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That's a great question. If you have pages that are generating revenue and ranking really well. I'd be hesitant to remove them from the index. Like the article mentions, Wayfair generates a huge amount of search traffic through these auto-generated internal search pages. If these are considered high quality and ranking well in Google, I would probably recommend leaving them alone.

If you want to trim some of these down, I'd use Google Analytics to find ones that aren't generating organic traffic/revenue. You could consider adding the "noindex" tag to those.

In general it is best practice to remove internal search pages from Google as they can contribute to a large amount of index bloat. However, I wouldn't reduce any that you see are performing well.

I'd be happy to take a look if you have any other questions!

I agree with you that I would probably leave them up. Redirecting those posts would likely sacrifice your ranking positions as you mentioned.

Your best bet might just be to create a new Google Analytics that removes the entire blog or at least those two posts. For your core reporting, you could just use that segment. That should allow you get the traffic but report your core KPIs on more relevant pages.

Basically  those tools aren't reading the DOM but Google can which is why it can see your site's title tags, H1s etc. Your site is using client-side rendering which Google can crawl through. Notice how if you go to a given page and click "View Source", none of the page's content appears.

While it appears Google is reading the content in the pages I looked at, I would definitely look into this more to see if Google is able to crawl/index the content on all of your site's pages. Client side rendering is less reliable than SSR so there might be instances where Google isn't reading sections of your content.

Hey!

Is there a particular reason that you want the help articles out of the index? That content may be useful to current users who are querying Google for how to use your solution. It also could be useful to potential users who are looking for specific functionalities. We generally recommend that our SaaS clients index this content.

In terms of a time investment, it's probably still important, especially if your existing users are interacting with the documentation. Personally, to start I'd prioritize any items that can be scaled. I might start with:

1. Removing the global "noindex" tag
2. Fixing mixed content signals
3. Removing global 4xx/3xx
4. Fixing individual 4xx on your highest traffic pages

Try implementing anything globally first and then working to page-level fixes.

Hey Tim!

Definitely an interesting question. If the links are tagged as "nofollow" than you should be OK in general. Even if they weren't, there's a good chance that Google is simply discounting the value of the links.

If you're really worried about it, you could test adding the domain to your disavow file and waiting to see if there are any positive shifts in rankings during this time. In our experience with disavowing domains, if a site doesn't pass the eye-test of "this adds value to my site", than it's generally safe to disavow.

If you post the link I'd be happy to take a look!

No problem! A good golden rule of JavaScript SEO is to always SSR where possible. Let me know if you have any other questions!

So if I understand it correctly, you're going to be incrementally adding new pages on the ww2 subdomain while content still exists on the www subdomain. This will be done slowly until all of the www content can be 301 redirected to ww2?

If that's the case, there's a few other things that could be helpful to know:

• What's the expected timeline to get all of the new ww2 pages live?
• How similar will the ww2 content be to the www content?
• Is the TLD staying the same and only the subdomain changing?

Ideally, everything would be added to the production site and redirected all at once.

However, if that isn't an option I'd probably try to implement the redirects from www to ww2 incrementally as well. Otherwise, Google will be able to crawl/index content from both the www and ww2 subdomains, leading to duplicate content issues. I'd try to keep the website architecture fairly consistent between the two so preserve the UX/equity signals between the two subdomains.

It's tough to give insights without more information, so I'd be happy to chat more about this!

Unlikely, as long as they're returning 404 errors you should be OK. Maybe update your disavow file and you should be good to go!

In the HTML of your pages there's an <a href="">link with "javascript:void(0". It appears that Google is getting into those. Is possible, remove that link or take it out of an</a> <a href="">element. Otherwise, you should be OK, those pages should 404. </a>

Good question! I've seen this happen with a few clients.

Here is my process for reviewing 5xx errors:

1. Manually check a handful of reported 5xx URLs and note their status codes. Often times upon manual inspection, you'll often find that these pages return different status codes (200, 4xx).
2. Perform a crawl using Screaming Frog and watch the "Status Codes" report. Watch to see if URL go from getting crawled as 200 to 5xx status codes.
3. If this is the case, the issue might that your hosting can't handle the requests getting sent to your site. If not and your URLs are getting reported as 200, it might been a temporary status the crawler found.
4. If possible, check your log files to see if Googlebot is returning a large number of 5xx errors.

Overall, if you only find a few 5xx errors in Search Console and your log files but don't find them in when you crawl the site, you're probably OK. However, if a crawl consistently reveals them or you see a large number in your log files then it's a high priority item to flag to your developers. You may need to consider upgrading your hosting or rolling back any recent development changes that were made. Definitely lean on your developer's insights here.

Got it!

While I've been a pretty heavy advocate against them, this might be a situation where using 302 (temporary) redirects is the best option. The current plan will tell Google:

1. The site is permanently moving the content to the ww2 subdomain
2. The site is now  permanently moving the content back to the www subdomain.

Instead by implementing 302 redirects gradually as the content goes live, you would send stronger signals that this is only a temporary move.

Let me know if you have any questions on this, would be happy to chat more: chris.long@gofishdigital.com

Your proposed redirect strategy looks good. If possible, I would keep the same URL path on the www subdomain. That way, when you're finished, you could simply remove the 302 redirects.

1. I would keep the redirects in place until the new content on the www subdomain is live.

2. Personally, I would avoid using the canonical tag in this situation. Google treats this as a hint and not a directive. If your content is too different, Google might just ignore the canonical tag and index both versions. As well, if you use the canonical tag from the ww2 domain to www subdomain, Google will only view the www subdomain content quality. If your content/UX is better on the ww2 subdomain, you won't receive any of that SEO benefit during that time.