I find it strange that this happens with Yoast as it points the canonical tag for the homepage to a 301 redirect URL. I don't think it's a big problem as search engines seem to handle it well, but it's a problem that I wouldn't expect to see in such a popular and reputable SEO plugin.

If you use the plugin editor to remove the trailing slash you will remove the trailing slash from all pages of your site (something you may not want to do).

If you only want to remove the trailing slash from the homepage the easiest option would be to manually add the canonical URL without the trailing slash in the Advanced tab for Yoast when editing the homepage (as Linda said above). Doing this for one page will take you 2 seconds and fix the problem!

Hi 94501,

I went through this about 6 months ago with a big Australian company. I did pretty much everything you suggested and the transition was very smooth.

Here are my dot point on what I think you should do and answers to your questions:

• 301 redirect pages from old site to corresponding pages on new site.
• Don't worry about nofollowing links from the old site to new site.
• No need to submit requests for old pages to be removed from index - search engines will figure it out with the redirects.
• No risk of the old site losing organic traffic - besides he obvious of not having those pages to get organic traffic, like you said.
• It took 2-3 weeks for G to figure out everything that was going on and index and rank the new site properly.

Only other thing I would add is to make sure you keep things like page titles, heading tags, etc., the same for the pages that are already performing well.

Also, if the new site is using a template that has big changes from the old site, make sure you do all the standard checks to make sure it's 'SEO-friendly' so you don't run into any issues not directly related with moving content to a new domain.

Overall, goal should be to keep the old and new pages as similar as possible - unless you are making improvements!

Cheers,

David

Sounds like they are wanting to make turtlesforsale.com/turtles-for-sale/ their homepage, which is quite strange. "Keyword stuffing" URLs like this will not help SEO in any way. I would advise against it and leave the homepage as turtlesforsale.com.

eg. for other pages on the site: turtlesforsale.com/state/city/ is better than turlesforsale.com/turtles-for-sale-in-state/turtles-for-sale-in-city/

Like most things in SEO, think of what is better for humans. The first example is much cleaner and easier to read, and for SEO purposes, there would be no difference between the two if all other factors were the same.

A similar question was asked (and answered very well) here: http://moz.com/community/q/url-seo-better-directory-structure-vs-exact-keyword-phrase

Hi Luke,

I don't think you have anything to worry about with making the improvements in one go.

As long as you are improving your titles to make them more relevant to the content on the page (and not just jamming them keywords), you won't be upsetting Google and you would only see positive results.

Cheers,

David

To add to this, you will also probably never get star ratings to appear for your homepage. I've never seen star ratings appear on a homepage but would love to see any proof of it ever happening!

John Mueller said back in 2014 that "review rich snippets should only be used in cases where "the main topic of the page needs to be about a specific product or service." -- using them on your homepage in general wouldn't be like that."

Article on SE Roundtable here.

I'd think you'd have a much better chance of getting them to display in SERPs if you moved the ratings markup to relevant service pages on your site.

Cheers,

David

Hi John,

For visualizing internal link data, I think Sitebulb is the only tool that does it automatically.

You can do it with Screaming Frog data but it's a bit of a process to visualize it (check out this guide if you're interested).

Cheers,

David

There was a great case study released by Reboot Online Marketing last week on exactly this topic: https://www.rebootonline.com/blog/hidden-text-experiment/

Basically, sites with visible text performed better; text in a textarea was treated as visible; and sites with text 'hidden' with CSS and JavaScript 'Read More' buttons didn't perform as well.

As Logan says above, Google is looking to give hidden content full weight with the release of the mobile first algorithm, but this algorithm hasn't been released yet and is likely not to be released this year: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-mobile-first-index-2017-23663.html

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

David

Hi Monu,

It's most likely because Moz hasn't crawled your shortened URLs before - anything that Moz hasn't crawled will report as PA 1.

But don't be too concerned about PA and how long it takes Moz to crawl your links!

And don't think that going through a URL shortener is going to "boost" the link value because it's reported as a higher DA/PA link - it doesn't quite work like that

Cheers,

David

Hi David,

I have to disagree with Dmitrii a bit here.

I would say the answer to your question depends on the size of your site and how many articles and tags you are talking about - on bigger sites with more tags, they can become quite an issue.

On a big-ish news site that I own and run (14,000+ articles), I added "noindex" to all tag pages (2,000+) and then blocked them in robots.txt a few months later (once Google had crawled and removed them all from index).

The reason for removing and blocking them for search engines is that tag pages generally don't offer anything unique or of substantial value when compared to other pages on your site site, and they can also use up a lot of your "crawl budget".

For the site mentioned, I saw around a 30% organic traffic increase after implementing these changes.

The tags are still there for users, but they are not visible to search engines and means that search engines are now only crawling pages that we want indexed and ranking, instead of wasting their time crawling thousands of links to thousands of tag pages.

Basically, don't think of tags as a way to "help your SEO" because they probably won't and they have the potential to do the opposite.

If you think creating a particular tag will help you get long-tail traffic, write an article about that topic instead! I guarantee you it will perform a lot better than a tag page.

Cheers,

David

No.

If you want to leave a legitimate blog comment to engage with the author and the community, go for it!

If you're only leaving blog comments to get links to "help your SEO" - don't do it.

It's spam and it won't help you at all.

Hi Eddy,

Edit: this was already answered before I could post my reply. But I've left the example.

The issue with the meta robots tag is that you are using curly quotation marks around robots and noindex:
You have:
“robots**” content=“noindex”/>
Instead of:
name="robots" content="noindex"**/>

This will fix your issue.

Cheers,

David

Hi GTAMP,

I would definitely remove the h2 tag from your site-wide header tagline.

Heading tags should be used to demonstrate a hierarchy to the content on a page and using a h2 in the site's tagline in the header is not doing this.

I wouldn't expect to see any noticeable gains from only removing the h2 tag, but it's one of those things where it all adds up in the end.

Cheers,

David

Hi Gianluca,

He was talking about a WordPress website which, by default, already has a 301 redirect in place on the homepage URL with the slash to the URL without the slash.

What's strange is that the Yoast SEO plugin points the homepage canonical tag to the URL with the slash - which is 301 redirected to the URL without!

I know search engines handle this very well and probably just ignore the canonical tag, but if you want it to be 100% correct (and why wouldn't you?) adding a the canonical tag in the Advanced tab is a very easy fix.