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English Google Webmaster Central office-hours hangout 6 March 2018

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English Google Webmaster Central office-hours hangout Streamed live on 6th March 2018

English Google Webmaster Central office-hours hangout

Otto Rommel
This is to settle an argument with a developer. Is it considered cloaking that would incur a penalty if link HREF values are blocked by disallowing access to a JavaScript file. Example: blocking the HREF value to a link in a calendar that would create and infinite crawl path of years. Example: Blocking the HREF values to Sort By links in a table. Prior to the advent of JavaScript rendering, this was a way to stop bad URLs from being crawled. Thanks.

Marco Logmans
How will GDPR affect the use of Google Analytics? It looks like we can only track visitors if they allow us to add cookies…or not?

Eduard Paziuk
In which cases does Google recognize a french-translated page “fr.example.com/page” as a duplicate of an English one – “example.com/page”? Hreflangs are correct but using the query “info:fr.exmaple.com/page”, we see an English page not a French one.

Greg B
Is there a way to auto disavow some tld’s? It would help with the .ru domains that are linking to me that are 99% spam. New ones show up every few days.

Dmitry Voytenko
How can I improve the indexing of sites developed on a single CMS and having the same catalog of products with the same description on the product cards? Google indexes the site and excludes pages from the index in a month. Sites belong to different organizations but they were ordered from one developer.

Jack Waldenmaier | Composer / Producer
Hi John,

I have about 60 pages with duplicate TITLES and DESCRIPTIONS because they are part of WordPress CATEGORIES.

(They are all Rel=Prev or Rel=Next and have Canonicals but they still show up in Search Console as duplicates.)

Is there any solution to this problem?
Thanks!
-Jack
214-636-5887

Ben Cohen
We have different branch pages for our depots and we also have different GMB profiles for each branch and they have reviews on them. Can we put the text from some of these reviews on to the relevant branch pages and mark it up. We already have a link from the branch page going to the google plus page but we could also do a link going to the reviews section if need be?. What do you think?

Russell Meara

Is there any benefit/harm putting some of our USP in the Title tag if we already have the keyword phrase first.

Bill Allen | Dad, Husband and SEO Guy

Does Google have any issues or preference for indexing and ranking urls that have special characters (comma, ampersand, parenthesis, etc.) or issues/preference for indexing/ranking special characters used in French, Spanish, German, etc.?

Rob Cuppett
None adult site showing hard core adult ads in Google search results when searching for domain.com. Every site on the VPS host is showing these ads. Is the IP address marked by google as adult? What would cause this? Here is a link to a webmaster help forum discussion with all the details and screenshots.

Antonio Dimitrovski
Earlier on Twitter we have conversation about translating content and still isn’t clear enough. If I translate article from another website to another language hreflang is a must to show proper language but how can i give him a credit if canonical is not good here? Should I just rank in other languages with my website? Link isn’t good, can’t canonical not the same content, what we need to do?

François Briod | Tech enthusiast & entrepreneur
Hey! It’s going to be my first Office Hours, I’m thrilled.

My question: how does google indexes texts generated by computers based on unique/proprietary meta-data such as a hotel description on Booking.com (For example: https://www.booking.com/hotel/ch/b2-boutique.html)

Let’s say that the meta-data are updated every day (reviews), would it make sense for Google to crawl this text every day?

Colin Manko
1) Does Google use other Google App data for search results? (ie; does Google use Gmail email opens or Google Chrome behavior to inform results past an individual basis?)
2) Can you explain the types/range of severity of algorithmic penalties? (ie; how do you receive an algorithmic penalty, how long does it last, does it affect a site on a page by page basis – or at the domain level?)
3) — Search Console Performance feedback (been a week since I’ve been in there):
——– want to be able to filter off multiple operations in filters (ie; contains “some word” AND does not contain “some other word”)
——– want filters to update the line graph – currently, it is just an overall view of the date range and search type you selected, even when filters are enabled (Is that right?)
——– property sets would be nice (ie; aggregate both http and https for YOY analysis)
——– option to download some time period of data and break it down by day for daily analysis away from Search Console interface (you can do this with the API, but that is over my head/don’t have time for it at the moment)

Thanks for everything you all do!

Glenn Gabe | Digital Marketing Consultant
Hi John. When a company fact checks an article using ClaimReview markup, is there a way to challenge that fact check?? If not, the fact check will show up in the SERPs even if it’s not entirely correct. It seems like there should be a way to challenge a fact check (like you can counter a DMCA takedown).

Also, would continual fact checks against an organization impact that site algorithmically at some point? Again, like DMCA takedowns funnel into the Pirate Algorithm?

Google Rankings Dropped

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Google Rankings Dropped

Google is one of the most powerful companies that we are aware of. They can make or break a business overnight. This is why your company should take them seriously and ensure that SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is taken seriously.
It is important for every business to have an online presence in the technological age we are living in. This creates trust between the brand and the user, and also acts as another platform from which to market and sell your goods and/or services. But what good is it to have a website that nobody can find? This is why Google rankings are important.

As Google is the most popular search engine of choice for the majority of Internet users, it is important that you get to and remain on the first page of results for your given keywords to help ensure that people will be vising your website.

A lot of companies are already aware of the need for SEO, and partake in it by employing an SEO company to do the work, or attempting it themselves. SEO is not an exact science, especially due to the fact that Google keeps making changes to improve its service for users, therefore Google rankings are prone to fluctuation.

However, if your Google ranking has dropped significantly over a short period of time, this could be an indication of negative SEO practices which may cause problems for your online presence. One of the most common counter-productive SEO practices is the building of unnatural backlinks. Websites need links to other trustworthy sites to add power and ensure search engines that they are reliable; these links take time to build up. To cut corners and save time, some SEO companies purchase large amounts of unreliable backlinks in bulk orders. Whilst this was an acceptable form of SEO in the past, it is now not-acceptable in the eyes of Google after their Penguin and Panda updates which were done to improve the quality of their search results. As a result, unnatural backlink creation is heavily penalised by Google, resulting in your website dropping out of the search engine results.

Some companies believe that once they have gained positions in search engine results that SEO is no longer needed; this is not the case. SEO is an on-going process; just because you are top one day does not mean you will be forever. It would be devastating to put a lot of time and effort into SEO, only then to stop once you reach the top, and then see your Google rankings dropped.

Significant drops in Google rankings can be avoided by ensuring that your SEO company only uses white hat methods and you continue to practice SEO continuously. If you have been penalised by Google for use of black hat methods, look for a SEO company that can rectify the mistakes and get your Internet marketing campaign back online.

Get SEO Advice from Chameleon, simply contact us.

SEO Consultancy

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SEO Consultancy

An SEO consultancy’s main role is to assess the current state of your website in terms of how optimised it is to appear in search engine results pages. There are a number of elements of a website that can be manipulated to improve user experience and the ease at which search engine spiders can crawl your site for it to be indexed. SEO consultants will review these practises in terms of if and how they are applied to your website, analyse them, and suggest ways to further improve.

SEO consultancies can have varied roles from start to finish. They can simply be asked to analyse SEO on your site and suggest improvements, give general SEO advice, or analyse and improve SEO on your site directly – the full SEO service.

One of the most important factors to consider when choosing an SEO consultancy to work with is reliability and reputation. Ultimately, your online success will rest upon the changes and decisions they make regarding the optimisation of your website. There are both ethical and unethical methods of SEO; ensure that the company that you work with use only ethical white hat methods; otherwise your website could be removed from Google completely.

SEO Advice: URL Canonicalisation

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Chameleon SEO Advice: URL Canonicalisation

If you have been told you have a canonicalisation problem with your website you will be asking yourself why no one else has told you this and is this really important?

What is a canonicalisation URL error?

Everyone spreading the word about your website will use different variations and as the Google spider goes around the Internet finding all the these links it will be collecting data and storing it into its database. But what is the chosen URL for the website so that Google can collect all this data for one website and add all the value being added to the website all in one place instead of various places.

If you are now confused we will explain, a website without a canonicalisation fix will have 4 landing pages as below:-

Now what we need is to funnel all this into one place. Also technically the web server setup may return different content for the URLs depending on the configuration.

Imagine that Google collects the data for the website as follows:-

If you configure the canonicalisation and then you will have all the value to one place. So the example above would be a total of 3360 inbound links to www.chameleonwebservices.co.uk if this is the chosen domain for Google to use.

We hope all this makes sense so far. If it does you will be wanting to do this change now so how do you do it?

Apache Web Hosting

If you have Apache web hosting you can setup a .htacess file as below:-

RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^chameleonwebservices.co.uk RewriteRule (.*) http://www.chameleonwebservices.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L]

RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9} /index.html HTTP/ RewriteRule ^index.html$ http://www.chameleonwebservices.co.uk/ [R=301,L]