Hey Mike,

I would publish content right away on the new site. You can also share in social to help get more inbound links and shares to the new site.

Thanks!

John

Hey Mike,

It sounds like you've done all the right things. If you are seeing 404's for elements or pages that you don't believe have value, then you can request them be removed from the Google index via the search console. You may want to do that. You are welcome to paste them in here for me to see just in case.

It's more or less a waiting game now. The good news is that you've done all the right things.  If you have time, I would start building links or social shares (anything natrual and not fabricated) to the new site to help with SEO while the redirects fully kick in.

Thanks!

Hey! Can you provide a bit more detail and even share the URL of the site? It sounds like you launched a new site at a different URL and 301 redirected everything (page to page). You'll typically see a drop in traffic/rank for 30 days - how dramatic of a dip will vary from site to site. A few things to review:

1. 404 errors in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools

2. Going through each of the 301 redirects to make sure they work (tedious but necessary)

3. Submit sitemap from new URL

If you can provide any more details on things you've reviewed that will be helpful. I'll keep an eye on this thread.

Hey Kyle! Roman had a great answer to this when he answered a previous question - https://moz.com/community/q/do-long-utm-codes-hurt-seo - take a peek.

Hey Kyle,

Another side question before I answer (sorry for the delay). Have you moved your site to https and have you changed the admin parameters to https in property settings and view settings?

Most change the former but some miss the view settings. We saw similar things with organic traffic over this year and the issue was that the view was not set to https.

Let me know and I'll give you feedback on the link question after.

Thanks!

John

Hey! Have you tried uploading more photos to the yelp account or encouraging people to leave reviews with photos? Perhaps they may pick those up and replace the ones current listed on the maps.

Hey Kyle,

This is also a good question. I'm curious as to why you would want to add the UTM parameters as you could just look at the referring source of traffic and attribute it to the specific site that the e-release is on. I'm looking forward to the discussion as I know some others will provide good feedback.

Perfect! Happy to help!

Hey James - would you be comfortable sharing the URL? I can run some diagnostics on it to see what other issues could be the cause of the drop.

Thanks!

John

I wanted to say that Vijay's answer was fantastic! To add to it - you do want to keep a close eye on if the video adds to the time on site or no once you add it to the page. Some videos may actually do more harm than good with time on site and conversion.

Thanks!

You can! Via https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663419?hl=en

• If you choose to hide a directory, then any file or directory starting with the prefix you supply will be blocked. So if you enter /folder, then /folder/somefile, foldername/somefile, and /folder.html will all be blocked.
• To hide an entire site, leave the path empty.

Hi Christian,

I'm sorry to hear about the issue. Here's what I would do:

1. Try to use a free xml sitemap generator (Google free xml sitemap generator) and manually upload it to your server and then submit that. That may involve turning off the Yoast xml sitemap generator. You can see if you still get the error

2. Try a different plugin to generate the sitemap - I'd recommend this one: https://wordpress.org/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/

If you are still getting the same error, I would take Everett's advice and call your web host.

Hey there! Do you have a link to a page where it's implemented live? As long as you have the no-index, no follow in there, you should be okay. Other things you can do:

1. Use robots.txt to hide the directory of pages that the plugin is outputting

2. Sign into the Google Search Console and no-index the same directory

I would do 1 and 2 to help speed up things once the no-index, no-follow tag is in place.

Ahh the dreaded redirect of a URL with a querystring. I would advise you to do it via cpanel (which you should have as part of your web host). Here are instructions via Bluehost.com: https://my.bluehost.com/hosting/help/redirects. You essentially paste in the old link and then paste in the new link, hit a button and the redirect is implemented into the .htaccess file automatically.

Otherwise, you'll need to redirect via mod rewrite. Here's a good article: https://perishablepress.com/redirect-query-string-htaccess/

Thanks!

John