages you are trying to rank….but it sucks for user experience. You have too much text on your homepage, and too long product reviews.

I’m sorry for the wall of text but there is no simpler way to ask this. Any guidance would be sincerely appreciated.

Jimmy, to add on to what Matt said: Low Quality Pillow would be considered what you mentioned above. Bookmarks, blog comments to non-crit anchors; you were on the right path.

Indeed a great article with amazing case studies. You always share stuff with strong proof. This has been an incredibly wonderful article.

Thanks for providing this info.

In regards to press releases you need to figure out what problem you are trying to solve. Google have site-wide and page-level algorithms. If a specific internal page is over-optimised and then you do a press release to your homepage – that’s not going to do anything at a page level.

We generally avoid press releases within the agency because there are better ways to acquire large volumes of valuable links. We also research anchor text each month before we get link placements so that we don’t find ourselves in a position of “Woops, over-optimised and now we need to get pillows.”

Pillow links are referring to non-critical anchor texts (URL, misc, etc).

I’ve heard this term before. No one seems to have defined it.

I’m assuming these are weaker links such as blog comments, bookmarking, etc. links of that sort.

Like you mentioned, press releases to fix anchor text ratios.

..on the right path?

Pretty much.

Check out this article.

Thanks, Dana.

That’s how I define it. The important thing is that you pick a convention and stick to it.

This whole thing about “use pbns for target anchors and other links for pillow anchors” makes a lot of sense, but I’m yet to see a solid case study on it.

Not sure. We use our own proprietary tools.

I’ve done it plenty, but supplement with Brazilian citations: read more.

You know where to find us.

Thank you for the post, looking for a clarification at the 10th point: to make myself clear, I will give you an example: do you think it’s OK to use contextual links (PBN / guest post / etc ) for target anchors, and web / business directory links + social links for pillowing (much cheaper to obtain), as long as they are indexed? Or do links that are not contextual count as low quality? In my country, most of my competitors are (still) using a lot of web / business directory links, so I’m thinking I should just blend in and drop a few PBN links with target anchors?

Quick question about the anchor text types. If my keyword is ‘best running shoes under $50’ am I right in thinking that any anchor text that contains the word ‘shoes’ will be targeted? Or is it just phrases like ‘best running shoes’ and ‘shoes under $50’ that will be classed as targeted?

Thought it was some kind of test at first 🙂

I always appreciate your posts. I have been guilty of #10 (creating LQ pillow links) too many times. Saved, bookmarked and downloaded for future reference.

Thanks!
-Eric

Thanks for the great info. As always I have picked up some invaluable tips in here.

I believe I may be suffering from low quality content on one of my sites, so it’s great you pointed it out!

Cheers

Can you elaborate this?

Both.

My pleasure.

Thanks, brotha.

Believe it or not, I don’t try to rank this website. For reasons that might be obvious.

Thanks for putting it together. 🙂

Lots of valuable insight. As always. 🙂