Welcome to the Q&A Forum
Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.
Hi Anirban,
The impact of adding the few lines of extra code of schema.org will be zero on the load time of your pages.
Apart from that, serving different content to bots & human users could be considered cloaking by search engines.
Implementing schema.org on the normal pages should do just fine!
rgds,
Dirk
Hi,
You should redirect the old url's to the new ones using a 301 redirect. Normally it's not really necessary to submit for re-indexing, Google is quite good in finding new url's itself.
The fact that Screamingfrog still finds the old url's is a sign that on your site you are still using links to the old url - you should update the internal links to the new url (you can easily get this info from Screaming frog - take the url's that have a 404 - check at the bottom of the page "In Links" - this will give you all the pages where the links need to be updated.
rgds,
Dirk
Hi,
Why would you do that for? A coming soon page has no value for visitors, and as a result no value for search engines.
If you're going to create a new site, I would first launch the new site and then redirect the old pages to the new ones.
rgds
Dirk
According to Google webmaster guidelines - a sitemap for users still has some value:
Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map has an extremely large number of links, you may want to break the site map into multiple pages. (source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en)
I agree with Patrick that now most people don't bother to consult sitemaps - if they need to consult it to find their way on your site you probably have a UX problem.
For SEO purposes - it still can have some advantages:
Sites like Linkedin.com still use these HTML indexes (although they are not called sitemaps but member lists) - as you can check when you visit the site in "Incognito" mode in your browser.
rgds,
Dirk
Google Academy http://www.google.com/analytics/learn/index.html would probably be a good starting point. Or just trial/error with some support from online help. It's pretty self-explanatory.
rgds,
Dirk
Hi,
Sudden traffic drops could have 3 principal causes:
you're being hit by an algorithm update - when I check http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change I don't really see a change on the date your problem starts. You could check in analytics if the traffic drop in mainly coming from organic traffic, or if the drop is for all traffic sources. Check your webmastertools - see if search queries dropped drastically (with the 2 day delay in Webmastertools it's probably to soon to do that). Do you see a manual action in your webmastertools? Check google - use the queries where you used to get the traffic from - does your ranking still looks ok - or did your site disappear from the results? If not - check the next point:
there is a problem with your analytics tag - install the Analytics plugin in Chrome (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/page-analytics-by-google/fnbdnhhicmebfgdgglcdacdapkcihcoh) and check your most important pages - see if the Analytics tag is measuring data. Go to Analytics - take the day where the traffic drop started & compare with the previous day - take the view on an hourly basis. If the drop appears on a very specific timepoint - than probably there has been some modification on your site which had an impact on your measurements.
last - check if your robots.txt is not blocking access to your site - take your main pages and check if they can be fetched by Google (there is a tool in Webmastertools)
Hope this helps. In my experience, a very sharp drop on a very specific moment (change occurs in 1 hour) is mostly caused by a problem with the analytics tag.
rgds,
Dirk
I think these names would be fine and following google guidelines for image search (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/114016?hl=en) - quote: "The filename can give Google clues about the subject matter of the image. Try to make your filename a good description of the subject matter of the image. For example, my-new-black-kitten.jpg is a lot more informative than IMG00023.JPG. Descriptive filenames can also be useful to users: If we're unable to find suitable text in the page on which we found the image, we'll use the filename as the image's snippet in our search results."
rgds
Dirk
The main reason to use internal "nofollow" links on your site if the links would go to technical pages like login pages, or links to pages that you don't want to have indexed. As Ryan says - if you link to other relevant articles there is no reason to use nofollow.
Dirk
Hi,
The difference between them
canonical : url has a canonical url - which can be self-referencing (canonical url = url) or not
canonicalised: url has a canonical url which is not self-referencing (canonical url <> url)
no canonical : quite obvious - the url has no canonical.
Potential issues could be - url's that you would like to have a canonical don't have a canonical or url's that are canonicalised don't have the right canonical url. You can use the lists (both canonicalised & no canonical) from Screaming Frog to check them - but it's up to you to judge whether the canonical is ok or not (no automated tool can guess what your intentions are).
Typical mistakes with canonicals: all url's have the same canonical url (like the homepage), or have canonical url's that do not exist. You could also check this with Screaming Frog using the setting "respect canonicals" - this way only the canonical url's will be shown in the listing.
Also keep in mind that canonical url's are merely a friendly request to Google to index the canonical rather than the normal url - but it's not an obligation for Google to do this (check https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en quote: "the search results will be more likely to show users that URL structure. (Note: We attempt to respect this, but cannot guarantee this in all cases.)"
Dirk
There are quite a lot of posts on Moz that cover link building. There is of course the beginner's guide, and this category page, which highlights the most important articles on link building.
Remember that all blogs once started from zero: without quality content, quality sites are not going to link to you. Create your content strategy and start building relationships. It will probably take time and a lot of effort, but it pays of in long run.
Hope this helps,
DIrk
Great work guys!
Would be nice if Moz would include this info yearly stats (https://moz.com/blog/the-best-of-2015) - activity in the Q&A section is now completely missing in this overview.
Comparing with total Moz points isn't always the best indicator:
As measure for activity in general:
Dirk
It's always this way - if you add up the clicks of the individual keywords about 50% of the clicks are missing. Google gives some reasons here (like privacy reasons) but they can hardly explain the (huge) differences.
See it from the positive side - at least you have some visibility on the keywords...
Dirk
For old content which is expired - just let them 404 or redirect to a newer version of the page (if available).
For new content that is going to expire you could use the unavailable after tag - see also this advice from Matt Cutts on content that expires (it's more about products for e-commerce - but the general principle is the same).
Dirk
It would be quite logical. Compare it with real estate. Your primary location is your homepage -which normally will list your most important & interesting content. As you normally cannot put everything on your home, you shift less important content to level 2, and then 3 ..etc. The deeper the content - the less important you find it. So it's quite normal that Google follows this logic as well.
The second part is the number of internal links - because your most important content will receive a lot of internal links. Normally - the more links a piece of content receives, the closer it will be to the homepage (chances are bigger it receives links from the home, level 2 or level 3 content).
Index pages can help to move your content closer to the home - but this will only get you so far (this doesn't change a lot to the number of links these articles receive).
You could try to regroup your content in a cluster per theme - with it's own homepage & a lot on links inside the cluster to create more internal (theme based links) & move content closer to the home. There is an interesting post on this topic from Gianluca Fiorelli: http://moz.com/blog/topical-hubs-whiteboard-friday
Hope this helps,
Dirk
Hi
Both questions are not completely related. Technically it is possible to have different hosts for different folders - so it's possible to have yourdomain.com/fr/mypage hosted in France & yourdomain.com/en/mypage in the US (see also http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1848605/can-a-website-subdirectory-be-served-by-a-different-web-server)
If you have to choose between folders / subdomains - go for folders (see also this post: http://moz.com/community/q/moz-s-official-stance-on-subdomain-vs-subfolder-does-it-need-updating)
If you check the signals Google is using to determine which country you are targeting (check https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192#2)
1: geotargeting - it's perfectly possible to activate two webmastertool accounts for yoursite.com/fr targeting the French market & yoursite.com/us targeting the US market
2. server location - is used as a hint & became less important with the use of CDN's (mainly important for performance reasons). If you use a CDN there should be no problem even when the "main" site is hosted in France.
-3. other hints like address, use of local language: it's probably a good idea to use the content-language metatag in the head of your HTML. If identical pages exist in different language versions - it's probably a good idea to use the hreflang tag to make it obvious to Google which part of the site is targeting which audience. For hreflang - this generator can be useful: https://moz.com/blog/using-the-correct-hreflang-tag-a-new-generator-tool & this tool to check if everything is implemented as should http://flang.dejanseo.com.au/
In your case - I would go to
Hope this helps
Dirk
It shouldn't- most people search in small caps anyway and Google doesn't seem to take capitals into account.
Dirk
Donald,
There are some issues with your site which could be causing the problems:
1. The load time of the homepage is quite slow -http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150316_8R_Y5A/1/details/ - apart from the heavy images, you also load a huge number of css & js files. If you analyse the page with Google Pagespeed https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fprimedraftarchitecture.com%2F&tab=desktop you get very low scores - both for mobile & desktop. I would remove some of the fancy stuff on the page & focus on the essentials. Follow the recommendation of both tools to make your site faster. This would be the top priority if it was my site.
2. There are some smaller on-page issues
3; Analytics
You seem to use both Universal & async tags on page (Universal on Contact / Async on the remainder) - on /blog you measure multiple 6 page views when only one should be measured. I would put everything on universal (and implement it in the head-tag
Hope this helps,
Dirk
Hi,
Try to answer your questions point by point:
1. You could add to your terms & conditions that sites created need to follow Google webmasterguidelines - and if they are not followed you can delete the subdomain.
2. Revoke the penalty is only possible by cleaning the site and removing the contested content. It depends on your current terms & conditions if you have the possibility to force the one who is managing this blog to clean the site.
3. Idem as above - if your terms & conditions didn't stipulate that messing with Google guidelines is forbidden, there is not much you can do at this point.
4. Wordpress is hosting the blogs on wordpress.com - the main site is wordpress.org. Weebly has terms & conditions that forbid Spam/SEO sites (probably Wordpress.com has this as well - but it's stated very clearly on the Weebly.com)
Update terms & conditions if necessary - send warning to offending blog users & delete them if necessary.
Hope this helps,
Dirk
Google is focussing more and more on user experience and analyses the way websites are visualized on screen. They already communicated that they don't like tabulated content where the user has to click to make content visible. Putting content in the beginning of your HTML while it is displayed at the bottom of the page goes a bit in the same direction and could be regarded as a shady technique. Not sute if this is already the case but I wouldn't do it on my site.
rgds
Dirk
Hi,
It seems that they are having technical issues - as mentioned by Rand last week on this question http://moz.com/community/q/when-is-ose-updated
"Our index is taking much longer to run than expected. We think there may be a hardware or software issues in processing that's having problems. We'll be doing maintenance so we can get back to faster indices ASAP."
We'll just have to be patient I guess,
Dirk
There is a similar thread here: http://moz.com/community/q/what-if-my-site-isn-t-ready-for-mobile-armageddon-by-april-21st
If you have a lot of mobile visitors coming in via Google, I think you may expect that this traffic will disappear (unless your competitors aren't very mobile friendly as well).
Nobody really knows what the impact is going to be, most discussions seem to agree that the impact will only be for mobile searches, but again, it's difficult to predict.
It also seems that it's defined on page - not site level, so you could try to provide mobile versions for your most important landing pages (dedicated or responsive). Your lay-out seems pretty straight forward, so I guess it shouldn't be too difficult to adapt it Remember that it doesn't have to perfect - it just needs to pass the "mobile friendly" test - https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/ - you can always improve later on.
Hope this helps
Dirk
Hi Darcy,
When people click on the results in Google - do they see the normal page (the one that Googlebot saw) or the version for the "new" users. If it's the second case - you are indeed cloaking according to Google's definition (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66355).
If you're listed in Google News - you could participate in "First Click Free" (https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/40543?hl=en) - which basically allows you to hide your content behind a registration wall but still be indexed as long as you provide at least 5 pages (articles) /day
Not all participants to First Click Free are playing according to the rules (http://searchengineland.com/google-fails-enforce-first-click-free-203078) - but I guess your site isn't the Financial times.
You could continue what you're doing now, but you certainly run the risk of a penalty in my opinion
rgds,
Dirk
I don't want to be rude - but why would you think your site is worth to be taken back in the index.
Most of your backlinks can be classified as "forum spam links" - it's nice as long as it works, but only having these type of links is waiting for spam penalties to happen.
I checked some of the content on your homepage - none of these articles seem to be original pieces of content. They seem to be copied from different sites across the web. Examples:
http://www.financialprospect.com/world/zika-virus-dangerous-than-imagination-us-25970.html - identical article here: http://www.livemags.com/2016/04/12/zika-virus-scarier-than-thought-says-us/
http://www.financialprospect.com/india-news/pm-modi-hosts-prince-william-and-kate-for-lunch-25774.html - identical article here: http://www.ndtv.com/india-news/pm-modi-hosts-prince-william-and-kate-for-lunch-1394631
So - no original content - bad link profile = added value for searchers & to be in the Google index?
Dirk
Hi,
If you look at the API pages it puts April 30th as date of next update (http://moz.com/products/api/updates)
rgds,
Dirk
It's not the size of the page that matters - it's the speed the page is downloaded on the user's device that matters (although there is of course a relation between these two). In general people expect a site to load in 2/3 seconds. There is an interesting article about that on the kissmetrics site: https://blog.kissmetrics.com/speed-is-a-killer/ - with a lot of useful resources & links. If you do search here on moz you'll probably find a lot of useful info as well. I think with the increasing focus on mobile, speed will become more important as ranking factor.
To be more specific on the size, according to this article - the average page size for the top-1000 websites is increasing and was 1600K in July '14. There is a negative correlation between page size & number of visits (no surprise). I would certainly not go above the 1600K (even this number seems already quite high for me)
rgds,
Dirk
Bob,
No - hidden text isn't exactly Google's favorite - to quote John Mulller (source Seoroundtable
" I think we've been picking up on that for quite some time now to kind of discount that information"
rgds,
Dirk
PS I noticed quite a lot of open questions from you - do you ever bother to mark a question answered when you get replies?
Hi,
These error code's are Moz custom codes to list errors it encounters when crawling your site - it's quite possible that when you check these pages in a browser that they load fine (and that google bot is able to crawl them as well).
You can find the full list of crawl errors here: https://moz.com/help/guides/search-overview/crawl-diagnostics/errors-in-crawl-reports. You could try to check these url's with a tool like web-sniffer.net to check the responses and check the configuration of your server.
608 errors: Home page not decodable as specified Content-Encoding
The server response headers indicated the response used gzip or deflate encoding but our crawler could not understand the encoding used. To resolve 608 errors, fix your site server so that it properly encodes the responses it sends.
803 errors: Incomplete HTTP response received
Your site closed its TCP connection to our crawler before our crawler could read a complete HTTP response. This typically occurs when misconfigured back-end software responds with a status line and headers but immediately closes the connection without sending any response data.
902 errors: Unable to contact server
The crawler resolved an IP address from the host name but failed to connect at port 80 for that address. This error may occur when a site blocks Moz's IP address ranges. Please make sure you're not blocking AWS.
Without the actual url's it's impossible to guess what is happening in your specific case.
Hope this helps,
Dirk
Blocking your mobile pages for indexing is not the best strategy if you have a dedicated mobile site. Better to use canonicals to point to the main domain - full explanation on "how to" here: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/mobile-sites/mobile-seo/configurations/separate-urls
With this setup - Google associates both Mobile & Desktop version - so in terms of page authority this should be equal. I would not ignore the 21st April date- Google is trying to make a point here - so for mobile searches mobile friendliness will be first priority.
rgds,
Dirk
Hi Carl,
The fluctuations in ranking are quite normal. Think of Google as an automated "learning" machine. Your site is pretty new, so is probably not getting that much visitors. By playing with the rankings, you will be able to get a little bit more traffic, generating additional data, which Google can than use again to see how your site is performing compared to the competition in terms of visitor engagement.
However, this is only one of the many factors involved, incoming links, number of articles,... etc all play a role (an exhaustive list can be found here).
Unfortunately, while being at number 51 with one post with no shares & links, doesn't guarantee a number 1 position if you add the shares & the links. Patience is a virtue you definitely will need to have if you're doing SEO.
Given the limited experience you have, I think you'll have quite a challenge by taking on your first client. I imagine that you already read the Moz Beginners Guide to SEO (http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo). There are some very good articles on SEO audit on Moz as well (here and here) and plenty of resources on keyword research (http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/keyword-research for starters).
Be honest with your first "customer", and make it clear to him that this will also be part of your personal learning process. SEO is not an exact science, and the basics are quite easy to learn, but as these basic techniques are known by everyone in the business, you're not going to make a huge difference by only applying these rules.
Most important rule in SEO for me would be - Imagine the different kind of visitors/customers you would like to attract. Put yourself in their position, and think about how you could deliver them the best experience possible on your site. If you are able to make your visitors happy, and you succeed in making them happier than your competitors can (by having excellent content, great products, fine usability,...etc), you are on the right track.
Dirk
You should minimize / uglify your code - because it speeds up your site (https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/MinifyResources).
Don't worry about readability/organisation of the code - that's for humans. Browsers & bots interpret the code - and as long as it is (more or less) valid HTML it will be rendered/crawled without problems.
Dirk
Just one small thing - I googled the phrases in the offers you mentioned. Your question which was posted 45 minutes ago on Moz is already outranking all the offers promoting these services. Guess these powerful links, link wheels & backlink pyramids aren't as powerful as advertised...
It is a "faux pas". The problem with the solution you propose is that the canonical url you are pointing to doesn't exist (domain.com/awesome-page has status 302 = temporarily moved to another location). Check http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.be/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html - best practices
With the canonical you indicate that you prefer that domain.com/awesome-page is shown in the search results rather than get.domain.com/awesome-page - Google will however not put pages with 302 status in the search results
Not sure if it's possible - but the best solution would be to maintain both pages & put a canonical on unbounce.If that is not possible - just leave it as it is. The moment you stop working with unbounce you 301 these pages to the corresponding pages on the main domain.
Dirk
It means that his site is an exact duplicate of your site and could potentially outrank your site in the search result (unless there is a canonical on which is pointing to the correct url)
He just pointed his domain to your server - instead he should redirect to your site.
Dirk
No - according to Google the value of the links is transferred to the https domain:
Check post from John Mueller on Google Plus: https://plus.google.com/+JohnMueller/posts/PY1xCWbeDVC
"#Do I lose "link juice" from the redirects? No, for 301 or 302 redirects from HTTP to HTTPS no pagerank is lost"
Dirk
Use a tool like screaming frog (free if less than 500 urls) - after crawling it's possible to do a bulk export of all internal redirections
Hi Jacob,
My point was that if the Moz crawler find duplicate content it has to be on your site - the Moz crawler is only crawling your site - not the social media. It may well be that you also have duplicate content issues across sites because you post on social media as well but the Moz crawler is completely unaware of that. The original advices remains valid - check which pages Moz considers to be duplicates and act accordingly.
rgds,
Dirk
There was an update of the Moz index yesterday - so it's not really abnormal that there are some fluctuations. If you want to read more about that - check this post from Rand https://moz.com/community/q/da-pa-fluctuations-how-to-interpret-apply-understand-these-ml-based-scores which explains quite well what's happening.
Dirk
If the markup passes the test it's valid markup & meets Google's guidelines. It would seem a bit ridiculous for Google to develop a test if the results of the test were not valid.
Never heard that markup needs to be put in one place. Most of the time the markup is inserted within your HTML so you will have several blocks of markup (unless you use the JSON-LD markup).
Dirk
Hi Craig,
Don't see any issue in using the word "comic book" in your H1. A bit reluctant to give Amazon as an example but they also add the word "Paperback" in the H1 title - they just format the book title & "paperback" differently - but it's still wrapped in the H1. Just make sure that the other content on the page is unique & you should be ok.
Dirk
As a rule of thumb - if the links add value for the visitor of your site, make it a "Follow" link.
If it is a commercial link, or a link to a site with low quality, it needs to be nofollow. Check also https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/96569?hl=en
rgds,
Dirk
If you're on Linux - probably the best way it to change the htaccess file on the old domain:
The .htaccess file needs to be placed in the root directory of your old website (i.e the same directory where your index file is placed)
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
Please REPLACE www.newdomain.com in the above code with your actual domain name.
In addition to the redirect I would suggest that you contact every backlinking site to modify their backlink to point to your new website.
Note* This .htaccess method of redirection works ONLY on Linux servers having the Apache Mod-Rewrite moduled enabled.
Disclosure - I didn't invent this myself - source can be found here: http://www.webconfs.com/how-to-redirect-a-webpage.php (this page give all the different options on how to redirect)
rgds,
Dirk
In both cases you will just see Facebook as referrer - if you want to track more in detail you will have to add a tracking parameter to your links.
Dirk
Hamid - the fluctuation is not necessarily coming from something you did wrong. The main takeaway from Rand's article is to consider the PA/DA as a relative measure - to see how you score compared to your competitors (see quote below). It tries to predict how well your site is doing in the search results - but (as all tools on the market) it will never be perfect.
"My strongest suggestion if you ever have the concern/question "Why did my PA/DA drop?!" is to always compare against a set of competing sites/pages. If most of your competitors fell as well, it's more likely related to relative scaling or crawl biasing issues, not to anything you've done. Remember that DA/PA are relative metrics, not absolute! That means you can be improving links and rankings and STILL see a falling DA score, but, due to how DA is scaled, the score in aggregate may be better predictive of Google's rankings."
Hi John
Nobody but Google can tell you for sure - but if I compare both pages & check the guidelines here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.be/2015/03/an-update-on-doorway-pages.html the site doesn't look like a typical doorway page:
1.Is the purpose to optimize for search engines and funnel visitors into the actual usable or relevant portion of your site, or are they an integral part of your site’s user experience?
=> the user experience on the vanity url is better than the standard page on the Hilton side. The only moment when you lead your visitors to the main site is when they want to book
2.Are the pages intended to rank on generic terms yet the content presented on the page is very specific? You're site seems optimised for people searching for this specific hotel - not hotels in general or any other generic terms
3. Do the pages duplicate useful aggregations of items (locations, products, etc.) that already exist on the site for the purpose of capturing more search traffic?
You don't exactly duplicate - you enrich the content in order to offer your visitors (and not the search engines) a better experience.
4. Are these pages made solely for drawing affiliate traffic and sending users along without creating unique value in content or functionality?
This point is definitely not the case
5. Do these pages exist as an “island?” Are they difficult or impossible to navigate to from other parts of your site? Are links to such pages from other pages within the site or network of sites created just for search engines?
Yes it is an island - but in that case you could see any hotel site as doorway page for a site like Booking.com when they use the Booking search engine.
To be honest, I would not be too worried. The goal of this update to eliminate pages will low added value, that only exist to rank & to funnel visitors to the main site. The example you gave has a high added value, and you're not funnelling to the main site (apart for booking purposes).
Hope this helps,
Dirk
If it's sounds to good to be true, it's probably not true...
Honestly - stay away from these kind of offers. You'll probably end up with thousands of low quality links to your site which could temporarily boost your site, but before you know it you'll be hit by a Google Penguin penalty. Buying links is and remains a violation of Google webmaster guidelines.
Quote:
"Any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site's ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. This includes any behavior that manipulates links to your site or outgoing links from your site."
Source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356
rgds,
Dirk
Hi
In my experience there is a certain latency with the links shown in Webmastertools, I has the tendency to continue to show links, even after they have been removed (we used to have a partnership with a large telco - and had 1.5mio links coming from them - when the partnership ended it took several months before they disappeard in WMT). If you are unable to find these links using the tools you mentioned I wouldn't worry about them.
rgds,
Dirk
You can use the domain as a vanity url - but in terms of SEO it has no real value as it's redirected to your main domain (especially if it's brand new & has no existing links and reputation).
Redirected url's are normally not indexed - Google is indexing the url behing the 301. In webmastertools you don't have to do anything special. You could indicate a change address (settings GSC) on the soyouwanta.website domain - but as the new domain is not indexed and doesn't have content I don't think it's useful to do so.
With rel next/previous you ask Google to consider all the pages with these tags to be considered as one page
With a canonical you indicate that the page is a duplicate (or variation) of the canonical url.
Your developers are right - if you put the first page as canonical for the subsequent pages your are basically asking Google to ignore the 2nd, 3rd,... pages which is in conflict with rel next/previous.
It is possible to combine both canonical & rel next/previous - but not in the way as your SEO company is suggesting. Example from Google:
The canonical in this case is used to strip the sessionid which could be a cause for duplicate content.
Please not that if your category pages are split over a lot of pages (like 100) - the rel / next previous stops making sense. In that case it's probably better to focus on optimising the first page & put a "noindex/follow" on the subsequent pages.
Dirk
If it's just design that changes it will normally have no negative impact on your site - if you do a good job it could even improve your rankings if user experience improves (increase time/visit, time/page & lower bounce rate)
If it has impact on your site structure I would do as ofw12387 : deploy a test site & use Screaming Frog to do a full audit:
If you have traffic on image search - also check that the position & the names of the images are not changing.
Good luck with the redesign,
Dirk
Point 6 seams to be the most important one - make sure they update all the logo's (most of the results I get seem to be affiliated with your company - so this shouldn't be to difficult to do).
Example: http://drellen.com/realself-reviews/ - the logo is changed in the body - but the bigger logo is still the old one.
On your site - rename your logo to real-self-logo.png & make the alt "Real Self Logo" to make it very obvious that the image = your logo
Dirk