Should the "WebSite" and "Organization" types and their properties be applied to all pages of a website or just the homepage?
I have valid JSON-LD code defining the the necessary items for Google mobile search results, but I am not sure if it should be included on all pages or just the root/home page.
It would make sense to provide it on any page where it’s relevant.
For example, if this is an organization’s website, each page is about/from the organization, so provide metadata about this organization on each of the pages.
A consumer looking for structured data on a certain page is not necessarily also visiting and checking the homepage, so it might never learn that you are providing relevant metadata.
That does not necessarily mean that you should include the full item (with all properties) on each page. It can be sufficient to provide the full item only on one page (e.g., on the site’s homepage), and link to it (for example with the property author) from each other page.
Related
I have a website and I'm beginning to add schema tags to it. One worry I have is having schema data only inside subpages.
My reviews page is located under /testimonials and the schema data works perfectly as tested in Googles schema rich snippets tool.
However, these reviews don't appear anywhere on the home page, so the review schema is NOT appearing on the home page. Should I add them hidden on the home page in the HTML so that they're picked up, or is there a way to tell Google that my reviews page is located at /testimonials?
To answer your first question, no, you should never hide your schemas. That goes against Google's guidelines and they will just ignore your markups. Secondly, a homepage is typically not a good place to mark up reviews and ratings, because the markups should be indicative of the main content on the page and because the page should also include a mechanism to gather and post customer reviews. So again, without that mechanism, Google won't trust your review markups.
So my advice would be to create a strong testimonials page that includes your business' reviews and ratings along with a system to gather and post them to that page. If you mark them up well and structure your markups correctly (don't trust Google's testing tool to notify you of all errors), Google may very well display a rating rich snippet for that page. And with good SEO, you can have both pages appearing on the first page of Google for relevant search queries, with rich snippets.
Is there any HTML code or page paramater or metaname that can tell search engines that the content of a page is closely linked to another page on another domain..
I keep the content metatag updated and also the keyword metatag.
I don't want to show these links to my visitors.
1)
I need to know if there is a protocol for communicating related links specifically to crawlers so as to improve my ranking
Is there any way via code I can tell crawlers (crawlers specifically, like how No Follow is addressed to crawlers) that mydomain.com/Porduct.php is closely linked to say
http://ebay.com/sameProduct
http://wikipedia.com/GenericProduct or
http://google.com?q=someKeywords
Should I include external links or CNAME mapped External links(Read Q3) inside the content tag ?? Would that make a difference
2)
Can I include these links in my Sitemap.. Common sense would suggest that links in my sitemap should be hoisted on my domain. Still though I did ask since the sitemap takes in the full URL including the domain name.
3)
If a particular well indexed page has content largely similar to mine can I map a CNAME of my page to that site and include that in the sitemap?? would that amount to cheating ??
First of all, I'm not sure what do you want to achieve there. Search engines in general are already pretty good at recognizing what your page is about. If your content is about product A, write a description about product A, have images about product A, let your users comment about or review product A, or add microdata to your page (i.e. http://schema.org/Product). All these will help search engines recognize that your page is about that product, just like that page on the other site which also have content about the same product.
To answer your questions:
1) I'm not aware of any tag like that which would also be supported by search engines.
2) In your Sitemap you can include only URLs that point to a location on the same hostname the Sitemap is hosted on (there are some exceptions, but those are irrelevant now). See http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html for more info about Sitemaps.
3) A CNAME resource record specifies that the domain name is an alias of another domain name, and thus it can't be used the way you described.
Lastly, you're trying to do something for crawlers which is usually a bad idea. Create an awesome website, something useful for the users, something they would love and they'd miss in case you closed the shop. Just focus on the user and all else will come.
Should one apply rel="nofollow" attribute to site links that are bound for secure/login required pages?
We have a URI date based link structure where the previous year's news content is free, while the current year, and any year prior to the last, are paid, login required content.
The net effect is that when doing a search for our company name in google, what comes up first is Contact, About, Login, etc., standard non-login required content. That's fine, but ideally we have our free content, the pages we want to promote, shown first in the search engine results.
Toward this end, the link structure now generates rel="follow" for the free content we want to promote, and rel="nofollow" for all paid content and Contact, About, Login, etc. screens that we want at the bottom of the SEO search result ladder.
I have yet to deploy the new linking scheme for fear of, you know, blowing up the site SEO-wise ;-) It's not in great shape to begin with, despite our decent ranking, but I don't want us to disappear either.
Anyway, words of wisdom appreciated.
Thanks
nofollow
I think Emil Vikström is wrong about nofollow. You can use the rel value nofollow for internal links. The microformats spec and the HTML5 spec don't say the opposite.
Google even gives such an example:
Crawl prioritization: Search engine robots can't sign in or register as a member on your forum, so there's no reason to invite Googlebot to follow "register here" or "sign in" links. Using nofollow on these links enables Googlebot to crawl other pages you'd prefer to see in Google's index. However, a solid information architecture — intuitive navigation, user- and search-engine-friendly URLs, and so on — is likely to be a far more productive use of resources than focusing on crawl prioritization via nofollowed links.
This does apply to your use case. So you could nofollow the links to your login page. Note however, if you also meta-noindex them, people that search for "YourSiteName login" probably won't get the desired page in their search results, then.
follow
There is no rel value "follow". It's not defined in the HTML5 spec nor in the HTML5 Link Type extensions. It isn't even mentioned in http://microformats.org/wiki/existing-rel-values at all. A link without the rel value nofollow is automatically a "follow link".
You can't overwrite a meta-nofollow for certain links (the two nofollow values even have a different semantic).
Your case
I'd use nofollow for all links to restricted/paid content. I wouldn't nofollow the links to the informational pages about the site (About, Contact, Login), because they are useful, people might search especially for them, and they give information about your site, while all the content pages give information about the various topics.
Nofollow is only for external links, it does not apply to links within your own domain. Search engines will try to give the most relevant content for the query asked, and they generally actively avoid taking the website owners wishes into account. Thus, nofollow will not help you here.
What you really want to do is make the news content the best choice for a search on your company name. A user searching for your company name may do this for two reasons: They want your homepage (the first page) or they more specifically want to know more about your company. This means that your homepage as well as "About", "Contact", etc, are generally actually what the user is looking for and the search engines will show them at the top of their results pages.
If you don't want this you must make those pages useless for one wanting to know more about your company. This may sound really silly. To make your "About" and "Contact" pages useless to one searching for your company you should remove your company name from those pages, as well as any information about what your company does. Put that info on the news pages instead and the search engines may start to rank the news higher.
Another option is to not let the search engine index those other pages at all by adding them to a robots.txt file.
I'm working on improving the site for the SEO purposes and hit an interesting issue. The site, among other things, includes a large directory of individual items (it doesn't really matter what these are). Each item has its own details page, which is accessed via
http://www.mysite.com/item.php?id=item_id
or
http://www.mysite.com/item.php/id/title
The directory is large - having about 100,000 items in it. Naturally, on any of the pages only a few items are listed. For example, on the main site homepage, there are links to about 5 or 6 items, from some other page there links to about a dozen different items, etc.
When real users visits the site, they can use search form to find item by keyword or location - so there would be a list produced matching their search criteria. However when, for example, a google crawler visits the site, it won't even attempt to put a text into the keyword search field and submit the form. Thus as far as the bot is concern, after indexing the entire site, it has covered only a few dozen items at best. Naturally, I want it to index each individual item separately. What are my options here?
One thing I considered is to check the user agent and IP ranges and if the requestor is a bot (as best I can say), then add a div to the end of the most relevant page with links to each individual item. Yes, this would be a huge page to load - and I'm not sure how google bot would react to this.
Any other things I can do? What are best practices here?
Thanks in advance.
One thing I considered is to check the user agent and IP ranges and if
the requestor is a bot (as best I can say), then add a div to the end
of the most relevant page with links to each individual item. Yes,
this would be a huge page to load - and I'm not sure how google bot
would react to this.
That would be a very bad thing to do. Serving up different content to the search engines specifically for their benefit is called cloaking and is a great way to get your site banned. Don't even consider it.
Whenever a webmaster is concerned about getting their pages indexed having an XML sitemap is an easy way to ensure the search engines are aware of your site's content. They're very easy to create and update, too, if your site is database driven. The XML file does not have to be static so you can dynamically produce it whenever the search engines request it (Google, Yahoo, and Bing all support XML sitemaps). You can find out mroe about XML sitemaps at sitemaps.org.
If you want to make your content available to search engines and want to benefit from semantic markup (i.e. HTML) you should also make sure your all of content can be reached through hyperlinks (in other words not through form submissions or JavaScript). The reason for this is twofold:
The anchor text in the links to your items will contain the keywords you want to rank well for. This is one of the more heavily weighted ranking factors.
Links count as "votes", especially to Google. Links from external websites, especially related websites, are what you'll hear people recommend the most and for good reason. They're valuable to have. But internal links carry weight, too, and can be a great way to prop up your internal item pages.
(Bonus) Google has PageRank which used to be a huge part of their ranking algorithm but plays only a small part now. But it still has value and links "pass" PageRank to each page they link to increasing the PageRank of that page. When you have as many pages as you do that's a lot of potential PageRank to pass around. If you built your site well you could probably get your home page to a PageRank of 6 just from internal linking alone.
Having an HTML sitemap that somehow links to all of your products is a great way to ensure that search engines, and users, can easily find all of your products. It is also recommended that you structure your site so more important pages are closer to the root of your website (home page) and then as you branch out gets to sub pages (categories) and then to specific items. This gives search engines an idea of what pages are important and helps them organize them (which helps them rank them). It also helps them follow those links from top to bottom and find all of your content.
Each item has its own details page, which is accessed via
http://www.mysite.com/item.php?id=item_id
or
http://www.mysite.com/item.php/id/title
This is also bad for SEO. When you can pull up the same page using two different URLs you have duplicate content on your website. Google is on a crusade to increase the quality of their index and they consider duplicate content to be low quality. Their infamous Panda Algorithm is partially out to find and penalize sites with low quality content. Considering how many products you have it is only a matter of time before you are penalized for this. Fortunately the solution is easy. You just need to specify a canonical URL for your product pages. I recommend the second format as it is more search engine friendly.
Read my answer to an SEO question at the Pro Webmaster's site for even more information on SEO.
I would suggest for starters having an xml sitemap. Generate a list of all your pages, and submit this to Google via webmaster tools. It wouldn't hurt having a "friendly" sitemap either - linked to from the front page, which lists all these pages, preferably by category, too.
If you're concerned with SEO, then having links to your pages is hugely important. Google could see your page and think "wow, awesome!" and give you lots of authority -- this authority (some like to call it link juice" is then passed down to pages that are linked from it. You ought to make a hierarchy of files, more important ones closer to the top and/or making it wide instead of deep.
Also, showing different stuff to the Google crawler than the "normal" visitor can be harmful in some cases, if Google thinks you're trying to con it.
Sorry -- A little bias on Google here - but the other engines are similar.
Google has been pushing its new canonical link feature, I agree it is really useful. Now instead of having a ton of entry points in to an area you can have one entry.
I was wondering, does this feature play nice with paging?
For example: I have this page which has 8 pages of content, if I specify the canonical of http://community.mediabrowser.tv/permalinks/154/iso-always-detected-as-a-movie-when-checking-metadata for the page, will there be any undesired side effects? Will this be better overall? Will this mean that a hit on page 5 will take users to page 1?
When specifying a canonical URL, it should have substantially the same content. Pages 2-8 have different content. Yes, if Google were to honor your canonical link on page 5, it would send users to page 1.
You should use the canonical link on page 1 so that Google knows that http://community.mediabrowser.tv/topics/154 and http://community.mediabrowser.tv/topics/154?page=1&response_type=3 are the same as http://community.mediabrowser.tv/permalinks/154/iso-always-detected-as-a-movie-when-checking-metadata
You may also want to put canonical links on the other pages so Google knows that http://community.mediabrowser.tv/topics/154?page=5 is the same as http://community.mediabrowser.tv/topics/154?page=5&response_type=3
You should only add canonical links on pages with identical content. For example, a set of links presented in a different order: sorted by date or alphabetically.
In your case all pages have different content (albeit representing several pages of the same article or conversation thread). Which means you don't need to canonicalize them.
Still if you do, all that happens is that Google gives more priority to the first page, rather than the other pages when displaying them in search results.
Canonical links do not affect your visitors. They only suggest priority and possible duplicate content to bots.
More info from Google here