My website has links like:  &lt;a href="messages.aspx"&gt;Messages&lt;span&gt;3&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/a&gt;   Well google indexes these links as:  Messages3  I have read some articles for preventing google from indexing some parts of the website like  &lt;!--googleoff: index--&gt; &lt;!--googleon: index&gt;   tags but there are 2 problems:  1.This seems very odd to use lots of these tags and for a number       &lt;!--googleoff: index--&gt;       0     &lt;!--googleon: index&gt;   2.I want to know is there a way or a rule that would work for all search engines like bing and yahoo too.
4950
As a webmaster in charge of a tiny site that has a forum, I regularly receive complains from users that both the internal search engine and that external searches (like when using Google) are totally polluted by my users' signatures (they're using long signatures and that's part of the forum's experience because signatures makes a lot of sense in my forum).  So basically I'm seeing two options as of now:   Rendering the signature as a picture and when a user click on the "signature picture" it gets taken to a page that contains the real signature (with the links in the signature etc.) and that page is set as being non-crawlable by search engine spiders).  This would consume some bandwidth and need some work (because I'd need an HTML renderer producing the picture etc.) but obviously it would solve the issue (there are tiny gotchas in that the signature wouldn't respect the font/color scheme of the users but my users are very creative with their signatures anyway, using custom fonts/colors/size etc. so it's not that much of an issue). Marking every part of the webpage that contains a signature as being non-crawlable.   However I'm not sure about the later: is this something that can be done?  Can you just mark specific parts of a webpage as being non-crawlable?
55169
I built a site with Angular 10. When the home page is visited it reroutes to this /welcome. However There's no link to that from anywhere within the app, so I don't think Google has any way of indexing that page. What would be the best way of telling Google to index the page.  From my research it seems I could do something like this: &lt;body&gt;   &lt;a class=&quot;hidden&quot; href=&quot;/welcome&quot; title=&quot;Welcome to example.com&quot;&gt;Welcome to Example!&lt;/a&gt;   &lt;app-root&gt;&lt;/app-root&gt; &lt;/body&gt;  What is the max number of links that this would work with and any other approaches?
103666
I know that Google has a duplicate content penalty for text, such as articles, etc.  However, does Google apply this penalty to two identical designs, such as templates?  I'm guessing that Google only cares about the content and not the internal markup/structure that makes up a web page, right?
104371
I was doing a little cleanup in a tag recently, and was wanting to find any questions with only that tag, since that often means they weren't tagged very well and are in need of a few more.  Unfortunately, there was no good way in the advanced search to do this. You can exclude a specific tag, but there doesn't appear to be a way to exclude all but one (or a subset). Also, tags can't be quantified with a range operator like, for example, answers can (i.e. answers:3 for all questions with 3 or more answers).  Is there a way to do this with the current search that I've overlooked? If not, could a tags:N search option be added to narrow down the search based on the number of tags a question has?
108707
You can search for anything on Google, right? At least, so I thought. I was trying to see how the special characters get encoded in the url, like how &amp; gets converted to %26. I started searching for *. It did not get encoded, but weirdly google didn't tell me that it was an asterisk symbol. All other search engines (yahoo, bing, duckduckgo) did.   See for yourself : . Basically it treats it as a regular expression. So *+* will also not give any results. Still, shouldn't Google at least say that * is the asterisk symbol.  I don't know where else to ask this question, so I came to SO.
82481
Can I use:  &lt;link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="?l=en" /&gt;   to link pages with different languages for SEO (recommended for )? Can that URL be relative as in the example above, or does it have to be full (start with http://example.com)?
38513
Several of my site's pages are appearing in search results with [Translate this page] next to it. When I click that it takes me to Google Translate and translates my page "from Catalan to English".  The pages are in English but have a couple of foreign words (actually Japanese romanisations, not Catalan) that appear to be tripping Google up.  A few weeks ago I set the html tag to &lt;html lang="en"&gt; which from research appears to be the best method to specify the language of a document. Google has cached the pages with this attribute but it is still offering to translate.  More research led me to a "notranslate" attribute which prevents translation entirely: &lt;html lang="en" class="notranslate"&gt;. The problem now is users cannot translate from English to their desired language!  Are there any other solutions that force Google to parse my site as English only?
85460
For example, in the past, links to www.example.com wouldn't have meant Google would pass any value to say, forum.example.com. What is the current status of this? (Please provide a reference if possible).
78508
I've been coding for a while and it's just struck me, what's better to use in terms of SEO:  &lt;b&gt;Hello&lt;/b&gt;   or  &lt;strong&gt;Hello&lt;/strong&gt;
27359
What approach should I take to make the website Google-friendly, .  The problem is that when a specific content is being requested (eg. ) user is taken to the page using scrollbar, though the surrounding content is still being loaded. How to tell Google that for this URL  only the #36 entry should be crawled.  Is there a tag or other way to select the surrounding content as irrelevant for the URL?
35989
I'm getting HREF no return errors in search console and I don't understand why.    We have a page that contains buttons for get multiple pages of results.  URL structure:  Base page: `https://example.com/XX/publications` Pagination of results: `?count=50&amp;page=4` Actual url: `https://example.com/au/publications?count=50&amp;page=4`   Source page:  &lt;link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/au/publications"&gt; &lt;link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-US" href="https://example.com/us/publications"&gt;   alternate page:  &lt;link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/au/publications"&gt; &lt;link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-AU" href="https://example.com/au/publications"&gt;   How can I tell Google that it should ignore the URL query parameters?
83832
As that title says, my website is being indexed by Google twice.  Both indexes have the right SEO information for the home page, such as title and description. However for the sublinks there are two versions, one version of the indexed site that has the correct sublinks and sublink information, and the other version that has all sublinks pointing to the home page with the format of these wrong sublinks being http://example.com/#random%20text  I have gone into webmasters and chosen my prefered domain, I have tried removing these wrong sublink pages, but due to redirecting to home, it stops home from being indexed, so I reverted this change, I have tried demoting the sublinks, it did not work, I've tried adding &lt;meta name="fragment" content="!"&gt; to my header, it did not work, I have tried disabling all plugins on WordPress to see if that was the reason, it was not.  I've everything I can think of and would really appreciate some help as to how I can stop Google indexing one version of my website with all the wrong sublinks.  If it's of any help, when I search for the business website name on Google as "businessexample" it shows the broken link index version, and when I search as "business example" it shows the correct version.  Update : Still not able to figure this out, any help is welcome.
84660
I did a search and i found a link to my site... twice. They are exactly the same except one is www and the other is static. How do i tell google to ignore everything in my static domain?
102545
How do tags influence Stack Exchange's ?  On  we've noticed we don't get as much traffic from Google as we would expect at this point.  One of the reasons we think this may occur is that our terms are often long, have ampersands, and otherwise don't match what people are searching on.  For example, "Dungeons &amp; Dragons Fourth Edition", "Dungeons &amp; Dragons Essentials", "Mutants &amp; Masterminds Second Edition" are common games. Our most active tag is dnd-4e.  This isn't a common search term in Google.  A much more common term is D&amp;D 4, or Dungeons and Dragons 4.  A search on dnd-4e has rpg.stackexchange.com questions pretty high in the list. But of course due to the 25-character limit and no special characters, our tagging options end up diverging from what people may search on.  In addition, people generally use the tags to avoid having to say all that stuff in their subject.  Do our tags have a lot of influence on how we're presented to Google? Should we be double-tagging items as e.g. [dungeons-and-dragons] and [dnd-4e] to try to get the SEO? Is there some other solution to this problem?  Our site gets some decent SEO but not near as much as it should be for the content on it (as compared to other RPG sites).
87007
I've been using the following line in the &lt;head&gt; of my sites for years:  &lt;meta name="revisit-after" content="3 days" /&gt;  I recently discovered that it's not one of  that Google understands, which I take to mean that there's no point in including it, and that it's been doing no good at all for years.  How often do search engines crawl a website by default, and what reliable ways are there to increase or decrease that frequency?
54158
Links in [link text][number] format don't work properly if they follow a tag using the new [tag:tagName] format. Here's the result of [tag:python] [gold badge page][1]:      [gold badge page]   Putting the tag inside the link is worse. Here's the result of [[meta-tag:bug] some text][2], where [2] is google.com:        The part of the link outside the tag just disappears silently.  EDIT: To be more precise, the entire link to [2] disappears. The markup that is produced contains (invalid) nested anchor tags, as shown here from Firefox's "View Source":  &lt;a href="http://google.com" rel="nofollow"&gt;&lt;a href="/questions/tagged/bug" class="post-tag required-tag" title="show questions tagged 'bug'" rel="tag"&gt;bug&lt;/a&gt; some text&lt;/a&gt;   So the tag is still a link, but it is a link to the tag page, which is the behavior it would have if the link to [2] didn't exist at all. The user's desired behavior in this case is... ambiguous, to be charitable.  EDIT 2: I briefly included markup from Firebug here, but it turned out to be irrelevant. It has now been removed to improve readability. See  if you're interested.
32464
I have some web pages that Google has indexed. I have now added a robots.txt file to exclude them, but should I also add a noindex tag? If so, then how do I do so?