For the month of December, we attended and are overviewing in this post English Google SEO office-hours from December 31, 2021. Refer to the Google SEO Office Hours blog series post overview for more information on Google SEO office hours.
And, as always, if you’re looking to improve your small business’s SEO strategy, we’d be happy to talk. You can contact Josh Hiemstra, SEO & Data Lead, at (616) 822-3706 or josh@simplersite.co.
We have pages that are indexed properly in Google Search Console, however we are unable to find the cache page on Google Search.
The cache pages are handled separately then the indexed pages in Google Search. It can happen that there can be an indexed page that do not have a cached page. This is not a sign of a problem, as this is essentially how the systems work.
Can a poor translation of a new language version negatively affect the SEO ranking for the original page of the main language version?
The short answer is yes it can negatively affect the SEO rankings of the main language version. This is due to Google Search looking at the overall quality of the website. If the website has significant portions that are lower quality, it doesn’t matter why they are lower quality, Google Search will think the overall website is not great. This can have effects throughout the entire website.
How does Google Search determine if a site has low quality translations of text?
Google Search doesn’t have a way to understand the quality of the translation. Google Search is more looking at the overall quality of the website. Google Search doesn’t have a checklist like “if there are 5 misspelled words, then this is a sign of low quality”.
I have pages on my site that we determined to be no index. For these no index pages, we are getting backlinks from other sites to these pages. Should we 301 redirect to an indexed page?
The best approach for this situation would be to set up a rel canonical to an indexed page, not a 301 redirect.
I have an ecommerce website where multiple products are similar. Is it better to have unique descriptions for each product or high quality description for each product that could be determined as duplicate by Google Search?
Google Search would see descriptions as duplicate content if this is the way it was set up. Google Search would not demote a website because of this duplicate content.
The item to note is that if you do not have any text that covers the elements of your products that make them unique, it makes it very difficult for Google Search to show these individual pages on Google Search.
Generally, it is fine to have similar descriptions for multiple products. What is needed in the text descriptions for the different products is what makes the product unique compared to the other products.
