Hi Ria

99.9% certain Google 'sees' all of those as the same in terms of character/word separation. I don't think OptionA/OptionB etc will be seen all as one keyword.

However Patrick has the right idea - to question if you really need one page or if things can be broken into separate pages.

I'd also optimize for readability and clicks too

-Dan

Hi Shaun

Yes in terms of keeping strictly to Google's guidelines, I agree that Yoast should in theory use either prev/next or canonical on subpages, but not both.

I am honestly not certain the settings it could be otherwise, as "subpages of archives" is the only one I know of that handles pagination.

Could there be another plugin or your theme (or custom coding in header.php) causing a conflict? One thing you can do is shut off other plugins one by one to diagnose. You can switch themes or switch to the default header.php file included with WordPress, but I (for obvious reasons) do NOT recommend doing that on a live website. I'm not sure if you have a testing environment.

Are you using a framework like Thesis or Genesis?  Sometimes those can cause unexpected things to happen as well.

-Dan

Hi

From what I have seen, if the NEW structure is done well (good architecture, good on-page optimization, better navigation, better keyword optimization in the new urls - its all an improvement from the old navigation) and you 301 everything corectly - you should see an improvement in rankings.  Although this can take a week or two.

And of course submit a new xml sitemap.  I also block the old pages/directories in robots.txt (this may be a little overkill but I do it anyway).

One extra tip is to just do a site:www.mydomain.com search in google to uncover any pages in their index you may not know about, or have overlooked and be sure to 301 those to the most relevant pages as well.

-Dan

I'd look at this in a holistic manner.  If your site looks great, functions great, has good information, promotes trust among visitors, has good on page optimization, etc this is likely not of concern.  The search engines know that an e-commerce site is going to have many add to cart buttons on a page and on a site.  I'm sure they take this into consideration when judging an e-commerce site. As long as you're not doing anything sneaky with the buttons like hiding text behind them or anything, I'm sure your fine.

Of course, an example of your site, screenshot or link, is always most helpful when determining these things

-Dan

Hi Shaun

Dan here, one of the Moz Associates - we're very sorry for the delay!

I've attached a screenshot of my own personal company site which uses the Yoast Plugin - just want to verify the code as seen here is what I would consider "correct" and best practice for WordPress pagination.

That code has not require any custom coding or anything. So either we need to get the Yoast settings correct, or something else may be interfering with Yoast.

Please first try going to: Yoast SEO->Titles/Meta and select "Noindex subpages of archives". This to my knowledge is the only setting that needs to be made to handle pagination correctly.

Let us know if that works - and again, apologies for the delay. Sometimes we have quite a backlog and don't pick up right away if the community has not appropriately answered a question.

Thanks!

-Dan

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Hi Andrea!

Funny, you just tweeted to me today and then I was assigned to help you out with this question

Anyway, just want to make sure I understand exactly how things are setup to see if your question has been answered.

Is this correct?

• You used www.wordpress.org (not .com) and installed a WP blog on a domain hosted with Go Daddy? In other words, you installed the WP files etc into your Go Daddy hosting account?

• And you want that blog to map to like blog.yourdomain.com ?

Let me know, thanks!

-Dan

Hi Anthony

There's two separate things here, so I'll attack each one individually - and give you some insight to the thought process.

• First - there's the issue of IF you should move them to WP
• Second - if you should, the question is how?

Should You Move To** WordPress**

It's unquestionable that for design, practicality, and long term benefits - you should move them to WordPress. The issue it really all about the ranking. So the questions then become - WHY is the site ranking now, and could you preserve that ranking with a migration.

I would look at things in the following ways.

• First - determine what keywords we're talking about. Is it just head terms? Is it just the exact match of the domain? I'd make a list.
• Then - try to determine why the sites are ranking for the given keywords. The Keyword Difficulty tool is great for that.
• Basically - what we really need to rule out, is if Google sites pass any authority that regular sites do not? I don't see that this is the case.

My inclination would be the say that you can safely migrate - so long as it's done correctly .. see next.

How To Migrate To WordPress

I should preface and say that I have no experience with Google Sites. But let's assume the following things are possible.

1. Build your new WordPress site - obviously on a test server of some sort.
2. Make the new WordPress site have the same content as the current site (same text, titles, etc). We want as little variables and moving parts. Scrape the existing site if you have to with Screaming Frog to grab a lot of that.
3. You can change URLs if you want to - but prepare the 301 redirects ahead of time.
4. "Flip the switch" - I assume you're on your own hosting? You can just basically switch out Google Sites with WordPress.
5. Immediately activate the 301 redirects (if any).
6. Immediately crawl the site looking for 404s
7. Monitor webmaster tools for 404s.
8. After a few weeks, you can probably start improving text etc etc.

Obviously without a deeper look I can't guarantee this as full proof. But I believe you should be fine - the main thing is just those 301s.

Also - couldn't hurt to just try this on one site first!

-Dan

Hey There

The post suggests keeping specific tags that are receiving traffic indexed. You can do this on a tag by tag basis with Yoast. The post also does not recommend deleting tags, just noindexing them.

I would suggest keeping tags that are bringing the most traffic indexed, while just noindexing the rest. Do not delete them. Out of your 1,000+ tags - how many are responsible for the 700+ visits?

There's also the option to 301 redirect tags to the most relevant post or category. But again, I would only do this with tags that aren't bringing substantial traffic.

-Dan

Hi Jenny

Yes you can redirect to URLs with anchor tags, but to Gaston's point - now that you have everything on one page, they may not rank as well as before. It does depend a little on how much overlap there was across the different products to begin with. The new page might rank well for a little while, but as Google starts to take the new consolidated page into account, you may lose ranking. The root fix would be to maintain separate pages like before, it that's possible.