Danitsunami

For added context, each brand will have a partner page that will link between their sister brands.

The business wants to let users know that each brand is related and they are getting the same level of service standards set by the business that acquired them.

@johnmu.com If a series of sister brands/websites wants to let their users know that they are related and owned by a lager company and create a partner page to link between each other, will this run the risk of being spammy under Google's eyes?

A bit of a follow up to this query. Is it necessary to have the same 'not found' content/messaging that is found within the CSR version to the SSR version or not really?

Thanks for confirming! I agree on having one version and I'm currently advocating for it but it seems like a huge project within it self to get there, like you mentioned. The good news is that the approach is not ruled out, so there still a chance.

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Also note, the 200 status code for the CSR version has the meta robots directive as 'noindex' to follow what is recommended here: developers.google.com/search/docs/...

@johnmu.com Happy new year! I have another SEO question. If a site is on a dynamic rendered setup, with CSR version for users and a SSR for bots. For 'not found' pages, will it pose an issue if we are serving a 200 status for the CSR version vs. a 404 status for the SSR version?

Thanks for confirming!

@johnmu.com if a non-percent encoded URL has a canonical tag pointing to it's percent encoded corresponding URL, will that pose an issue with Google?

Awesome, thanks for the feedback!

@johnmu.com Hope all is well. Quick internal link question. Is this setup ideal for Google for a site that has millions of pages? I couldn't find much documentation around it jsaction.

It's an odd setup, for sure... the content will be the same (besides the "you are being redirected" messaging) but the content for both versions are relatively the same. I'm leaning against the approach but I wanted to get your POV.

@johnmu.com during a site migration, if the final redirect URL for a user contains a parameter that allows us displays special messaging like a modal that tells them they are being redirected. At the same time we are serving redirects to bots to non-parameter versions. Will this cause issues?

Thank you for your feedback!

@johnmu.com Will this markup work for products in a unauthenticated view in where the price is not available to users and they will need to login (authenticate) to view the pricing information on their end? Let me know your thoughts. web.archive.org/web/20240601...

@johnmu.com If a promotional banner is above the main navigation consistently across the website will Googlebot see it as part of the MainNav or will be able to differentiate it as not part of the MainNav? For example, Bose's website has this banner that follows you around:

@johnmu.com I saw this canonical setup the other day. Is it still valid for Googlebots? <link rel="canonical" href="about:blank"> , which I think it basically means that there is no canonical tag for the page.

Yeah, I looked into that too but GSC doesn't provide where it's being referred from internally, which makes me believe that they are being picked up from an another domain. I tired to run a 3rd party tool to see if there are any backlinks coming from any domains and still no luck.

Thanks for the feedback, I'll try these disallows to see if it has any effect. Also, despite the these URLs being long, I'm seeing thousands of them being discovered within the past couple of weeks. I'm hoping to fix this issue before it becomes a bigger issues down the line.

Apologies for that, those pictures came out really grainy, especially when you view them on a mobile device. The dark screenshot is showing the disallow should work in the robots.txt. The 2nd one shows GSC fetching the robots.txt. The 3rd shows that the related URLs are still being crawled.

@johnmu.com thanks for the feedback! I wasn't able to find a tester within GSC. However, there is a robots.txt report under settings. I did use an alternative tester, technicalseo.com/tools/robots.... It shows that the targeted pages should be blocked. Below are results from the tester & GSC reports

For added context, the meta robots is setup as 'noindex, follow'

As I dug deeper, I'm noticing that a handful of these pages that should be blocked are being blocked via robots.txt, the only difference is that they do not have the meta robots 'noindex' directive in place.

@johnmu.com Does Google favor the meta robots tag over the robots.txt tag in certain conditions? The reason I'm asking is because I'm noticing pages being crawled that contain a 'noindex' directive, despite having a disallow directive in the robots.txt.

@johnmu.com when blocking specific URLs via robots.txt that contain text strings like ?q=:

Will it make sense to display the directive in a percent encoded format? For example, in this case, it would be encoded as the following in the robots.txt file: %3Fq%3D%3A

@johnmu.com I've submitted a XML sitemap file with multiple sitemaps via GSC. Google was able to read the XML file but couldn't fetch the multiple sitemap files. I've read in several forums that this is may be a bug or Google's way of saying that it hasn't crawled it yet. Any thoughts?

Thank you for your response!

@johnmu.com I'm currently working with a ecommerce website's product schema but the challenge I'm facing is that their products pricing is only available once users are able to log in to their account or get that info upon request. Is there a way to provide valid product schema in this scenario?