Peter,

It depends.

If you don't get a lot of traffic from image search there is no need to do anything special.

If you are receiving a lot of traffic you basically have two options

• redirect the images to the new location (if this is easy to do)

• alternative would be to keep the images in the old location & put them in the new location as well. As you update the sitemap & redirect the url's Google will after a while update the index for image search & get the new location. As long the index is not updated, your 'old' images will still appear in image seach, when people click on the link they will however be redirected to your new page (as the page containing them is redirected). In my experience - the update frequency of the image index is lower than the normal search index.

I applied this strategy on 2 migrations of sites with 90% of search traffic = image & it proofed quite successful.

Hope this helps - let me know if you have additional questions,

rgds,

Dirk

Agree with Ryan - if you want to make changes - better make the image name a descriptive one.

Also, take care if you get search traffic from image search - changing the name of your images could cause a big negative impact on your traffic. In my experience the image index is updated slower than the normal index - so if 2554.jpg is indexed and you change it to 6842.jpg or even better red-ford-truck.jpg the image in the result will return a 404 and be replaced by the same image from another site (if it's a stock photo) or dropped from the results. Better to keep the old image in the initial location until the index is updated

rgds

Dirk

Hi,

2 things can have an impact on the underlying pages:

1. Your navigation is appearing on all pages - so the pages that are linked to from the navigation will get internal links from all the other pages of your site.
While internal links are less important than external ones, they still play a role in telling Google how important the pages are (=more links is more important). Removing important pages from the navigation will result in a (substantial) lower amount of internal links to these pages

2. If the pages that were previously in the navigation are not linked to from the home page they will be 1 click further away from your homepage (same goes for the underlying pages). How deeper the content is in your site, the less likely it is that it will rank. This might have an impact as well.

So yes, it can have an impact. On the other hand - you also have to keep your visitors in mind. If you had one of these huge dropdown menus before with lots of different links, and now a very clean and logical navigation, it could have a positive impact on the user experience. This would be reflected by things like time on site, bounce rate,...etc and would have a positive effect on rankings.

Just my 2 cents,

Dirk

You might want to check this thread https://moz.com/community/q/804-https-ssl-error - there are possible solutions mentioned in the answers if you scroll towards the bottom of the page

Basically Moz has issues crawling https sites using SNI - which is often use by Cloud Flare (and some other hosts)

"Our current crawl libraries do not support SNI which is typically what is enabled by default by Cloud Flare. Our engineering team is still investigating expanding our libraries but an ETA is not available quite yet."

As far as I know this issues hasn't been solved yet. If the SNI is not the issue - you might want to contact Moz directly (help@moz.com) to take a look at your specific issue.

Hope this helps,

Dirk

Hi Ruben,

You could translate the full site or only part of it (focussing on the most important parts). Only putting a translated homepage is an option but will not help you much in terms of SEO & isn't really great for user experience either.

You shouldn't worry about duplicate content if you translate the content to Spanish (and certainly don't put canonicals to the English version). In multilingual countries (like mine) it's more or less the standard approach. If you want to make it very obvious for Google (and the other search engines) you can use the hreflang tags. Check here for more info https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en or here: https://moz.com/learn/seo/hreflang-tag

Personally I wouldn't put the Spanish version on a brand new domain - as it implicates that you'll have to build your reputation almost from scratch - rather use a folder on your main domain (domain.com/es/ ) - this way the Spanish pages will benefit from the reputation of your current site. You could use the Spanish domain as vanity url & redirect it to the Spanish version

Would also add a link on each page - pointing to the version of that page in the other language or (if only partially translated) - to the homepage of the other language.

If you have questions let me know.

Dirk

Do you get al lot of traffic from image search? If not, I don't think it really matters, there are thousands of site who are using the same setup as you.

if you get a lot of traffic from image search you need to be careful. Never moved from main domain to sub domain, but did a recent migration of a site where 80% of traffic came from image search. All the images were moved to a new folder.

In my experience, the image index is updated much slower than the normal index, and while google is quite fast to index the redirected urls it seems to need  much more time for the images. On a previous migration we had the situation where the image thumbnails where still visible, but as soon you did preview the image the image didn't load as it had moved from it's original location. The problem with image search is that when this happened the position of the image remained in the results the site behind it changed (at that point we also discovered that an huge number  of sites had stolen our original images).

To avoid this we now migrated the images to the new location and updated the links in the html, but we also kept the same images in the old location until we had the impression that they were no longer indexed.

this strategy seemed to work as unlike the first migration our results from image search were unaffected.

hope this helps

Dirk

I have migrated several sites - including changes of urls (and even domains). If done well (meaning that all pages are properly redirected from the old to the new url) there should not a be an issue. In 80% of the migrations, you couldn't even notice that there had been a migration if you looked at the search engine traffic. In the 20% where traffic was lost, it wasn't related to link juice but to other issues:

- if you change the look & feel of your pages this can have an impact on your visitors (both positive and negative - check bounce rate, time on page, avg. pages/visit) - if it's negative you can quite easily loose positions in search (resulting in lower search traffic). If your pages stay exactly the same - this shouldn't be an issue.

• Same goes with performance - if the performance of the new platform is worse than the old one - it could again have a negative impact on your users, and as a result on your position in the SERP's.

• if you change your site structure - take care of you site depth. Sometimes changing you site can push important content deeper or cause less internal links to these pages, again having a negative impact on the site's performance in the SERP's.

Nobody will be able to give you a definitive answer on your question, but as far as I know, link juice doesn't get lost with 301's, but a lot of other factors can have a severe impact.

If you loose traffic, recovery can take a long time (up to 6 months) provided you find the root cause of the problem (and it won't be the link juice). If you don't - that traffic is gone.

Hope this helps,

Dirk

The resources mentioned  by Patrick are all good ones - I am even going to add one: http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/structured-urls/ . You don't even have to read it :

• structured url's help semantics  - the folder like structure helps search engines understand how the site is structured
• it's easier to check which pages are indexed as you can do a site:mysite.com/folder/
• reporting is way easier with a structured url

Apart from that, and probably most important argument: a site depth is measured on how many clicks you need to get to a page and how pages are cross-linked - Google is not counting the number of "/" in your url's to determine if your site is flat or not.

rgds

Dirk

I doubt that Google is seeing using a CDN as cheating - it is one of the factors which helps increasing the speed of the site and increase user experience. It would be an ideal world if you could get a 100% score on Pagespeed Insights and all A scores on webpagetest.org - but you have to start somewhere, and adding a CDN is normally one of the easier things to do. So it's certainly not cheating - rather taking a step in the good direction.

Apart from that, Google is offering a CDN itself (https://cloud.google.com/dns/docs).

rgds,

Dirk

You don't seem to have much options if canonicals are not possible.

To be honest - in cases like this I wouldn't use canonicals but always go for 301 redirects. They are pretty easy to implement (2 lines of code in htacess) and they are directives Google has to follow (and will pass pagerank). Canonicals are mere requests to Google that it can but is not obliged to respect.

Would also indicate in the Search Console of the duplicates that you're moving them to the main domain (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/83106?hl=en) - you need to validate the duplicate domains before implementing the redirects.

Dirk

You could point a canonical to the original source (in fact that is the way Google prefers it). It's a great solution if it's you who's syndicating the content. However, if you would do that, you would loose any opportunity to get ranked on that content.

Googles view: (source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66359?hl=en).

"Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results. If your site suffers from duplicate content issues, and you don't follow the advice listed above, we do a good job of choosing a version of the content to show in our search results."

The big problem with duplicate content across different domains is that it's up to google to decide which site is going to be displayed. This could be the site which is syndicating the content, but it could also be a site which has the highest authority.

In your case - if possible I would try to enrich the content you syndicate with content from other sources. Examples could be interesting stats on the neighbourhood like avg. age, income, nearby schools, number of house sold & average price...etc or other types of content that might interest potential buyers. This way your content becomes more unique and probably more interesting (and engaging) for your visitors (and for Google)

Hope this helps,

Dirk

You can use Screaming Frog for this (and much more). It's not free but is great tool to check the SEO health of your site as well.
Trial is free (up to 500 url's).
To generate the sitemap - crawl  your site with following settings:
Configuration > Spider > Advanced tab: select:

• always follow redirects
• respect noindex
• respect canonical

After crawl - under the Sitemaps you can create the XML & image sitemaps.

Dirk

These are normal 404 errors - the :443 after the url just indicates that it's using the https port (you can add the 443 after each of your https urls - they redirect to the normal ones); Don't know why wordpress is adding the :443

Check your site if you have internal links to these 404 pages (try Screaming Frog or another crawltool. These pages seem to have existed in the past: check this example http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:_M5jZnMoFmcJ:https://www.compleetverkleed.nl/hoed-al-capone-panter-8713647758068-2/+&cd=2&hl=nl&ct=clnk&gl=nl

If no internal / external links to these pages exist - this problem should disappear after a while.

rgds,

Dirk