Dan the rule of thumb is if the text is readable and not purposelessly hidden then you're safe. The operative word there is purposelessly.

I will also add that in general crawlers are not going to find these types of problems rather they are reported by users or more often than not your competition. From there search engines may have a human evaluate the report and make a manual ruling.

Hi,

I checked the business name and got your homepage as first result here from Dayton, OH, USA. See image attached. It would be hard for us to diagnose other keywords without knowing what they are. Though I understand why you may not want to list them.

One thing you may also want to try is using private browsing to check search results. I would also highly recommend if you haven't already is to create a campaign here at moz and use the analytics tool as it will not only tell you the rank for the keyword but also the URL associated with it. (see second image for example).

Hope that helps,

Don

WMvVUWo f7xPoRK

Yes Dan something like that could get reported. You should do your best not to have this happen, mostly on a large scale, a single incident would likely be ignored.

Google and search engines in general will treat the title as what it sees when indexing the page. There is nothing wrong with changing titles (people do it all the time for testing and optimization) however it isn't ideal to have one page with a dynamic title. By having one page with a dynamic title you are really just confusing search engines, they will have a hard time trying to serve their result page (SERP).

The way us web builders handle the situation you are in is by using parameters. Example:

examplesite.com?state=OH
examplesite.com?state=CO
examplesite.com?state=AZ

These are in essence 3 different pages which would be treated as such for indexing purposes,  content wise it may all be the same but changes with parameters on your index.html / asp / php page. Since you must be using parameters to serve a dynamic title why not include some dynamic content and rank for 3 pages?

Hope it helps,

Don

Hi Simon

BobGW last a very similar question last week in which elicited some nice responses from the community.

My advice is it is not hurtful to follow link them as long as we talking a few sites, but I would not do it site-wide like in the footer. Rather an example of a site we own which only links to the family sites on 1 page (where it made the most sense).

Hope that helps,

Don

404 would make sense only if we were referring to what you were searching for. Basically 404 says this page is not found, but could be found again later...

In this sense we are talking about the webpage not the product being searched for, which is what response codes are all about. So a 200 response would be correct, the page is there, the results are null.

Does that make sense?

I have not seen any guidelines laid out. It is important to note that

<aside>tag is a HTML 5 element and as such highly likely every crawler will handle it differently. The purpose to the best of my understanding is to tell the crawlers this content is not exactly what my page is about, allowing for places on the site the owner can advertise or cross link similar but necessarily different content. Which if I understand it correctly gives every crawler / bot  the perfect way to weight the

<aside>tag differently in their algorithms.

Maybe Dr. Pete will run a test on Moz for us.

Here is a good little read on the aside tag: http://www.html-5-tutorial.com/aside-element.htm

</aside>

</aside>