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Yes, I actually see this quite often for smaller sites. DA is looking at the entire site, while PA is only that page so if that one page is really awesome then yes it will have a PA higher than the overall site. Typically that will happen with the homepage or a really great piece of content, since both would attract the most links to your site. Those pages would grow to have a higher PA, which would be a strong indicator these are important for the overall health of the site.

So if you have a page that has a high PA, you can spread that by having a solid internal linking structure within your website. Link from the high PA page to other important pages for your site, and you'll see the PA of the linked pages grow.

Best place to start is in the "learn and Connect" section (in the top nav), and check out the Beginner's Guide to SEO. That should be your foundation to starting to learn how to improve your website. That section has a ton of great guides and resources you should really dive into. Hope that helps point you in the right direction

I think the homepage should be optimized for the vertical or the wide-scope most competitive keyword. Your homepage will be the strongest and most authoritative page on the site, so leaving it optimized for just the brand (which you should rank well for anyway) is kind of a wasted opportunity. For example a DUI/DWI lawyer could optimize the home page for Criminal Defense Attorney, but then have sub pages for DUI and DWI to speak to the user with specifics about each case or the different types of situations. Start broader with the homepage and narrow down with internal pages.

Not optimizing the homepage would be a wasted opportunity in my opinion. Which Yoast article were you reading? Care to share a link?

Definitely use rel=canonical for situations like that. If there's a solid business case to keep the pages live (A/B testing layout?), then yeah definitely make sure both pages are canonicalized to one main page for search engines. That will also help keep the other variation out of the index as Google (and other bots) recognize that you have multiple variations, but only one page they should be paying attention to.

That's a pretty typical message a browser will display when a security certificate is either set up incorrectly or it expired. A big reason why these messages are shown are because of phishing scams that typically happen from sites attempting to display security to a user when in fact they are only looking to steal info. Not all sites are like that, but it is a concern.

_NET::ERR_CERT_COMMON_NAME_INVALID _means the certificate is not registered with a valid authority. Check where the certificate was registered and make sure it's valid. If it's self signed, i'm not sure what steps you would need to take to get that resolved... I'll do some googling, but someone with a little more experience should chime in to help

Update: Found this google product forum thread which might help - https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/chrome/95NrJOxJKSg/0KyeuTNlbj0J

Hey James,

I read through the post and it's interesting because Yoast isn't necessarily saying homepage SEO doesn't exist (even though that's the name of the post... clickbait much?), he's saying you shouldn't be targeting it with one keyword. So if you go the route of targeting a general theme of the site + brand, then you're going to be much better off than simply trying to rank for the one keyword you want to rank for. Going back to my example of an attorney and using the general term of Criminal Defense, then using internal pages to rank for the most specific (and potentially more likely to convert) phrases is the better way to go.

All pages on the site should speak to the theme, because it will help users and Google understand what the site is about. For general, and especially local, terms I see a lot of homepages ranking well. Not optimizing the homepage could cause you to miss a large amount of users just starting their search. They may not know exactly what they need yet, but there is a need. The queries will start broad and get more specific as they hone in on what they really need. Make sure you catch the users on the broad query because they will be more likely to remember your brand later down the road.

I would recommend reviewing Google's guidelines on Link Schemes very closely. If you offer a discount if someone links to you, I'd consider that on the same level as a paid link or paid endorsement. The other thing you need to really watch if you're having customers review your business is the FTC guideline regulating the disclosure of paid endorsements if you're planning on offering some sort of payment or discount.

If a customer links to you because you did a great job, then it's cool. If you tell them what URL to link to and what anchor text to use, then it's going to be seen as manipulation. Getting customers to review your business or link to you is a good idea; you just need to make sure you're doing it the right way. You don't need a discount if the customers really loved what you did.

I'm also in the camp of not putting footer links from a client site to mine. If you put it there because you work on a client's site and it's passing juice to your site, then it kind of seems like it's only there to benefit your ranking. I've seen this debate go back and forth, so I'd really like to see other opinions (preferably contradictory to mine) to see why designer/developer links in the footer would be good. I think they would be fine if you no-followed the link, so it wouldn't pass any benefit. If you only wanted it for traffic, then cool, but really how qualified would that traffic be? Curious to see other thoughts.

Creating new locations will actually create more work for you. Do like Miriam said and update the current listings. If you create new listings, you still have the issue of cleaning up the old ones which could cause ranking problems as you battle yourself to tell Google which information is correct.

LocalSEOGuide created a cool tool (NAP Hunter) to help find mismatched citation sources. Download that chrome extension and plug in both your current address, and past variations. Pull all that information into an Excel file, and then you'll be able to run a pretty good gap analysis to see what you need to try and update. Not all sites will allow you to update, and old unstructured citations like news articles, blog posts, etc would fall into that category. Local directories will be a little easier, but again there are sites that lock you out from editing unless you pay.

Don't wait & pray, be proactive to get these updated. Citation work can either be a large project or can be outsourced to different teams/products (Moz, Yext, Whitespark, or other consultants/contractors). It also sounds like they've manually claimed a few sites prior to you coming on, so you'd need to spend some time working with each site's support team to try and get access/reset the account. Without that you won't be able to update the business information.

It actually looks like most of the results are getting the meta description ignored in favor of content that's on the page. There's not a whole lot you can do about this except to try and write a better description that Google will favor more. I wouldn't worry too much about the meta description as long as traffic is good and you're ranking well for your target keywords. The description is more to influence CTR and does not have an effect on ranking (directly).

Do your best to write a compelling description about the page to help users understand what they should expect to see. Rewriting to explain why someone would want to visit the page (buy the product, learn more about the product, see the product used by famous musicians, etc...) could help it show up in the SERPs.

Take a look into tools like Places Scout or BrightLocal. Those have some pretty good Local (pack) reporting features which could help you solve this problem. The monthly plans aren't too expensive, so if you have a ton of keywords to check they could be viable options for you.

You most likely won't see any new links from Yext because they use a URL redirect on all sites they control. Check the live listings an confirm. If you're using Yext for link building/gaining do-follow links on directories... It's probably best to consider alternative options. Most of the links to your website from those directories will actually pass through a redirect set up by Yext, then land you at the final destination (your website). One benefit of that redirect is so they can track click data in your Yext dashboard.

I could be wrong, but you should check and see if you're seeing any new links from a Yext subdomain. I haven't used Yext in a while, but I remember seeing a redirect for past clients (when I was working in an agency. That might be worth checking out.

Either way, you should have reporting in your Yext dashboard on all the listings that are live. Once again I'll stress that you should not be using Yext simply for building links.

Google removed the ability to change your location in search results. There are a few hacks to get it back, but it's not simple like it used to be (click of a button). Here's an awesome thread from the Local Search Forum explaining the hacks you can use to emulate the location setting.

Let us know how that works out for you.

How many times has it been owned and dropped? It might be possible that the domain has backlinks but all the sites are blocking the bots you're using to check. If it's been frequently picked up and dropped, then I would stay clear. You might be getting the trash after others have abused it.

It could hurt you in the long run (Google may decide the dev site is more relevant than your live site), but this is an easy fix. No-index your dev site. Just slap a site-wide noindex meta tag across all the pages, and when you're ready to move that code to the production site you remove that instance of code.

Disallowing from the robots.txt file will help, but that's a soft request. The best way to keep the dev site from being indexed is to use the noindex tag. Since it seems like you want to QA in a live environment that would prevent search engines from indexing the site, and still allow you to test in a production-like scenario.

You can't get it removed. Google stopped removing My Business listings years ago. Basically what you've done is correct, mark it closed or relocated. By marking it as closed, it's removed from general search terms but will show up for branded searches. If you've changed locations, you should be cleaning up the old citations/directories to make sure they're showing users and bots the most up to date information. That would hurt you more than a single Google My Business page marked as closed (Google already knows you've moved from that location... sort of).

As Googlebot continues to crawl the web and find the old information it (they?) starts to distrust the "closed" location, since it's finding third party data contradicting what you submitted. Once you start building new citations, you need to correct the old data as well on major sites (use MozLocal as a guide to clean up some of the big ones). There are a few patents the US govt. granted Google on "scoring" (ranking) local results based on location prominence, which has a major component of how many sites reference the business online. The reference online is a citation through a local directory (structured) or through a news article, press release or other mention (unstructured). All these contribute to helping Google understand where your business is, which in turn will help you rank better in the local market.

So really long post short... TL;DR - Get your citations consistent with the actual address. Fix the old ones and make sure the data is correct. That will help you rank better. You can't delete Google My Business pages from the map, they will always show for branded searches.

Search Console is a sample set of your links, much like OSE is a sampling of your overall link profile. Google won't show you all your links, so its best to use multiple sources to try and piece together the puzzle.

It seems like you're saying the reported links are pointing to the wrong subdirectory but when checked manually they are correct "after redirects" to the appropriate page. Can you explain that a little more? Have you redirected URLs on your site to new pages? Curious to know what kind of redirects you're seeing.

What's the point of the new domains in relation to the primary domain? Are you planning on using them to cover niche's unrelated to the main site? Are they different businesses branching off of the main company (subsidiaries on the main)? Depending on how you're planning on using them, there's a variety of different things you can do. There are a variety of ways to solve a problem so depending on what your goals are, the community may suggest something different.

Share a little more about what you're doing (you don't need to give away full specifics), and maybe we can come up with a good way to use them.

Peter has a great answer with some good resources referenced, and i'll try to add on a little bit:

1. Why it is important that the rel canonical tag points to a non-parameter URL?

It's important to use clean URLs so search engines can understand the site structure (like Peter mentioned), which will help reduce the potential for index bloat and ranking issues. The more pages out there containing the same content (ie duplicate content), the harder it will be for search engines to determine which is the best page to show in search results. While there is no "duplicate content penalty" there could be a self inflicted wound by providing too many similar options. The canonical tag is supposed to be a level of control for you to tell Google which page is the most appropriate version. In this case it should be the clean URL since that will be where you want people to start. Users can customize from there using faceted navigation or custom options.

2. What is the extent of the negative impact from having rel canonicals pointing to URLs including parameters?

Basically duplicate content and indexing issues. Both of those things you really want to avoid when running an eComm shop since that will make your pages compete with each other for ranking. That could cost ranking, visits, and revenue if implemented wrong.

3. Any advice for correcting this?

Fix the canonical tags on the site would be your first step. Next you would want to exclude those parameters in the parameter handling section of Google Search Console. That will help by telling Google to ignore URLs with the elements you add in that section. It's another step to getting clean URLs showing up in search results.

I tried getting to http://www.chasing-fireflies.com/costumes-dress-up/mens-costumes/ and realize the parameters are showing up by default like: http://www.chasing-fireflies.com/costumes-dress-up/mens-costumes/#w=*&af=cat2:costumedressup_menscostumes%20cat1:costumedressup%20pagetype:products

Are the parameters needed for every URL? Seems like this is a websphere commerce setup kind of thing.

I haven't personally used it, but I've seen places that utilize it (https://www.shopify.com/facebook). I don't know how many people actually buy things directly from social media, since the whole point of social media is to establish connections and have conversations. It could be worth checking out depending on the niche your client is in, but I have my doubts these stores within social platforms are actually profitable.

It looks like it's not too hard to set up within Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/business/news/shopping-on-facebook - so why not explore setting this up in conjunction with a FB ads package for your client instead of having another company run it? Also according to Buzzfeed this seems to be Facebook's next big push - http://www.buzzfeed.com/alexkantrowitz/facebook-takes-big-step-forward-on-commerce-builds-shops-int#.pt12yovez

I'm interested to see if anyone has seen any success with this yet.

You have to use the home address as the main point to send the postcard & list on the Google business page, then hide the address. Do not use virtual offices, po boxes, or anything else to try and game the system. The reason Google is tougher on this niche is because so many locksmiths have done shady things to manipulate the system and gain an advantage. Follow the rules and set up the page legitimately to have longer term success.

If there is no physical office location, you must use the home address. Optimize the website to cover the different service areas that you want to target (use local landing pages), which will help improve organic ranking in those areas. Do not create multiple pages for each location (that's another violation), just use the home address & hide it on maps when you select a service area.

Googles guidelines on link schemes covers this:

"Additionally, creating links that weren’t editorially placed or vouched for by the site’s owner on a page, otherwise known as unnatural links, can be considered a violation of our guidelines. Here are a few common examples of unnatural links that may violate our guidelines:

(scroll down the page a little bit)......

• Widely distributed links in the footers or templates of various sites"

In addition to Don's suggestion to review Cyrus' video, I would strongly recommend reviewing Google's guidelines on the subject. They aren't specifically saying links from a client site to yours, but it's pretty clear if you're putting a do-follow link to your site from a site you built for a client... that's a no-go since it was placed there by you and not editorially placed by your client.

You're basically at the mercy of Google to update. There's no real way to fetch the citation sources via Google Maps (at least not that I know of), so the best thing you can do is update the citations and make sure the upstream data providers get updated asap. Citation cleanup will always be a battle because you'll never have all the information updated at any given time. You need to look to not only typical local directories, but newspapers, government files, etc. All that information is collected by Google to determine location accuracy, so you'll basically be in a revolving battle to keep the information updated.

I will say to make sure you prioritize the biggest sites that could drive you traffic/business. Don't spend too much time on tasks that provide little value to your bottom line. If you really feel like you need to get EVERYTHING updated, then I'd recommend finding an outsource partner to take on the tedious low revenue tasks.

Ideally just take the snippet of code from the output that's highlighted (whatever structured data you needed), and edit the code on your site. What CMS are you working with? Are you building from HTML or are you using a CMS platform like WordPress/Drupal/Joomla? Without knowing your site limitations it's hart to answer this question.

Thanks for sharing this Miriam! I'm still seeing a lot of movement, and a lot of speculation on the local search forum. Joy just published a really nice article explaining what she's been seeing. I recommend everyone looking into this thread check it out - http://searchengineland.com/everything-need-know-googles-possum-algorithm-update-258900 

@Tabassum M - you should probably start up a new thread for a high level of Google My Business Listings (since that is a good topic), just so we don't derail this discussion.

We were actually discussing this on the Local Search Forum - http://www.localsearchforum.com/google-local-important/38249-heads-up-google-either-moving-removing-search-location-setting.html - Looks like Google is removing that function in many of the data centers across the country. This may be a test, or it may be a full depreciation of the function since it is possible most people aren't aware of it. I would assume consultants and marketers know of the ability to change location, but normal searchers will just tack on a location to the query.

Check out the other forum to read up on the discussion.

Josh,

To prevent this thread getting out of control and getting to the point where everyone is name calling, let's step back and clarify a few things. While I respect your opinion that paid search could influence traffic from a personalization standpoint, your explanation leaves too many questions unanswered. I personally won't trust anything someone says without a valid explanation WHY they have the position they have. If you can produce a few links/references so we can take a closer look at what you're talking about, that would benefit this discussion way more than simply saying "because I talked with X, and they said it's true." Sharing more information can help educate everyone here, and help us all grow as professionals.

I really don't care who feeds information to whom; the only thing I care about is the fact. The fact is (according to my knowledge) Google has stated paid search (Adwords) does not directly affect organic rankings.

Google Forum thread disputing that PPC influences rank: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/tN5pIG8Qy0I

Google's Search Console Help: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35291?hl=en - "Advertising with Google won't have any effect on your site's presence in our search results. Google never accepts money to include or rank sites in our search results, and it costs nothing to appear in our organic search results."

I agree that promoting your site through a variety of mediums will send a signal of trust that your site is legitimate, but that would be a macro view that everything helps a little bit. The question to this thread is, "Do you really think that them pointing their ads to the actual domain is going to increase your rankings?"

That answer is No. Pointing ads to the actual domain will not directly increase your organic rankings. Will it help with branding and trust, sure. But that's not the question we're trying to answer.

Now... If you have evidence that contradicts my points, I'd be more than happy to discuss and debate. I think opposing viewpoints are important to the development of the community/industry, and is really what makes it exciting. However, if the only thing anyone has to say is "I heard it from so and so" then this thread deserves to be closed if there's no additional facts to support an argument one way or another.

The better way to go is revise the redirect to point abc.com to ert.com. The more jumps that someone (whether it's a bot or a user) needs to take, the longer it will take the page to load. Limit the redirects and make sure the jump lands at the final destination instead of many detours.

Could you provide a little more information? Website URLs or business information would be helpful to give a more accurate response to this problem. Typically you really shouldn't have two separate businesses at the same address - that could cause merging issues with the pages. The most common solution is using a suite number, but it some cases that's not possible. This address wouldn't happen to be in a shared office suite (eg, regus suite), would it?

Find out problems that your potential customers are having, then help answer them in the blog.

Scrapebox is a great tool. You can use it to do white hat link building by using it in the research phase of link building. It allows you to find hundreds or thousands of potential websites using search engine commands, check if those sites are indexed in Google, and export into a .txt file or excel spreadsheet.

Personally I love using it, because it saves me a ton of time by automating certain aspects of keyword research and outreach target research within specific niche's. If you're using it for just automated blog comments, then you're using a tiny fraction of that tool. Yes you can do blog comments in mass quantities if you want, but that's not the real benefit of a tool like that.

Google "How to use scrapebox" and you'll find a ton of resources how to really use that tool, like Neil Patel's write up here - https://www.quicksprout.com/the-advanced-guide-to-link-building-chapter-8/

It's also a lifetime subscription where you'll always be able to get the most recent updates, so it's well worth the price.

It looks like you noted that all the product descriptions have been rewritten to be unique, so I don't really see a huge issue with this. I guess the better question to ask you is if the amazon/ebay pages you control are ranking, and if so are you getting sales out of them? I know everyone wants their native website to rank, but if you're selling products then the real KPI you need to be worried about is sales. If the amazon and ebay pages are getting you sales, then I would make it part of the strategy to keep those ranking above competitors.

"As effectively why would you show our site in the search results for a product range, when all of the content/products already appear on eBay/Amazon which is several SERPs places higher?"

That's a great question... what can your site provide users they may not be able to find on Amazon/eBay? Do you have more information about the product, buying guides, use cases, great stories about how other people have used the product (since I really don't know what you're selling), or other useful content? My take is that you need to provide a good reason for someone to visit your site, so don't fight Amazon if you're using it to sell. Ranking well doesn't keep your business in the black, sales do. Utilize Amazon and eBay as part of the marketing/sales strategy to push the competition out of the SERPs (1st page), and use the website to provide a unique experience which caters to your brand.

"Is Google not inclined to think, "hey no need to show x site, as the content is already features on Amazon, why show it twice?"

I would think that too if the content is the same or if the experience is the same. The question really is WHY should I visit your site? What can you offer me on your native site that I can't find from visiting your Amazon page? Amazon is a very trustworthy site, so If I'm going to buy something it might make sense for me to purchase there (especially if I can use Prime).

Think about it and let us know

What's the thought on using a 410 server response (Gone) for products that won't be in stock on the site anymore? I've seen that strategy work to get pages out of the index. Does anyone have opposition to using that strategy? That would be assuming the page isn't linked to on the site (or other sites for that matter). I've seen that work OK for product pages buried a littler further in the site architecture.

I would think the parameters wouldn't count, but the root URL would (eg; search engines ignore anything after the "&" or "#" in the URL). I think Google devalues affiliate links, because those aren't "editorial" links - they're essentially paid links. It's really hard to say whether the links will be determined as "affiliate" by Google since the author is adding that in the tagging (that word may serve as a flag). My recommendation is to reach out and ask if they can change that URL tagging, since you're not an affiliate and don't want to be seen as one. UTM parameters are common for campaign tracking, and they don't influence the URL in terms of passing juice or whatever, so really you can put whatever you want. Those exist so you can define attribution models more effectively to learn what campaign provides the best ROI for your company/website.

I'd try to change that parameter, and maybe making the case that the author adding parameters like that to your URL is hurting your tracking (getting mixed in with real affiliates). It seems kind of weird to me that an author would add a tracking parameter like that without someone asking, but maybe that happens more than I realize.

Let me know how it works out - I haven't seen this case before so if others have experience I'd be interested to see how people have handled it in the past.

Before doing that I would make absolutely sure the previous owner didn't do anything that'll bite you down the road... like buying a bunch of garbage links. Do you not want to run that site or do you just want to pull all the traffic they're getting to your site? I'm also curious how you know that site gets about 500 visitors per day; have you seen their analytics?

As long as the site looks clean, and you just want to buy their traffic I don't see why you can't 301 it into your site.

Ah... I see what's happening

Basically what might be going wrong is your concerns section like here - https://treato.com/ParaGard,Side+Effects/?a=s#concerns

If you keep expanding the list, the number of reported cases goes down but the list is almost infinite. Somewhere down the line you have someone that selected "tired" instead of "tiredness" which caused the first issue. Not sure why you're getting flagged for ParaGard vs Paragard though, because you have a 301 redirect in place to catch that.

The tired vs Tiredness issue is one you need to address (consolidate similar topics through redirects or run a script to find close variations), because those differences are indexed as separate URLs. That's going to cause problems both for ranking and for user navigation/experience.

You don't need to. Just let Google crawl at will. The only reason you would want to limit the crawl rate is if you're having performance issues from the server you're on (too much traffic at once). If you're not having any issues, then allow Google to crawl as many pages as they can.

@Peter basically nails it. None of these tools will be completely accurate to what Google determines is a "bad" link, so it will be very subjective. You really should use a variety of tools (even link detox is a good one) to get a list of sites linking to you. The reason being is that all these tools have very different indexes, so you'll get a more comprehensive view of your profile... however that will be a little more expensive since you would need multiple subscriptions.

Like Peter said, you'd then want to download all the links into excel, dedupe, and review. I usually look at aHref Rank below a certain threshold and Trust Flow below a certain threshold (you need to either use a VLOOKUP or an INDEX/MATCH formula to combine the lists from all sources). After that you review those links manually, and add the "bad" ones to a disavow file. The "bad" ones are those that you would agree violates the Google Webmaster Quality Guidelines that fit into a link scheme definition. Once again, this is a subjective process so you'll really need to review the guidelines.

To do this analysis to the full extent that you'd want... I don't think there are free tools that will give you any meaningful data. Remember they need to maintain bots and their own software to expand their indexes, so the free trials will be very limited data (usually with no way to export). I'll also say this is a very tedious process and depending on the size of the site I would allocate anywhere between 5 (small site) and 40 hours (larger site) to tackle this process. Buffer in a little more if this is the first run, since there will be a learning curve for the tools and it will take time to put together a professional looking report.

What kind of link is it? Is it something like "Our other sites" or pretty obvious that you own those properties, or are they links to try and manipulate ranking (aka PBN style links)? One will be harmless, the other will get you penalized. There are plenty of people out there running many sites suited for different verticals, markets, etc but if you're using the sites as second/third tier sites with the sole purpose of getting a money site to rank (and make money) then you might be in some trouble. If it's the former, then don't expect to see any major advantage to doing that. If you're setting up a PBN and listing all the sites within Google WMT then you should rethink that strategy.

PPC will not effect SEO efforts. The biggest reason I would suggest sending someone to the actual domain is because the user would be more likely to return and convert later. It usually takes a few visits to convert (PPC > Organic > Direct, or some mix of those), so that would be a good reason to try to keep it within the same domain.

However... If these landing pages cannot be imported to the current website CMS, and the external landing pages are converting, then it would be negligent to cut those out of PPC. You could really hurt the business if they stop getting leads. I would first try to see if the landing pages can be created on the client's domain, and A/B test. PPC does not affect SEO, and SEO does not affect PPC. It's all based on bidding, and quality score of the ads. If the client is getting business out of the current PPC work, don't kill it without testing and being absolutely sure you have a solid game plan. You don't want to get caught in a scenario where you could be fired if the client stops seeing leads.

I'll assume these are going to a different secure subdomain, so don't worry too much about it. Like Thomas posted, you aren't going to get the shopping cart to rank (and don't want it to) so there's no real concern. A 302 is essentially stopping "link juice" from going to the cart page, so as far as domain authority goes it seems like you should leave it how it's set up now. You're keeping the authority on your pages while sending users to the correct place to complete the purchase. As long as these aren't internal links to other product pages or family pages, you should be good.

If the only option is to disallow via the robots.txt, then I would agree with your setup - disallow the slugs specific to the tags you don't want indexed. I've heard shopify is a little rough to work with sometimes because of the limitations, so whatever you can do I think is better than nothing. Remember that the robots exclusion is treated as a suggestion and not a command, so if it's possible to assign a no-index meta tag to those URL types that would be best case.

Looks like you're on the right track with the post below:

{ % if handle contains "tagged" % }

{ % endif % }

The one suggestion I would make is that you use noindex,follow so the content will still be crawled, but the duplicate tag won't get indexed. That would create multiple paths to the content on your site, but not create an index bloat issue with multiple tags.

So to clarify when you say "menu" are you talking about faceted navigation or are you talking about actual page navigation (near header/footer)? If it's faceted, then you should canonical back to the main page so you're not competing with other pages on your site (/mens-shoes or /womens-shoes). If you canonical the men's or women's page back to the main /shoes/ page then you will lose the benefit of those pages.

Does the site only work off of parameters, or do you have separate pages for different genders?

Paid traffic does not directly affect organic ranking. Those two elements are mutually exclusive when it comes to search. Click patterns will affect personalized results for the individual, but not as a whole. You're looking at this at a micro level, but I think (correct me if i'm wrong) Kevin is looking at this from a macro perspective to see how the two directly influence each other.

If you're suggesting that pointing an Adwords destination URL to any particular domain will positively impact organic ranking, then i'd like to see the proof. Making a blanket statement to say Paid does influence organic is sending an incorrect message. If you have evidence to support that claim then I'm sure this and many other communities would love to see it, but I stand by Google's official position that those two mediums do not directly influence each other.

If the previous site was penalized in any way and you're trying to start with a new domain, then you don't want to redirect or note a change of domain. This is going to help them update their index to reflect the new domain for your pages. I don't know enough about the penalty, but if it was a manual action then you really should fix the penalized domain before doing this. If you're too far into the penalty box, then you almost need to start fresh.

Can you offer any more insight on your current situation? Without knowing much more, my instinct is to say to not note a change of address if you're trying to move forward from a penalized domain.

It depends.

If you are in Europe (or serve a European market), then you need to comply with GDPR rules. You'll need to specify how you use cookies, and how users can remove their data.

If there are nuances with how you use site data, then you'll need to speak to that as well.

Basically, if you collect data in any way from a website visitor then you need to disclose and help someone understand in lay mans terms what you're doing with it. If a generic/boilerplate privacy policy fits the need, then go with that. If you have custom applications, then have a lawyer review it for accuracy.

So all tools (including Search Console) have different link indexes they're going to show you. That's one reason why you're seeing a difference between tools. The other reason is that Search Console will only show a **sample of your links, not all of them. **To really find all internal links, you should use a crawling tool like Screaming Frog or Xenu then check inlinks and outlinks on your site. I wouldn't rely on Search Console to give as much insight on your internal linking.

To get a better understanding about your backlink profile my recommendation is to use a couple of tools (OSE, aHrefs, Majestic, etc) in addition to the data provided in Search Console. Export the backlink data from all sources into Excel, de-dedupe the data (so you're not looking at duplicate links), and that will help you understand your profile a little better. Using multiple tools will be a little on the expensive side, but will give you a much better understanding what's out there.

Like Justin said, make sure you have the correct version of your site verified in Search Console. Google will recognize multiple variations as different sites (HTTP/HTTPS/WWW/Non-WWW). You'll also want to set a preferred domain (www vs non-www) to help Google consolidate data.

Unless the business locations are franchises and independently run, I'll say keep it all under one domain. Build location landing pages out for the different locations with unique content. Splitting them to separate domains will create more work for you (and the company) to maintain and build the authority. If you use location page silos, then you can keep content and links under one domain and consolidate your efforts. The divide and conquer approach won't work well if you don't have a pretty sizable staff (and budget) to work on both sites simultaneously.

If you keep it all under one powerful domain you can have a setup like:

Homepage > Location 1 (general) > Specialized services for location 1

Homepage > location 2 (general) > specialized services for location 2

That way you're able to capture traffic using each unique location page and more specific traffic for the services. All are sharing a benefit from the homepage authority, and you'd be able to internally link to the other locations so customers can easily find all the business offices. It's a little cleaner than replicating another site on a new domain... plus you need to think about creating all unique content for the other site, and making sure it's optimized... That would be a lot of extra (not needed) work.

Keep it simple - one primary domain, and local landing pages for the new locations.

If you're still being impacted by a penalty (algorithmic) then I wouldn't 301 any URLs, since that would carry the penalty over. Did you get a manual warning in webmaster tools? Do you have specific dates of traffic drops that would line up with known algorithm updates? Kind of hard to diagnose without knowing the site or understanding traffic fluctuations, but if this is the last resort then you might want to think about starting a new site as a fall back. If you've bounced back from 7 to 2, there still could be hope you could make it to page 1 again but it will take some work. Do your competitors have better onsite optimization? Do they have higher quality links? If this is a local business, are you optimized on and off site?

There are still a lot of factors to consider before jumping to a new domain. Keep in mind that a new domain would be starting from scratch, and it will take just as long (if not longer) to see page one in a competitive market. I would only move domains if that is your absolute last resort.

I think BOTW is a good citation source, but if you can't get it for free the best thing to do is test. If you're thinking that site will be a valuable piece to your marketing (and deserve a piece of the budget), then test with the first location to see how much traffic it drives. Set up a special segment or filter in Google Analytics to track referrals from BOTW. If you're seeing some decent traffic for what you're paying (and possible conversions), then it's definitely worth expanding to. If you're just paying for the citation source then you might be better off sinking that monthly fee into paid search or somewhere else. I agree BOTW is a good local citation to have, but that's what I would do to try and justify spending money on it.