Google Hangout Highlights: Canonical and No Index, Search Analytics and Redirects
Google frequently arranges live Google Hangout sessions online, hosted by its Webmaster Trends Analyst, John Mueller, who runs one-on-one sessions with a select group of search specialists.
Ingenuity Digital’s SEO Technical Account Manager, Dan Picken attends these sessions to ensure he’s at the leading edge of search science, asking the questions that will enable us to keep our clients’ businesses fully optimised online.
Please see below Questions & Answers we asked in the latest Google Hangout.
We even got exclusive access at the start due to a few technical difficulties their end, a win for us!
Highlights
Canonical and No Index on the Same Page
An interesting question I asked from the team was if you have a canonical tag and a noindex tag on the same page, will the noindex tag be passed on to the page being canonicaled to and noindex it?
John starts off by saying “we discussed this a long time ago internally, at least with regards to what we should be doing in a case like that, because with the canonical you’re saying these two pages should be treated the same and with the noindex you’re saying this page here should be removed from search so our algorithms theoretically could get confused and say these should be the same and this one should be removed so we should remove both of them.”
He does give other scenarios of what could happen, however he says: “In practice what we’ve kind of come to is just saying well maybe the canonical is the mistake here and using the noindex as a way to pick a canonical or force a canonical and from our point of view we’ll try and follow it like that.”
So to sum up, the algorithms are likely to conclude that having both on the page was a mistake by the webmaster and assume the canonicalising of the page is what was intended.
Video can be found here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1l_E5b801Pw&feature=youtu.be&t=289
Search Analytics in Search Console, why doesn’t the data add up?
In the search analytics report in Search Console, we like to get an idea of what the brand/non-brand split is for clients. To do this we typically filter on keywords that contain our brand name (see below image). However, what we have noticed is that the number of clicks we receive from keywords that contain our brand name, and the number of clicks we receive from keywords that do not contain our brand name do not total the number of clicks when there are no filters applied. So we put this to John, what is the reason for this? Is there a better way to get our brand/non-brand split?
Search Analytics filtering on brand below
John’s response:
“That’s probably when you’re looking at things where there are parts included that we filter out, so specifically in search analytics we filter out queries that see very few impressions just to kind of make sure that there is kind of like a privacy threshold there, you can see the full numbers if you look at it on a per page basis so that might be an option, the other option might be just to say ok there is always going to be this difference and we’ll just have to live with that.”
So to sum up the comments John made:
- They remove queries deliberately so there is a “privacy threshold”e. so we cannot see queries that would otherwise be personal, queries with low impressions attributed to them.
- You can see the full number of impressions but on a per page basis (see below). Although you would NOT be able to filter on search queries still and get the same number.
Video can be found here:
https://youtu.be/1l_E5b801Pw?t=376
Old Blog Pieces, Keep or Redirect?
If you have an old blog piece as an example, a past event, is it better to 301 redirect that to pass the link equity to a new blog piece such as a similar more updated event or is it better to keep that page live?
We put the question to John.
His response: “totally up to you.”
He goes on to say:
“If you have a new page that replaces the old one then redirecting is fine, on the other hand if these are totally separate events then redirecting could be a bit confusing because it’s not that the old event will be replaced with the new one, it’s a completely different event.”
“If you have a series of ongoing events and you’re saying well we did it in this city last time and we’re doing it in this city next time and we’re kind of moving around and the old events are not relevant anymore and being replaced by new ones, then maybe that’s something a redirect would make sense.”
He recommends that he wouldn’t blindly do this across the website and say all old blog posts should be redirecting to new blog posts, I think that’s a lot of effort to put in and probably the gain you would get out of that would be minimal. So really judge this on a case by case basis.
Video can be found here: