This tool is a great extension for Chrome

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Justin

I personally prefer lowercase because to me it looks better.  And I prefer hyphens for the same reason, and it seems like these days everyone from WordPress right to the SEOmoz site does it that way.

-Dan

Hi David

Yes 2-3 weeks is fairly young for a site. Image indexation can lag behind a little bit from what I've seen. Unless you're super dependent on images for traffic (which is unlikely) I would give it 2-3 months honestly. I don't see any issues from what I can tell crawling etc. So I wouldn't take it as a sign of a problem, just probably Google's normal timeframe. Definitely write back or follow up if it's 3 months and there hasn't been much more indexed.

Hi There

You could generate one for the whole site, but this will be a pain because you'll have to update it very often. What I would recommend is;

• Let Yoast generate one for the blog area. This will sit under site.com/blog/sitemap_index.xml
• Create one for the static part of the site - you can use a sitemap generator (google search). Just don't include the blog in it.

Then you can submit each separate to Webmaster Tools. This way Yoast will update the blgo sitemap automatically, you'll just have to update the static one on your own.

-Dan

Hey Luke

Assume you mean XML Sitemap?

You should only include pages in your sitemap, which also are indexed. So then the question becomes, should you index tags or categories. I firmly believe, so long as the site is set up correctly, you should not index tags but it's OK to index categories. I also assume you're using WordPress.

So the steps become;

1. Noindex tag archives.

2. Then exclude tags from the XML sitemap.

You can refer to my WordPress SEO guide on Moz for more details.

Good luck!

-Dan

Google recently updated how they prefer AJAX is handled:

https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2015/10/deprecating-our-ajax-crawling-scheme.html

They now recommend using the PushState Method - I won't pretend to know all the intricacies of how it works for implementation, but that's the best method to go with. If you need any more help let us know, and I'll have another associate jump in and take a look.

-Dan

No problem

What you would want to do is learn a little about site architecture, and how different pages will target different thing. Think of a sire like Zappos:

• homepage - targets something broad like "shoes" and "shoes for sales" etc
• shoes categories - target things like "men's shoes, men's dress shoes" etc
• subcategories - "men's dress shoes black"
• finally products - "size 9 men's dress shoes black"
• even resources - "how to choose the most comfortable men's shoes"

So your homepage should target the broadest concept / keywords. Then you might have category pages targeting things slightly more specific. Then your posts would target informational searches of very specific things people are looking for.

Hello! Roman's answers are really good, but thought I would add some info as well.

Article or BlogPosting Schema can help in some of the following ways (vs hentry)

• Give search engines backend / structured info about the contents of the page
• Google's reference on Article schema shows all the snippet and SERP features
• Using article schema is the only way to get into 'in depth' article spots on Google
• I've had luck with Google showing the 'Last Updated' date in search results, which shows a newer date when using it in conjunction with article schema

So even though you'd technically be doing a 'blog post' I would use the parent Article schema as it's more widely recognized.

Hey There

Just seeing if you still need help with this? Just to clarify, having a "nofollow" meta tag on the post does not prevent it from being indexed, that would be a "nopindex" tag - perhaps we're using the two terms interchangeably here?

To get the posts indexed again, you want three things to be true;

1. There is no "noindex" present in the html meta tags
2. There is nothing blocking the content in robots.txt
3. You are linking to the posts from the block so they are crawled.

If those three things are all true, Google does need to crawl the page again to then reindex it. Thomas is correct in that you can "fetch as Googlebot" in webmaster tools to speed up this process and you can then submit that page, or even the whole site to the index.

Let us know if you still need help!

-Dan

Hi Brigitte

To echo some of the other answer here, simply having www vs. non-www does not affect rankings at all directly. What matters is choosing one and keeping it consistent. This would mean consistent across;

• Internal links
• Always redirect from the non-preferred to the preferred
• Don't switch if you don't have to
• Try to get back links pointing at the preferred version

By the way, you need to register a separate google webmaster tools account for non-www (it is treated as a different website in terms of some of the data).

I would choose the version with the most backlinks pointing at it, honestly, and then keep it that way forever.

-Dan

Hi Lehia

Given that your site has relatively low domain authority right now of 17 and to eliminate user (and your) confusion, I would 301 redirect every individual blog URL to the corresponding new URL on the new domain. It's possible you may lose some ranking - but let me ask:

• how much traffic do you get from the blog right now?
• I bet there's a typical 80/20 pattern where maybe a small handful of blog URLs are getting more of the traffic?

Point being, I would really do what's best in the long-term and to consolidate your brands/domains. I've performed and seen many migrations perfectly fine.

One last thing!

1. Crawl your old site or somehow gather up the old URLs from the old domain
2. Throw them in Screaming Frog in List mode
3. Export the "Redirect Chain" report
4. And undo any redirect chains

I talk about that a little here.

Also, make sure you continue to allow Google to crawl the old domain (don't block it with robots.txt).

Yes, you can try Screaming Frog. Free up to 500 page crawl, or you can buy the pro version.