Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Oops, I missed that part. Have you checked Google Search Console to see if someone set any URL parameters?

The first thing I would do is determine how many pages actually should be indexed to see if there's a large discrepancy between that and the number Google shows. A crawler like Screaming Frog can help with this. If you export the crawl to Excel, you can easily remove duplicates in the canonical URL column and filter out the noindexed pages.

If you find there's no real discrepancy, Google may have simply been cleaning house of some really old links in the index that hadn't been crawled in a while.

Beyond that, if you can pinpoint any specific URLs that have been deindexed, use the "Fetch as Google" tool to help diagnose or post it here so the community can take a look.

First of all, citations are not synonymous with links, although a lot of citations do include links. A business citation is just a mention of the company, often in a structured format and including the address, phone number, and website (but not necessarily).

Secondly, you'll need to clarify if you are referring to local search results (3-pack, 7-pack etc with map) or the organic search results. Citations (with or without links) have the greatest effect on local results. They help search engines distinguish one business from another, particularly in local search and map results.

Your question implies that citations only have value inasmuch as they help your website perform in search. On the contrary, business citations help customers find the products and services that they need online, even if they never make it to the company's website.  In fact, it can be extremely frustrating to customers when they can't find what they need online, as I recently found out.  Citations can be highly beneficial in terms of "Barnacle SEO" as well.

To answer your questions:

1. There are typically about 50-100 general and niche citation websites that are important for each industry. Anything beyond that will see diminishing returns.

2. Links from citations can be beneficial to an entire site, for the most part, but they are more significant for the target page. Avoid citations from spammy sites.

3. Citations are one of the biggest factors affecting local search results. See the 2014 Local Search Ranking Factors.

Take heart. There are a lot of great SEO companies out there who will strive to work within your budget.  We try to offer options so that clients with smaller budgets can afford our services, but that usually means our work is stretched over a longer period of time. In such cases, it's important to understand that it will probably take longer to see results.  This can be a good option for business owners who understand the need to invest in SEO but can't afford a large retainer.

You'll want to use pagination markup (rel=”next”/rel=”prev”) to handle this. See this article for specific guidelines.

It's a fairly simple process to transfer ownership of a Google My Business page. See Google's instructions for how to do this.

You'll be fighting a steep uphill battle if you try to optimize one URL for all three. You should, of course, mention that you have offices in all three cities on your home page, but why not create local landing pages for each city?

I don't mean that you should create one page, copy it, and replace the city name. That would be bad.

Each city page should have unique content with a local focus. In addition to contact information and directions, there's probably plenty of ways to add unique content to each local page. Highlight key staff members for each location, add location photos (inside and out), add customer testimonials, etc.

More about location pages:

• https://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide
• http://niftymarketing.com/optimal-local-landing-page-infographic/

Any chance you can give us the URLs? Otherwise, it's difficult to troubleshoot.  Does this only happen in Google, or do you see it in Bing as well?

Based on what you're saying, I would look first at at a few possible culprits.

• Index Issues - Have you checked to confirm that the home page is indexed by the search engine? Search site:domain.com to check. If not, you may have a technical problem that prevents the
• Internal Link Scheme - Is the other page getting more internal links than the home page, making it seem more important?
• Content - Does the other page have loads more relevant content than the home page?

It's really a shot in the dark without knowing the website URL, but there are probably multiple issues going on.  If Google is only indexing half of your pages, it's probably a crawl issue or a meta robots issue.  Check to make sure the pages aren't being blocked or noindexed. If that isn't the problem, you may have a problem with crawl inefficiency.

Optimize the umbrella company as a brand for organic search but NOT for local SEO. Use the 3 local venues for local search optimization and it helps to use the local landing page for Google My Business and 3rd-party citations.  For the GMB pages, you really need a separate phone number for each venue even if they forward to the main line.  You can create a Google Plus page for the umbrella company but you should not create a Google My Business listing.

You are correct to noindex it, but I see no reason to nofollow.

Yes. I suppose if you have a massive site and you're seeing a problem with crawl budget, it wouldn't hurt to nofollow the print links.  Otherwise, it isn't really necessary.

Is there a particular reason that you don't want to 301-redirect the old domain to the new domain? If customers go to the old domain or even search the domain name, they'll be redirected to the new one automatically. Can you help us understand why this is not ideal?

A common post-Penguin misconception is to avoid using important keywords in anchor text at all. You should avoid using the same keyword-stuffed anchor text in a bunch of backlinks to your site, but it's still a best practice to include important keywords in anchor text. Just don't be spammy about it. Make it natural and vary the anchor text. It shouldn't be a problem on your own website as long as it isn't done in an unnatural way that isn't helpful to the reader at all.

It really depends on your rationale for having two different pages with mostly the same content. Ideally, you could remove the old page or merge the old with the new and 301-redirect the old URL to the new one.

On the other hand, I recognize that there may be a legitimate business case for keeping both pages. In that case, you would add the new URL within the rel=canonical tag to the old page. That tells the search engines that the new page is the one that should be indexed by search engines and come up in search results.

Having the same phone number and address on two websites is not a duplicate content issue. It's very common because of business directories all over the web. If that's the only duplicate content you're worried about, then you're fine.

Yes, you are right that Google has included this caveat about deceptive and manipulative practices that relate to duplicate content, but that is not a "duplicate content penalty."  Merely having the same description for product variations will not get you penalized. That's a common issue with ecommerce websites and isn't the sort of black hat tactic that will incur the wrath of Google.

There is no limit to the number of redirects that Google is willing to crawl within a site. However, there's a limit to the number of redirect chains that they'll crawl. A redirect chain is when one page redirects to a page that redirects to a page that redirects ... and so on.

In your case, the best thing to do is set up canonical tags to let Google know which version of the URL should be indexed. That way, it doesn't matter if Google can access the https page, and you won't have the duplicate content problem that you have now.

I can't advise you on the best way to set this up with Drupal, but you'll need to be wary of any type of automatic canonical tags. You may end up with an "http" canonical link on the http page and an "https" canonical link on the https page. That doesn't solve the problem at all.

If you are not already familiar with canonical tags, you can learn more at the links below.

• https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en
• https://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization
• https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html

By the way, I would set it up so that Google indexes the https version of your pages rather than the http version.

When you say you currently have self referencing canonicals, is the following happening?

The page http://example.com is canonicalized to http://example.com.

The page https://example.com is canonicalized to https://example.com.

If so, this is the bigger problem because Google sees these as 2 different URLs and may index both of them. Furthermore, you could be splitting backlinks between 2 URLs unnecessarily. This duplicate issue may be part of the reason you saw organic traffic drop when you launched your new site.

If the HTTPS URLs are already being indexed by Google, go ahead and canonicalize the http URLs to the https URLs. In other words, http://example.com will canonicalize to https://example.com.

By setting up the canonical this way, Google will fold the two URLs together and correctly treat them as the same page.

Ideally, you'll migrate the entire site to https, and Cyrus' guide is a good one. Google has some helpful info for an http to https migration at https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6073543?hl=en.

The canonical tag solution is for the situation where you can't or don't want to go ahead and switch the whole site over to https right away.  Either way, make sure Google knows, either through 301-redirects or canonical tags, that the http and https versions are the same page.

The backlinks shouldn't hurt you as long as you aren't doing anything spammy. This can happen quite naturally with a lot of websites.

The important thing to know is that 1,000 links from a single domain won't help as much as 1,000 backlinks from 1,000 different domains.  Try to balance it out with backlinks from a variety of different websites. That way you'll have a more natural backlink profile.

Have you reported the change using Google's change of address tool? Here's the intro from Google:

If you've moved your site to a new domain or subdomain, use the Change of address tool in Search Console. A change of address notification helps you manage the transition needed by Google to index your new URLs at the new address, while minimizing impact to your current ranking in Google Search results.

A change of address notifies Google about the new URLs for your existing content, so that we can update our index to reflect the new domain for your pages. This updated index status remains in effect for 180 days, by which time Googlebot will have crawled and indexed the pages at the new address.

The canonicals appear to be set up correctly, and I would not advise listing the product URLs as their canonicals in the category as suggested above. That will create duplicate URLs with the same content, which is exactly what canonical tags are designed to avoid.

A reduction in the number of pages indexed does not necessarily mean something is wrong. In fact, it could mean that something is right, especially if your rankings are improving.

How are you determining that only 80% of pages are indexed? Can you provide a specific URL that is not being indexed?

If you made changes to your canonical tag, robots.txt , or meta robots tag, these could all cause a reduction in the number of pages being indexed.

If I understand you correctly, you are referring to the following two URLs:

https://www.symectech.com/epos-systems/customer-displays/pole-mounting-kit-94591.html

https://www.symectech.com/pole-mounting-kit-94614.html

Both of these have the same canonical referenced, which is https://www.symectech.com/pole-mounting-kit-94614.html.

It doesn't matter what actually shows in the address box. For the purposes of indexation, what matters is what is referenced in the canonical tag.

.

I would be interested in seeing examples of where this has happened. Were the canonical tags added after the URLs were already indexed or were the canonicals in place when the site launched?