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I'm sure there's folks on both sides but giving my opinion, provided that the redirects are (as you say) directing visitors tot he right page then I'd just do them all at once. Right now they're being picked up as dead links, you're just fixing that not gaming the system.
One could ask WWGD? Redirecting serves the visitor better so Google would say it's best to redirect them than leave them floundering on a 404 page. In this case I have to agree.
Great great question.
From my experience you'll be looking at a roughly 2 to 8 week hit in rankings. I know that's a wide margin but it depends on more than just the single redirection of your homepage on the city domains to the city page on the global domain but also includes the content and of course the internal links. You'll want to insure that you move any content that's attracting traffic, social signals or links and also redirect the pages with links or traffic to the appropriate page on the new domain.
Past that it's really just a matter of waiting and trying not to chew your nails off.
I wish you luck, that's a hard call to make but I think you're making the right one.
Regards.
Dave
It's always important to remember that every scenario is a bit different and that the title tag rules outlined by Moz are meant to be guidelines as opposed to gospel. There are times when the title may have to extend past the recommended character count though it's also important to remember that Google uses pixels as opposed to characters so some titles can have more characters than others.
Dr. Pete (from Moz himself) created a great tool at https://moz.com/blog/new-title-tag-guidelines-preview-tool that you can use to test titles. Whenever I hit one that needs to extend past the visual I like to use the tool to make sure that at least my marketing message is presented properly.
I'd personally focus on clicks and that might be something you want to dig in to. While your rankings went down it may be worth checking if your clickthroughs for a query to that page went up as a percentage of what would be expected given your position. If they did then you'll want to look at ways to boost your rankings with the given titles so when you do recover you recover with a higher clickthrough rate, if not then you may want to run some limited tests on some products to see what happens if you extend the titles back to what they were. I mention this to insure that there wasn't a coincidence issue occurring where your rankings dropped due to an update that was poorly timed with the title changes. It would be wise to look through your analytics, find the time of the drop and compare that with the algo change history page (also kept up-to-date by Dr. Pete ... busy guy) to help safeguard against reacting to the wrong issue.
I personally don't have a big issue with some limited keyword duplication provided it still reads right. I don't like what your competitor's title is but then ... I don't have to - only the searcher does. 
If it's not an urgent issue ... install analytics now and collect data for a month or two. You'll also want to install Search Console. Basically, if the pages have incoming links or traffic you'll obviously want to move them but if not and they're low quality they should probably be left behind.
The unofficial best practice is 100 as the upper limit but in the end I'd try to think of it more from the context of how the weight passes between pages and how you want the engines and users to prioritize your content.
I actually wrote an article on this exact subject some time ago on Search Engine Watch where I show the math and how site structures to pass weight differently. That's probably a better answer that a flat number without reason so if you're interested you can see how the weight flows with diagrams at http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2179376/internal-linking-promote-keyword-clusters.
Hope that helps and let me know if you have any questions.
You're certainly not the only one dealing with that issue.
Fortunately it doesn't negatively impact your rankings but it sure does mess with Analytics.
Jared Gardner did a great post on just this subject that covers why it exists and more importantly, how you can block it right here on the Moz site at https://moz.com/blog/how-to-stop-spam-bots-from-ruining-your-analytics-referral-data
And it's probably good to know too that if it's the subject of that type of article ... you're not alone. You know ... because misery loves company.
Hope that helps !
You're bringing up a subject that's much disputed in the SEO community as I'm sure you well know. I note this so you'll take my answer as educated opinion rather than fact. Before we get into the exact question you're answering it's worth noting a hangout recently in which John Mueller answers a different but related question. In the hangout he was asked whether Google uses onsite user actions as a factor. His answer was "no" and noted that he doesn't believe they know what people are doing in the context of filling out a form or making a purchase and that it's not used as a ranking factor. Conversion and goal tracking aside I choose to believe him as factoring this in would force Google to compare apples and oranges with sites that use Google Analytics sending different signals than those that do not. The reason I mention this is that while he answered that questions and I believe he did so honestly, there's a bigger point in there that ties to your question. So let's get to that ...
Does Google Use Clickthrough Rates?
To answer this we have to answer two things ...
1 - can clickthrough rates provide a positive signal on a site's likelihood in addressing the searchers need, and
2 - can this create false positives?
The answer to both of these questions is "yes". If a site appears in the search results and is clicked by a user that is a signal that the site likely matches the users need. If I searched for "blue widgets" and a site with a title like "Exclusively Red Widgets | OnlyRedWidgets.com" appeared in the results then it would likely have a low clickthrough rate and that can be used as a signal. The signal shouldn't count as an overall quality-of-site signal, just a signal based on that specific query as the site might be a great supplier of red widgets. Now, this leads us to the second question, can it give false positives?
Let's image that red widget site used the title "Red & Blue Widgets Galore" but still only sold red widgets. This is where functions to address the second question would be necessary and that is tracking the user's site behavior. Since John has said they don't do that in Analytics or, by extension, Chrome, etc. use (and again - I believe him) then we have to look to Google themselves. We can see in the SERP URLs themselves that Google is tracking which sites get clicks. Past that they also know (just like you or I do) when that user is back at Google. So while they may not be tracking the users behavior on a specific site for the SERPs it's certainly possible (dare I say "probable") that they are tracking the time from the click to the site to the searcher's next appearance at Google. Whether said searcher has remained on your site or simply read a blog post there and followed a link to a different article is irrelevant, they have found what they wanted.
What I see is four core scenarios:
1 - the user clicks a link in the SERPs and returns quickly to Google and selects another site under the same query. This would be a negative relevancy signal.
2 - the user clicks a link in the SERPs and after a good deal of time returns to Google and selects another site under the same query. This would indicate a positive experience where the user was simply seeking additional information or options.
3 - the user clicks a link in the SERPs and after either a short or long period of time returns to Google and adjusts their query to a related but different one. This would indicate the user needs to refine their search to find what they want and send neither a positive nor negative signal.
4 - the user clicks a link in the SERPs and after either a short or long period of time returns to Google and adjusts their query to a completely unrelated one. This would indicate the user found what they were looking for and has moved on to another task sending a positive signal.
So to your question, I believe the answer is a conditional "yes". Clickthroughs can send a positive signal to Google however that requires that the user found what they wanted to boost the relevancy for that phrase.
The real perk here is this, whether you believe this explanation or not (and again - this is opinion) the actions you need to take are the same. Regardless of whether clickthroughs or even onsite time are a ranking signal the purpose of your site is to attract clicks and satisfy the users so the actions you need to take are the same regardless. One has to love those types of scenarios.
Might be my favorite answer of all time.
I haven't tried All-In-One (though I now plan to) but I have found success with Schema Creator by Raven.
Totally agree with Daniel on Breadcrumb NavXT.
As an SEo I never do it but that's more to the question, do I want to say, "Hey Google, here's a site that's been SEO'd." From the perspective of a web designer simply taking credit for their work, I've only seen it cause issues recently if they're followed links and anchor heavy. From my experience, branded links seem to work fine but mix it up.
That said, who knows what's coming. If you want to play it safe - nofollow is the way to go. But then, you probably knew that.
Already answered repeatedly but piping in just to lend even more support to the consensus.
Hey Scott.
I'd avoid it for two reasons:
1 - you'd have to be careful to avoid ranking for the same term so it's not viewed as spam, and
2 - you'd have to split your resources.
It can take a lot of work to rank, even for local phrases. A lot of that work is external - citations, links, etc. All of that will have to be duplicated. Time that would be better used building out the office section of the site and focusing just on links and citations around business services to that section and starting off ahead due to the weight carried by the primary domain.
Obviously the answer may differ based on the real scenario - there are cases for multiple sites but that's in very specific cases like Search Engine Land having a different site for their conference - basically where there are two completely different offering and user intents.
If your current site is secure and you want to redirect to the new one then yes, you'll need to keep your SSL cert. If you don't you'll get a certificate error and the redirection will hit that snag and perhaps worse, the link weight will hit the same one. Someone linking to the non-https page will redirect but the https will generate the issue. Annoying I know ... now you get to pay for two certificates.
If anyone else knows a way around this I haven't thought of I'd love to hear it but I had to deal with this a few months back and the only solution was to setup the old domain with it's own hosting and certificate and deal with the redirections at that level.
I'd take a slightly different approach to solving your issue though blocking the pages will work. My only concern with doing that is that if you do any weight to that page will evaporate from your site as opposed to being passed back internally. You won't be finding the pages in Wordpress as they're auto-generated and I'm guessing there's only one author which is why the author archive would be the same as the general archive.
Assuming you're using Yoast you can remedy the issue by simply going to the Titles & Metas area, selecting the "Archives" tab and check the box next to "Add noindex, follow to the author archives". This will allow the PageRank to pass but the page won't be indexed as duplicate content. There are other types of pages int eh same area you can do the same thing for.
As an aside, you should change your username. From the example you've given I'm assuming you've left the user as "admin". Since that's the default for Wordpress it makes it easier for attacks to brute-force their way in as they already have the username. This can be done via phpMyAdmin to just change it but if you're not comfortable in there you can simply create a different user with Admin privileges and delete the old "admin" making sure to attribute all posts and pages to the new user.
I shouldn't have to say this but just in case something goes wrong BE SURE TO BACK UP YOUR DATABASE !
I agree with Kashif. Another option would be to block the cart in the robots or canonical all cart pages back to the root (/cart/ not your homepage) if the root of the cart is an actual page you want crawled.
Question one might be - why is Google deciding that's the most important information on the page? If you have a well-worded description tag and quality content, what is missing from what you're doing that this donations area is what they're grabbing onto?
Generally I've found that if the wrong information is being displayed as a description int he SERPs, it's generally a shortcoming in the description tag or content.
Assuming that's all working, heck you could use something as simple as an iframe to "hide" the content. Technically Google can crawl iframe data but I'd bet dollars to doughnuts (whatever that means) that if you did this it certainly wouldn't show up in your description tag. The perk to this being, it is kinda-crawlable so it's not "hidden".
I hit a similar issue with a client once. A completely legitimate second business running out of the same address as the first. We simply set the second one as "Unit B" and mentioned to the letter carrier that there would be mail delivered there. As long as you've been nice to them and given them a nice Christmas card they'll probably do you the favor of delivering the Suite B verification card.
Not the whitest of hat things to do technically probably but ethically they were 2 registered and visited business and it wasn't their fault they both were run out of the same location so I didn't personally have an issue with it.
Sorry about that code. Ordinarily I'd have had a chance to test it but didn't have a test site ready for that type of testing.
Thinking about it further, an actual redirect won't work due challenge/response on the certificate not being installed. If you load the site in a new browser you'll see what I'm talking about.
If the site were mine (or a clients of course) I'd recommend getting a certificate setup and redirecting the whole thing to HTTPS now. If you don't want to do that the certificate will at least light up the HTTPS site directly (i.e. without the insecure warning) which will allow it to be redirected properly.
That said ... you do have the canonical tags on the pages properly so a duplicate content warning will be a false positive in that the content is indeed duplicated but Google knows that the HTTPS is the primary source as far as I can tell. Your site is going into a redirect loop on HTTPS so I can't double check but it appears as though it should from the way it's displaying in the source. Happy to double check after the loop is corrected.
Dave
Hey Karl, Dave here.
As I'm sure you can imagine, it's pretty tough to get a feel for the issue without more info. If you'd like to PM me the URL I'm happy to take a quick look. I may respond back here to help others but I won't list off any details that could be considered proprietary or confidential.
Cheers !
Dave
If I had to place my money of what would happen next from what I've seen int he past I would put it on one of two things assuming you are 301 redirecting to the new homepage:
1 - Nothing. Penalty passes instantly or is already assigned to the domain which was part of what the focus of Penguin 2.1 was about. Matt Cutts, discussing this update said:
"The previous iteration of Penguin would essentially only look at the home page of a site. The newer generation of Penguin goes much deeper and has a really big impact in certain small areas."
or ...
2 - Google gets tricked and passes the weight but not the penalty. In this event the rankings will likely last somewhere between 1 and 3 weeks before the penalty follows. I've seen this happen as well but mainly in cases where the penalty was an "unnatural links" warning.
Google luck and if you go for it, I'd love to hear how it turns out.
Back in 2007 Matt Cutts announced at Pubcon that sub-domains and folders were to be treated the same. Of course, that didn't exactly happen as it was supposed to but the principle is sound. If what you're worried about is how weight is passing then it's pretty much a level field where you're left to chose the one that makes the most sense for your backend. I personally tend to lean on sub-directories whenever possible for predictability and simplicity.
I will note that I have quite recently seen penalties against a sub-domain on a large-scale site affect the rankings on the domain as a whole so there's definitely crossover in domain authority and trust.
The quickest answer to your question is, yes the domain will benefit from the sub-domain. But it's probably still easier to use a folder.
Good luck and hope it works out as well for you as it should.
When I visit https://www.kimwist.com/ it's spinning into a loop and doesn't display the site. You can check it at http://www.redirect-checker.org/ and see what I'm talking about. It looks like it's 301ing to itself. I'm wondering if you've set a redirection to go to https that's trying to do it if the URL itself is https in which case you'd want to switch it to point to http.
I'm always hesitant to switch domains and you do have some good links in there that would be a shame to lose. If you have a manual penalty (which i assume you don't) then it might be something to consider (though still not my favorite path) but with just an algorithmic kick in the butt I'd audit the links, disavow the low quality ones and build up from there.
As a warning I'm sure you're aware of, when you disavow the bad links you'll likely be disavowing links that are actually passing weight currently. The site might see a small drop in rankings after but that's better than a massive drop with the next Penguin update.
I suppose that technically if you really wanted to come clean you could ask the currently linking domains to remove their links since the subject of the site has changed. Those that don't, you could disavow.
I'm not saying to do that or not, and I don't know if I know anyone who would but it's an option.
I have to agree with Oleg in going one-to-one redirects of any pages with links or incoming traffic. Most hosting plans will let you have multiple domains so setup the one you're "not using" and just one-to-one them in the htaccess file. Remember - it doesn't need to be every page on the site, just the pages with links or entry traffic.
Speaking on links, when you're choosing the domain to use as the primary I'd be sure to very strongly consider which one has the best link profile. A bit is lost in a 301 so better not to lose that.
I'd be interested in hearing what someone else has to say about the way the canonicals are coded. You're doing yours similar to the way I do DNS Prefetching with the double slash to start the URL:
It works fine with prefetching as all the browser needs to do is find the IP of the domain but I'm not sure here how it'll handle sub-directories including www and I hate variables even when they're "it should work". The more common way to canonicalize your secured page would be:
/>
I'd be interested to hear if anyone has any direct experience with this but at the core of technical SEO issues I always lean to "most common usage" and "how Google shows it in their examples" just to make sure there is minimal chance of hiccups or issues.
That aside though, the developer is right though I'd always still prefer to just see the pages at a single URL. Since that can't be done however ... canonicals are the way to go.
A 200 is perfect (it just means "OK"). I double-checked and your canonicals' are pointing to the http version which is also what you want if you're not doing a 301. Some tools will still show a duplication even with the canonicals but rest assured ... Google knows what's what.
Best of luck to you as you proceed forward and glad it worked out.
Regards.
Dave
It seems to me that this is more just decent SEO getting rewarded over time. Knowing when your site jumped up would help though.
Penguin 2.1 has taken place since then (on October 6th). If you're still in Google's dog house then it's a matter of not doing enough or not doing it they way they wanted you to. Or that wasn't the issue.
I have seen a number of cases where people believe they have been penalized when in fact their links have only been devalued. This leads to a scenario where they spend gobs of time getting links removed and submitting disavow lists without effect when the real issue was that the links they had held less value and what they should have been doing was building high quality links instead.
Eric Ward did a good Hangout last Friday and gave them the nod too. the full 1hr 48min is at but but the short answer matches the answers above. If it makes sense for your user, it makes sense for Google. I think I hear Matt say that once or twice too. 
Via Search Console try to "Fetch As Google" and assuming that works without errors use the submit function. You'll know very quickly whether you've got technical issues and get the page into the index very quickly.
One can never write off an algo change of course (especially given that there were 3 Panda updates from late August though September) but if so it was probably a case of you having good content (congrats) and solid links from domains that held their value through the updates and being rewarded during this period via the decline of others.
Or one could simply say, "We have good content and links from good sites so our rankings improved."
Manual actions aren't update based, they happen on an ongoing basis when someone at Google looks at the site and decides it's in violation of their guidelines.
Good luck !
Authorship and publisher are different things. the author tag tells Google who wrote a piece, the publisher tag tells Google who owns the site and it only needs to be put on the homepage (as far as I know ... anyone have any different feedback?)
You can read about the difference at http://www.websitemagazine.com/content/blogs/posts/archive/2013/02/05/the-difference-between-rel-author-amp-rel-publisher.aspx in more detail but in short ... they don't do the same thing and I don't think the publisher tag is going to do what you want it to.
Hope that helps !
Which manual action notice did you get? I'm assuming from what you noted that it's the user-generated spam notice but thought it better to check before replying. The only other one I can guess might apply was the unnatural links penalty. If it was the unnatural link penalty then you'll have to wait for the next Penguin update but if you can confirm the penalty I'm happy to look into it further.
Regards.
Dave
There's basically two ways to look at it and John is right - testing is key.
Getting new business is critical obviously and if they're not yet bidding on your brand then I'd focus there BUT it's worse to pay for that first click and then lose the visitor when they find a competitor on the second query. So if your competitors are bidding on your brand you need to grab it, the cost per click is less and you can't afford to lose the conversion after you're paid for the first click but you of course don't want to use some of the limited budget on a second click if you could have had it organically.
Then there comes the discussion over the cost to monitor competitor activities vs the cost of just bidding on the brand. If it costs more to manage it and monitor then just bidding would be the way to go obviously.
Worse case you can test bidding on your brand and monitor the assisted conversions to see how that works out for you.
They will recrawl it but equally important is that traffic following links to your site will get where they're supposed to go. A good rule of thumb with search engines as well as humans ... it's never too late to do the right thing.
(Of course, with a Penguin penalty you might go bankrupt before they get around to rewarding you for good behavior)
Hope that helps !
Good point. I've taken that approach that if I use it well, it'll work well and until it's replaced and not working - will continue to.
But as with all things SEO ... one always needs to pay attention to what's going on around you.
Hi galwaygirl.
I'm going to be PMing you my thoughts as I've taken a bit of a peek at your backlink profile and my advice is specific only to your scenario and might be taken wrong and applied to others incorrectly if anyone else read it.
Dave
Hello Lydia.
First - I don't recommend it in general but it does work to a degree. It used to work better.
The idea is that if you link to a page dedicated to a subject and cram enough instances of that phrase onto the page (such as in a product list as in your example) that the page will rank for at least longtail versions of those queries.
In the example you sent it likely does work to some degree but that's because they're a fairly strong site. Nonetheless they probably saw their search volume decline as of late as it's pretty thin content. Focus on this type of strategy and you're basically asking for trouble.
If you stick to creating good content people want to link to and work hard to get people to find it and link to it in the first place (pretty necessary) you'll do far better overall. If you want to rank for longtail phrases - build real pages on the subject. Sure you can mention and link to products but provide some value for readers - not just a product list.
And of course ... GOOD LUCK !
Always a good rule of thumb to follow Josh's advice here. If Google gives you an opportunity to give them more info about your business or site ... drink the Kool-Aid and do it.
I've always used it as a "this person is responsible for this content" which helps clarify things. Yes having an author deemed an authority helps of course but on the other side, they'll never be an authority if they don't start somewhere and your own blog is a good spot to work from as a starting point.
Re: taking inspiration from the work of others, as long as that person or work is getting credit for it (i.e. stat sources noted, etc.) then there's nothing wrong with it. That author write that piece so they get the credit. the author of the stats (for example) will get the credit for their work on their own site (re: authorship).
This is of course opinion as content ownership has a whack of grey areas but if you know your sector, what you can and can't ethically do, and properly credit your sources in the post - you shouldn't have any problems.
Provided that there are no links to http://clientname.com/products/ and obviously it's not part of the breadcrumbs you're fine though you may want to consider adding these pages to give you a point to all products (of a list of categories of products), etc.
But no ... the structure itself isn't inherently going to cause problems.
What you're referring to was discussed by John Mueller a while back and Andy's right ... it's devalued.
You can read a bit about what John said or listen to it yourself at https://www.seroundtable.com/google-hidden-content-tabs-19534.html.
Cheers.
I'm pretty sure I've seen something like this but obviously not sure the exact details. Do you mind PMing me the competitor and the query so I can take a peek? I don't need to know the client.