Hi,

I'm with Philip on doing this selectively. Many users find content hard to digest in the manner it was intended when they have no idea if it was written in 2006 or 2014. If your industry is one where time really doesn't matter or change anything, this may be different. From an SEO point of view, Google still knows when it first crawled a piece of content, so not including a date won't fool Google into believing the content is fresh when it's not.

I agree that creating evergreen content where appropriate is also a good move - articles, case studies, etc. that can be updated where appropriate (and blogged about + linked to to spur re-indexing).

If you see a marked drop off in traffic to or engagement in a post from 2+ years ago that used to be successful for the site, I'd consider re-writing the post with a current slant, linking to the old one from the post and being upfront about the fact that you're refreshing an old article. You can move engagement to the new post. If there really isn't anything new to say about the subject, you can still cover it again "for new readers" and redirect the old post to the new one, canonicalise it or leave it as is if there are no duplicate content issues.

Hi there,

Since Domain Authority is a Moz metric, it is not affected by CTR due to Moz not being able to determine or collect this sort of data.

As far as CTR and PPC influencing search rankings goes, there are good reasons why Google would not rely on either metric too intently. For one, it would be very easy to mimic a very bad bounce rate on a competitor's site: set bots to click on search results to a competitor website, click straight out.

It would be a big conflict of interest for PPC to influence SEO either positively or negatively, and although none of us are naive enough to believe that Google always does everything with the best of intentions, they would be in a world of trouble if this type of behaviour were proven.

CTR and bounce rate are so easily influenced / manipulated by factors outside of quality, authority and relevancy that I assume their influence on rankings is quite low. Sure, this data is valuable to Google, but it won't be a signal that has a huge amount of relevance.

Hi Damien,

There are cases where subdomains are very necessary or inevitable, usually because of technical limitations (and even then, they can usually be worked around via practices like reverse proxy). When you see subdomains in the wild and aren't sure why they're being used, they will often just be legacies - old set-ups that no one wants to change because it would require redirecting old URLs, which is inadvisable if those URLs don't need to be redirected and if they rank well.

In this case, I'd be really interested to know why the SEO was adamant that the new structure should use subdomains and not subdirectories. Google is much better at working with new subdomains now than it was in years past, but if there is no good reason to use them, subdirectories are still the safer option for SEO purposes, and the content housed on subdirectories should automatically inherit authority from the parent domain. New subdomains seem to be far less likely to inherit this authority, as other responders have said above.

Find out exactly why the SEO wanted subdomains - if their reasoning isn't solid, you may want to place this content in subdirectories and place 301 redirects from the subdomains to the subdirectories. If you are going to do these redirects, doing them sooner rather than later is advisable as redirection usually comes with a short period of lower rankings / traffic.

On that note, redirection does usually result with that short period of traffic loss, but that should happen quite quickly and be fixing itself in 2+ weeks, not getting worse.

Hi again,

The canonical tag sounds like the right way to go for you.

Regarding the meta refresh method of redirection - this works perfectly for users... it was always the case that search engines did not honour this as a redirect though. This may have changed in the recent past (and realistically, it should have - a lot of people used this tactic for redirection and Google should understand that it shows a moved page). However, it is generally thought that the meta refresh does not pass all authority (as noted here), and this thread shows a Googler advising against it (this is a post from 2010 though).

Honestly, with the canonical tag, you don't need to do the refresh / redirection - this will take care of the issue

Cheers,

Jane

Hi Nick,

I believe there is no longer a "character count", but more a space or pixel limit - http://www.seomofo.com/experiments/serp/snippet-ascii-art.html

This has been played out by a few people's experiments, so looks fairly solid - the limit relates to space, not character count. You could certainly try to create something that looked good both as a regular result and a sitelink.

Hi Mike,

Are you saying that there is a canonical tag on http://cheaptubes.com/cntmaterialsafetydatasheet.htm, pointing to http://www.cheaptubes.com/cntmaterialsafetydatasheet.htm? This would solve the duplicate content problem, but I do not see a canonical tag on either of those pages...

Hi again,

Are you aware that you have a canonical tag on http://cheaptubes.com that points to a non-existent URL? i.e. http://i.imgur.com/yEd2377.png

http://www.cheaptubes.com/default.html

If http://cheaptubes.com/ 301 redirected to http://www.cheaptubes.com/, this would resolve the issue.

Are you aware that the www version of your site shows for a brand search (https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=cheaptubes.com&oq=cheaptubes.com&aqs=chrome..69i58j69i60l2j69i57j69i60j0.3367j0j4&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=91&ie=UTF-8) but that the canonical tags on each page point to the non-www version, e.g. http://i.imgur.com/P7Tizsv.png and http://i.imgur.com/lhTA95w.png?

The canonical tag on the www.cheaptubes.com/ page also points to http://www.cheaptubes.com/default.html. Sorry to show so many errors, but it doesn't look like canonicalisation has been implemented properly here.

Hi Joanne,

The "fewer than 100 links" quote is a little bit outdated in terms of what Google can actually handle. This article from late last year makes clear that the limit is long gone. The guideline is an okay benchmark when it comes to ensuring that you aren't overloading a page with useless or irrelevant content and links, but it's definitely not a requirement for crawling / indexing / ranking success anymore.

Your drop-down looks pretty standard to me. Some sites choose to present menus like this using JavaScript to call lower-level URLs (e.g. Hair, Face & Body + Natural Skin Care might be links in the HTML but then a JS call is required to bring up Certified Organic Skin Care, Cleansers, etc. - Google and other search engines do not traditionally execute JavaScript and thus won't see the links) but this is an increasingly unnecessary tactic, and could be detrimental if those URLs are not linked to in a crawlable manner elsewhere within the website.

Having a lot of links on a page has one "detriment" - a page does not "leak" PageRank / authority if it links out a lot, but it does mean that less PageRank passes through each link if there are hundreds of links, as opposed to 50 or 100 links. The total amount of PR that can be passed on is divided amongst more links. Again, it's important that links to all your pages be crawled so that those pages are indexed and receive authority, so I don't think you have to worry about this.

Further example: http://www.marksandspencer.com/ uses a JS-powered navigation, http://www.debenhams.com/ does not.

Hi Alan,

I replied to you about this on another thread, but I wanted to reiterate:

My SEO firm claims that Google looks at link profile only when there is a Penguin update and that these only occur once or twice a year.

This is not correct. Google only looks at removing or handing out Penguin penalties during a Penguin update (1, 2 or 3 times per year is the norm), but regular sites with regular link development can improve at all times. Link building might take a month or so to really show progress, but Google crawls and updates its indices almost constantly. It's simply not true that you will only see ranking improvements once or twice a year.

Similarly, you can lose rankings if you lose links that were counting, outside of a Penguin update.

Regarding DA and PA - yes, you can rank well with any combination of these. They are not indicators of how well you will rank, but a gauge of what your site's authority is relative to every other site Moz analyses, based upon backlinks. DA and PA are configured in a way that is meant to best represent how Moz believes Google values backlink profiles, but clearly Moz doesn't have access to Google's actual algorithm or measures of which links Google counts / discounts / values / doesn't value.

Also, "can I rank well" depends on what query you want to rank for. You will easily outrank a far higher authority website if your site is much more relevant to the query (although it's annoying to see high authority websites pop into SERPs for queries that they're not particularly relevant for, and it does happen from time to time).

If you have relatively low authority and you're trying to rank against similar websites with DA / PA scores in the 70s or so, your job is likely to be a lot harder. That said, it can still be done with focus on the specific niches you're interested in and work on improving the number and quality of links pointing to the site.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Jane

Hi Joanne,

Sorry for not totally expanding on what I meant as the outcome using javascript! Yes, you're "hiding" portions of the mega menu. There is speculation that search engines might execute JS commands to find out if there is content behind them, but at the moment this still seems a valid way to "remove" links from Google's total link count. Keep and eye on whether this changes though (and acknowledge that it might not be totally reliable, even now).

Perhaps check out this tutorial for JS menus: http://www.siteground.com/tutorials/menu/javascript.htm

Cheers,

Jane

As Devanur says, this will achieve your goal. It's worth reiterating that there is nothing inherently wrong with /index.php URLs as long as you cannot access the same content without /index.php. For instance, if www.site.com/page1/index.php exists as well as www.site.com/page1/, then this is duplicate content and should be fixed. I imagine this is your current situation because this is most common when /index.php is being added to URLs.

However, if only one version of every page loads and that version has the /index.php extension, this is not automatically bad. It's preferable for the extension not to be there for the sake of URL tidiness and because this does move the content one folder-level away from the root (not a huge issue, but probably best avoided) however.

If you go through 301 redirects to shift the old URLs to the new ones without /index.php, your rankings should not suffer. There might be a little bit of ranking fluctuation as Google indexes the new URLs and acknowledges the redirects, but nothing permanent. It's worth noting that this is not an absolute rule, however, and that there is always a risk of lowered rankings or rankings not returning to what they were before after a 301 redirect though.

Cheers,

Jane