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It should be noted that individuals searching long tail keywords are likely farther down an acquisition funnel and more apt to perform an action.

Example: "shoes" gets millions of searches a month, is very competitive, but broad/vague. "Women's red Nike running shoes size 6" is a specific, low competition, long tail search. This individual knows exactly what they are looking for and are more apt to purchase.

While this isn't always the case, many companies have become successful by leveraging long tail queries. Amazon being the biggest! Chris Anderson's The Long Tail better describes this phenomenon. There are more long tail searches than there are fat head (short tail) searches. So if you can invest some keyword research muscle into understanding where your long tail keyword opportunities are, and then provide the best resources/content to deliver that information to users, you'll site will be better set up for success.

Hi Chris,

Are you still using ColdFusion?

It sounds like you're on a Windows server, yeah? If so, adding this to your web.config file should do the trick:

<match url="(.*)"><conditions><add matchtype="IsFile" negate="true"><add matchtype="IsDirectory" negate="true"></add></add></conditions>
    <action type="Rewrite" url="{R:1}.cfm"></action></match>

Otherwise, adding the following to your web.config for WordPress should work:

 <rulename="company cfm"=""><matchurl="^company (.*)$"=""><conditionslogicalgrouping="matchall"><addinput="{request_filename}"matchtype="isfile"negate="true"><addinput="{request_filename}"matchtype="isdirectory"negate="true"><actiontype="rewrite"url="{r:1}.cfm"></actiontype="rewrite"url="{r:1}.cfm"></addinput="{request_filename}"matchtype="isdirectory"negate="true"></addinput="{request_filename}"matchtype="isfile"negate="true"></conditionslogicalgrouping="matchall"></matchurl="^company></rulename="company> 

Are you using webtrends.com?

?WT.srch=1 means that it was coming from paid search.

Here are some resources on those parameters (which you should customize to your campaign for more accurate tracking data):

https://producthelp.webtrends.com/streams/webtrends-basic-parameters/

https://help.webtrends.com/en/analytics9admin/visitor_tracking_parameters-sdc.html

Hope that helps!

Thanks for your great question!

Schema.org has stated that using either is fine. Here is their longer form answer from their FAQ page on which to use:

"There is a general trend towards using 'https' more widely, and you can already write 'https://schema.org' in your structured data. Over time we will migrate the schema.org site itself towards using https: as the default version of the site and our preferred form in examples. However 'http://schema.org' -based URLs in structured data markup will remain widely understood for the forseeable future and there should be no urgency about migrating existing data. This is a lengthy way of saying that both 'https://schema.org' and 'http://schema.org' are fine."

That being said...I think I'll go switch Moz.com to https now. Think they will keep http:// around for a while, though. Especially considering SEOs who implemented Schema before https and G doesn't want to penalize site owners for not knowing any better? <- My personal thoughts on this.

Thanks again!

Thank you SO much for raising this question!

The Beginner's Guide To SEO is currently being updated and will address exactly this.

Google's John Mueller has stated in the past that it's ok to put a link on a client's site back to yours as long as it's rel="nofollow". When I was previously self-employed at Pryde Marketing, and heard Google state this, we instantly changed our client footer "Made by Pryde Marketing" links to rel="nofollow" and almost immediately saw organic improvements. I can't say for certain that changing our client > Pryde links to "nofollow" 100% caused this, but it didn't hurt.

My personal opinion is that you can benefit from clients linking back to your site in a credible way (ex. If you built their website) and have a rel="nofollow", you will be fine. If you reverse engineer any of the top web developer's sites, you'll likely see quite a few "built by xyz" linking back to their domains.

Hey lcourse,

Definitely don't send users through an intermediate URL, that will get you penalized.

How many affiliate links are you looking to add? If it's just a few you should be fine.

Don't try to hide anything from G or go overboard on affiliate links. Here's a great affiliate link penalty case study to better understand the limitations of affiliate marketing.

Hope that helps,

B

Definitely, agree with Robert. You do not need rel=canonical tags on filtered / search views of your content.

After you remove these rel=canonical's, I'd suggest running your site through Screaming Frog's rel=canonical error report to confirm that the rel=canonical issues are fixed.

Hope that helps,

B

Hi Jessica!

You're absolutely correct, use of a canonical on paginated pages should point to a "view all" page as opposed to page 1 of the paginated content. I've heard of the Yoast plugin causing some problems with rel=canonical markup in WP and would suggest getting rid of that canonical (especially if you have rel=prev/next markup).

Hope this helps.

B

Hello,

Are you seeing an internal site link as the first result for your brand search? I'm a little confused, would you mind attaching an image of what you're seeing?

Thanks!

Yes, but you currently have an error in your markup, so Google is not rendering it properly. Please see link above. On-site review markup does not necessarily boost rankings, but can help with CTRs, etc.

But yes, even with the right markup for aggregate, Google could choose to ignore it.

The best way to influence rankings (specifically for local) is to have customers review your business on local review sites(Google +, Yelp, etc.) these do help to naturally increase your local search rankings over time.

Hope this helps,

B

Thanks for your great question!

Schema.org has stated that using either is fine. Here is their longer form answer from their FAQ page on which to use:

"There is a general trend towards using 'https' more widely, and you can already write 'https://schema.org' in your structured data. Over time we will migrate the schema.org site itself towards using https: as the default version of the site and our preferred form in examples. However 'http://schema.org' -based URLs in structured data markup will remain widely understood for the forseeable future and there should be no urgency about migrating existing data. This is a lengthy way of saying that both 'https://schema.org' and 'http://schema.org' are fine."

That being said...I think I'll go switch Moz.com to https now. Think they will keep http:// around for a while, though. Especially considering SEOs who implemented Schema before https and G doesn't want to penalize site owners for not knowing any better? <- My personal thoughts on this.

Thanks again!

Fascinating question Gyorgy!

I've always been a big fan of dynamic targeting.

It would be a great idea to have different URL parameters for each unique set of content. You might also want to push these pages to fetch & index within Google Search Console (and your sitemap.xml to showcase you're not attempting to cloak, etc.)

This would be a fantastic question for Google reps...I can try to reach out to someone today and let you know what they say.

Cheers,

B

PS. Just curious, how are you pulling in persona data?

Did some digging and found a few resources stating:

Googlehadan official statement about this in its webmaster guidelines:
"If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a ? character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few. Don't use &id= as a parameter in your URLs, as we don't include these pages in our index."

That was many years ago but more recently Google changed its position on that subject. The entry has been removed from Google's guidelines but here's the official statement from Google's blog:
"Google now indexes URLs that contain the &id= parameter. So if your site uses a dynamic structure that generates it, don't worry about rewriting it -- we'll accept it just fine as is.

Keep in mind, however, that dynamic URLs with a large number of parameters may still be problematic for search engine crawlers in general, so rewriting dynamic URLs into user-friendly versions is always a good practice when that option is available to you. If you can, keeping the number of URL parameters to one or two may make it more likely that search engines will crawl your dynamic urls."

Click here read the full article

Penalization for personalisation

Let me know if this helps

So the consensus is that there's no right or wrong answer here, but in general, you should be looking to be higher than your competitors (especially on non-branded KWs).

You should also aim for higher visibility over time. The higher your visibility, the more traffic you will drive to your website. However, if you don't see organic traffic increase (with increased search visibility), you might be missing some primary keywords.

Hope this helps,

B

It's being pulled from their Wikipedia page. Google will generally attribute things like this to larger brands with significant search volume. You could try to fill out a comprehensive Wikipedia page for your business to see if you can get a similar card, but you'd have to generate a certain amount of search volume for G to add something like that.

Surprisingly, I couldn't find any schema markup on Walgreens website.

In a nutshell; you have to be a big enough powerhouse to get meta cards like this, or drive significant traffic.

Hey lcourse,

Definitely don't send users through an intermediate URL, that will get you penalized.

How many affiliate links are you looking to add? If it's just a few you should be fine.

Don't try to hide anything from G or go overboard on affiliate links. Here's a great affiliate link penalty case study to better understand the limitations of affiliate marketing.

Hope that helps,

B

Agree with Andy, here's another great resource on how Google considers Sitelinks.

Hope this helps,

B

Are you using webtrends.com?

?WT.srch=1 means that it was coming from paid search.

Here are some resources on those parameters (which you should customize to your campaign for more accurate tracking data):

https://producthelp.webtrends.com/streams/webtrends-basic-parameters/

https://help.webtrends.com/en/analytics9admin/visitor_tracking_parameters-sdc.html

Hope that helps!

It should be noted that individuals searching long tail keywords are likely farther down an acquisition funnel and more apt to perform an action.

Example: "shoes" gets millions of searches a month, is very competitive, but broad/vague. "Women's red Nike running shoes size 6" is a specific, low competition, long tail search. This individual knows exactly what they are looking for and are more apt to purchase.

While this isn't always the case, many companies have become successful by leveraging long tail queries. Amazon being the biggest! Chris Anderson's The Long Tail better describes this phenomenon. There are more long tail searches than there are fat head (short tail) searches. So if you can invest some keyword research muscle into understanding where your long tail keyword opportunities are, and then provide the best resources/content to deliver that information to users, you'll site will be better set up for success.

Yes, that sounds great! Please let me know how it all goes and if you run into any other hiccups.

Cheers,

B