Yes, that is what I was referring to regarding Search Console.

It's _possible _that Moz isn't recognizing the H1 because it's below the H2 tag and  there are two H1 tags. Those two issues should be resolved whether or not it's the cause of Moz not registering your H1.

Hi Tiffany,

Have you rendered the page in Google Search Console to see how Google will render the site? In most cases, this will answer any question you have about Google's perception of a page element.

Canonicals will help with the trailing slash issue, but that's not the sole reason for your traffic loss. Read up on Angular and address those issues first. It's definitely going to be a boatload of work, but the impact you'll see from that will far outweigh any smaller optimizations you're able to make.

Google has stated more than once that accordioned content will be crawled, indexed, and weighted the same as any other content on the page. This wasn't always the case, but as mobile usage grew and accordions became commonplace for good mobile UX, they pivoted their stance on this type of content. In your example, I would especially not be worried about it since the primary content of the page is in the Overview section.

You see that because the site is built to be a progressive web app, as seen in their Lighthouse Report.

When did the redesign occur? I looked at the wayback machine and it looks like it was well over a year ago. It's concerning that you're still seeing rank/traffic issues.

I noticed that MozBar isn't able to grab a status code from the site, which is concerning.  From the looks of things, you're using a version of Angular that isn't Google-friendly. When I click links on the site, none of the data in MozBar changes, which means Google likely isn't seeing anything different when they follow links either, effectively making your site a single page.  Read more here: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/angular-seo-guide/303849/#close

I feel like I’ve read this comment somewhere before....

Seriously, Moz. It’s time to shut this thread down.

Moz team, looks like this has turned into feeble attempts at creating links instead if discussing them. Might be time to turn comments off.

I took a look at the paginated versions of these pages and it looks like canonicals and rel next/prev are all setup correctly. Have you gone into Search Console and specified the purpose of the 'start' parameter? That might help Google better interpret what's going on. Typically pagination is handled by a more accurately named parameter which could be causing confusion, despite having canonical/prev/next tags configured properly. Under the Crawl menu in Search Console, go to URL Parameters and configure 'start' for pagination.

In the situation outline by the OP, these pages are noindexed. There’s no value to clutterig up crawl reports  on these pages. Block rogerbot from non-critical parts of your site, unless you want to be alerted of issues, then don’t.

I agree, unfortunately Moz doesn't have an internal disallow feature that gives you the option to feed them info on where rogerbot can and can't go. I haven't come across any issues with this approach, crawl depth by search engine bots will not be affected since the user-agent is specified.

Hi,

I would advise against this for a couple reasons. First of all, dropping and re-adding pages to the index isn't quick, it often takes weeks before Google will obey a noindex tag. Second, even if it were quick, is going to cause problems at the authority level - is your site a trustworthy source of information? This week, yes, next week, no. It's best to have long-term content that can build trust/authority over time without ephemeral.

An alternative approach you might take is writing content about the particular trials offered, this will help prevent thin content. You might also consider adding a call to action on empty pages that prompt users to provide an email address and you'll notify them when trials of type XYZ have opened back up.

Wanted to jump back in on this topic as I've just confirmed my initial suspicion.

I just added a new client to our Moz account and had the exact same issue, crawler unable to access the robots.txt file. It's a secure site and was configured in Moz without the HTTPS. When I go to the robots.txt file without https://www, it redirects to the same thing as yours where the / between the TLD and page path gets removed.

Reconfigure your site and it should begin to work.

Hi there,

There's something odd going on when I try to access your robots.txt file without the www. The www gets added back on, but when it does, the slash between the TLD and page path gets deleted, see below. I'm guessing your domain in Moz is configured without the www, which means RogerBot is getting redirected to this slash-less version of the file.

https://www.thefurnshop.co.ukrobots.txt

Hi there,

I haven't heard of using product markup on category pages until reading your question. It's a good idea and while researching I came across this other thread from a couple years ago: https://a-moz.groupbuyseo.org/community/q/google-rich-snippets-in-e-commerce-category-pages

My main concern is that most ecomm category pages have a lot of products showing by default, and if you've got a snippet of JSON+LD for each of those, you're going to hurt your page speeds. Just something to be mindful of and monitor if you do decide to go this route.

Hi Nichole,

You're correct in noindexing these pages, they serve little to no value from an SEO perspective. Moz is always going to alert you of noindex tags when they find them since it's such a critical issue if that tag shows up in unexpected places. If you want to remove these issues from your crawl report, add the following directive to your robots.txt file, this will prevent Moz from crawling these URLs and therefore reporting on them:

User-agent: rogerbot
Disallow: /tag/
Disallow: /category/

*edit - do not prevent all user-agents from crawling these URLs, as it will prevent search engines from seeing your noindex tag, they can't obey what they aren't permitted to see. If you want, once all tag & category pages have been removed from the index, you can update your robots.txt to remove the rogerbot directive and add the disallows for tag & category to the * user agent.

Hi,

I'd definitely recommend keeping users on the product detail page to read reviews, for both structured data and UX reasons.

You need to have reviews on the page if you want the rating to show up in search results, there might be a way around this but I wouldn't trust it in the long-term.

From a UX perspective, if people can easily read the reviews on the same page, they'll have a lot less reason to do a search for "Product A reviews" and you're not distracting them by sending them to a different page. People have very short attention spans, so keep them on the product detail page, they shouldn't have to navigate back to the product in order to complete a purchase.

Having reviews built into the page also helps different your pages from each other (in the event you have two very similar products) as well as the competition.

Even though your product titles have lower search volume, you still want to use your product detail pages as the preferred ranking URL for any product-specific query. This is where the benefit of long-tail keywords comes into play, you'll get a lot less traffic from them, but the quality (likelihood of them converting/purchasing) is much higher.

Take the 'Nicolai – 8th Wonder finger bit – Granite' for example. If I've done a Google search for that, my research is already done and I know exactly what I need. If I click on a result that takes me to a category page, that's not going to be as useful to me. But if the search result is for the product detail page, I'm landing on the exact page I want. It's got all the product info & specs I need, pricing, and most importantly, an Add to Cart button.

Hope that's helpful. For more info on ecomm SEO, I'd recommend taking a look at back through some of the Moz posts on the subject: https://a-moz.groupbuyseo.org/blog/category/e-commerce

Jeroen,

In addition to helping mitigate duplicate content, the hreflang tag you're referring to helps keep content in its respective version of Google. For example, you don't want English content showing up in Google.es (Spain), or German content showing in Google.co.uk.

How is the content broken out on the site, in different subfolders, subdomains, or TLD?

Marco,

Do not proceed with that task, it is not the proper way to use a canonical tag. If you put a canonical tag pointing a product to a category page, the product URL will eventually get removed from the index and therefore won't drive any traffic for product-specific queries.

You mentioned "24 different products quite similar but not exactly the same", is Moz flagging them as duplicates? If so, I'd recommend differentiating these products more. You could write more robust descriptions or add user-generated content such as reviews or Q&A.