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Hi Bull, actually I don't recommend you to make a 100% accurate math on how much juice is lost, what you have to maintain clear is that this will make you lose value.

So, if you really need to make those redirects, try to reduce them to only one step, but, for ease of management if you REALLY need to create two steps redirects consider that you'll be losing the same value you'll be losing from one page linking to another and to other one (further reading here).

For page rank (juice) purposes 301 are treathed as links. However what I recommend you is after having put in place the generic redirect rules, identify your best traffic delivering pages and create an ad-hoc 301 for those ones, so you'll be sure those urls will receive least impact in that sense.

Hey, I can't find them on your site.

Is it possible that those pages are part of an older version of your site? I can only see /category/ folder but google definitely indexed 600 of your urls containing such tag.

As Patrick said I really recommend you to noindex all archive, category and tag pages as they are just thin pages useful for user navigation but not for google.

After you have added the noindex tag you may ask google to remove them from index and you'll ahve your issues solved

Hi Trish, it really depends on what your site is about. If you're a news website google will expect many daily updates but if you're a less dynamic market it may be probably fine for you to make changes in longer periods. However to add freshness to a more stable website you may also:

• build a blog or an article sections which always attracts new users and helps feeding your social profiles
• change the order of your listings weekly so they may seem more dynamic than they are(not under google eyes but for users)

If those pages are linked only internally to your website you may not need to put any 301 at all.

301 are useful only, as Federico said, if you want to save part of your external juice. If you have backlinks you want those websites to change those backlinks to the canonical page or if not 301 that page to the new one.

If those pages doesn't have any external backlink pointing to them they shouldn't be ranking at all since they're canonicalized to another one, so you'll just need to avoid internal traffic to them changing your internal structure.

heheh well I'd love that 47 not found could be "lots" by the way, where are thos links coming from? What you have to bear in mind is that it's not the same if the 404 is caused by internal or external linking.

If internal, then you have to see which page is creating the 404 and fix it

If external you have to ask the webmaster for fixing the link and meanwhile have the 301 in place so you can save the value of those links..

Hi Marcus, your approach is very solid, the hreflang and the language information in sitemaps solidifies the /en/ and /es/ folders. Google is smart enough to recognize such different languages but you'll do a well job if you add those tags too.

You can also consider to add a parameter instead of a folder and then specify in GWT what is the functionality of that parameter.

Hi BJS, normally the most important page of a website is the homepage not just because it is the homepage but because is the most linked page interanlly where all the juice flows, so the pages which are nearest the homepage are supposed to be the most important too. The farest they are from your homepage, so the more hidden they are the least important they are.

Moreover if a page is widely linked internally the more important it should be just because if many products belongs to a category, the most this category is linked through breadcrumbs and the more content it has.

Don't be concerned about having products deep in structure is normal that for the most competitive kw categories are the pages which are focusing on those terms because these are the most useful pages for users to filter and find what they're looking for.

The issue I'm seeing here is that Google has digested all the info and since pages were canonicalized and 301'd to others then they consolidated the value and dropped them. Even if you fix the canonical google won't be crawling those pages again as they've been dropped.

My theory is that you have the new structure live but not the old URLs, so you may want to ensure Google recrawls those pages and understands the right path.

I would create a Google Webmaster Tools account for the old website and submit an XML sitemap forcing google to re crawl the old URLs. and so to see the newly corrected 301.

If you can't do this, you may try creating a set of HTML pages linking to the old URLs, by letting google crawl and index them (with the index page and all pages linked on the page option) you should be able to have google crawling those pages and so to discover the right path.

I hope this works. Let us know how it goes, happy to dig further

e

Hey Josh, the title you've put in those page is the same. The structure is good but you're repeating the same in every page. Maybe you can use that title here: http://www.farnorthkennel.com/german-shepherd-puppies-the-girls

and then in each page you may consider adding the dog's name at the beginning/en of the title like:

Hazel Index Card | German Sheperd Puppies in Alaska

Sorry for the bad translation however I think you got the point. In the titl eyou should specify what do you want to achieve with that page. If you're lloking for external visits try to fit there a good DIFFERENT keyword. If not just try to be descriptive like: Hazel profile | Meet the Kennel mother

if those pages are all in the same directory are in a couple of them you can remove them using the removal from index tool in gwt, in order to make this those pages should return a 404 or being noindexed (which is what you already did).

mmmm I'm not sure if I understand the problem correctly.

There is no way you could register a domain with dots in it. So you're suggesting that Google may have an issue if your page title is including dots in crawling the URL? If that's the case no worries.

Aside from my personal experience you can check this page: https://www.bls.gov google doesn't get confused by the U.S. in the title of the page and correctly show it in the SERPs. Note that dots are not usually part of the query, with some very rare circumstances where its presence change the meaning of a word.

Your case is a good example, google will understand that your site is about USA and not about "us", despite you not adding dots.

I hope this helps.

HI Juan Miguel, I don't understand well. You want to redirect everything to piensapiensa.com isn't that so?

But in your htaccess you're saying to redirect the non www version to the www version of piensapiensa.es

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.piensapiensa.es [NC]

RewriteRule (.*) http://www.piensapiensa.es/$1 [R=301,L]

What you'll need in your domain is a redirect like

RewriteRule (.*) http://www.piensapiensa.com$1 [R=301,L]

and you're done. if you're sharing server config in the same htacces you can put an

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} piensapiensa.es [NC]

Hi Sandra, don't worry about 404s volume because they won't hurt your rankings.

About your issue I understand that you want to be really clear with your users and don't hurt their experience on the site. So create a custom 404 which changes its content depending of what page is returning it. If it's one of your old product you can return a message or an article of why you decided to remove them and propose some alternatives. For all other errors you can just return a search box or related products to the one you lost.

301 IMHO are not the way to go, if an url is gone it has not being redirected anywhere, so a 301 will result in a bad UX 99% of the time.

Hi Yosepgr,

one thing I would like to clarify IMO is that dev needs SEO guidance on how to implement schema. Sometimes people just request schema implementation and then wait for dev to do it. I'm not saying is your case but we, as SEO, should provide technical guidance on how to correctly implement that.

That being said I had a similar case in the past and what I did was creating a sitemap including just the dead URLs. I this way I was forcing google to crawl them and see that they now redirect to the new version.

After doing so, ensure that your redirect is actually a permanent redirect (301). You can check that easily with screaming frog by crawling those URLs in list mode or get the ayima plugin for chrome and visit the URL so you can see what the header response look like. Ensure that the redirect is 301 and with just 1 step (if possible).

It may take a while for google to digest the but you shouldn't be worried about schema as if google is penalizing your site for spammy markup, it will penalize only pages containing that markup which are now dead and removed from the site.

I hope this helps!

e

Ok, actually having set up the GWT makes google understand which one is the main address but it is not phisically redirected for the other Search Engines.

You'll have two different htaccess files. One in the .com site:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.piensapiensa.com/$1 [R=301,L]

if you have the same url structure. If not:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule . http://www.piensapiensa.com [R=301,L]

And the other in the .es site:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.piensapiensa.es [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.piensapiensa.es/$1 [R=301,L]

this will make redirect everything to the www.piensapiensa.es version. HOpe this clarifies you everything. However I really recommend you to have a well trained webmaster doing this for you, because if you don't know how to edit an htaccess you can mess up your whole site.

There's not always a clear science around that but usually a penalized site never gets back to its prior shine, or at least it will take you a lot of time, that's why is it somewhat better to have a slower growth than risk anyway a penalty.

Regarding your examples, I see that pvc banners query returns a lot of otpimized results on that query. I don't know which link you may have removed but looking at backlinks pointing to http://www.discountbannerprinting.co.uk/banners/vinyl-pvc-banners.html
 in OSE I see that:

• one third of your referrals are spammy domains
• you are using quite alot of keyword rich anchors which are actually a good signal for link schemes to google

try to be as natural and possible and consider that you'll need to work more to get google trust than some other clean websites.

yes just create one you can call 301-sitemap.xml and submit it to google webmaster tools. This is a separate one from your full sitemap as when you ll get those pages removed from google seeps you can just delete it without affecting your normal sitemap.

I think that having outbound links is a key part of an healthy site (unless your accepting a guest post for each post you create). I think there are also some good assets from linking outside of your site:

• you may get links in return as using those outbound links as part of an ego bait campaign
• people you're linking to may want to give visibility to that mention so they may share that article on their social media and other channels they control
• there are some articles about outbound link cogitation which works similarly to internal backlink cogitation but instead of considering inbound links it consider outbound. In other words, sites linking to same sites are somewhat similar

As you can see there are different approaches, but natural outbound links are a natural part of the we, which is the "web" because of its networking system. Cyrus, covered the topic in a previous whiteboard https://moz.com/blog/external-linking-good-for-seo-whiteboard-friday you may get some nice insights from there

There are many things you may do before considering adding the nofollow tag, maybe you can apply other optimizations to improve your rankings. Anyway, if you think there is some good opportunity, you can always test it. Instead of testing the entire site at once why don't you just modify a couple of pages and see if there is a significant ranking change? Data is far superior than any opinion I can give you

try visiting the site now, It seems Godaddyhas fixed the issue

Happy to have been of help, please do let us know how the test goes

hey camarin, so far I see 271 URLS indexed for the search "site:https://www.northshoreymca.org". There are of course a couple of changes I would do like try to have a friendlier look to the tag URLs instead of having the tag parameter, but anyway it seems that it's working. Also PA for this page https://www.northshoreymca.org/locations/haverhill/ is 33. I think as you said it was just a matter of time. I hope your problem got fixed.

You can export your database to an excel spreadsheet, then you can retrieve the url based on your ids in database.

After you have your list of urls you can both do a crwal using screamingfrog or xenu and join the two lists with a vlookup or you can simply retrieve your title and meta description using seotools extension for excel from nielsbosma.se

I'll advice to use the hreflang tag on each page to be sure that google know ehich language are you targetin for especially for english and spanish having those languages different variations from one country to another.

maybe you'll see a swap for local search engines for your base language which I suppose is english and gain some additional trafic from other languages. You'll start ranking in languages you disn't have before so extra traffic is highly possible.

HI Josh I think that you won't run inmore problems than the normal issues of a domain migration.

Considering you have your social media set up withthe old domain would make sense for the users to have everything under that site, that makes  a lot less confusio for users lanidng in your site.

Agree, it totally depends on what's up with the website. It may be more or less work, but unless they caused a google penalization for changing their website (ex. unwanted cloaking) it should be a matter of fixing the broken stuff.

Most likely google lost the track of their backlinks and without proper 301 redirection (which may have been sent all to the homepage is not helpgin them recover).

I would recommend try get access to their GWT first so you can assess how doable is the work for you. You can make a preventive analysis at no cost which will  help you understand the timeline and weight every single action you'll need to take, and how much are your clients able to support you.

Hey Daniel, I'm glad you're achieveing good results with your strategy. However since you can read and write in proper english I recommend you to try to tweak your site not only to what is working now but focusing on what will work tomorrow.

focus on long term strategy, try to not spam a good technique because it may return back to you as a negative impact. Try to dilute your links and build high quality ones, I'll really focus more on brazilian sites than building links in foreigners sites.

You still want to reach your audience and you're audience is not so much in english websites. Try to stay focused and build value where you need. PR is not the most important thing try to focus on themed sites, related to your business and with an high autorithy,(normally old and frequently updated sites)

Good luck!

Sure! I'm glad you found that useful, it's always good to ask since in seo there's no clear path to the success, share the experience and doubbt is always helpful

I would not focus too much on GSC if the site has been recently built, the place where you want your pages to be is google index

The place I would check is GA to see how many of your pages are getting at least 1 visits and which ones don't. You can then look for the pages which are not getting traffic and understand if they are not being indexed or not ranking high.

This page for example https://www.northshoreymca.org/programs/creative-arts I've noticed that you're using the rel="<a class="attribute-value">shortlink</a>", which I don't think it's adding too much value, probably is making things messier, as you two different version of your page, in fact if you check for /node/ folder you're finding pages you don't want (ex.https://www.northshoreymca.org/node/145 instead of this <a class="attribute-value">https://www.northshoreymca.org/content/ymca-north-shore-annual-gala</a>) I would set up a 301 at least so you ensure that google is not deciding which is the best page to index and serve to users, I know you hav a canonical but it could be something you could test, and help google not making too many decisions, especially because canonical is just a recommendation done to bots, and which google normally doesn't follow boldly for new sites.

hoep this helps, let me know how it goes!

In SEO there's no perfect answer since the environment always changes.

I think that you should bet on one site and build there the whole value. Give to your authors a page where they can build their profile and link them to their g+ page (if they don't have it recommend them to build one) in that way you'll achieve extra exposure in serps with the tiny image of the author.

Then for the book try to rank both for their name a ISBN code which is more long tail always useful. You may also try to boost the traffic to those pages using some tiny adwords budget, so more authors may join your community and enlarge the authority of your site.

this is one of the few things where google has a pretty clear statement:

"If you think a content is relevant to your users you should always make it clearly visible"

If you think about that it makes complete sense, if someone searches for a content and clicks on a result they expect to see that text, if that is hidden somewhere they won't consider that result relevant for their search, and that's what google do not want to happen.

I have to agree that the 500 words content still works for the long tail, so I would say, keep your important content at the top of the page and reference other supplementary content at the bottom or at the side but always try to make it visible.

You can see Google standing on Barry Schwartz latest article on google discounting tabbed content

As an addiitonal thing it's totally safe to hide some content on your mobile version if you've a responsive website for improving user experience, as far as that content is clearly shown in your desktop version.

hoep this helps

Hey Becky,

quick note here, I may not be understanding correctly but I see one thing omitted. While I agree that in the long run you'll need the 301 ony from pages which receives links from outside in order to keep the SEO juice flowing into your website, I think you should also apply 301 to pages which doesn't, just because need to understand that when one page returns a 404 which is the one you want to be indexed instead of it, (if you have one). This will make the transition process easier for google to digest.

e

You have to be natural. That is the key. If the page you're linking is about "red leather boots" then the anchor should reflect that. What you have avoid is forcing things.

Example of a good breadcrumb
Home > Shoes > Red Leather Boots

Now an over optimized one
Home > Boots > Red > Red Leather Boots

You are repeating words that do not add any value, same things happens with URLs many people repeat their product in the folder then in the URI of the page.

My recommendation would be to keep it optimized but without forcing anything. If you are in doubt if Google will like it or not, think about your users. Will they like this link showing that text or will it be too redundant? there you got the answer

There are places where variation is not only allowed but also recommended, ex. external backlinks, internal links from other pages, etc. You may want to use call to actions or LSI keywords. You can use this tool to find interesting LSI terms: https://lsigraph.com/

about the breadcrumb I would keep it always the same. Breadcrumbs purpose is not for optimizing anchors but to give users a navigational support so if I were you I would always keep them descriptive but never over optimized.

That could be completely normal. Google sends a warning because you're giving conflicting directions as you are preventing them to crawl pages (via robots) you asked them to index (via sitemap).

They do not know how important those pages may be for you so you are the one that needs to assess what to do net.

Are those pages important for you? Do you want them to be in the index? if that's the case change your robots.txt rule, if not then remove them from the sitemap.

About the previous answer robots text is not used to block hackers but quite the opposite. Hackers can easily find via the robots txt which are the pages you'd like to block and visit them as they may be key pages (ex. wp-admin), but let's not focus on that as hackers have so many ways to find core pages that it's not the topic. Robots txt is normally used to avoid duplication issues and to prevent google from crawling low value pages and waste crawl budget.

Hi QuickLearner,

You are actually raising a very interesting point. So, as for disavow you have to disavow links pointing to the current site and the ones pointing to any other property you own which is 301ing to it to be extra safe.

Remember that the disavow file should include all URLs/Domains that are pointing to your site that you are not able to remove by yourself or after trying to ping the webmaster. Based on this:

• you should disavow in your http site all the links that are pointing to the HTTP site only that you marked as spammy
• since you're going to make many changes on the disavow file, it may be a good moment to further reanalyze links you want to include vs you want to remove. Just ensure you're doing it right.
• the HTTPS site disavow file should contain all the links of the HTTP site + the ones pointing to it. Again only the links you want to remove obviously
• Even if sites that have expired can be safely removed as they're not linking to your site anymore, in the past I always kept them. Two reasons:

1. sometimes google index is not very much up to date especially with tiny, low quality sites, which these ones may be. The site may have disappeared but if google doesn't drop it, it still counts as a link to your site
2. you never know what's the real reason behind that site 4XX,5XX. So in case they may reappear I would just keep it there. It's like an IP blacklist. I don't know if that IP is still used but just in case I keep it there.

I hope this helps you!

e

I imagine there is no way to show the new design and layout on the old domain.

If that's the case I find option #2 to be the best. You are showing the new website while keeping the areas you're developing closed, and without any redirects. It's critical that you place redirect from old to new website after everything is ready so you can make a page by page or section by sections redirect and not send everything to the homepage.

I understand that clients sometimes wants to move forward but it's better to make things right. You're still providing hiim/her and option to start marketing it, although I still think it's not a good idea as people will see a work in progress website. Ensure to explain all the drawbacks on moving on early as you may be wasting a good marketing opportunity.