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The noodp and noydir tags are archaic, so they are not used by search engines anymore.

They were used to notify the search engines not to retrieve data for your website from open directories or from Yahoo. Right now they are not used because now the search engines retrieve all the data from your site meta tags or content.

Regarding index and follow tags, you don't have to use them as they are set active by default. You just remove noodp and noydir (They don't affect anything, anyway) and you'll be good to go.

Daniel Rika - Dalerio Consulting
https://dalerioconsulting.com/
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As there are 19K new links to your site that appeared out of nowhere, most certainly they are spam links, that could be done by a competitor as a form of negative SEO. It can be very harmful to your site and lower your rankings or ever de-index you from google and bing.

What you should do is disavow the backlinks. In order to remove the spam links, you need to check all the backlinks one by one. Moz Spam Score is a very useful tool to filter some of the links, but mainly it's manual work and you need to be very careful not to disavow the positive links that your site already has. You can read more about it at my answer here: Advise Help on Bad Link Removals

If you need any help with the disavow process, feel free to let us know.

Daniel Rika - Dalerio Consulting
https://dalerioconsulting.com/
info@dalerioconsulting.com

Yes, the PDFs would help increase your domain rank as they are practically considered as pages by Google, as explained in their QnA here.

Regarding hosting the PDFs on a subdomain, Google has stated that it's almost the same as having them on a subfolder, but that is highly contested by everyone since it's much harder to rank a subdomain than a subfolder.

Regarding the canonical tags, they are created for "Similar or Duplicate Pages", so the content doesn't have to be identical, and you'll be good so long as most of the content is the same. Otherwise, you can safely have them both be and have backlinks linking from the pdf to the main content to transfer "link juice", as they are considered as valid links.

I hope my response was beneficial to you and that the included proof was substantial.

Daniel Rika

Deleting a post on your site should always be your last resort and 301 redirects are used as a way to remediate the damage that the deleted post would make.

Now, what would be appropriate in your case will depend on the type of website and post. If the post is ranked on google and has backlinks, it would be more beneficial to you to keep both the post and the page and to add a link to the page from the post, while keeping differences between both posts content and meta so that they are not marked as duplicate.

Otherwise, if your posts aren't put on a separate directory p.e. "/blog/post-name" and the title is SEO-optimized, you can just add the extra content and convert it to the page while keeping the previous backlinks and content.

If the old post doesn't have any backlinks, does not rank and has a URL that will be different from the page that you are looking to create, then the best solution would be to create a 301 redirect. After creating the redirect, the post will not be accessible by users or crawlers so you can go ahead and delete the old post.

Daniel Rika - Dalerio Consulting
https://dalerioconsulting.com/
info@dalerioconsulting.com

The main reason to use a redirect engine on your site would be either for safety purposes to scan the URL for malware or in order not to pass the rank (SEO juice) by Disallowing/NoIndexing the redirect engine URL.

If you are looking to help rank the linked site, then what you should do is use an old-fashioned DoFollow link. Otherwise, feel free to use a redirect engine.

Daniel Rika - Dalerio Consulting
https://dalerioconsulting.com/
info@dalerioconsulting.com

Generally speaking, unless your site has a very high Domain Authority, then it will be very difficult to rank on the first page without building some external backlinks. Internal backlinks alone won't be enough to take your site's pages on the first page of the Google results for the targeted keyword.

Also, in regards to internal links, don't forget to cross-link within the article. If one of the pages is referenced on another page, then you can put a link to that. Take the very good example of Wikipedia's internal linking to master it. However, don't overdo the internal links or you might raise some flags.

After building more quality external backlinks for your pages, you should be able to see your pages slowly grow in rank and help increase your Domain Authority.

Daniel Rika - Dalerio Consulting
https://dalerioconsulting.com/
info@dalerioconsulting.com

The Moz spam score is measured on a multitude of metrics, some of which are related to backlinks and some not. The fact that you have purchased an old domain that dates back to 2013 on web archive ( which although in itself is not negative), is possibly a factor that has contributed to tip over some flags.

You can find the full list of metrics that Moz uses to calculate the spam score here:
https://moz.com/help/link-explorer/link-building/spam-score

You will need to analyze the factors listed there in order to work on improving your Moz Spam Score.

On the other hand, the Moz spam score is a metric created by Moz and it doesn't necessarily represent how your site will rank on search engines. I suggest that you keep adding quality unique content and good backlink on your site, and I'm certain that as the time passes your site spam score will decrease.

Daniel Rika - Dalerio Consulting
https://dalerioconsulting.com/
info@dalerioconsulting.com

If I'm understanding your question right, there are various sub-pages on the directory, and you want to redirect the directory and not the sub-pages. In that case, the only damage to SEO would be the ranking given from the directory page, so you would have one less internal link. It will be the same as redirecting any page/post that links back to the sub-pages, so in most cases, it won't be noticeable unless the directory page itself that links to the sub-pages is highly ranked.

Daniel Rika - Dalerio Consulting
https://dalerioconsulting.com/
info@dalerioconsulting.com

The reviews only make a small part of the site's content, so they wouldn't be enough for the page to be marked as duplicate. It is a very common tactic to include reviews from other sites, so it is safe to assume that they won't be of any harm to your rankings.

Daniel Rika - Dalerio Consulting
https://dalerioconsulting.com/
info@dalerioconsulting.com

SEO-Wise it is the same whether you include the www or you don't, but since you mention that on some of the pages indexed it shows with the www and on others it doesn't, then you should do a 301 redirect to the option you like. Having both options accessible can make it possible for the search engines to rank them as different pages, although that would be unlikely.

I personally prefer not to include the www because I want my URLs to be shorter. Other people think that including the www can make the URL look a little more professional, but in the end it's just a matter of personal preference. As long as you stick to one option, you should be totally fine.

Daniel Rika - Dalerio Consulting
https://dalerioconsulting.com/
info@dalerioconsulting.com

To clarify, the site is on google and it does index.

Now as to why the site doesn't rank for the requested keywords, it will depend mainly on the backlink building and keyword optimization. Checking your backlinks on Moz Link Explorer, I see that there are only 6 linking domains.

What you can do is create pages that are optimized to rank for the keywords that you are targeting and start building quality backlinks for those pages, and slowly you will see them grow through the ranks. Once you have more pages that are ranked higher for keywords, your domain authority will grow and it will become easier to rank for new keywords of higher competition.

Daniel Rika - Dalerio Consulting
https://dalerioconsulting.com/
info@dalerioconsulting.com

The golden rule is that you never use two H1-s on the same page.

The best solution will be based on how your website is designed, but from what I am understanding, you are looking to have a portal of agents and businesses. As they are individual profiles, then you can put the agent name as an H1 on the agent profile and the business/company name as an H1 on the business profile, while listing the agents working under the business with the h2 tag, or even h3.

I hope my answer was helpful to you. I would be able to give a more informative answer if you could provide a link to the website or an example page.

Daniel Rika - Dalerio Consulting
https://dalerioconsulting.com/
info@dalerioconsulting.com

Google generally takes some time to update the robots.txt file and even more time to update the SERP and remove the disallowed links from the results. After you have properly blocked the URLs from the bots, then they should be removed from the results within a few days.

In order to check how the robots.txt file affects the files, you can use the Google robots.txt checker tool. There you can see how the file is stored by Google and you can add your link to test whether it is allowed or not.

Daniel Rika - Dalerio Consulting
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Whether you want to index the pdf directly or not will mostly depend on the content of the pdf:

• If you are using the pdf as a way to gather e-mails for your newsletter, or if you are offering the pdf as a way to get users to your site, then it would be best not to have them indexed directly, but instead have the users go to your site first.
• If the pdf in itself is a way for you to promote your website or content then you can index it so that it can be accessed directly and may help you to get a bit more rank or clicks.

If you are looking to track pdf views, there are options to connect GA and track your pdf views, such as this plugin.

If the content is similar to the web page, then you can put a canonical tag to transfer the ranking. You can add it to the http header using the .htaccess file as explained here.

Daniel Rika 

It depends on how it is implemented on your website. If it's just a plain page with a title and description, and just the image slammed into the page with no content, then it won't do any good for page or image SEO. Instead, it can even harm your indexability as the pages might consume some of the "crawl budget". You can read more about it in my answer here.

My suggestion would be to link to the images directly. If you want to however keep the image pages, you can set them not to be indexed through the meta no-index tag in the header. Regarding image SEO I would suggest you work more on optimizing the image file name, title and description on the page where you are using it, and keep creating quality links for your website and pages.

I hope my answer was helpful to you. If I had a link to the website I would be able to give you a more accurate response/solution.

Daniel Rika - Dalerio Consulting
https://dalerioconsulting.com
info@dalerioconsulting.com

The issue with your slider is that as all 4 slides have the same text which is copy-pasted for every slide, and it might hurt your keyword optimization.

Since your site doesn't have an H1, the ideal solution would be to turn the slider text into an H1 and make it so that the text floats over the slider, and not cycle the same text all over again, or setting an H1 outside the slider.

Alternatively, it that's too complicated, switching the text of one of the slides as an H1 would be a plus for the website.

Daniel Rika - Dalerio Consulting
https://dalerioconsulting.com/
info@dalerioconsulting.com

The quality of a backlink is based on several factors, with the main being:

• Domain Authority
• Page Authority
• Spam Score
• Relevancy

For the first 3 measurements you can get an estimate through the Moz Backlink Checker and it will help you filter damaging domains. Firstly you will need to focus more on the Spam Score, which is based on several factors calculated by Moz. Low Domain Authority and Page Authority aren't on itself a reason to disavow a backlink, but along with a high spam score or is posted on a page with irrelevant content then it can do more harm than good. My personal choice is disavowing most of the backlinks with a spam score of 50-70% and higher, and most of the backlinks with a low DA/PA and a spam score of over 20%.

Relevancy is the most difficult to maintain because it requires you to manually inspect every link and check their content. If your website is regarding construction and you have built backlinks on a gucci bags vendor it will do nothing to improve your rankings, or even harm them.

The geo-location of the site where the backlink is posted is very important for some businesses as well, given that they operate within a certain region. If you're operating within the US there would be no point in having backlinks in Italian or Chinese sites, and ranking on those regions, and from my experience it tends to lower rankings in the origin country. Backlinks on sites without a specific geo-location are fine though.

When selecting which backlinks to disavow you will need to be very careful not to disavow backlinks that are useful to your site and all the above factors need to be taken into consideration altogether.

Daniel Rika - Dalerio Consulting
https://dalerioconsulting.com/
info@dalerioconsulting.com

The new max-snippet feature is used for you to limit up to which length of characters you want to display the meta description for the page. You should be able to put any positive integer there.

The issue stands by the Meta Description best practices. If your meta description is over 160 characters, then Google will shorten it not to take too much search results space, so ideally you would want to put a max-snippet length of up to 160.

You can find more information about Meta description best practices here.

Daniel Rika - Dalerio Consulting
https://dalerioconsulting.com/
info@dalerioconsulting.com

It is actually a good idea to split the two language versions into two different sites as it will help each of the sites rank in their own countries. It's an even better idea to use country-specific domains for that.

To make things clear, translated content is not duplicate content. The search engines have no incentive to penalize sites for translating their content, so you would be safe from any filter that search engines might use.

However, you are advised to use hreflang when linking to the different language versions of the site to let the search engines know that both sites are linked together, as it would help search engines provide the correct language version of the site to targeted users.

Daniel Rika - Dalerio Consulting
https://dalerioconsulting.com/
info@dalerioconsulting.com

As long as you are inserting the canonical tag and pointing to the right URL, then there shouldn't be any issue with the additional attributes. As long as the attributes don't affect Google, then it should safely ignore them.

You can try some A/B testing if you wish, but in other cases of adding attributes, Google just applies the tags that it recognises/reads.

Daniel Rika - Dalerio Consulting
https://dalerioconsulting.com/
info@dalerioconsulting.com

As stated by Google, subdomains can be considered as part of your site, so the redirects can negatively harm your site and raise red flags although not as much as directories/posts.

As the redirects are done on subdomains, then you should check with your domain provider or hosting provider in order to disable the use of subdomains and revert the issue.

Daniel Rika - Dalerio Consulting
https://dalerioconsulting.com/
info@dalerioconsulting.com

I've had the same issue when one of my clients disallowed a directory that contained the CSS and some other scripts.

What you should do is make sure 100% that you have removed any conflicting line from the robots.txt file, then you should go to the robots.txt testing tool from Google and see whether it's updated. If not, you just make a request for it to be updated, and usually, it's done within 30 min. Then you should run the Google mobile-friendly test and see if there are any issues.

If both of the tests return positive results, then you should request at the search console to "validate fix". After that, it usually takes up to a week for it to be removed from the pages with errors.
If it's a small number of links, you can also "text live URL" within the search console, and then "request indexing". As mentioned, if everything goes right, it should take up to one week for the errors to be removed.

Daniel Rika - Dalerio Consulting
https://dalerioconsulting.com/
info@dalerioconsulting.com

If the pdfs are duplicate within your own site, then the best solution would be for you to link to the same document from different sources. Then you can delete the duplicated documents and 301 redirect them to the original.

If the pdfs are duplicate from another site, then disallowing them on robots.txt will stop them from being marked as a duplicate, as the crawler will not be able to access them at all. It will just take some time for them to be updated on google search console.

If however, you want to add canonical tags to the pdf documents (or other non-HTML documents), you can add it to the HTTP header through the .htaccess file. You can find a tutorial on how to do that in this article.

Daniel Rika - Dalerio Consulting
https://dalerioconsulting.com/
info@dalerioconsulting.com

Hopefully, I understood the question right.

You don't get duplicate content for the product if the product is located on two different pages (categories), as you are just linking from 2 different sources while the content of the product is unique. You do get duplicate content for the category, however, if all the products in both categories are the same, in which case there is no point in having both categories so you just merge them or 301 redirect one of the categories to the other.

You can get duplicate content if there are tags that have the same posts as categories. Many people no-index the tags entirely, but depending on the site you may watch out so that they don't contain the same products(posts), or just 301 redirect from the tag to the category.

Daniel Rika - Dalerio Consulting
https://dalerioconsulting.com
info@dalerioconsulting.com

One key thing to have in mind when designing your URL is to relate it to the keywords you're aiming for. Cluttering it with folders and categories will put less attention on the targeted keyword, which in your case should be about the download or purchase of the software. That is why generally in WordPress blogs it is suggested to go for the direct slug as in "site.com/url-slug-keyword/"

The perfect solution will depend on your site and what you're aiming for, but what I would suggest is to keep the URL up to one or two categories that are directly related to the targeted keywords. Also, on a study of the top sites on Google by NeilPatel, it is suggested that you keep the URL length between 50-60 characters.

As for the SEO impact, after properly completing the 301 redirect to the new URL, then you won't have any issues and will instead see growth if the change is seen positively by Google.

Daniel Rika

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One of the most comprehensive case studies that comes to mind for this issue is the following from Jeff Baker:
This Is What Happens When You Accidentally De-Index Your Site from Google

My main suspicion as to why the new site isn't ranking as well would be because often times Google is very slow at re-crawling the pages on your site. If Google hasn't re-crawled the old domain and documented the 301 redirect, then it hasn't transferred the rank of the old domain to the new one. In order to verify this, you should check if the old article page has de-indexed. If it hasn't de-indexed and the new site is ranking in a low position, then it means that the new site is ranking by itself without the support of the 301 redirect.

There is bound to be some change in rank as you joined several sites into a new domain, but since the topic is very similar, then the change should be very small. With time Google should be able to slowly crawl all the pages and transfer their authority to the new one.

Please let me know if my theory holds ground and whether there's anything else I can assist with.

Daniel Rika - Dalerio Consulting
https://dalerioconsulting.com/
info@dalerioconsulting.com

There are several factors that you need to check to determine whether a backlink is positive or negative for the SEO of the site. Whenever you consider disavowing a backlink you should be very careful and take all factors into account, because if you disavow backlinks that are positive to your site, your rankings will decrease. That is why Google has "hidden" the link disavow tool.

The main factors that you should take into account are:

• Domain Authority
• Page Authority
• Spam Score
• Relevancy

You can read more about it in my answer here.

Daniel Rika - Dalerio Consulting
https://dalerioconsulting.com/
info@dalerioconsulting.com

The purpose of the <base> tag is to set a base domain for linking to elements within it.

Basically, what the base tag does is if you set your <base href="moz.com"> and you link within the document to "/community/q", then the link will take the user to "moz.com/community/q".

There is no effect in SEO besides the fact that you will be creating backlinks to the base site for each element that is referred directly, without a URL.

Daniel Rika - Dalerio Consulting
https://dalerioconsulting.com/
info@dalerioconsulting.com

NoFollow links are normal and have been proven to be healthy when it comes to ranking on Google. In fact, if you have an unhealthy ratio of DoFollow vs NoFollow links to your site, it could raise red flags for SEO.

As the NoFollow attribute was introduced in 2005, the entire web slowly began to switch to NoFollow because of fear that they would be penalized by Google if their user-generated content was linking to spam sites. That entirely defeated the purpose of introducing NoFollow in the first place, and because of that Google has recently introduced and has been pushing the use of "sponsored" and "ugc" tags.

In a case study by SemRush, it was noted that for the #1 ranking pages on Google, around 20%-40% of their links were NoFollow. In fact, the percentage of NoFollow links for the #1 ranking page was higher than the percentage of NoFollow links for the entire site.

To sum it up, NoFollow links are good for your site and you should continue building links on quality sites, with a bit less regard to whether they are DoFollow or NoFollow.

Daniel Rika - Dalerio Consulting
https://dalerioconsulting.com/
info@dalerioconsulting.com

It is difficult to tell whether Google will mark the two locations as the same business and link them to your site when it comes to local citations, but the usual stance as also outlined at Moz here, is that you always use the short version of the address, since not all sites will allow you to put the full-length address.

So, what you can do is update your website and other profiles where you have inserted the address to have the short version:

Blue Widgets Ltd
Hope Springs, Stow on the Wold POSTCODE

That should help you be consistent with nearly every local citation.

Daniel Rika - Dalerio Consulting
https://dalerioconsulting.com/
info@dalerioconsulting.com

There are plenty of free or paid resources on the web for tracking duplicate content.

What I generally use as an easy solution is the plagiarism checker provided from SmallSeoTools. Which is free and simple to use (not very advanced though). You can also produce similar results by searching on Google for random sentences throughout your text to see if they have been copied anywhere else.

There are more advanced paid solutions to finding plagiarism, which is used by academics, but for the average website, a free online checker would do fine.

Also, if you want to constantly track and be notified whenever your content has been copied, you can sign up for a notification service like Plagiarism Checker

Daniel Rika - Dalerio Consulting
https://dalerioconsulting.com/
info@dalerioconsulting.com

The main takeaway for me would be not to focus too much on the NoFollow/DoFollow links ratio. If there are listings where you can put your site and you can get traffic and rank from, then just go ahead and add your site there. A site with (no-spam) nofollow links will always rank higher than a site with no links.

Having your site listed in those directories can in fact sometimes give you more credibility or even new leads, and if the directory has a high spam rating, you can always disavow the backlink.

Daniel Rika - Dalerio Consulting
https://dalerioconsulting.com/
info@dalerioconsulting.com