Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Firstly I cannot actually think of any legitimate reason for hiding or making a category invisible, however if you had one that means you don’t want the content to be indexed then you would be best blocking that Category within your robots.txt file.

If it is for any other reason and the content is indexable by ANY search engine not just Google then you run the risk of being penalised.

In fact, Google’s guidelines state that, “hiding text or links in your content to manipulate Google’s search rankings can be seen as deceptive and is a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines

There is a first rate post on this subject here that could explain this far better than most of us could.

https://moz.com/learn/seo/page-authority

Hope this helps.

Andy

Would agree with Silkstream on this one, this app used to be called Just Unfollow so you have probably heard of it before, it is quick to setup and easy to use allowing you to search on various aspects as described above.

Definitely a useful tool to have in your arsenal.

We had a similar thing happen with a client a while ago and it was to do with point 3 as mentioned by Tom, it turned out that the site had been hacked and had some very adverse and unwanted links added to the footer that were invisible to the naked eye or by searching the code.

We were recommended a little plugin for chrome called User Agent Switcher which identified and revealed these hidden links on the site, once they were dealt with the site recovered to where it was previously.

Hi Tom

Agree with Martijn that it depends for example, the robots.txt is generally the first port of call for bots as it allows them to understand where you want them to spend their finite time crawling your site. You can aslo give direction to all bots at once or specify a subset. It is generally the best option for blocking pages such as you /cart/ etc were they don't need crawling.

The problem with robots.txt is that it doesn't always keep pages from being indexed especially if there are other external sources linking to the pages in question.

The meta tag noindex on the other hand can be applied to individual pages and you are actually commanding the robots to NOT Index the relevant page in serps, use this option if you have pages you don't want appearing in Google (or other search engines) but the page may still be relevant for authority or able to acquire links (make sure to use Noindex follow) as you still want the robots to crawl the page. Otherwise use Noindex Nofollow hope that this helps.

Hi Tymen

It's not really my area of expertise but I have read a really good article on Moz about 'Enabling https without sacrificing your Web Performance' by Billy Hoffman that may be of some assistance.

https://moz.com/blog/enabling-https-without-sacrificing-web-performance

Hope it helps and good luck with improving things to your satisfaction.

Andy

I have checked all of the urls that you have added in your question above and I can confirm that they are all clean and green according to the Structured Data Testing Tool as highlighted by Dirk above https://developers.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/ so not sure what the SEO Company is looking at.

Just as an update to where we was with this I have seen this article this morning where many others are seeing significant activity around the 20th 21st but still doesn't appear to be clear what is causing this.

Still it is an interesting read and update.

http://searchengineland.com/google-update-their-ranking-algorithms-some-webmasters-believe-so-234185

Hope it helps

Hi

You will certainly have to update your profile in Search Console (Webmaster Tools) on both Google and Bing, most modern analytics can handle https without any change but if you have older code on the site you may have to update the script.

There is a really good post on switching to https here on the Moz blog that may help with other considerations you may have forgotten to check.

https://moz.com/blog/seo-tips-https-ssl

Hope this helps

Andy

There are quite a few tool out there that can assist with finding trending content but a few that we have used in the past or still use are:

Buzz Feed: Can be a bit annoying at times but the editorial staff do try and stay on top of trending news.

BuzzSumo: Is another good one especially for looking at what content has done well in the past year.

Google Trends: Which we find is invaluable for tracking trends and content across the internet and too be fair is an undervalued and underrated tool.

You might also want to take a look at such things as Reddit.

Hope this helps and good luck with your search.

Have always found Cognitive SEO to be a reliable and very indepth tool for this kind of work, it is a paid for model but you can have a free trial to see if it will do what you need it to.

There is a great article on Link Audits here as well https://moz.com/blog/link-audit-guide-for-effective-link-removals-risk-mitigation

Even though the products are identical in what they do I would still go down the route of having a separate page for each. We have a client that sells many flea products but have still managed to give them unique product descriptions.

If you are concerned about keyword cannibalisation make the focus for the manufacturer on their brand name rather than the product or what it does.

Hi Radi

No I don't believe any of the above tools do what you are looking for, not sure if there is anything that will do exactly what you want anymore, there used to be many tools that did this like 'Its Trending' but most of these are no longer available.

Maybe some of the Social Monitoring/Listening Tools will do what you need, hope you find a solution and would be interested to know if you do.

Andrew

I wouldn't particularly class it as thin content but it is almost certainly going to be classed as near duplicate content as the pages only vary by a small amount on each one, even though your descriptions appear varied and well written.

It may be better in this instance to focus on one of the pages as the main page and then canonical or no-index the others.

Andy

Hi Davit

If as you say you would not get anything from this mention in the way of a paying customer because as you say in your own words 'her audience is not our target customer' I would have to ask yourself if her audience is not relevant how would Google see the relevance of a mention to your site in her blog etc.

Are all the other posts on her blog in a similar vein or is she a genuine blogger discussing a particular topic consistently, if its the former then I probably wouldn't bother.

Hope this helps.