John,

Not long ago, you should have fully expected to lose up to 15% of a page's SEO equity with a 301 redirect. That changed in February of this year when Google's John Mueller announced that no page rank is lost with 301 or 302 redirects.

Moz's own Cyrus Shepard wrote a What You Need To Know Post after that announcement. I think if you read it, you'll be well equipped to weigh your options and decide on the best path forward for this particular situation.

I agree with Skye AP. There's no lasting value to paid links, just increased risk. I know it's cliche, but your best investment is in creating and publishing truly original, sought-after, high-quality content and then promoting the heck out of it on sites where your best prospects, customers, peers, and influencers like to hang out.

Hard to tell without knowing the name of the business and the website, but I'd make sure you have a Google My Business listing and local schema on the page. It's a place to start.

I must be thick because I certainly don't understand the statement "they are arguing that these images should NOT have alt text as it doesn't add anything to the disability screen reader as the image text would be repetitive with the text on the page. "

No, I haven't run into this problem before. Perhaps they're referring to situations where alt tags just get stuffed with keywords. Image alt tags shouldn't just repeat the text on the page or act as a repository for keywords, although that's often what you see. Image alt tags should accurately describe the image first, use keywords second and where it makes sense.

So, for example, this page has an alt tag coded for the little blue button above that depicts Roger, the company mascot (<img <span class="html-tag">alt</img <span>="Roger_blue_square"). The text "Roger blue square" doesn't appear anywhere else on the page. (Well I guess it does now!) It's a bit succinct - first time visitors might have a heard time understanding what the image represents - but it is accurate and isn't just stuffed with "Moz Q&A Community" keywords.

I'm waiting for the day when Google decides to start penalizing folks for doing what you've described above.

A meta refresh can be used as a back-handed way to redirect one page to another. It works but causes a delay in the page rendering which is considered a poor user experience and therefore typically tagged as a warning.

What causes a meta refresh? You probably have a meta refresh tag in the header section of your code. It would look something like this - . "30" means wait 30 seconds before doing anything. The URL listed after that is the page you want the website visitor redirected to.

How to fix? Get rid of the meta refresh tag and replace it with a 301 redirect. Here's Moz's help page on 301 redirects. https://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection

Does that answer your question?

So, we all "nofollow" most of the external links or all external links to hold back the page rank.

Nofollowing links does not mean you retain link juice or page rank. That page rank gets dropped rather than being transferred to another location.

Is it all same about external links and nofollow now?

I don't understand your question but if you mean should all external links be nofollow, the answer is no. As Google has suggested, you should still tag trustworthy destination links with the follow attribute.

If you haven't read this yet, please do (best practices for URLs).

So, it's a combination of things. As Devi Allen said, less is more. You want to use (and not over-use) descriptive words, separated by hyphens, "keeping URLs as simple, relevant, compelling, and accurate as possible". "To correctly render in all browsers, URLs must be shorter than 2,083 characters."

Which is better, your URL or your competitors? They sound pretty close based on your description but what matters is the actual words used in the URL, the site structure represented by that construct, whether the words truly represent what a visitor will find on the page, and whether the page content will provide visitors with the information they came looking for.  URL length is but one of many factors that go into determining whether you or your competitor will rank higher.

Do we lose backlinks and domain authority when we change domain name?

Assuming your site structure, file and folder names, and content remain the same and you do 301 redirects then no, you would not lose backlinks and domain authority. You should also:

• benchmark key metrics (for example, site speed and rankings);
• update internal links (don't forget about your non-html pages as well);
• check for and fix and redirect chains;
• tell Google (via Search Console) that your domain name has changed;
• set up new properties in GSC (www, non-www, http, https), set your preferred profile and geography, and eventually merge profiles into a set;
• transfer your disavow file in GSC;
• track 404 errors (that could indicate you've missed some files) and customize your 404 page to help visitors that encounter them as a result of your domain name change;
• update any external URLs with UTM codes that point to your site (UTM codes get stripped with redirects);
• update your domain name in Google Analytics;
• update your sitemap and add to GSC as well as your robots.txt file;
• I usually update major sites that point to me as well, things like Google Maps, local data aggregators, and social media sites; and
• check your traffic, rankings, and GSC daily for a while so you can react quickly if something's amiss.

Unfortunately, it is rarely the case that only your domain name changes in which case you'll need to a page-by-page mapping. Don't forget about images and PDF files that may be indexed separately from HTML pages.

Check out this slide presentation (https://www.slideshare.net/bastiangrimm/migration-best-practices-smx-london-2018) from SMX London 2018. It was recommended by John Mu at Google and is really useful.