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Have a look in /wp-content/plugins/wp-super-cache/wp-cache-phase1.php you will find it there

This should do the trick

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^sub1 http://example.com/sub1/sub2/sub3 [R=301,NC,L]

Hi Iris

Sorry about the slow reply been very busy - 3600 is seconds which is the equivalent to an hour so it should be fine with this new value.

Hi Iain

You don't need to create your old pages again just create 301 redirects in your .htaccess file which can be done using Yoast plugin - http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/#files

Here is SEOMoz's guide to redirection - http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection

Here is a redirection plugin for Wordpress just enter old url and new one you want it to point to and it will do the work for you - http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/redirection/

I agree with Travis if you are going down the keyword rich domain I would go for the one without hyphens.

No problem Iain - firstly I would still create the redirects from your old html pages to their new locations as you rightly say there will be other sites with old links. You wouldn't want potential visitors/customers thinking your site is no longer there or down because they found it via a redundant link..

Secondly I wouldn't worry about doing anything regarding the current redirects - if you type any of your pages without a trailing slash you will see you are redirected to one with a trailing slash essentially reducing duplicate content for you.

Have a look at this article as to why it is something you don't need to worry about changing - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2010/04/to-slash-or-not-to-slash.html

Hi

I have used the URL removal tool in the past to remove URLs with success - as we know it helps speed things up. What you have done is right and if you are patient Google will start removing each page as it crawls it again. You might find this confirmation from Google reassuring in your situation - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93710?hl=en

Reading the article you posted of when not to use the tool I can't see that your pages fall into any of these categories - but either way I personally can't see using it causing an issue to be honest but its your call.

Yes in terms of a redirect the target URL is the new page that you are redirecting the original one to, so just add the URL of page you are redirecting to.

Hi Hashtag - Ricky is correct - it doesn't really matter either way as the 301 redirect will force the load of the new location page and its content whatever, so you won't be able to access your old page contents as its url is redirected - unless you have logins for your server of course...

Have you glanced at SEOMoz's best practices for title tags? - http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/title-tag

In my opinion you should have the title as natural as possible and that should be the a clear label as to what your article is about. Have you looked at examples such as how SEOMoz has titles on their blog - article title | brand

In my experience you will also pick up more long tail traffic with more natural titles such as using the full title rather than just a specific keyword. It also looks less spammy and over-optimized which is something to take into consideration after recent Google updates.

Hi Kumar

Oh ok - that makes sense well there are lots of people that can help you on here - however I would consider having a go at some of it yourself as your site isn't huge and you could improve some of the basics before getting help. The resources above should really help and off course you have the community to turn to - just a suggestion to help you get the most for your money. As ever I guess this boils down to your time available and budget - good luck

Best Regards,

Matt

Try the following in your .htaccess:

RedirectMatch 301 ^/stuff-1/(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/stuff/$1

Brand or domain anchor text links are far more natural than keyword anchor text. Gaining links that are brand or raw domain from an authority site will benefit your sites authority. I always look at it like this - if you didn't know anything about SEO and you liked a site that you wanted to link to and this site sold blue widgets for example would you link via the domain/brand name or by entering "blue widgets"? You would go with the more obvious, easier option domain or brand - hence this is far more natural in the eyes of Google and far more likely to have been earned naturally. Increasing authority is all about earning links not (dare I say it..) link building. Focus on creating great content and making people aware of it then the links will start to come naturally. SEO isn't a quick fix, so approach this with a strategy looking to build a quality online presence and establish a relevant audience for your site through social and other channels.

I agree with Anthony on this one - make sure you 301 redirect the pages you are loosing to the most relevant pages in your new structure.

Hi

I can see that Tom and Ryan have done a great job of handling the most obvious issue that may have caused your site to drop in terms of changing to HTTPS. You have also mentioned the fact that you have changed some significant on-page factors which could definitely be the culprit.

However I thought I would just add this - I saw someone move to HTTPS and they did implement the correct redirects and then register both versions of the site in webmaster tools and so on. However they still saw a noticeable drop in their organic traffic which turned out to be caused by a significant drop in site speed after moving to HTTPS.

You may have already checked and your site may seem fast but I would double check the speed of your site with Google Page Speed Insights and GTMetrix (another speed tool I like). If your site seems slow look at what you can do to improve it with the recommendations on these tools (as this will help your site whatever) - also speak to your host and explain you are seeing a decrease in speed can they help.

This tactic worked in this case and I just thought I would mention it as another angle to approach this.

Hope this helps!

Have you setup your https version of the site in webmaster tools as a separate site, if not I would and then I would submit a https sitemap on this profile.

I would also 301 redirect the http to https across the site - you may find this previous question useful - http://moz.com/community/q/best-method-of-redirecting-http-to-https-on-homepage

This is the correct code and will validate if you copy and paste it into the structured data testing tool -

ASG Seamless Gutters Inc

• About us
• Testimonials
• Email Us

70 Leete St., Springfield, MA 01108 (413) 455-0800 info@asggutter.com <time itemprop="openingHours" datetime="Mon,Tu,Wed,Thu,Fri, Sat 7:00-19:00">Monday - Saturday 7:00a-7:00pm</time>

The postaladdress schema wasn't declared properly so wasn't being read and you needed to close this set of postaladdress schema with a prior to opening hours which are part of the HomeAndConstructionBusiness schema.

Hope this helps

K1KKwfa.jpg

In terms of rel=canonical that will pass value the same as a 301 redirect - for evidence have a look here:

http://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization

"Another option for dealing with duplicate content is to utilize the rel=canonical tag. The rel=canonical tag passes the same amount of link juice (ranking power) as a 301 redirect, and often takes much less development time to implement."

See DR Pete's response in this Moz Q&A:

http://moz.com/community/q/do-canonical-tags-pass-all-of-the-link-juice-onto-the-url-they-point-to

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?rd=1

http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2288690/how-and-when-to-use-301-redirects-vs-canonical

Matts Cutts stated there is not a whole lot of difference between the 301 and the canonical - they will both lose "just a tiny little amount bit, not very much at all" of credit from the referring page.

Hi Laura,

I believe http://www.seopowersuite.com/rank-tracker/ will provide the data you are looking for - you can track keyword rankings on different search engines in different countries and see what page is ranking. This should be easy to monitor your different ccTLDs.

Hope this helps

Matt

There is no limit to 301 redirects and in my opinion it makes your site much more crawl friendly for the search engines.

Here is Matt Cutts of Google on the subject - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1lVPrYoBkA

I would definitely say that your site is over-optimised and that you are having issues as you have built a lot of landing pages for locations which are very similar just with postcodes and location names being the main difference.I know you have tried to write unique content and specific location information but it still feels very similar and over-optimised purely written as an aggressive way to rank in all these London locations. I would say your site could be classed as being full of doorway pages for all the locations and this is definitely something Google doesn't like and falls fowl of their guidelines thus hurting your ranking ability. You also don't appear to have physical locations in these places so they are more of a service area. As you aren't ranking at the moment I would personally cut everything back focus on ranking for your actual physical location then you may want to choose service areas and build some pages around these, but you don't want to overdo this and you definitely don't want a cookie cutter approach. Look to build pages that really are unique. You also need to look at building the main service areas you cover into your main navigation not at the bottom of your page.

Here is an article on Search Engine Land which addresses this very well and gives you lots of points to consider in order to help you get your site sorted and hopefully ranking - http://searchengineland.com/local-seo-landing-pages-2-0-222583

Have you also looked at how others have ranked for the main terms you mention above? Competition that is successful is always a good place to look

Hope this helps!

Matt

If you decide to go down this route the best way to minimise SEO impact would be to implement 301 redirects from the .html to the new .shtml.

Have a look at the Redirect While Changing File Extensions section on Moz's Guide to redirects here - http://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection

This page is well worth a read in order for you to get a better understanding but I thought I would draw your attention to this section to help put your mind at ease -

"There are multiple options for doing this, but in general, the 301 redirect is preferable for both users and search engines. Serving a 301 indicates to both browsers and search engine bots that the page has moved permanently. Search engines interpret this to mean that not only has the page changed location, but that the content—or an updated version of it—can be found at the new URL. The engines will carry any link weighting from the original page to the new URL"

In terms of what loss of value a 301 redirect will have no one is sure and what impact this will have. 301 redirects would be the best way to do what is being suggested by your developer with minimal seo impact. I think you might find this post interesting - http://moz.com/community/q/how-much-juice-do-you-lose-in-a-301-redirect

Hope this helps

hi - you will want to make sure all your canonicals are updated to https as these are now the master copy of the page. Check out this migration article from http to https guide from search engine land - https://www.google.co.uk/amp/searchengineland.com/http-https-seos-guide-securing-website-246940/amp

Hope this helps

I have never had an issue having two sites setup under one webmaster tools account - what verification problem are you having when you add and verify another site in your account? Have you tried alternative methods in the options?

In terms of Google Merchant Center how have you set this up - you may find this useful regarding having multiple websites under one account

- https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/188487?hl=en

Hope this helps!

Hi - In my experience doing a rebuild/redesign improving the content and then redirecting sees fluctuations with some rankings dropping initially but overall there being a pretty quick positive response to an improved site with rankings peaking for redirected pages between 3 and 6 months. With quite a few terms that ended up page 1 average position 1-3 i have seen the most fluctuation in rankings during the first 3 months - assuming Google is deciding where you should sit testing a higher position and seeing if you belong there. Hope this information helps a little

Hi Adrienne

This means that Google has processed that number of items in your feed but there is an error with them - go on feeds and then click on feed name - you should see a message at the bottom that tells you what the error is with the items in your feed - this can be one of several things that mean you items aren't eligible for shopping.

Hmm, I am a big advocate of quality content and a good user experience with decent on-page SEO having a positive impact on rankings. However the majority of high ranking sites all have links - after all, they are a vote of confidence in the eyes of Google (obviously a very broad statement and not all links are equal or help). If your site is that good and lots of people visit it you would expect to earn links whether you actively go after them or not. In order to help yourself why would you not try to earn links, I would say, even if a low competition term.

In relation to your original post will it take longer to rank? There are lots of factors that can impact this but I would say it will definitely take you longer to rank and your rank would likely be lower. At a very basic level if you take two local business sites and one site does nothing other than have a great site and no links, yet the other has an equally good site but it has set up it's Google My Business and made sure it has links from relevant local directories plus maybe some local media/interest sites - Which do you think Google would trust more and rank higher? I have had some great sites that have come to me as clients - well optimised with nothing major needing changing to optimise the site but their rankings have all improved significantly in a short period of a few months through a structured outreach campaign earning links and ultimately increasing the DA. One final thought - even zero backlink experiments that have been successful have ended up naturally earning links and increasing their DA - to an extent worthy content in front of the right audience, such as social media, earns exposure/links.

Hope this makes sense...

Hi Adrienne,

In terms of the URL not claimed error can you confirm how you are doing this - there are several reasons why this can be lost including - trying to claim more than one URL in Merchant Center - for this you need a multi-client account which I linked to in my original response. You can also lose it if your site becomes unverified in webmaster tools - what I would suggest is that you look at this Google help article in relation to this and see if any of the reasons apply to you - https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/176793?hl=en-GB

I think the best way to answer this would be go look at the landscape - e.g. I used London Bike Tour and you will see what titles are ranking and then click the links to get an idea of the page contents intent - what I saw was mainly tours you can book listed. Page titles are important but so is the page content - even if you get to page 1 briefly if the searches intent isn’t served by your content you are likely to see poor engagement metrics and you won’t stay there long.

If you take Burgundy specifically the results landscape is slightly different with more pages ranking with specific routes rather than tours available from providers. For your page title in theory it would be possible however I would personally go more down the route of Burgundy Bike Tour - A Cyclists Guide To Burgundy. Again it is hard to judge without seeing your page and domain but it appears competitive, so it’s hard to judge your chances by page title alone. However in my opinion it would be wise to have it laid out more like this with specific term at the front and then additional related text after leaving room to capture related longer tail searches and encouraging engagement. If I were looking for a biking tour of Burgundy with the intent of finding routes I would be encouraged to click on one that says guide...

Hi Marina,

I have come across issues with redirect plugins on WordPress when trying to deal with http and https. They can have bugs which can cause redirect loops or other issues causing your page not to load. When you say your design is messed up do you also get a warning about the page containing insecure elements or similar? This often happens when moving a site to https - you may find this plugin helpful for dealing with this issue - https://wordpress.org/plugins/ssl-insecure-content-fixer/ - then you can choose to have your site fully https if desired.

In terms of the redirect what server are you on? If you are on an apache server you can easily take care of this redirect by logging into via FTP and then editing the .htaccess file.

The following code will allow you to redirect the whole site to https if you fix the layout with the above:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.domain.com/$1 [R,L]

replacing your www.domain.com with your domain.

I personally would go down this route and have your whole site on https once you have dealt with design/content issues - but in order to help with your decision take a look at this great post from Cyrus Shepard - https://moz.com/blog/seo-tips-https-ssl

*Note many sites have now moved to https - look at Moz for example.

Hope this helps!

Matt

I think Moosa and Andy both make great points which I agree with. I would definitely give it more time and it would be easier to give input with your domain. In terms of the content you have added in the form of new pages are these targeting new keywords or ones you were already ranking for? The reason I say this is because I have seen people cause themselves issues by creating new pages targeting terms that current pages were ranking for and this lead to keyword cannibalization. Jon Earnshaw gave a brilliant talk on this at Brighton SEO earlier this year - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASsxh8ZwseQ

I just thought I would mention it on the off chance

Best

Matt

Hi Kerry

I have had a look and it appears that you do have one link on each page that is causing this - the link with the anchor text permierdoorco.com which I believe is in the address block in the footer of each page - it isn't properly declared but has a href on it which is premierdoorco.com rather than http://www.premierdoorco.com/

Here is the copied element from your source code -

premierdoorco.com

just login and make the change to the link and all should be fixed.

Hope this helps

Hi Caro

Just before I directly answer your question can I ask whether you have done a backlink audit on their site? If not I would strongly advice it in order to make sure they don't have any penalties or links you don't want associating with your site. I like to work this way, yes it does take longer but you are going into it with your eyes wide open and avoiding any issues down the line, which will inevitably take up even more time trying to rectify. I would recommend further reading on the following:

Link Audit - http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2207168/how-to-conduct-a-link-audit

Link Removals & Risk Mitigation - https://moz.com/blog/link-audit-guide-for-effective-link-removals-risk-mitigation

As the others have already said I would look to redirect individual URLs to similar corresponding URLs on your site in order to get the best from this. As we know 301 redirects pass authority from the original URL to the new one.

However I would also take this one step further and look at the Google Analytics and Google Search Console Search Analytics Report for the other companies site if you have access to it and I would look at the most popular pages in terms of organic traffic. I would also look to analyse current rankings for that site and see if it is out ranking any of the corresponding content on your site. If so I would look to use it to improve my own content and then still do the 301 redirect. I have done this in the past and when moving across a popular blog from one site to yours I would look and see what are the most popular posts in terms of organic traffic as mentioned above but also other factors such as social interaction (I find https://socialcrawlytics.com/ ) and referrals. Then if my current site that I am redirecting too doesn't have some content that is on the same subject and very close in nature and popular I would look to migrate the content itself to a new post with the same content and then 301 redirect the original to that new piece.

Too many times you see people rushing this and just blanket redirecting things, however they forget that 1. you need to redirect to similar content to get the most benefit as a redirect is essentially telling the search engines the content has moved to a new location and 2 you won't always get close matches so why not take that content and publish it on yours if it is already working rather than trying to fit it somewhere it doesn't (basically don't force a square peg in a round hole).

Obviously I don't know how strong the site you want to redirect is but taking time over this now will pay dividends.

Hope this helps!

Matt