Hi Marcel,

301s can be done in the htaccess, just make sure as Patrick noted above that your site does not link to http version but directly to the https. You will want to avoid redirecting people from one version to another without need.

Another thing that might be important. Webmaster tools might require you to add another property as if I'm not mistaken it considers http and https as separate entities, it will be good to set it up and monitor both versions to notice that you don't have strange errors during and/or after the migration.

Hi Marcel,

A switch to https shouldn't hurt but would most likely have a positive impact on your baseline. Which is significantly more important than any loss in traffic. That said if you do the strategy properly and you redirect all the pages to the equivalent in https it should be fine (assuming you are not changing URLs and/or content).

What you might want to be wary of is the following.

1. Make sure that your CMS is able to automatically serve all your assets in https. So if you have images which are linked directly with http://domain.com/image.jpg you'd have to run a script to change the http into an https.

2. Any third party scripts / images also need to be run over https. As you have a web shop I don't think you're doing some kind of third party advertising but check in case you have any other http content.

Any of the above two will mark your site as unsafe, which will deter visitors and possibly be a negative flag to google.

Good luck on the migration.

If your title is incorporated in an image (not the recommended) what you can do is wrap the image tag in an H1, and provide an ALT description.

You could also hide the H1 under the image, but I am not sure if that could possibly trigger some flags by search engines.

I'd appreciate if someone with multilingual experience can jump in and give some ideas.

I've just set up a client who uses internationalization on Google Webmaster tools and Google Analytics. For easier management they opted to use subfolders rather than subdomains or cctlds.

So I set up a Google Analytic Property, with one Unfiltered profile, and another 3 profiles filtered per language. With the main language English being exclude anything starting /fr/ /de/ as it resides on root.

The filters seem to work fine; however after linking this to the Google Webmaster Account to be able to access Search Engine Optimization I do not seem to get any language filtered data. I was wondering if someone had any idea or possible solution to this problem. As I would expect to at least have the Landing Pages if not exactly the keywords filtered by the same criteria that the rest of the data is being filtered.

I know there's also an option to create a separate webmaster tools account, however this way I still cannot filter just the English; and I cannot link it to all the separate profiles.

I would appreciate some more feedback, I'm looking to group some of these pages from the 100k we're bringing it down to around 33k.

As regards comments not sure it's very feasible from research we did not many people go into back-dated entries so it's highly doubtful we'd receive much if any comments.

On my browser the page returns a 302 (temporary redirect). It could be that MOZ would still expect the page to eventually resolve. A 302 usually means that the page is temporarily down or not available. Thus should keep the page in index as it should eventually re-appear.

If you are not planning on making this page available again I would suggest you use a 301 instead.

I tend to use this quite a lot; It does not harm Search Engines, what is important is that only inline elements are contained within an H1 tag, that is span is a perfectly valid element, however a div is not. In your case you should use multiple spans with separate class names.

You should also consider splitting it into H1 / H2 depending on your site structure and navigation as it might make more sense in some cases.

If you have still left the redirects in place; these should work. As they would indicate that the 'old' page redirects to the page without comments. I would also suggest adding a canonical link to all your pages. So in case you missed a redirect or you have disabled them it would tell Google that the page it is visiting is exactly the same as the one in the canonical link.

Change will not happen overnight; it will take some time; especially if you had a robots blocking Google from doing to that url, as it would have to first identify the url to be 'crawlable' then find the redirect or canonical, after that update the serps & indexes.

Right, I guess that's true as we still rank for other terms. However there are concerns that this could effect the Domain Rank ( I don't think its the case). We've decided to try drop at least 1/3rd of these 'automated pages' by displaying them in AJAX this way there should be a bit less stuff in the google index.

If you have still left the redirects in place; these should work. As they would indicate that the 'old' page redirects to the page without comments. I would also suggest adding a canonical link to all your pages. So in case you missed a redirect or you have disabled them it would tell Google that the page it is visiting is exactly the same as the one in the canonical link.

Change will not happen overnight; it will take some time; especially if you had a robots blocking Google from doing to that url, as it would have to first identify the url to be 'crawlable' then find the redirect or canonical, after that update the serps & indexes.

I tend to use this quite a lot; It does not harm Search Engines, what is important is that only inline elements are contained within an H1 tag, that is span is a perfectly valid element, however a div is not. In your case you should use multiple spans with separate class names.

You should also consider splitting it into H1 / H2 depending on your site structure and navigation as it might make more sense in some cases.

Yes and no;

The root domain usually tends to get far more links then your inner pages, as any links about your website / brand usually come in here. Should you target keywords on the root; it would benefit from having the increased in-links.

The result would then depend on the level of on-page optimization that you are able to do on the home-page or internal page. Usually on internal pages you can control far more the content and thus make better on-page optimizations, should the levels of optimization be more or less the same I would safely assume that your home page (root) would take prominence.

Hi Marcel,

A switch to https shouldn't hurt but would most likely have a positive impact on your baseline. Which is significantly more important than any loss in traffic. That said if you do the strategy properly and you redirect all the pages to the equivalent in https it should be fine (assuming you are not changing URLs and/or content).

What you might want to be wary of is the following.

1. Make sure that your CMS is able to automatically serve all your assets in https. So if you have images which are linked directly with http://domain.com/image.jpg you'd have to run a script to change the http into an https.

2. Any third party scripts / images also need to be run over https. As you have a web shop I don't think you're doing some kind of third party advertising but check in case you have any other http content.

Any of the above two will mark your site as unsafe, which will deter visitors and possibly be a negative flag to google.

Good luck on the migration.