Welcome to the Q&A Forum

1. Get connected

Make sure that you hook up GA to your profile, in addition to all of your social profiles.  This makes sure Moz can get all your data.  Also, be sure to make sure that your robots.txt does not have anything wonky in it that would stop Moz from getting a good crawl of your site.

2. Keywords

Put in the keywords you want to track so that you can start getting data on those as well.  If you are not sure where to start, they have tools and tutorials to help

3. Brand mentions / keyword monitoring

Set this up so you can start getting alerts on your brand and major key terms

4. Let everything run for about 1 week so you can get all of your data in.

5. Set a calendar or other reminder first think when you get into work on Friday to watch the latest Whiteboard Friday video (some of my favorite content on the site)

6. Set a schedule so that when you get email alerts from Moz you can do the following

a) See if you need to fix any technical seo items based on your Moz crawl

b) See if you have any link outreach opportunities based on your brand monitoring

c) Check any trends in ranking of your key pages

d) Start a regular audit of your most important pages for your most important keywords to see if you need to make any modifications to pages.

7. After about a month in, read everything you can get your hands on around Open Site Explorer.  Download the CSV that has your data and consider things like

a) Are there any bad links (links from sites with a high spam score) that I might need to disavow?

b) Are there any links that are no followed to my site that I could request to be changed to a follow?

c) What are my competitors doing and can I gain similar links?

d) Are there any new links that I need to reach out to those sites and say thanks to or otherwise network with?

8. When you have read everything about all the above or during any of the above points, feel free to search the QNA and or ask questions.   This list is just part of what you can do.

How do you eat an elephant?  One bite at a time.  CHOMP!

1. The site is ranking due to spammy links, this is why the site, despite having a "large" number of links has a low DA etc.

2. Why is it not hit with Penguin (corrected from Panda sorry typo)?  While Google is pretty good, it is not perfect.  People can still get away with this stuff (sad to say).  Also, Google does not roll out all updates to all countries that Google works in at the same time.  They have to account for things like differences in languages etc.  So, it could be possible that this site would not rank in Google US at this time, but maybe in other countries.

3. Word of advice.  Beggars can't be choosers.  Your question qualification of "expert answers only please", could be considered a little rude as most everyone on here is doing this for free and because they want to help other people in the community.  If you want expert advice only, then pay for a consultant, otherwise just be appreciative of the nice folks who are willing to chime in and hopefully point you in the right direction.

Cheers!

On page factors are just on page factors and while are important, are just one part of the ranking process.

I think of on page optimization as what, "gets you in the door" with Google/Bing/Etc.  If you get it wrong, then you may not get into the search engines to start with, or your ranking is much worse than should may be otherwise.

That said, just because you get on page optimization right, does not then automatically get you into the top 50 places for a keyword.

If it were that simple, then what would Google do with 100 pages that are focused on the same keywords that all got an A in onpage optimization?  How would  Google rank them as far as relevancy?

There are several hundred factors that come into play when getting a page to rank for a keyword.  What is the age of the page/domain?  Is this on a trusted domain? How many links are coming into that page?  Where are the links coming from?  What is the anchor text used on the link?  How many other pages are trying to rank for the same key words?  What are the link profiles for those pages?  etc. etc.

Take a look at the SEOmoz ranking factors article for more info

http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

Not to sound sarcastic, but congrats on getting an A for your on page factors!  Many people never get that far and have poor rankings due to things that could be easily fixed!

Look at your SEO checklist  http://www.seomoz.org/blog/an-seo-checklist-for-new-sites-whiteboard-friday and check that one off!  Onto other tasks!

Hello there!

When you read an IP address it is something like 45.452.456.77 - this is the actual "address" on the internet where your website lives.  It is like your phone number.   When you put a domain on top of it the domain "maps" to the IP, it is an alias (like speed dial), they type in the name and you are sent to the right number.

The IP address has sections separated by periods.  In my example above it would be aa.bbb.ccc.dd   The "C-block" (and dont confuse that when you are at a bar and your buddy cuts in on a conversation you might be having with a cute young lady), is the 3rd group of numbers in an IP address starting from the left, or in my example 456

Usually, when the "c-block" section of the IP address of two different websites is different, that means that the websites are hosted on separate servers.   Why does this matter?   It is very easy for sites to share an IP address or even to share C-blocks.   Kind of like houses.  You can share the same IP address, would be the equivalent of a lot of people in the same apartment complex, the street address is the same.   Having the same C-block is more like you live on the same street.  Having different C-blocks is like being on different streets, or even in different zip codes or cites etc.  Not a perfect analogy, but you get the idea.  Sites with different C-blocks are seen as more "separate" than those that share a c-block.

Why does this matter?

If you get a ton of links from sites that all share a c-block - it looks like a link farm or link scheme and Google may ignore those links or could penalize them for you.  Back in the day (not that I ever did this) you would setup a bunch of sites quickly and cheaply and they would share IPs or even be on the same c-block of IPs.   You could generate a bunch of links that way.  This was obviously spammy and Google cracked down.

Note that this could be one link per website linking to you, but if all the websites were in the same c-block it looks suspicious.

So, you can get links from the same c-block - it is not like an automatic penalty, but if ALL your links are from 1 or 2 c-blocks - it looks suspicious.  If you host websites that are truly different from each other, they all produce original content and it makes sense to cross link, I would talk to your hosting company and make sure that each site is on a separate c-block - just to be safe.  You could be "linking properly" from one site to the other, but the c-block issue could make your link pattern look suspicious.

Your host might say, "Well we cant control what IP we give you", blah blah blah.  They do use different ones over time.  What we have done is had one site setup on an IP, then wait a while (few months) then get a new IP for the next one etc.  Naturally over time, your host will be getting new IPs all the time and so you can work it that way.  You will need to update your DNS settings etc, so you need to be technically astute to change IPs, again if you think you need to (it may be that you do not).

Usually, worrying about c-blocks for links is not an issue assuming that you are getting links naturally, so this conversation may become old hat, but if you are hosting sites and linking them together, it is just something to consider.

One more, you can actually do a lookup of what sites share the same c-block.  If you find a bunch of p0rn sites on that c-block or other questionable sites, that could cause an issue with your site as you are seen in the same neighborhood.  Most hosts today you do not have to worry about and/or they keep those sites on separate blocks anyway, but just something to consider.

Answers

1. Not really.

2. Yes. Actually, competitors can just ignore your KW field and look at your title tag to see what you are focused on or see what you rank for. So the answer is actually No, or maybe sort of, but not really.

3. Like a red headed step child

Yahoo uses Bing results, Bing back in 2011 stated

http://searchengineland.com/the-meta-keywords-tag-lives-at-bing-why-only-spammers-should-use-it-96874

"Duane Forrester, senior product manager for Bing webmaster outreach, provided this advice about the tag: I’ll make this statement: meta keywords is a signal. One of roughly a thousand we analyze. Getting it right is a nice perk for us, but won’t rock your world. Abusing meta keywords can hurt you."

Cheers!

Looks like you are running Google Tag Manager on the page.  That is probably where it is being called from.  This is assuming you are seeing GA data coming in for this site on your reports.

Follow the directions for using the Chrome Developer Tools and you will see the GTM code firing.  These links will help

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1032399?hl=en

https://blog.kissmetrics.com/events-in-google-tag-manager/

Cheers!

Just some background on GA and bounce rate and time on page.      GA calculates time on page (using a default setup) by looking at the time between page loads.

If someone lands on your page (1 pageload) spends 20 min reading and then closes the browser you would have a visit with a single pageview but 0 time on page.  This is because there was not a second page load (say clicking to another page on your site) to calculate the difference.

There are a couple of issues here if you just consider time on page and time on site.  On a single page view visit, your time on site and time on page will be 0.   If someone visits 4 pages and spends 2 minutes on pages 1-3 but then finds the article they want on the 4th page and spends 20 min there.  Guess what?  You dont get any credit for the time spent on the most important and longest visited page - the 4th one.

Similarly, GA looks at bounces as single page view visits with 0 time.  Your bounce rate will be really high if you have a bunch of single page view visits, even if the visitor spends 20 min average on that page.

We had an issue like this and there is a way to look at this differently.

1. You can setup events on the page (scrolling down the page, hovering over a menu etc) and when those events are logged in GA, it signals the time difference and you get credit for time from the page load to the logged event.

2. You can setup an event "ping" that runs in the background.  As long as the window is open, the ping can be sent at various intervals so that GA has a time difference between that event and the initial page load.  Obviously, if someone leaves a window open, you are logging time for someone on the page who is not engaged, but you may feel that this is better than getting no credit.  You can also limit when the ping is sent as well.

Another variant (when focusing more on Bounce rate vs time on page) is to have the ping run once at 30 seconds after page load. You can then have all the other visits who do not reach the 30 second mark then effectively be counted as a bounce in GA.  This would not give you as much accuracy as total time on the page, but you would get a better snapshot of interactivity from that bounce threshold.  That threshold could be 5 sec, 10 sec or 120 sec - just depends on the goal of your site.

If you take a little time to work with you config on GA, it can give you the information that is a little more actionable etc. and find a happy medium on Bounce and Time on page.  It is all about 1) when the first ping should fire, 2) how often you should send additional pings or events and 3) when the last ping is sent.   If you look at the Google reports, I would suggest putting a ping in the middle of the default time slots for how they group user time on page (as an example).

As far as how Google uses bounce rate, there are some conspiracy theorists that say that Google looks at your GA data for ranking.  I am not of that group.   Your concern about Bounce rate and ranking is more related to what Rand mentioned in a recent WBF on the "Pogo stick" problem.

http://moz.com/blog/solving-the-pogo-stick-problem-whiteboard-friday

This has nothing to do with your GA data and everything I mentioned above.   Google tracks for itself clicks out of SERPs on links and then sees how long you spend on a site before you come back to the Google SERP.  This is Google's own tracking and nothing to do with GA as Google does not need GA to calculate this.  They look at how you move in and out of a Google page back and forth.   A search result may have a high click through, but if Google sees people coming back to the search result time and time again, they may question the quality of that site.  What is the threshold for this etc?  Hard to tell.  Your bounce rate will give you an insight to what Google is measuring, but again, users may not be going back to Google, but just closing the browser.  The two are closely related, but are separate measures.

Regardless, I would suggest you do some custom configs of GA on your site to give you more information about user behavior of time on those pages.  Use that information to find your "problem pages" and then get them fixed.  This should also improve any Pogo Stick metrics that Google is measuring, plus you are probably going to make your users happier and that is really what this is all about.

Trailing slash or no trailing slash - it does not matter, you just need to be consistent.  I would also make sure that the no trailing slash 301 redirects to the URL with the trailing slash (or vice versa).

The only reason you need to look at trailing slashes is when you have a reporting system that needs the trailing slash to differentiate between folders.  i.e.  website.com/folder vs website.com/folder/  The first without the slash is a page within the root folder and the second is a foler within the root folder.

I am not aware of an "advantage" of having the slash vs not on the home page URL, per se though.  You SEO company may reason that more people with link to you with a trailing slash (I am not aware of any data on average to support this - your mileage may vary), and if that is the case you are losing link juice through the 301 from the non slashed version to the slashed version on those links to your home page.   301 redirects work and pass equity as long as the two pages are semantically related, I would not think that a 301 from a non slashed to a slashed would cause any issue.  Getting back to above, I am not sure that I see any reason to change what you have.  Ask the SEO company what reason they have and have them make a real reason vs a generic "best practice" answer.

If you own all the locations in the 38 cities, Google has a bulk upload function.  It is done via a spreadsheet.

https://support.google.com/places/answer/178024?hl=en   You are then able to verify in bulk .

Step 6: Request bulk upload verification

It's important to verify your authority to manage your initial upload, because unverified listings will not appear on Google Maps. If you are the business owner of all of the bulk uploaded listings in your Google Places account, you will need to request verification for your bulk upload. Simply click the “Verify your locations” link and fill out the subsequent form. It will be submitted to our team for review. A reviewer will respond to your request at your Google Places email address.

That said, I would not use a central 800 number if each of the local businesses has a local number that they are already associated with at a give address.  Phone number is KEY to Google connecting the dots between what you submit, what they already have in their databases and what they find out on the web in other directories and from other business databases.    If you change all of them to a central 800 number you may actually be messing up your local search results as now your NAP information in Google is different.    It is not about where the local number routes, but the consistency of that number over time.  If these are well established locations with well established phone numbers for those locations, changing the phone numbers via the bulk upload may negatively impact you.

I am not familiar with bulk uploads at the other resources you mention, but a quick web search should set you up.  They will probably also be more responsive than Google.  Just did this for you

More on Google - http://searchengineland.com/google-places-launches-new-bulk-listing-management-tool-120552

Bing - https://www.bingplaces.com/Home/MoreFAQ

Yahoo does not have this option - http://www.rioseo.com/local-seo-bing-places-bulk-upload/#fbid=mUJJOb8Zyi6

Yahoo - http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/local-listings/

Yelp - http://www.yelp.com/topic/charter-township-of-clinton-business-with-multiple-locations-sign-up-help

"If you send an email to feedback@yelp.com they can help you with multiple biz locations. Just send them a list of the locations you want to claim. "

Also http://moz.com/community/q/what-is-yelp-best-practice-for-updating-multiple-business-locations

Hello there,

My Uncle Dan would be upset if I did not correct you in stating that FTO for Fair Trade Organic is actually an acronym and not an abbreviation.  Uncle Dan also got mad when I used to talk about my GPS system, but that is another story.

There is an acronym HTML tag http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_acronym.asp but I am unaware that Google actively uses it.  I would answer your question as follows.

1. Is there search volume for the acronym and when you search for that acronym, what type of pages does Google show?  In other words are people searching for it and does Google know what it means.  When I search FTO https://www.google.com/search?q=FTO I get a pages related to the FTO gene http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FTO_gene that is related to obesity and also Fresh Touring Origination a sports coupe from Mitsubishi

I tried "FTO vegetables" but I got instructions on how to make lacto fermented vegetables - I could not find FTO on the page with the instructions though.  Results 5 and 6 looked to have to do with fair trade vegetables.  I Googled "FTO food" and got sites for "Fresh to Order Food" and "Food Truck Outfitters Atlanta"

My point is, if most people don't use FTO to represent Fair Trade Organic, then Google probably will not, but it still may understand it in the context of use with other words.  It may be that FTO is searched a bunch, but it may not be the searches you want.

2. Based on my 30 second assessment above, you may want to consider using the acronym in combination with the words Fair Trade Organic and that would work.  You need some variety of the words on the page.  That goes without saying.  I would not though, use it as the primary words in place like your title tag, h1 etc.  Makes more sense in the body of the text on the page.

Specifically, "would it provide a weaker result" ? It depends.  I would say for FTO searches, you would probably not show up as Google potentially does not associate FTO with Free Trade Organic.  For "Free Trade Organic" (full keyword) related searches, I would use it, but not as much as other keywords that are probably searched more often and are more relevant in the results as you need to vary up your keywords anyway.

Hope this helps!

Question - why move to the .com?  If you are a non-profit, you want to stay .org and just redirect the .com to your .org.

If you are moving to the .com, it would be like any other domain name move.  The key, you need to really plan your move and make sure you have your 301 redirects in place that is specific as possible for all of your old pages pointing to new pages.  In other words, don't redirect everything to your new home page.  Ideally, your redirects should be 1 to 1.  Old page A on .org redirects to New page A on .com.  Old page B on .org redirects to New page B on .com.  Rinse repeat for as many pages as you have.  Yes, it is tedious, but yes worth it if you do want to retain your traffic and rankings.  The more work you do prior to the switch the better.

I would advise you to read everything about the Moz migration from SEOMoz

http://moz.com/blog/domain-migration-lessons

http://moz.com/webinars/domain-migrations-lessons-from-the-moz-transition

http://moz.com/rand/10-traffic-graphs-seomoz-moz-domain-migration/

Also, lots of Domain Name Transfer - Site Transfer Type Checklists

http://moz.com/blog/achieving-an-seo-friendly-domain-migration-the-infographic

http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2013/04/29/big-content-site-migration-tips/

Good luck!

Drop the subdomans and 301 redirect them to related pages under the folders as you suggest.  I would spend some time thinking about your folder structure and how it relates to you keywords to make sure you get the keyword names of those folders correct and the hierarchy to be correct and logical as well.

Subdomains divide the authority between all the subdomains.  Use of the folder system consolidates all of that authority under that central URL.  I use this on all my sites and it works very well.  I think use of the subdomain is an old technique that really is not relevant or useful for SEO purposes today.

Cheers!

It is hacked, you just have to look at the page as Googlebot.  Sadly, I have seen this before.

If you set your user agent as Googlebot -  you will see a different page (see attached images).  Note that the  Title, H1 tags and content are updated to show info on how to Buy Zithromax.   This is a JS insertion hack where when the user agent is shown as Googlebot they overwrite your content and insert links to pages to help gain links.  This is very black hat and bad and yes scary.  (See attached images below)

I use "User Agent Switcher" on FF to set my user agent - there are lots of other tools for FF and Chrome to do this.  You can also run a spider on your site such as screaming frog and set the user agent to Googlebot and you will see all the changed H1s and title tags,

It is clever as "humans" will not see this, but the bots will so it is hard to detect.  Also, if you have multiple servers, you may only have 1 of the servers impacted and so you may not see this each time depending on what server your load balancer is sending you to.  You may want to use Fetch as Google in Webmaster console and see what Google sees.

This is very serious, show this to your dev and get it fixed ASAP.  You can PM me if you need more information etc.

Good luck!

mI1yZjN.png qMLv3Wa.png?1

A side note first.  Something to consider on transient content for job listings like this that I have used on job sites I have worked on and worked pretty well - The unavailable after meta tag

http://searchengineland.com/more-info-on-googles-unavailable-after-meta-tag-new-x-robots-tag-in-header-support-11714

http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-seo-advice-unavailable-e-commerce-products-186882

"The “unavailable_after” Meta tag will allow you to tell Google that a page should expire from the search results at a specific time. "

This way your pages would be removed from the index on the date you list and if you have also removed the links from your sitemap etc, Google may not need to crawl them and find the 404 and/or soft404 to begin with.

The soft 404 (according to Google) means your server is not showing a 404 server response for the HTML snapshot version.  I would try fetch as Google on those pages to see what Google is seeing and that may help you diagnose the situation.  I may be that your server is giving a different response than the 404 and Google is questioning it.

I would say make sure that your new sitemap has all the latest URLs.  The reason people say that you should have old URLs in the sitemap is so that Google can quickly crawl the old URLs to find the 301s to the new URLs.

I am not convinced that this helps.  Why?

Google already has all your old URLs in its systems.  You would be shocked how far back Google has data on your site with old URLs.  I have a site that is over 10 years old and I still see URL structures referenced in Google from 7 years ago that have a 301 in place.  Why is this?

Google will assume that, "Well, I know that this URL is a 301 or 404, but I am going to crawl it every once in a while just to make sure the webmaster did not do this by mistake."   You can notice this in Search Console error or link reports when you setup 301s or 404s, they may stay in there for months and even come back once they fall out of the error list.  I had an occurrence where I had some old URLs showing up in the SERPs and various Search Console reports for a site for 2 years following proper 301 setups.  Why was this happening?

This is a large site and we still had some old content still linking to the old URLs.  The solution was to delete the links in that old content and setup a canonical to self on all the pages to help give a definitive directive to Google.  Google then finally replaced the old URLs with the new URLs in the SERPs and in the Search Console reports.  The point here being that previously our site was giving signals (links) that told Google that some of the old URLs were still valid and Google was giving us the benefit of the doubt.

If you want to have the new URLs seen by Google, show them in your sitemap.   Google already has all the old URLs and will check them and find the 301s and fix everything.  I would also recommend the canonical to self on the new pages.  Don't give any signals to Google that your old URLs are still valid by linking to them in any way, especially your sitemap.  I would even go so far as to reach out to any important sites that link to old URLs to ask for an updated link to your site.

As I mentioned above, I do not think there is an "advantage" of getting the new URLs indexed quicker by putting old URLs in the sitemap that 301 to the new URLs.  Just watch your Google Search Console crawl stats.  Once you do a major overhaul, you will see Google really crawl your site like crazy and they will update things pretty quick.   Putting the old URLs in the sitemap is a conflicting signal in that process and has the potential to slow Google down IMHO.

Just to be clear on what Logan said. You have to allow Google to crawl your site by opening up your robots.txt to Google so it can see your noindex directive that is on each of the pages. Otherwise Google will never "see" the noindex directive on your pages.

Likewise, on sitemap.xml.  If you are not allowing Google to crawl the sitemap (because you are blocking it with robots.txt) then Google will not read the sitemap, find all your pages that have the noindex directive on them and then remove those pages from the index.

A great article is here

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93710?hl=en&ref_topic=4598466

From the mouth of Google "Important! For the noindex meta tag to be effective, the page must not be blocked by a robots.txt file. If the page is blocked by a robots.txt file, the crawler will never see the noindex tag, and the page can still appear in search results, for example if other pages link to it."

The other point that logan makes is that Google might list your site if there are enough sites linking to it. The steps above should take care of this, as you are deindexing the page, but here is what I am thinking he is referencing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBdEwpRQRD0

Google will include a site that is blocked in robots.txt if enough pages link to it, even if they have not crawled the url.

You can go into Search Console and find all the links that they say are pointing to your site. You can also use tools like CognitiveSEO or Ahrefs, Majestic or Moz etc and gather up all of those sites to find links to your site and include those in a disavow file that you put into Search Console and tell Google to ignore all of those links to your site.

Secret bonus method.  Putting a noindex directive in your robots

https://www.deepcrawl.com/knowledge/best-practice/robots-txt-noindex-the-best-kept-secret-in-seo/

This allows you to manage your noindex directives in your robots.txt.  Makes it easier as you can control all your noindex directives from a central location and block whole folders at a time.  This would stop Google from crawling AND indexing pages all in one page and you can just leave the rest of the site alone and not worry about if a noindex tag should or should not be on a certain page.

Good luck!

Two things I found when using the Wayback Machine to look at your site

1. Did you setup 301 redirects from old to new content?

https://web.archive.org/web/20150225025506/http://advanced-driving.co.uk/

I pulled links to various and random advanced driving groups and they 404ed vs 301

http://www.advanced-driving.co.uk/advanced-driving-lessons/region5/

http://www.advanced-driving.co.uk/advanced-driving-lessons/region6/

Also on the page for driving lessons

https://web.archive.org/web/20150219123145/http://www.advanced-driving.co.uk/driving-lessons/

I pulled links to various and random advanced driving lessons and they 404ed vs 301

http://www.advanced-driving.co.uk/driving-lessons/norwich/

http://www.advanced-driving.co.uk/driving-lessons/liverpool/

Looks like you did not properly migrate the URLs from the old site to the new site.  You should be seeing 404 errors in Google Search Console and so that can be a starting point to find what pages need to be updated.  It sounds like you tracked rankings for pages on the old site, start with those URLs and make sure they are 301ed to the correct new URL.

2. Site structure

On the new home page, you are not linking into any of the pages such as your Driver Instruction and Traffic Reports page.  Likewise, your header and sidebars used to link into your content.  Your new design is cleaner, but you pretty much blew up your previous internal linking structure.  Google will use your internal links to find pages to crawl and also to determine what pages are important on the website.  I see much much less of this on the new site.  You may want to consider updating how your internal linking is structured so that you are showing your users and Google what your most important pages are.

Good luck!

I think of getting contributors like dating, you can't just reach out in an email and expect a lot of hits, you gotta woo them.   Get to know them.   My suggestions.

1. The phone.   If this person is that important, don't send them an email.  Talk to them on the phone.  If the DA is 83 and they are that important you may also consider ...

2. Food / beer.  Nothing beats a meeting in person.   Take them out to lunch.  If they are related to your website, try and connect with them at an industry conference.

3. Friends of this person.  The person you want may be just unapproachable.  I bet they have people like you sending emails like you just did all day long.  If they have a colleague, buddy up with them and get an introduction.  On one of my sites, we actually paid "Associate Editors" on a contract basis not to edit, but to help us connect with the top tier folks.

4. Do #RCS and eventually this person will notice you.  You may have to show off and then get thier friends to brag about you, but word will get around.

This is not always easy stuff, but eventually it all pays off!

Good luck!

Google ignores everything after the hash to start with, so you do not need to block it to finish with.  It is a clever way to pass parameters without having to worry about Google getting lost.

Either way it is going to end up being a huge pain in the butt.

How come no one else jumped on that?

Title tags - put your main keywords for the page first, or near the beginning.  That helps google know what the page is about.  The number of characters varies as Google does not look at characters per se, but pixel width.  Good article by Dr P.

https://moz.com/blog/new-title-tag-guidelines-preview-tool

You just have to watch what gets cut off at a certain point.  Beyond that length the title is getting too long for readability anyway and if you need a longer title to explain a page, just put the longer one in the H1, but try and be sensible.  If the client insists on putting the company name and you are not trying to rank for the company name just do something like

Keyword and keyword is really key here because it ranks good! | Company Name

The company name is at the end and will get hidden in the serps anyway, and you have your key word(s) or phrase in at the start.

Meta description is about conversion and click through rate vs ranking.  Focus on getting the best call to action with a keyword somewhere in there first.  I would say, this could be a good place to sneak in the company name, after you get your call to action right.  Your limit is larger there (about 150-160) so you have more room before the cutoff.   I tend to worry less about keywords and think about searcher intent and see if I can match that to get them to select my page among others in the search result.  Another good article by Dr P

https://moz.com/blog/i-cant-drive-155-meta-descriptions-in-2015

Cheers!

Use of the canonical link should solve all of your problems as far as how the search engines.  Bots that view the PF page will take the canonical directive and treat it like a 301 redirect and pass link equity etc.

The other thing you need to consider is the use of rel next and prev for the article that you broke into parts if you consider this one big article broken up into parts.  That would be used to "connect" all the sections of your depression article to each other.

Frankly, I do not know why you broke up this page into parts as the article is not that long as a whole  There is some data out there that longer articles get more links http://www.quicksprout.com/2012/12/20/the-science-behind-long-copy-how-more-content-increases-rankings-and-conversions/

One issue on the print pages is that you have a meta noindex tag. That tells Google to deindex the page and not to crawl it.  You do not need to use that tag as you are using the canonical to tell Google what the "parent" page.  If you are using the rel next prev on both the regular and paginated pages, I would advise canonicaling P1 to P1, P2 to P2 and the All to the All page vs canonical everything to the main page.

You are basically telling Google two things.

1. with rel next prev - here are the parts that make up the whole.

2. with the canonical - if they look at the PF version, here is the "real" page they want to pay attention to.  This is what passes the link equity along to the proper pages.  If you are getting links into the "print all page" this is the key page to have canonical linked to the "real" page.

What I would do is put this all into one page and then it is simple.  Just canonical the PF page to the actual page and remove the noindex meta tag off the PF page.

If the above does not make sense, read each of the articles below about 3x and watch the video 3x it should help

Here are the Google Pages on canonicals

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

and rel next prev

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/03/video-about-pagination-with-relnext-and.html

Good luck!

According to Matt Cutts

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2281151/Matt-Cutts-Short-Website-Downtime-Wont-Hurt-Your-Search-Rankings

"According to Google's Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts if your website is down just for a day, such as your host being down or a server transfer, there shouldn't be any negative impact to your search rankings. However, if the downtime is extended, such as for two weeks, it could have impact on your search rankings because Google doesn't necessarily want to send the user to a website that they know has been down, because it provides the user with a poor user experience.

Google does make allowances for websites that are sporadically having downtime, so Googlebot will visit again 24 hours later so and see if the site is accessible."

That said, what should you show Google?

http://yoast.com/http-503-site-maintenance-seo/

According to Yoast, you should not show a 200 (ok) or 404 (file not found), but a 503 code on all pages with a retry-after header to Google.

The 503 (http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html) tells Google "The server is currently unable to handle the request due to a temporary overloading or maintenance of the server. The implication is that this is a temporary condition which will be alleviated after some delay. If known, the length of the delay MAY be indicated in a Retry-After header. If no Retry-After is given, the client SHOULD handle the response as it would for a 500 response.:

The retry after tells Google when to come back.  You should set this to a time that is generous to allow you plenty of time to get everything back up and running.

Another point from Yoast that he links to https://plus.google.com/+PierreFar/posts/Gas8vjZ5fmB - if the robots.txt file shows a 503 then Google will stop wasting time crawling all your pages (and wasting time) until it sees a 200 back on your robots.txt file.  So it is key that you get the 503 and retry after properly on the robots.txt

Cheers!

This is similar to the question, blog on a different subdomain vs a folder.  Most SEOs would agree that putting a blog in a folder is better as any links to the blog builds the domain authority of the entire domain.  Rising tides raises all ships.

Likewise, I think it is telling that Moz rolled OSE under the main moz.com domain.  Why? I would guess (Disclaimer: this is just my guess as I do not speak for Moz) for the same reason of consolidating domain authority, but also I think it makes sense from a branding perspective.   Why would you want to spend all this time creating a tool and getting people to remember another domain name when you could be piggybacking off the fact that they already know your domain name to start with and so with any press around the new tool your main domain name is being talked about (let alone linked to).

I think in most cases a separate domain or subdomain is at the suggestion of developers to make it easier to develop on a separate server etc.  That is technical hurdle that should not drive the answer of what is best for your users and for branding.

One domain name is hard enough to remember, why make people remember another one?  Keep it simple. Reduce cognitive load.    Plus, if the new tool goes viral and is on your main domain, your main domain is going viral as well.

Unless you are trying to build a separate company with a separate brand, then you might go the separate domain route.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/to-slash-or-not-to-slash.html

Rest assured that for your root URL specifically, http://example.com is equivalent to http://example.com/ and can’t be redirected even if you’re Chuck Norris.

Note the quote from John Mueller in the comments

_Lots of good advice from an older blog post that's still valid & relevant today. _

There may be some technical merit that Googlebot starts at the slashed version on the TLD, but I do not think there is any type of SEO advantage with that (if that is the case).

Probably not.  If you are going to pay $500 and get a link wheel, you will end up with a bunch of spammy/low quality sites linking to each other and to you and that will just kill you.   In theory, if all the sites were of high quality and were on related topics, sure it would help, but the time and effort and cost would not be worth it.

(offers napkin to EGOL to wipe up coffee spittle)

The page you mention

http://www.tripcentral.ca/vacations-packages_mexico.html

is about Vacation Packages to Mexico.  That is the "product" you are selling and aggregating ratings on them on the page and then marking them up with schema.

You then have the item reviewed as "Mexico"

But if you look at all the individual ratings they really all for different resorts in Mexico and not single specific Mexico vacation package.  Example from your page

review [Review]:

name:Riu Santa Fe - Great Resort

datePublished: 2015-09-06

reviewBody:

Very clean resort, nice rooms food was ok a lot to choose from. Barbq by the pool was excellent. Great entertainment staff. Spent most of our time at infinity pool. Staff does an excellent job shutting down party pools early to get drunks out and back to room. They are also quick in stopping rowdiness late at night. Would go back again. Sunwing very comfortable flight and champagne toast was a bonus you don't get anywhere else.Google is normally looking for the aggregated review rating to be of a single product or location.  i.e. if you had an aggregate rating of the Riu Santa Fe resort and then all the reviews were of that hotel/resort it would all tie out as far as Google and schema is concerned.What is probably happening is that when you have only a single review, Google is seeing that as the single review for that hotel and so you are ok, and the stars show up in the SERPS.  Then you start to add the other reviews related to other hotels/resorts, your stars get dropped as you are now mixing up reviews of different locations/things and Google does not like that.I have as a general rule that when I aggregate ratings like you are doing, I show the aggregated review results to the user as it may be helpfil, but I do not mark that up in schema as that is not what the schema was intended for.https://developers.google.com/structured-data/rich-snippets/reviewsReview and rating markup should be used to provide review and/or rating information about a specific item, not about a category or a list of items. For example, “hotels in Madrid”, “summer dresses”, or “cake recipes” are not specific items. See also our structured data policies for multiple entities on the same page.Good luck!

Option 1 - If you want to reach out to the mainstream - Tier your information out.  I have a site that is meant for the general public on a given health issue.  If you have the health professionals write the articles, they are way too technical for the general public, but it is information that the public needs (and ultimately wants).  We hired a journalist/editor to work with editors on writing things that go on the everyday blog type items and social media.  The health professionals give input into the topics etc, but we let the journalist/editor do the writing.  The articles are fact checked to make sure that they are accurate, but we try not to edit too much.   We then have a second level of content that is more advanced and is really the reference section of the site.  When topics get too complex for the blog, we link to the reference articles if they need to read more.  It is a classic hub and spoke type setup, but we find it works for blog vs reference type of articles.   On the reference articles, we do get a little more technical, some more than others.  We do not feel that this is "dumbing it down" per se, but making it more accessible.

Option 2 - If you only care about the experts, play to that niche and see if you can find topics that may have low search volume, convert really well.  Give the site more of an exclusive feel to it.  You actually may be surprised at how "non-experts" want to find and read that information.   If you layered this in with Option 1, you could hit both audiences potentially.

Good luck!

Yes.  GWT links can be out of date.  This has been mentioned in various places.

If you want to hear it from the horse's mouth see this GWT hangout

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OuD3NuxiNY

At about 21:45 there is a question about how Google handles 410 and why they keep crawling them.  Then at about 27:00 it moves into the re-spidering of dead links and if/when they are updated in GWT.  A participant brings up dead links that are mentioned in the links report in GWT, John Mueller from Google states it may take 6 months to 1 year to have them expire from GWT.  The video is very interesting - you should watch the whole thing.

The other thing to remember, GWT is really overall a sample that Google is offering so you can't use it as your only source.  It usually takes referencing several different databases (Moz, Majestic, Ahrefs, GWT etc) to get an idea of what is out there.

Good luck!

Well, you can move to a black or gray hat technique of link building, get results (maybe), and if you do, just have them later backfire on you when Google updates the algo and puts you back to square one.  

I would suggest continued education such as http://moz.com/academy or other related sites. There is a ton of info out there, just have to see what works for you.

Creating sub folders is better as you do not have to worry about your 20 web sites looking like some sort of link farm. Plus, you build the overall brand with the main website.  That said, you do not want 20 identical pages for each location on the main website.  You would want to have unique and original information on each location page about that location, who works there, what services do they provide, etc etc.

If you want to give the client more control, why not setup each of the location pages so that a location could login and update the information.  It would be just like you can update your Google+ Local profile, you could even setup a login etc.

That said, if you give the client control of the listing/page/website then you run into the issue that client will often do a poor job of providing good information, and/or mess up your SEO if you are trying to get those pages ranked.

I would suggest a hybrid solution where you setup the pages for each location, even interview each location and gather up the information that is needed to really make those location pages information rich.  You can then take input from that location and build your pages with that information.  If there are some small edits or updates that a location needs, you can make those updates (or not) as you would still maintain editorial and SEO control.

I have managed a site with thousands of locations and we found that use of the folders worked really well.  We actually gave users access to update location profiles, but often they would put information that was frankly, poorly written.  Throw out all the SEO points, some of these "self edited" location profiles did not make me want to visit that location as the copy was so poor.  It was not until we took more control of the content on location pages that we were able to get a good balance between original content from the locations and well written page with an eye to SEO.

Hello!

I looked in the internet archive and the most recent version they have of this site is from the end of 2014.

http://web.archive.org/web/20141222162951/http://www.princessdesign.co.uk/

The design and URL structure is different from what you have today.  Did you recently relaunch the site?

On the old site this was one of the links to the bedroom section

http://www.princessdesign.co.uk/bedrooms/bedrooms-at-princess-design.html

that URL 301 redirects to this page

http://princessdesign.co.uk/bedrooms/bedrooms-at-princess-design.html

and that page shows a 404 error page.

So, if you did just do a redesign and overhaul of your URL structure on the site, you need to get all the URLs that were ranking and make sure they 301 redirect to the correct page.

You should also to look in your Google webmaster tools to make sure that there are no warnings about penalties or what not.  I checked your robots.txt and meta robots and there was nothing there that would have blocked Google from crawling.  The recent version of the site is image and JS heavy, I almost thought it was a flash site at first (gasp!). As the current site seems to have very little text on the page and is mostly images there is very little for the search engine to read and then know what to rank based on the text it reads.  Similarly, only the home page has a meta description.   While meta descriptions are not important for ranking per se, they are important once you rank, to help with click through.  That is, once the page ranks, Google will show the title and description and the description can influence if the person clicks through to your site or not.   With all the images, the new site is probably slower than the old one, and this can penalize you as well.

This is all based on some assumptions made quickly, so I could be totally wrong.  Hope this helps to point you in the right direction!

Good luck!

You want to go page to page (your second example) as much as possible.  Google prefers more of a one to one vs a many to one relationship with 301 redirects.  That said, if you have a bunch of garbage pages with garbage links with not much traffic to them, you may just want to let them 404 and die out of the index.  Take some time looking at your Analytics and you may find you can just drop those pages.

Your question here is accuracy, but I think you are missing the bigger picture on rankings.   Google does so much personalization on search results, there is no single "rank" for a given page on a given key term.   If you are signed in, Google will rank pages higher that you visit a lot.  Even if you are not, Google may rank pages higher that relate to your geographic location.  Whenever a tool is pulling a KW ranking, it is doing so with a set of parameters that may be different than another tool and so the results may vary.  Some people have even called them useless  http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2014/08/11/seo-rank-checking

Dr. Pete did an article on this recently to compare different methods of measuring rank

https://moz.com/blog/comparing-ranktracking-methods-browser-vs-crawler-vs-webmaster-tools

While he found differences, they were not that huge across tools.

Your best advice is to find a tool that will report what you need and stick with it.  Consistency is the key. That way you can at least know that if there is a change that the change did occur and in what direction. You want a baseline and then to know once you make a change are you doing better or worse.  You will find discrepancies if you were to compare Moz, Keyword Planner, Google Webmaster Tools, CognitiveSEO, Authority Labs, etc etc.   Everyone measures it slightly differently and you see some differences due to Googles personalization.  Heck, take a read of the Search Console Help Google calls is an "average position" due to personalization of results when they show ranking results  https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35252?hl=en

• Average position: The average top position of your site on the search results page for that query.  With change also shows the change compared to the previous period. Green indicates that your site's average top position is improving.

  To calculate average position, we take into account the top ranking URL from your site for a particular query. For example, if Jane’s query returns your site as the #1 and #2 result, and David’s query returns your site in positions #2 and #7, your average top position would be 1.5.

I know this does not answer the question you asked, but I hope it gives you the question you need to understand to put all this in perspective.  Get a reputable Keyword tool that gives you the data output that you need for reporting.  Stick with it and you will do fine.

Cheers!

Yes this is an issue.  All pages in pagination using rel next prev need unique titles (just like all pages on your site need unique titles).  I usually accomplish this with each title being something like

Website Name Article Archives - Page $

or

Shoe Inventory - Page $

Where $ is whatever page of the pagination the person is on.

If you do have duplicate titles due to pagination (or otherwise), then you will start to see this show up as errors in your Search Console reports.

The 410 is supposed to be more definitive

http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html

404 is "not found" vs 410 is "gone

10.4.5 404 Not Found

The server has not found anything matching the Request-URI. No indication is given of whether the condition is temporary or permanent. The 410 (Gone) status code SHOULD be used if the server knows, through some internally configurable mechanism, that an old resource is permanently unavailable and has no forwarding address. This status code is commonly used when the server does not wish to reveal exactly why the request has been refused, or when no other response is applicable.

10.4.11 410 Gone

The requested resource is no longer available at the server and no forwarding address is known. This condition is expected to be considered permanent. Clients with link editing capabilities SHOULD delete references to the Request-URI after user approval. If the server does not know, or has no facility to determine, whether or not the condition is permanent, the status code 404 (Not Found) SHOULD be used instead. This response is cacheable unless indicated otherwise.

The 410 response is primarily intended to assist the task of web maintenance by notifying the recipient that the resource is intentionally unavailable and that the server owners desire that remote links to that resource be removed. Such an event is common for limited-time, promotional services and for resources belonging to individuals no longer working at the server's site. It is not necessary to mark all permanently unavailable resources as "gone" or to keep the mark for any length of time -- that is left to the discretion of the server owner.

That said, I had a similar issue on a site with a couple thousand pages and went with the 410, not sure it really made things disappear any faster than the 404 (that I noticed).

I just found a post from John Mueller from Google

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/qv49s4mTwNM/discussion

"In the meantime, we do treat 410s slightly differently than 404s. In particular, when we see a 404 HTTP result code, we'll want to confirm that before dropping the URL out of our search results. Using a 410 HTTP result code can help to speed that up. In practice, the time difference is just a matter of a few days, so it's not critical to return a 410 HTTP result code for URLs that are permanently removed from your website, returning a 404 is fine for that. "

So, use the 410 as a matter of a few days you may see a difference with 30k pages.

All of that said, are you sure with a site that big you would not need to 301 some of those pages.  If you have a bunch of old news items or blog posts, would you not want to redirect them to the new URLs for those same assets?  Seems like you should be able to recover some of them - at least your top traffic pages etc.

Cheers

Thanks Jay. If I look on the backlinks side, they all seem to have the same subdomain in some form or another.  You would just need to setup the regex in Screaming Frog to look for just that keyword in the subdomain so it should match all the variants of it.

That said, ignore everything I just posted.  I was thinking earlier, "Surely there is scraper software out there that does this already."  I did not take the time to look.  Your mention of Scrapebox reminded me of that.

Scrapebox has a separate addon that does this

http://www.scrapebox.com/anchor-text-checker

The ScrapeBox Anchor Text Checker allows you to enter your domain and then load a list of URL’s that contain your backlink. It will scan all the URL’s containing your link and extract the anchor text used by the websites that link to you.

Directories are not the way to go.  Do you know anybody who uses web directories anymore?  When was the last time you saw a directory rank for something?  I think the last time I saw that occurring it was sometime in the last century.

Will this impact your site for SEO?  Hard to tell based on your overall link profile.  It may make no difference.  If you wanted to be conservative, I would take all the domains and disavow them.  You can also run the URLs through OSE and see the numbers on them.

Just to clarify what is happening here, I looked at your examples links and here is what I see.

Your website has a home page (e.g. homepage.com) and site wide links in navigation etc to various categories such as

http://www.website.com/category-keyword1/

http://www.website.com/category-keyword2/

http://www.website.com/category-keyword3/

As I look at these what I will call "original" category pages, they have canonical links that link to the following pages (note I do not see this on any of your product pages or other pages on the site)

<link rel="canonical" href="http: website.com="" category-keyword2="" limit:9999"=""></link rel="canonical" href="http:>

<link rel="canonical" href="http: website.com="" category-keyword3="" limit:9999"=""></link rel="canonical" href="http:>

The URLs with the limit:9999 also show a 200 if you visit them, are a duplicate page and canonical to themselves.

This is not good.  What you are telling Google is that for each of your "original" category pages that you link to extensively with your internal link structure, that the actual (aka canonical) page is the URL with the limit:9999.

I would say that you did not need the canonical to start with, but now that it is there, here is how you fix it.

1. on all the original category pages (i.e. http://www.website.com/category-keyword1/) you need to add a canonical to self.  Just update the canonical tag and remove the "limit:9999"    There is somewhere in your CMS that is doing this, you may need a dev to help.  You have to absolutely do this.

2. on all the limit:9999 pages you have 4 possible options that you can do.  I put these in order of preference with option a being your best approach, option b your second best, and so on.  Therefore, if you cannot do option a, then try option b, and so on.

a) 301 redirect the limit:9999 pages to the original category pages

b) set the canonical on the limit:9999 pages to the original category pages

c) 404 the limit:9999 pages

d) block the limit:9999 pages in robots.txt, but be careful that you do not block the original pages.  Search Console has a great robots.txt testing tool for figuring this out.

Good luck!

One key point on using robots.txt vs the meta tag noindex. It is not that the noindex meta tag is "superior" they just work differently.

If you use robots.txt - it will stop the spider from visiting that page, but it will not remove the page from the index.  Also, if you have a page in robots.txt and on that page have a 301 redirect, or a canonical or a meta noindex Google will not see the page (due to the robots.txt directive) and then not be able to act on the 301 or canonical or the meta noindex.

A meta noindex, because the spider crawls the page, will not only tell Google not to visit the page anymore, but also tells Google to remove the page from the index.  This is key if you want the pages removed from the Google index.

The rule of thumb I use is that

1. If you have a page that is not in the Google index and you want to keep it out of the index put that file in robots.txt.

2. If you have a page that is in the Google index and you want it removed, then use the noindex meta tag, do not put it into the robots.txt for reasons mentioned above.  Over time, once the pages are removed (and this may take a while depending on how often the page is cralwed) then you can put into robots.txt for good measure.

Just as a follow-up to Tom's great post.  If you were wanting to test a robots.txt setup, especially if you were using a wildcard or using an allow combined with a disallow, Google Search Console under the Crawl section has a robots.txt Tester.  You will see your most recent robots.txt file there that Google has a copy of.  You can then modify that version and then enter a URL at the bottom to see if everything is set correctly or not.  It is pretty handy, especially if you have a big robots.txt file.   Note that this tool does not change how Google crawls your site or your robots.txt file, it is just for testing.  Once you find the configuration that works, you would still need to update the robots.txt on your server.

This will sound backwards but it works.

1. Add the meta noindex tag to all pages you want out of the index.

2. Take those same pages out of the robots.txt and allow them to be crawled.

The meta noindex tells Google to remove the page from the index.  It is preferred over using robots.txt

http://moz.com/learn/seo/robotstxt

The robot.txt - blocks Google from crawling the page, but things can still show up if there are other pages linking to the page you are trying to remove.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBdEwpRQRD0

You have to allow Google to crawl the pages (by taking them out of the robots.txt) so it can read the noindex meta tags that then tell Google to take them out of the index.

The keyword meta tag is alive and well, they just call it the meta title nowadays

Just to clarify.  You have a main page or node page, and off of that node page you have various comment pages that are commenting on the node page.   The comment pages are canonical linking to the main page.

I would say this does not make sense.  You would want the comment pages to rank potentially or at least add more to the main page.   I would consider making the comments on the same page as the node page - much like they do on Moz.  Or if you had to break them out, I would make them paginated pages off the main page and then use rel next prev to show the relation to the main page.

Google treats the canonical like a 301 and it usually means that something is a copy of the original.  As new comments are not copies of the original and actually may add to the main page, using the canonical does not make sense.

Different example, I use canonicals for the printer friendly version of a page. It is a duplicate and I want to make it clear why and which one is more important for ranking.

Two parts

1) If you link to two different URLs

http://youngepilepsy.org.uk/news-and-events/events

http://youngepilepsy.org.uk/news-and-events/events/

the two above would classify as that (with and without the slash are two different URLs)

and

2) if your server shows a 200 response on both of those URLs and shows the same content for those URLs

Then yes, you have a duplicate issue.

You need to

1) Make sure you keep consistent with how you link to URLs (with or without the slashes).

Decide on a standard, I personally like ending in slashes if this is an index page as this helps with reporting in places like Google Analytics where they are looking at your directory structure for reports.

If you never end in a slash

http://youngepilepsy.org.uk/news-and-events/events

and

http://youngepilepsy.org.uk/news-and-events/events/article-xyz

these two pages would be put into two different "folders" in your report for Google Analytics. I went round and round with the developers on this and had to show them the reports in GA to show why.

I also think we have had the standard that / being the index page for years now and then you have all the pages within it.  I know with modern CMSs there may not be any folders and these are all actually "routes", but as a mental organizational construct (and in the reporting example above) I think most people (who are not programmers) think that way.

That said, I currently help run a site that has no trailing slashes, and I am living with it, again, being consistent is the most important.  You will see many wall known SEO sites go sans slashes, so either way will work.

and

2) Then 301 redirect the "non standard" to the "standard" version (say the non slashed version to the slash version) so that you can clean up any other confusion that may be out there.

Cheers!

Regex: href=("|'|)http:(?:/{1,3}|[a-z0-9%])|[a-z0-9.-]+.

This allows for your link to have the " or ' or nothing between the = and the http   If you have any other TLDs you can just keep expanding on the |

I modified this from a posting in github https://gist.github.com/gruber/8891611

You can play with tools like http://regexpal.com/ to test your regexp against example text

I assumed you would want the full URL and that was the issue you were running into.

As another solution why not just fix the https in the main navigation etc, then once you get the staging/testing site setup, run ScreamingFrog on that site and find all the 301 redirects or 404s and then use that report to find all the URLs to fix.

I would also ping ScreamingFrog - this is not the first time they have been asked this question.  They may have a better regexp and/or solution vs what I have suggested.

Howdy!

TLDR - I would estimate Google bot desktop to run at about about 980 pixels, but there is an easy way to test, just mess around with your site by adjusting the width of the browser and see if you can duplicate what you see in Google fetch and render.

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_display.asp  97% of browsers have a width of 1024 or greater.  Therefore, if you use that minimum of 1024, your width would be appropriate for pretty much everyone. That said, you might want to go with 980 as the width to account for things like scrolling bars and the fact that most people do not browse in full screen. This is a pretty standard starting point for width.

When you use fetch and render - Google uses one of it's bots depending on the type of page https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6066468?hl=en

When Google talks about responsive design https://developers.google.com/webmasters/mobile-sites/mobile-seo/responsive-design it notes, "When the meta viewport element is absent, mobile browsers default to rendering the page at a desktop screen width (usually about 980px, though this varies across devices)."  In other words in some Google documentation they are giving a nod to the 980 pixels being a "standard desktop width"

Having that in mind, I would look at your site and see if you can tell if this jives.  If you have setup the page to look "normal" at greater than 980 pixels, say 1200 pixels, set your width to 1200 pixels in your browser. Then play with the width of the browser and see if you can get it to match what you see in Google fetch and render. If your site looks the same as what you see in fetch and render and your browser is at 980 pixels, then you have a confirmation of the Googlebot desktop viewport size.

You could also setup a simple page and put several images on separate rows that are 950px 980px 1000px 1200px etc wide. Run fetch and render and see what happens, but I like my first suggestion better.

Have fun!

If they are paginated and you are showing say 100 pages of blog posts, I would use rel next prev to connect one page to the other and show the relationship then I would use the same title on all of them, but on pages 2 through N, I add the page number to the title and the description.

So if your title is "Worlds Greatest Widget Posts" and description is "These are the best posts on widgets on our site." you would use that for the main index page.

Then Page 2 title would be "Page 2 of Worlds Greatest Widget Posts" and description is "This is page 2 of the best posts on widgets on our site."

You get the idea.  I use this very effectively to tie them together but make them unique.  Another pointer, if you use Printer Friendly versions of pages, you can add "PF" or "Printer Friendly" in the title and descriptions of those and then you can also use the canonical link to canonical the PF version to the actual version.