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It would be very unlikely that using "and" instead of "&" throughout your site would confer any advantage and it might confuse your customers, if that's not the way they are used to seeing your name. So stick with the & you use in your branding.

As always when these types of questions come up and you are not sure of the answer, go with whatever is the best user experience and you are likely to be rewarded. (Also, take a look and some big sites like Lord&Taylor and see what they do—they don't give up their branding just because there is "and" in their URL.)

How is the name written in other types of official correspondence—letterhead, signage, etc? The look of the name should be standardized across all sources, but that's a bigger issue than just SEO.

In terms of search, using "and" or "&" in searches will likely give you different (but very similar) results—try searching your company name with each one and see what Google already thinks of the two variants.

Using symbols like "&" can be more eye catching than just letters so that can be a benefit on a crowded search results page, depending on what else is there.

The first question you need to ask is why does your company have 15 websites selling the same things? Would having one site rank and the others just be canonical (or eliminated) be an acceptable solution? If the sites have different audiences you can try gearing the descriptions, keywords, etc. to the particular audience of the site you are working on but doing that 15 times in ways that would be unique enough to each site to allow them all to rank well on the same search isn't possible. If you ask about the business reason for the 15 sites, you may be able to work with the company on a realistic path to their desired outcome.

You don't seem to mention which site you want people to look at?

You should write your description in a way that will make people want to click on your link when they see your description in the search results.

But be aware that Google won't necessarily pick your description to show—it shows what it thinks best matches what the searcher is looking for. If your description is heavy on keywords that are not on the page and does not contain words that reflect the content of the page, it probably won't get shown.

Hi Thomas,
As you can see in the answers in this thread, DA can fluctuate with updates and the latest update was April 26. Do you track competitors' sites? That might tell you whether they saw similar changes. One inbound link from a low DA site won't do this. Unless there are other things going on that you didn't mention, this isn't worth worrying about.

I did just this type of thing a little over a year ago and organic traffic is up over 300% now. We made the change mainly to improve the structure of the website(s), with more logical organization and better internal linking. We did do the move all at once (thousands of pages) but it took a lot of behind-the scenes planning to be ready for that.

First came the decisions about what sections and categories made sense for our site. (Using the URL structure to guide users around the site makes it easier for them to find what they are looking for and interlinking between related posts as appropriate is also good—and this helps a lot with search engines.)

Then came the organization of posts into their new categories. To make things easier, we kept the individual path names the same (so www.siteA.com/old-category/old-post-string became www.siteC.com/new category/old-post-string) and uploaded them into their new categories when the time came.

We also used this time to do a limited content review (posts with the most traffic) and we updated a lot of these. We made the choice to keep most of our old posts, even though in our market they can get outdated quickly, to conserve any links we may have acquired. (The main site that we were directing to the new site was pretty old and had picked up a lot of links over time.)

We could have done a more complete content review before the changeover, but in part we wanted to see how these posts did under the new structure—we did get renewed life out of some of them, and we further updated and optimized those.

In conjunction with the export of the old sites to the new one, we made sure to 301 redirect all of the old posts to their counterparts on the new site. For the posts we chose not to bring over, we 301 redirected them to a related post in the same category.

We still occasionally come across things that need to be fixed—old posts that need redirecting/updating or 404 errors that need to be tracked down (one big issue we found was a lot of old pages had old links with hard paths to the old website root domains, causing a bunch of nasty internal not found errors—not good!) but overall we are happy with the change. (Up 308%!)

What we do is add explanatory content to the tag pages that are for key concepts for our website and link to them from a "glossary" page—people who are new to some of these terms can go there for definitions. We also link to the relevant glossary page in posts where the term comes up, helping to create good internal linking.

Other tag pages can be noindexed or just ignored—the Moz report is just for your reference.

Noindex doesn't mean the page is invisible to Google, it just means it won't show up in search results. So no one "disappears."

I don't think you will lose traffic if you noindex the login page. People who are doing a search and then clicking on a login link are very likely to be specifically looking for you and if the login result is not there, they'll choose the next best page, like the homepage.

I second Gaston's comment about intent and usability. If searchers are going to be driven to a different page, you need to be sure that they can easily complete their task there.

When we changed domains, I moved several thousand posts, all at once—I don't know of any reason to throttle that. Our organic traffic is up 174% since then, so it definitely didn't hurt anything. (I am assuming that you will be setting up the appropriate redirects and Google will know that this is just a domain change.)

It's behaving exactly the way I'd expect and since it shows up in search, it's clearly indexed. When I search for "dentist, port washington" your listing is the fourth regular organic result, with your preferred title and description. So, good job!

I've not done one myself, but we use CoSchedule for our social media (and are happy with it) and this is what they recommend. The post even includes a downloadable template.

This is an old question—I found it because I was looking for the same information.

In case anyone needs this answer, this is what I found. Also, this.

In brief, yes, cross-domain canonicals are appropriate for syndication.

That is apparently what Google thinks is the most useful result to return. The searcher knows the URL of the company, but maybe wants to know the name associated with it.

It's hard to tell sometimes exactly why Google does what it does. (Which is what keeps SEOs employed.)

I just popped that into ScreamingFrog and I don't see a noindex on that page, but I do see it on some other pages. (Though that shouldn't stop other pages from being crawled.)

Maybe it was just a glitch that happened to occur at the time of the crawl. You could try doing another crawl and see if you get the same error.

Hmm. How about on the page itself? Is there a noindex?

That just says that you are blocking the Moz crawler. Take a look at your robots.txt file and see if you have any exclusions in there that might cause that page not to be crawled. (Try going to yoursite.com/robots.txt or you can learn more about this topic here.)

It looks like the error you are referring to did not come through in your question. Could you try editing it?

This sounds like you will be pointing/canonicalizing the two similar pages to the third one that is different from them? I am not quite sure why you would want to do that.

If you don't want the 1/2 content available but the pages have some authority (good links), 301 redirect those pages to 3 (if the topic is close enough and you don't have a more similar page) or if they are not strong pages, just remove them and let them 404.

If you do want the 1/2 content available on your site, but don't want it competing with page 3 in search, you could redirect 2 to 1 and rewrite 1 to make it stronger for whatever it is that makes it different from 3, so both 1 and 3 could potentially rank (for different things). Or you could redirect 2 to 1 and noindex 1.

Canonicals are intended for pages with very similar content, however people sometimes do use them as a type of redirect for not-so-similar pages. The problem with this is that a canonical is just a suggestion to Google and, as you mention, Google may ignore the canonical, especially in a situation like this.

The title and meta tags that you yourself post are only suggestions to Google—what is actually shown in the search results will depend on what query the searcher used to get your listing. Google tries to make the results as useful for the searcher as possible. (Try for example "3V Dental Associates, hours" and you will see the hours in the description.) Here is a Yoast post that talks about this (scroll down a bit).

You have to decide how important the new pages are compared to the old ones.

If you really want the new pages to beat the old pages, you should 301 the old pages to the new ones. (You could even make another new page, "old guides," that you could link to from the new page, if there is enough demand for the old guides.)

1. If you are trying to move authority away from the old pages and onto the new pages, the old pages won't be as findable in search. You have to decide whether this is important.

2. Yes, canonicals do pass page rank though (as with many things in SEO) there is debate about the details.

3. Yes, you could do that, but it is sending Google mixed messages. First you tell them to ignore the old page and look at the new page, but then the new page points to the page you said to ignore. (Take a look at Pete Meyers' Whiteboard Friday for more on this.) The other problem with this approach is that the old content would still be out there, potentially getting links or other recognition that you'd rather have for the new page. (Even though page authority can be passed in various ways, you always lose something during transfer.)

First, why can't you canonicalize the old subdomain pages to the new ones? It won't affect people who are using those old pages since the old pages will still be available. Canonicalization only affects search (unlike 301 redirects, which would make the old pages unavailable).

Links from a higher ranked page to a lower ranked page will help the lower ranked page, but if what you want is to have the new pages beat the old pages, this won't do it.

If a page has no links and has not been submitted another way, Google won't see it.

It's been a while since that has been considered as a ranking factor (and it never was a big one).

However—depending on what types of pages these are, I'd leave the bolding (unless it is excessive). It could be useful in terms of user experience—as soon as the person lands on the page, they see what they are looking for.

I use CoSchedule to manage social media (and as a content calendar). Easy to use and nice analytics.

Google has a number of ways to find pages, including links from indexed pages (whether internal to the site or external) as well as sitemaps and Fetch as Google.

Most of the time when you come across a page like that (one that has few if any internal links) it's not an organic-traffic oriented page, it is set up for some other purpose, like a landing page for a marketing effort.

Google's goal is to have the most relevant information possible, so improving and updating your content won't get you deindexed—quite the opposite.

When you say you dropped in rankings when you added new content, what do you mean? The pages you changed dropped down? Or dropped out of Google's index?

It is hard to say why that would have happened without seeing what changed but if you are sure that your changes made the pages better for what they were ranking for, it is likely that they will come back.

In the meantime, be sure you didn't change something you didn't intend to change like the index/noindex status of the page. (It seems obvious, but sometimes these things can just slip through!)

I recently did this with our site of a similar size. We had some categorized posts and a lot of date-based posts (like /issues/cwa/archives/2016/02/post-title) and we moved everything to new categories. We changed our domain name as well, which was an additional issue.

We did it all at once. The month we made the change we had about a 15% dip in organic traffic, which slowly grew the following month. By the next month (so starting about 60 days after the change) traffic was up 30% over our pre-change levels.

Now, not quite a year later, we are up 65% over our pre-change levels and still growing (even though there is still more work to be done). So for me, it was well worth it.

My biggest challenge was making sure that I had a careful and comprehensive 301 redirect table to share with the developers—it was a lot of content to categorize. I started with the pages that had the most traffic/conversions and went from there. I still had quite a few pages that were just brought along for the ride (they were outdated and had little traffic), which I just redirected into a general category. I am going through those bit by bit, updating, redirecting, removing as appropriate.

It's a big job, but it can be very rewarding!

Meta descriptions are not direct ranking factors, but they help get people to click on your result in the search results pages.

Google will not necessarily use your description—it shows what it thinks is most useful to the searcher.

If I am searching for 1-3/4 inch Bugle-Head Coarse Thread Sharp Point Polymer Coated Exterior Screws, those are the words that will likely show up in the descriptions I see, regardless of what you write in the meta description header.

So be, well, descriptive in the meta descriptions and on the page.

Do some searches on the generic product you are promoting and look at a) what their meta descriptions look like and b) what you actually see when you search. (Try different search queries, ones you think your customers might use.)

Thank you Alick, I will try that!

Has anyone received and responded to a notice of class action settlement from Google Adwords?

The sender (and the website it directs to) is adwordsclassaction.com. I see that there was such a thing, I am just not sure whether that domain is the official one to respond to?

That looks like an error in the guide to me. That little arrow symbol next to the URLs generally means it will go to the indicated page and that is what it does in this case.

If you create high-quality, unique useful pages that are well-optimized and also engage people and encourage linking then yes, they will tend to rank well (how well depends on the competition) and help your website rank well. But it is unlikely that simply optimizing on-page SEO for high-volume search terms will be enough to get the result you want. There is a lot of competition out there and many people know SEO basics. (There are many who don't as well, but I wouldn't depend on that as a strategy.)

It probably depends on the site. There are some high-authority sites that are basically platforms for other sites, so in that case, no.

I would think a relevant link from an integral but low-authority page on a high-authority site would be a plus, especially because the authority of that page might be higher than you think (maybe Moz just hasn't found its other links yet, for example).

As far as your problem, to start, I'd take a close look at the pages that used to convert and see if there are any on-site improvements you can make. Use the on-page grader and make sure you have your bases covered on that end.

I recently did something similar and left behind a bunch of "thin" pages, just be sure to check your internal links to make sure you are not linking to a page you are 404ing. [Screaming Frog is great for this—if you don't have it, you should get it.] You can always "revive" any that you see a lot of people trying to reach. My redirects took hold quickly—I couldn't even say how long, it was that fast. [Mine was an old domain and frequently crawled.] Good luck!

Some people shorten their links differently to make them more memorable. In the case you mention, MZ.CM is like MOZ.COM.

This is done through bitly: "A Branded Short Domain (bsd) is a the domain that takes the place of “bit.ly” or “bitly.com” in a shortend URL. Adding a Branded Short Domain to your bitly account is free of charge although you must purchase a bsd from a third party domain registrar. Domai.nr, GoDaddy, and 101domain are great places to begin your search, also visit our help article “Common Domain Hosting Providers”. Keep in mind that your bsd must be less than 15 characters, including the dot."

The page title should be what makes the best sense for the page, so no, you do not need to maintain the same pattern across all pages—just make sure the keywords you use describe the page. In many if not most cases brand will not be the first keyword you want in the title. Read more about titles here and here.

When we create meta descriptions in our headers, those are only suggestions to Google. It will show what it decides is most relevant to the searcher and what it shows will depend on the user's search term.

For example, I just searched on: "thuman agency homepage" and saw:
Thumann Insurance Agency | Commercial Insurance Dallas, TX Blog · Contact ... An Independent Insurance Agency in Dallas, TX ... Our agency specializes in commercial insurance for Texas, ranging from business owner ...

And "thumann agency dallas tx" brought up:
"Thumann Insurance Agency | Commercial Insurance Dallas, TX Get the most competitive rates & exceptional customer service from the Thumann Agency in Dallas. Specializing in all commercial & personal coverage's."

That search brought up several sitelinks as well. ["coverages" should not have the apostrophe, btw] You can also see that the words I used to search were made bold.

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It is a known bug and Google should fix it soon.

First, although it's great to keep on top of your link profile, you do not need to go overboard. What Google says about link disavowal is: "In most cases, Google can assess which links to trust without additional guidance, so most normal or typical sites will not need to use this tool."

As far as link assessment, Moz has this built into Open Site Explorer. Enter a URL and it will give you the spam score for the page.

That's a very broad question. Common keywords for what topic?

Here is a post describing how to get demographic information around search terms using Google Adwords. (Though Adwords is less generous with its data than it used to be, especially if you are not a paying customer, you might get some ideas.)

The numbers in the MozBar, PA, DA, links, can be found with Open Site Explorer. Just input the URL you want to examine and hit enter.

Right now, the MozBar only works in Chrome. (Scroll to the bottom of the thread to see the latest update.)

I love this add-on (I especially love it when I do a search and see all the data on each result) but you can get the same information by using the tools inside Moz, you just won't see it immediately as you look at different pages.

I myself prefer Firefox and was disappointed when the MozBar stopped working there. So my compromise is that I still mostly use Firefox but just switch to Chrome if I am doing something where the quick information from the MozBar would be useful. You could do the same with Safari.

A canonical link looks like this: and goes in the head of your page.

Some people use these to keep credit for a page that an outside party may have scraped and used as their own. I assume this is what you are worried about. A canonical won't necessarily protect you (not everyone scrapes all the content) but it can serve as an extra signal to Google that the content was originally yours. (And adding a self-referential canonical doesn't hurt.)

I didn't know about that remove functionality—you learn something new every day.

The point about internal links to the 404 page is a good one. Having those links sends Google mixed messages and could be a reason for a 404 page not to drop out of the index.

If you want the non-www URLs to be the ones that show up in search, yes, the canonical should be the non-www ones. You are sending mixed messages. Google will pick for you in this case, but why add confusion.