Welcome to the Q&A Forum

This is typically called a "microsite" and is not a black-hat strategy at all. It is more of a marketing tactic--to build a good, quality site with lots of content on a keyword rich domain name. Typically, many companies will purchase keyword rich domain names and not use them, they will just redirect them to their main site: like the way Books.com redirects to Barnes and Noble.

If the microsite only has thin content and doesn't have quality content, it could be considered a doorway page or doorway domain--but if it does have enough quality content on it then it would be considered a microsite. It still needs to have a good amount of quality links pointing to it, as well, in order to help the other site it points to. But, if the microsite is working, then the main brand site doesn't necessarily need to rank well. It gets its traffic from the microsite.

When you launched the new version of the site, did you set up the 301 Permanent Redirects so that all of the old pages are mapped/redirected to the most appropriate page on the new version of the site?

It sounds so me like you might not have set up the 301 redirects properly.

One thing you can do, though, is look at your Google Search Console crawl errors and pay attention to the most important ones--and fix those first.

Whenever you move domain names, you should make sure that you use 301 Permanent Redirects (you may want to verify this by looking at the server headers, doing a server header check).

Then, you need make sure that the Google Change of Address Tool has been used to tell Google that they moved from the old domain to the new domain. You'll need to verify the old domain and the new domain in the same Google Search Console account, and then do the Change of Address.

Whenever you move to another domain like this, the old domain name will still remain indexed for at least a year or so (sometimes longer), as that's just how Google handles it. So if the old domain name still shows up for certain search queries then that's normal.

In any case, though, 301 redirects must be used and the Change of Address Tool should be used, as well.

In the past, for these situations, we've had to get the location to set up suite numbers for each business. That way the address is correct, and then there is a suite number for each one. What we prefer to do is to get the USPS (postal service) to also set up and have those suite numbers in their system, as well. So, that way it's official.

You'll also need to post the suite numbers on the outside of the business, as well.

If you have changed the URLs with trailing slashes, then there are a few things you'll want to do:

• make sure all the internal links on your site are updated to point to the proper version.

• make sure that the sitemap.xml file(s) are correct, pointing to the proper version.

• set up 301 permanent redirects so that the ones with the slash are redirecting to the old URLs.

As long as you have corrected the links internally, updated the sitemap file, and set up the 301 redirects, everything should go "back to normal" within a fairly short period of time. You will need to give it time, though, as Google will need to re-crawl all of those URLs and get it all ironed out.

When it comes to content on your site and Google Panda issues, you need to look at the site as a whole. Generally speaking, we want all of the content to be quality content. If there are book reviews that have plenty of content (as in there is a good amount of text on the page), then even if they are older books you'd want to keep those pages.

When it comes to Google Panda, which you're describing, we're more concerned about "thin content pages", not necessarily content that no one as viewed in a while. When it comes to identifying this content, though, I prefer to look at pages that haven't had any views for 6 months. Even if the page has had less than 10 views in any given month we'd still want to leave content that has had a few views in the past month.

I do believe that there is a use for older book reviews, so if the pages do have enough unique text on the page, then it would be worth it to leave those pages. You might need to look at your overall site structure, though, if you have a lot of pages then they might not be ranking well (or have a lot of page views) because of the site structure--and not necessarily because of the content.

We've seen this happen with a lot of sites, especially with sites that are related certain events. For example, a 5k race or a marathon website would suffer the same fate.

It's the drop in engagement on the site, as the competition is over so visitors have no need to go to the site anymore. Also, the site may have lost links pointing to the site. The site owner pointing links to you figured the competition was over so they removed the links.

I would take a look at the links to the site and look at the historical links (using Majestic.com) or see if you have a list of links from previous link evaluations--crawl those links and see if any of them have changed or been removed. If they have, you may be able to see if you can get those links back.

Sherry, unfortunately, without having a 301 redirect in place, there's not much you can do to directly tell Google that the site has been moved. In order to use their Google Change of Address Tool, you have to set up the 301 permanent redirect from the old URL to the new URL (old domain to new domain). If you can get access, that's what you really need to do.

If the old site won't be taken down, there are a few things you can do, like send them a stern letter or let the lawyers get involved. Typically a letter from a lawyer will get their attention. You can, also, file a DMCA request with their web host, which they must comply with, telling the web host that the material on the old site is copyrighted (you own the copyright and rights to it) and it must be taken down.

If they won't give you the domain name, then you can file a UDRP domain dispute with ICANN to try to get ahold of the domain name. That will take some time, though. But in the long run you'll get ahold of the domain and be able to redirect it.

In the meantime, while you're dealing with all of this, you can begin to get all of your local listings (like Google My Business, etc.) and local citations moved over to point to your new site rather than the old site. In fact, you can start building links to the new domain name and Google will, hopefully, start ranking your new domain name higher in the search results.

Finally, you might actually consider moving the site to a .CARS domain extension, we've seen some really great success from dealerships that have moved from a .COM to a .CARS domain.

If these were previously closed locations or removed in Google My Business then most likely Google picked them up from the aggregators. It sounds as if that's the case, as those locations were probably listed on other websites, the local search data providers.

Moz has more information about these here: https://moz.com/learn/local/local-search-data-providers

What you'll need to do is figure out where your other listings are--and get those removed, as well. Otherwise, even if you get them removed from Google again they will show up again once Google pulls the data from the data providers again.

Michael, from what i can tell, your website is built using WordPress. We typically recommend installing the Yoast SEO plugin and using that--which will help with your robots.txt file. If you need more information, take a look here: https://yoast.com/wordpress-robots-txt-example/

Generally, most of your site won't need to be disallowed in the robots.txt file, unless you're using tags and categories on your site. Yoast typically helps disallow the proper directories that you need to disallow.

One thing that you need to be aware of is the fact that you don't want to disallow your .CSS or .JS files on your site, many of the themes nowadays will put those files in your wp-admin folder--which by default typically gets disallowed.

Probably the best way, actually, is to stop it even before it gets to your site. Using Cloudflare or something similar, you can stop that bad traffic (or at least some of it) before it even hits your site. Another option is to use Wordfence, which is really good at stopping that traffic, as well.

Google recently did say that they have fixed the referral spam issue in Google Analytics, but I am still seeing some of it from time to time.

If you've set up Cloudflare and Wordfence on your WordPress site, you can still set up filters on Google Analytics. The best solution that we've seen recently is to use the site's hostname to set up filters. So, if you look at the referrals from the past year or so, and you look at the hostnames, you'll see the hostnames that are for your site. For example, if your site's GA is for moz.com, then you'd want to set up a filter that only shows referrals that use moz.com, www.moz.com, etc.. Typically, the referral spammers don't know your hostname, so that will filter all of that traffic out.

I tried using it last week and again this week but my location no longer seems to update.

As far as we know, recently Google has changed this feature (turned it off). So, it's very difficult now to use Google to change your location and see results as if you're in another location. Pretty much the only thing you can do now is use a proxy service or VPN to change your location.

Google has made it pretty clear in the past--translated content, even if it is directly translated as you suggest, is not duplicate content. So, if you have a page in English (even the meta data) and translate it into Spanish, those two pages are NOT duplicates.

Google has now officially turned off all of the public data for PageRank. There is no PageRank anymore--all will show a Zero or no data. More information here: http://www.thesempost.com/google-officially-turns-off-all-public-pagerank/

If you are looking for something similar to PageRank, you should like at Moz Domain Authority and Page Authority, or look at Majestic.com's Trust Flow and Citation Flow.

Based on the last several Google Penguin updates, if your site was going to be harmed or your rankings were going to go down, they probably would have gone down already. That said, that doesn't mean that you could still be penalized.

If there are sitewide badge links, they need to look natural. I wouldn't use any specific keyword anchor text, I would use your website name or brand or URL as the anchor text in the link. Don't make it look like you're trying to "game" Google by having too much exact match anchor text.

If these links are only a small percentage of the overall links that you have pointing to your site, then there won't be a problem. But if you have only 5 percent like you're saying then it should be fine.

Yes, I believe you're referring to Google's PageRank--which has, in fact, been turned off. It is no longer available. You may want to use Moz Domain Authority and Page Authority, or look at Majestic.com's Trust Flow and Citation Flow.

The 404 errors and other crawl data is provided by a separate database in Google, so the timing of the links and the data you're seeing isn't exactly "in sync" so to speak. I would do a few things--look at the pages to see if there's something on your site that might be causing the errors.

Another option is to look at the link data to see if there are any links pointing to those pages. I would use another source, such as OSE or Majestic.com to see if there are links pointing to those pages that Google isn't reporting (which is often the case).

I'm not sure how you're blocking Google from crawling external links in the robots.txt file--typically you only block them from crawling internal pages on your site.

If you're using a script, though, to track the clicks on external links and that script is running your site (and you're blocking that script in robot.txt), then that still should be fine. You may want to add a "nofollow" tag on those links, though, so you don't end up passing link "credit" or "link juice" to those affiliates (unless you want to do that?).

As far as external links go, though, it's typically okay (and expected) that you link out to other sites.

What you'll want to do is crawl the other site--and make note of all of the URLs. Then, 301 redirecting each page to the most appropriate page on the main site.

We usually recommend using a spreadsheet and making a list of the old URLs in one column and then listing the page it will redirect to next to it, in another column. That will make it easy to set up the 301 redirects in the .htaccess file on the site or put them into a redirect plugin.

There will be pages that you can't find another equivalent page on the new site--so you should 301 redirect those to the site's home page.

Omakad, Google's list of links in Webmaster Tools is different than what you're going to see in Moz because these are separate companies. They both have their own crawlers and crawl websites differently. Moz doesn't crawl as often or as quickly as Google does.

Google has, on purpose, decided to not give us all of the links that they know about, mainly because they don't want us to reverse engineer their algorithm. There are actually other tools that will show you links to a website, including MajesticSEO.com and ahrefs.com. What I recommend is that you go to several link sources, including Google, Moz, Majestic SEO, and ahrefs, and get all the links--and then put them into one big list and remove the duplicates. That will give you a better picture of the links that are pointing to your website.

You're exactly correct--if a link or a list of links is buried in the site's footer then they're really not useful to visitors. No one really clicks on those links. I recommend only having links like "terms of service", "privacy policy", etc. links there.

If you want proof that no one clicks on those links, then check out Google Analytics and see the "in page analytics" to see where people are clicking on your page. You will see that no one clicks on footer links, especially link lists.

I would remove any link lists that you have in your site's footer.

Google uses a lot of different factors to determine why one site ranks above another site. However, when it comes to duplicate content (other sites using your site's RSS feed to generate content on their site), Google determines who posted the content first--and then the others are considered to be duplicates.

In your case, most likely the other sites are getting crawled quicker--therefore you are not the one who is originating the content, according to Google. You need Google to crawl your site quicker, and that typically is determined by how often you post content and the links to your content. Get more quality links to your site, and make sure you post on your social profiles (twitter, google plus, facebook, linkedin) whenever you post on your site.

We generally don't recommend copying/pasting reviews (or other content) from other sites and then putting those on your own site. Google sees that as duplicate content. Furthermore, Google doesn't like those reviews to be on more than one site at a time.

If you do have reviews on your site, make sure that they're unique to your site and don't appear on other sites. In that case you can, in fact, mark them up with Schema. But that doesn't guarantee Google will show that markup in the search results.

Typically, the site: command in Google is unreliable. There are lots of reasons why, one being that there may be pages indexed that aren't "good enough", for whatever reason, to show up in the search results. When we look at the site pages indexed, we typically will use the site: command, then click a few pages deep and look at the number it shows (not the first number of pages it shows).

For SEO auditing purposes, we're looking to see if there is a significant difference between the number of pages indexed and the number of pages that we find when we we crawl the website ourselves.

For a true 404 error page, Google wouldn't tell you about those errors. You may have a custom 404 error page set up with the tracking code on it and visitors are going to those 404 error page(s). But, since it's JavaScript that must load, then you won't see 404 errors in Google Analytics.

Keep in mind that a Google URL shortener is a 301 redirect to the URL. It would actually be better to use the full URL if possible, as it won't result in a 301 redirect. You typically lose some "link juice" when passed through a 301 redirect.

If you can't use the full URL, and you want to use the shortener, consider using one that will give you statistics (such as bit.ly). This way you can actually tell which video is sending traffic to your site and getting clicks. In that case, I would go with a unique shortener for each one.

Jordan is right, I don't recommend spinning any of the content, it generally doesn't turn out well for users, and tends to make it 'unreadable'.

Your best bet here is to think of Search and Email as two separate things. If you're going to use the content in multiple newsletters and reach other audiences (the same person won't read it twice), then that's perfectly fine. However, if you're going to allow ANY of it to get indexed by the search engines, then I would only allow one copy to get indexed. You can archive the other copies, but just make sure that you don't allow indexing of those copies.

Duplicate Content isn't generally thought of as  'penalty', it's more about the fact that only the first crawled version gets indexed, and the others generally don't.

You may want to consider a .REPAIR new gTLD domain name. One of the keywords is in the ending (in the TLD), and we've seen good results when sites have migrated to an appropriate new gTLD domain name. In your case, you may be able to get a really good, short, memorable .REPAIR domain.

If you migrate the old site to the new .REPAIR domain name  using 301 redirects and the Google Change of Address Tool, you won't see any negative effects--your rankings may in fact get better.

Shares on certain social networks don't necessarily have an effect from one social network to another. Google Plus doesn't necessarily have more ranking power--it doesn't work that way. What is more important to Google is the actual rate of engagement and who is sharing/interacting with it.

If one post is shared by an influencer and there are a lot of comments, that will have more ranking power than a post that's made and no one shares it. Or lots of non-influencers (spam accounts or fake profiles) share it.

Look for actual engagement and shares by influencers, not whether it's shared on one particular social network.

Akira, there really is no direct connection between AdWords and organic rankings. However, there have been studies that show that if you show up in AdWords and in organic search for a search query it will benefit your organic--the visitors will tend to click on your organic listings and on the PPC ads.

Organic is not affected by PPC.

You may be able to pause the low-converting ads while still keeping the higher-converting ones. Furthermore, there may be other keywords that you can bid on that you aren't showing up for. I would look at Google Search Console's Search Analytics report and look at the impressions for organic and see which keywords are getting impressions but not clicks. That may reveal some keywords that you may want to bid on.

All in all, though, if you want to totally pause your AdWords ads it won't affect your rankings.

There are several out there, including Authority Labs, SEMrush.com, serps.com,and this one:

<cite class="_Rm">https://moz.com/tools/rank-tracker</cite>

The duplicate titles are being picked up because all page titles are in English for all 5 languages -

That, there, is the issue. If the page is in French, then the title tag needs to be in French. That's why the title tags are being flagged as duplicates. Because they are duplicates.

The good news, though, is that if you do take the time to update/translate all of your title tags into the proper language, then I bet that your site's search engine rankings will improve quite a bit.

Max, for the type of writing project that you're mentioning, we typically look for the writer first--and don't necessarily go with a service. We are looking for someone who is an expert or good writer in a particular subject that fits. For example, we may have a healthcare content need, so we look for healthcare bloggers and contact them directly. This way we end up getting better, more quality content written.

The new gTLD domain names are, in fact, treated exactly the same as any other TLD such as .COM, .NET, and .ORG by Google. They even wrote a blog post about it. However, we have been seeing very good results when it comes to using keyword rich new gTLD domain names.

When it comes to Google Plus in particular, we do recommend that the authorship and publishership tags be used, as there has been mentions by Google reps in the past that those could come back at some point. We don't know if Google is still using Google Authorship internally as a search engine ranking signal of some type even though it isn't being promoted publicly. The same goes for Google Publishership, as well.

If it requires a lot of extra time coding this into the site then you might consider not including it--but we do recommend that it still be included, especially since it may make a comeback at some point.

This "card" that you're referring to is actually the Knowledge Graph data that's being displayed. While Wikipedia data is actually a part of the Knowledge Graph, just having a Wikipedia page doesn't mean that it will get a knowledge graph entry shown on the right hand side of the search results.

We have been able to get certain companies and entities their own Knowledge Graph entry previously by adding an entry into Freebase, that option is no longer available. The knowledge graph is, in fact, something that's closely guarded by Google, as there is no place where they list all of the websites that make up the KG, and I believe it changes or is updated regularly.

Based on your example, it is clear Google knows about OIN, but most likely it isn't showing a KG entry because of what it is--an online version of the database published by the U.S. Department of Labor. So, OIN isn't an entity according to Google.

Like others have mentioned, if your site has both the "healthcare solutions" and "healthcare identity solutions" categories (category and subcategory), then it would make sense to keep it that way. We should be able to navigate to each of those pages in the URL.

If you just are referring to the URL, though, the keywords in the URL is such a small part of the search engine algorithms that it really won't make a huge difference--and I hardly believe you'll be penalized for it.

There is generally no reason that you need to redirect old images if the new site design no longer uses them. However, you might just keep them on the server in the same location.

Rob, generally speaking, creating pages or sections of your site just to target certain cities is not going to get you anywhere. Those typically are going to be considered "doorway pages" and violate Google's Webmaster Guidelines. What we typically recommend is being honest with the location of where you are, posting that location/address on your site, and using Schema.org markup to the search engines where you're located. Then, using Google My Business (Google maps, etc.) to set up your local business listing is key. I would also consider working on local citations in order to get more listings for your business, as well.

Since you're a photographer, using social media such as Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, and Facebook is going to be key to driving visitors to your website, as well. Google is watching engagement on the social media sites, and that typically helps your site's search engine rankings.

When it comes to Yoast, we typically use it for on-page changes only, such as optimizing the title and meta description tags. If  you need to redirect pages, you might consider a separate WordPress plugin to do that. If you're having trouble with duplicate pages showing up, then you may need to delete the specific duplicate pages and wait for Google to re-crawl your site.

Generally speaking, the decision should be based on the location served--so if the company does business in the entire Dallas area then I would use Dallas. But, if it's only in Farmer's Branch, then typically you'd choose just that city.

Another decision would be whether or not this business is going to have (or currently has) more than one location in the area. So, if in the future they will have a Dallas location, a Farmer's Branch location, a Plano location, etc. then that could cause an issue in the future, as you'd need to fix it.

If the Farmer's Branch location serves the entire Dallas area, then you should probably go with Dallas.

If you look at those links in Google Search Console (crawl errors), you'll see that there is a date there. If there are some that show up with an older date (than yesterday, for example), you can mark as fixed. If those errors are still there, then they'll show up again.

Yes, you can definitely use an IP redirect and redirect users to the correct 'version' of the site based on their IP address. You still may want to add a link to both versions, though, since it is possible that someone from the USA might be traveling in the UK and want to see the USA version of the site.

Keep in mind that most likely these two versions may look like duplicate content to Google, you may want to only allow Google to see one 'version'. Otherwise, use the proper hreflang tag to indicate US English and UK English.

When it refers to links, it's ALL links on the page, even navigational links. If you have too many links, then you might consider updating the navigation and splitting up those links into categories and subcategories. You may need to add additional category and subcategory pages on your site as a result.

Typically the canonical tag should be used when content is duplicate--like when you have the same article appearing on one or more websites. I don't see any reason why you should be using the canonical tag, as those articles are unique.

Since the Google Panda algorithm might come into play here, though, the older articles may eventually hurt your site's search engine rankings if there are too many of them on the site. You might consider creating an archive of your content, perhaps on archive.yourdomain.com and then stopping the search engines from crawling that archive (but still making the article available to readers).

Each location should typically have its own listing. That way you can link directly to the location's page on your website. If you have multiple locations and it's not feasible to manually add them all, there is a way to upload them. I'd say that if you have over a dozen locations then you may consider that--or use a service such as Yext or Moz Local to get them all set up.

Tymen, there are different types of SSL certificates, and I understand that they can, in fact, be optimized so it will load quickly. You might point your web host/developers to the Google help topic(s) here for more information: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/module/https_support#load_from_file

Also, make sure that you're using a Content Deliver Network (CDN) when you can, and use caching, as well.

What we recommend is that you concentrate on one domain name to build up that site's domain authority. The other domain names should be 301 redirected to that main site.  If you have domain names that are related to certain products or categories, you may want to redirect those to an internal page on your site.

What we have seen in the past is that if you have too many domain names pointing and redirecting to your main site you can run into ranking problems, even incur penalties from Google. So, I would limit the number of domains that you redirect to your main site.

If you decide to set up "micro sites" on those domains, keep in mind that they are going to need a lot of attention such as link building and social media marketing--it may end up hurting your main site if you were to have low quality or "think" content sites pointing to your main site.

Generally speaking, if you think of the keyword set as part of a large "topic", then you should optimize your site's home page for the main topic in general--and then the sub-topic keyword(s) and the "sub-sub" topic keywords would also be pages, as well. The sub-topic keyword would be linked from the site's home page, and then the sub-sub topic would linked from the sub-topic's page.

I like to think of this as a theme pyramid approach

Main Topic
     Category
          Sub-Topic
     Category
          Sub-Topic

Ben, I'm assuming that you have 301 redirects properly set up for all of those page. Then, make sure  you've used the Google Change of Address Tool to properly tell Google that you've moved from one domain to another. If you are consolidating domains, then you need to verify all of those sites in Google Search Console and then use the Change of Address Tool.

You don't mention how long it's been since you've set up those 301 redirects, but it literally can take months before everything is straightened out in Google.

One thing you can also do is to look at the site's log files to see if Google is crawling those pages--it could be that they're not crawling. If they have crawled, then it might just take time before they're indexed.