Hi There

First off, I rarely delete pages. Better and easier to noindex. That way you get them out of the SERPs and reduce the poor user metrics, but people can still find the pages otherwise and you don't have to 301 redirect them etc. You can delete if you feel they are just a bad user experience over all of course - but I noindex as a starting point.

Anyhow, regardless, here's how I access it - first I use a custom report with the following metrics (you can play around with them);

• pageviews
• entrances
• new visits
• avg time on page
• exits
• exit rate
• "page" for the dimension

Thresholds - starting point (I use filters)

• pageviews - I start with over 50
• avg time on page - less than 30 seconds
• exit rate - great than 80%

I like to end up with a list of maybe 50-100 pages that fall within the thresholds. Every site is different. But I try to isolate 50-100 of the worst pages (we're assuming maybe a 2,500+ page site).

You can throw a segment on there if you want to segment just Google Organic traffic - that could in some cases be more accurate.

Hope that helps! Interested to see what other people do.

-Dan

Brandon

Just catching up here. You can do as suggested and use .html but I would highly recommend going with the new URL structure and using 301 redirects. Especially if it's a fairly small site (under 100 pages). I've rarely seen this affected rankings one bit.

-Dan

Thanks for the details. It may not be those links, but if there were even a few others, it could potentially hurt the site. I had a client who had done some spammy link building in 2011ish with another agency and just those few links hurt the site. I would try removing or disavowing anything you can find that's spammy, and not helping, and see if they helps anything.

The types of things to de-optimize on your own site would be more like keyword stuffing in the titles, URLs, headers and internal anchors - not so much blocking pages from being crawled. Blocking crawling it typically only if you want to improve crawl efficiency on really large sites or you just don't want Google to page attention to that content, but it won't fix a Penguin issue if it's on-site.

-Dan

Penguin 2.0 is definitely from webspam and backlinks. I suggest using Google Webmaster Tools as your backlink dataset. They provide links that are more likely to be causing problems. It's extremely unlikely the internal links are hurting you if it is Penguin 2.0.

I agree with David here. Someone made a custom category plugin for WordPress which will do what David is suggesting. I would not block anything, but rather noindex what you don't want in the index, which is typically for me tags, subpages, author and date archives.

-Dan

Hi There

It's definitely hard to say, without intimate knowledge of all aspects of the site - what the benefits will be by moving to WordPress. As a standard answer, I always see it as beneficial to move to WordPress. But the client should understand it's an investment, it's not like they're going to instantly rank better just by moving to WordPress. What it's going to do is put them in a better position (in a lot of ways) to rank better moving forward.

So in general, I'd always say "worth it" to make the move - but it's all in the specifics in the current site and how well things as executed.

It is entirely possible to have minimal link loss through redirects. You just have to;

1. Avoid chains
2. Make the redirects on a page by page level - and the topic needs to match (as Cyrus does a great job explaining here.)

You can fulfill both #1 and #2 no matter what platform you switch to, no matter how old the site is. You can always go back and undo redirect chains using the methods in the post I shared.

I'm not recommending a new design - I'm saying the process of how you go about implementing on the redirects can be a little more straightforward (and thus eliminating potential for chains and link losses). You first build the site in WordPress, without worrying about URL structure, .html slashes and so forth. Then you redirect old pages to the new pages however the URL structure ends up. You can go to past redirects and redirect them directly to the new wordpress URLs.

Hope that all makes sense - summary being - it is worthwhile to switch to WordPress - and any link juice loss is the fault of poor implementation, not the result of the switch itself per se

Raviv

Just to make sure we're not assuming incorrectly, temporarily shut off the Yoast SEO plugin. This should be fine to do for just a few minutes. Do you still get the 403 errors? If so, then it is not the Yoast plugin but some other issue.

Also, do you get this error while logged out of WordPress? Trying doing it on your site in incognito mode in Chrome without logging in.

Let us know what happens with both of those tests!

-Dan

Hi There

You might want to give Screaming Frog a shot for creating XML sitemaps. Here's a post which talks about how. Basically, since you can customize the crawl, this will allow you to exclude the parameters etc. I'd give that a shot.

-Dan

Ha! I'm trying to quit. _Again. _

Hi

Great question! Stumped me a little, but I found this article.  Safe to say it seems as if google ignores the apostrophe (and other characters including hyphen etc) so in effect "men's fashion" and "men s fashion" is the same thing.

-Dan

I saw the AdWords help tab had a email address and phone number. I bet if you or someone payone for AdWords contacted (and asked like you're a paying AdWords customer) you could get an answer.

You could also submit a question in the Google Webmaster Help forum, or their Google Plus Group - or join a hangout they hold every Friday.

-Dan