Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hello Dan,

Playing with URl structure is considered as a risky business. It’s highly rewarding or disappointing. I personally do not want to change URL structure but as you said, No recent hits & ranking so its worth a try as there is nothing to lose.

There are many things to consider before you implement the changes which cannot be explained here (you can read on internet, which we SEO mostly do). As far as your questions are concerned:

**What do I need to keep in mind when deleting posts, categories, and tags - besides 410, Google URL removal? **

When you make a link 404,410 make sure, every internal anchor (pointed to 404) should be replaced with suitable link or removed.  There should be no reference of 404 link on website including sitemap, old navigation or images.

**What do I do with all the old posts that I am going to re-direct? Each post has between 10-15 internal links. I've started manually removing each link in old posts before 301'ing them. **

There is no need to replace the internal links of article which need to be redirected as they will be null and void (uncrawlable/ inaccessible) after redirection. But make sure every instance of internal link pointed to old url should point to new redirected Url (to keep things less messy and quick).

Best of luck

As per my experience, Google want to crawl each and everything which visitors are consuming. Showing different types of content for Google bot (or hide) and normal visitors termed as clocking. Google loves to penalize website using clocking practice.

So my Recommendation is to avoid hiding anything from Google & suggest you to use simple dev or html5 based website instead of JS to make Bots life bit easier.

On a side note, your website will not be rank if you hide the content.

Hi

I would not recommend adding utm in backlinks. You can track the traffic from Google analytics without adding utm.

But for some reason if you still want to add use Google search console to let Google know that it doesn’t change the content by going Crawl>> URL parameters>> (best thing I come up with but won’t recommend).

Hi Eroc,

I don’t see any value throwing review content by blocking in robots.txt, (no offence to IKEA ). I recommend to configure product pages as it won’t generate pagination issue for having too many reviews.

It can handled by loading all comments on same product page (till load time won’t hurt) and display to user in chunks (without changing the url). If your page support 50 reviews (without hurting load time) remove the “Add Review” button after 50 review’s so you won’t receive new review’s or add moderation  to simply chose which 50 comments you want to show because every review will not have same impact (and good enough to publish :P).

Hello Leana,

As you said both shops have different product description but adding more content is not a bad idea either.  Move the content of smallshop to relevant product pages of bigshop so that you won’t lose (do not replace just add) your quality.

2^nd, adding 301 in domain level seems to be logical to transfer full authority instead of some links from smallshop (or sitewide link).

It probably won’t affect badly if unique product information covers more content than those small reviews. I personally follow 80/20 rule here. If your product pages have unique engaging product information than you have no need to worry about.

During my audits I encountered 2 type of scenarios.

1. Product page have canned information. Content duplicated internally or manufacturer information which duplicated externally.
2. Some (rarely) store have unique product information.

In 1^st case good user reviews helps a lot to create new, informative & engaging content (add uniqueness in product pages).

In 2^nd having unique reviews is like cherry on cake, even small reviews won’t hurt.

This might help. https://www.hochmanconsultants.com/how-to-block-part-of-a-page-from-being-indexed-by-google-or-other-search-engines/ let me know if it doesn't work.

Hi

I would not recommend adding utm in backlinks. You can track the traffic from Google analytics without adding utm.

But for some reason if you still want to add use Google search console to let Google know that it doesn’t change the content by going Crawl>> URL parameters>> (best thing I come up with but won’t recommend).

This might help. https://www.hochmanconsultants.com/how-to-block-part-of-a-page-from-being-indexed-by-google-or-other-search-engines/ let me know if it doesn't work.

It probably won’t affect badly if unique product information covers more content than those small reviews. I personally follow 80/20 rule here. If your product pages have unique engaging product information than you have no need to worry about.

During my audits I encountered 2 type of scenarios.

1. Product page have canned information. Content duplicated internally or manufacturer information which duplicated externally.
2. Some (rarely) store have unique product information.

In 1^st case good user reviews helps a lot to create new, informative & engaging content (add uniqueness in product pages).

In 2^nd having unique reviews is like cherry on cake, even small reviews won’t hurt.

Hello Leana,

As you said both shops have different product description but adding more content is not a bad idea either.  Move the content of smallshop to relevant product pages of bigshop so that you won’t lose (do not replace just add) your quality.

2^nd, adding 301 in domain level seems to be logical to transfer full authority instead of some links from smallshop (or sitewide link).