A 301 redirect is the header response sent when a page does not exist or not required and the redirected page is loaded instead.  Typically a 301 redirect is created when a page is taken down.  A 301 redirect is not bad for a site.  Redirect chains can be bad - so 301 to 301 to 301 etc.

What you want to look at is if you have 301s in your menus, homepage or main content linking to main pages.  These links should be either removed or updated to the new URL.  There should be no 301s here, it's good housekeeping.

A backlink is an link from an external site linking to a page on your site.

If it is an image URL that is being proliferated with spammy backlinks, you can do one of the following, based on the links actually being harmful:

1. Rename the image and replace it in the post.  But only if the existing image has no SEO value, real traffic coming in to it etc.
2. Set the image URL to noindex, only if the image is not organically useful.
3. Add the culprits to a disavow file.

The .co.uk domain is already geo-targeted to the UK, so unless you are targeting other countries/languages

The head office happens to be the e-commerce store.  Then there are actual physical stores that sell the same products physically.

So we do want visibility for 'HQ' as the main 'entity'.  Yes if anyone has a problem they contact the shop or HQ/e-commerce store.  So with that in mind I still need clarification of the schema to use.

Hi Alan,

"Most  503 error links are from low quality directories, so I would disavow anyway. "  Yes if they are low quality non-human edited then yes i'd disavow.

"We would disavow the majority of our links in one shot. Any risk of doing this?" If ranking is impacted by a toxic link profile then disavowing only 75% of them will not recover you 75%, probably nothing.

"Is there a reasonable chance that our ranking would improve significantly by disavowing these links? How long does it take Google to process the disavow? Is there a way of checking if Google has actually processed the disavow?" How long is a piece of string.  The timeframe depends on how long it takes Google to crawl the toxic links.

Will this improve your rankings?  I don't know is the simple answer.  The best bet is to take the links on merit and disavow the ones you know are clearly toxic, manipulated etc.  But soon as you mention improvement it makes me wonder if you have had a hit on organic traffic.  If that is the case and it was around Sept onwards you may be looking at a broader E-A-T issue so disavowing would not resolve the bigger issue.  That's pure guesswork but you get my point.

I don't know anyone who has any significant success with requesting links to be removed, other than sharks trying to charge to do so.  You could argue that the 'good' sites will help, the poor sites ignore/charge, but it's a bit too much time and effort to use that signal in any way.

Mick

I think the most important aspect of your question is to not trust a tool.  The tool might flag domains/URLs as spam or manipulated links but the most important thing is to manually inspect each domain.  I have had reports from tools where the domain in question is actually not a problem at all when inspected.

If you are getting 404, 403 or 503 error messages the links are gone.  You wouldn't be penalised by Google for these because they no longer exist.  There is no need to disavow because they don't exist, but you wouldn't be causing a problem if you did.  The potential issue is that those header responses 'could' change back to a 200 found.  I'd be inclined to monitor them at this stage and add to the disavow if the status changes.  A 503 header is a maintenance response so that may come back and you would want to check what you'd be disavowing, as the link may be good.

With regard to disavowing all the links.  If you have a toxic link profile you have an issue you need to address and resolve as quickly as you can, so if you determine there are 100 toxic links/domains you will want to add them to the disavow in one hit and hope that you have captured them all.

But please be aware that if some of the links are just a bit spammy/low quality then Google looks like it takes the view to ignore those links anyway.

Some things you need to manually check are:

• the relevance of the link
• the quality of the content
• the anchor text (e.g. have you got exact match, close match anchor on multiple dubious quality posts)
• the ranking of the page/domain
• the placement of the link on the page (e.g. is is a site-wide footer link).
• the quality throughout the domain
• is the link paid for but dofollow (e.g. are there signs on the site that content can be somehow 'purchased', advertorial)

I have been getting conflicting advice on the best way to implement schema for the following scenario.

There is a central e-commerce store that is registered to it's own unique address which is "head office". There are a few physical shops each of which has their own location and address. Each shop has its own landing page within /our-stores/.

So each page on the website has the Organisation schema for the central 'organisation', something like:

Then on each physical store landing page is something like the following as well as the Organisation schema:

Is this correct? If it is should I extend LocalBusiness with store URL and sameAs for GMB listing and maybe Companies House registration?

It's also been suggested that we should use LocalBusiness for the head office of the company, then Departmentwith the typeStore.  But i'm not sure on that?

Due to the restraints of category page layout many of the products in certain categories have the product titles truncated, in some cases missing off 2-5 words depending on the product in question.  The product name which displays on the category page is lifted straight from the product page itself, so not possible to do something like "product name including spec..."  to place ... to indicate a bit more.

I'm assuming not but just wanted to check that Google will not frown on this.  Text is not being hidden it just does not render fully in the restricted space.  So there is a scenario of 'bits of' text in the source not displaying on the rendered page.

Just a quick question re implementation of JSON-ID breadcrumbs

You are here: Acme Company → Electronics → Computers → Laptops

So in this example laptops is my current page without a link on the visible on-page breadcrumb.

When implementing JSON-LD BreadcrumbList should  Laptops be included in the schema snippet, or commence from Computers to home?

I mentioned both.  You add a meta robots to noindex and remove from the sitemap.

I think it really depends on your blog, the market and what you want to achieve.  A tight niche could be very lucrative if you become the authority.

Say a keyword has approx 100 searches per month and you rank well and achieve a sale/signup/commitment per month from that.  Then there are 30 other search terms with similar volumes you can rank for.  Is this valuable to you?

If you are selling 'blue widgets' at £1 per widget and a typical customer only ever buys one or two then your niche blog may not be worth your efforts.  But if they are repeat purchasers then again that changes the landscape.

Name, Address, Phone - you should provide comprehensive contact details.  Part of your service could/should be to double check their details on their site and make sure it identically matches on your listing.  Businesses are still lapse in this, or try to extend their address to capture more than one county, as if it will somehow do them good.

They also need to give you fresh new content about themselves, not some default directory description.

True!  

I'm working on a site that had a very poor disavow file in place from a previous agency.  I went through the link profile with a fine tooth comb and added a bunch more domains to the file.  Organic traffic has gone up over 80%.

That is not our only problem and there are other factors to work on but the cleansing is reassuring even though we know the profile is pretty thin.  But again that just goes to show quality always wins over quantity.

I would say there may be a whole host of issues hampering ranking but a dirty profile is a must fix, no matter the immediate outcome.  I explain to clients that I anticipate a short term fall and why to set their expectations, then anything positive is a great bonus.

For me longtail keywords are purely more finely focused keywords cascaded down from the big money/focus keywords whatever they may be.  So it doesn't matter if they are model related or how any words etc, they are just one way or another the closest thing you can get to a finer granularity exact match the next level from the big volume main keyword.  I think the target is selecting the ones with modest competition and a search volume.

Has the mobile/skype link been set up incorrectly, not using the attribute?  I'd check the source code to see what the link actually is.  It should be something like -

Stripping it back to the bone the basic rule is that you violate Google terms by purchasing links.  It is not an instant Google hit if you do, but you kind of move into death row and take your chance.

Because you don't always instantly suffer a penalty doesn't mean that you should follow any advice that seems like a quick fix.  I would stick to here or the other main marketing sites to get a concrete base of what is ethical, what works and what doesn't.  That's not to suggest you shouldn't implement your own strategies but they should be built on that concrete base.

I think the most important aspect of your question is to not trust a tool.  The tool might flag domains/URLs as spam or manipulated links but the most important thing is to manually inspect each domain.  I have had reports from tools where the domain in question is actually not a problem at all when inspected.

If you are getting 404, 403 or 503 error messages the links are gone.  You wouldn't be penalised by Google for these because they no longer exist.  There is no need to disavow because they don't exist, but you wouldn't be causing a problem if you did.  The potential issue is that those header responses 'could' change back to a 200 found.  I'd be inclined to monitor them at this stage and add to the disavow if the status changes.  A 503 header is a maintenance response so that may come back and you would want to check what you'd be disavowing, as the link may be good.

With regard to disavowing all the links.  If you have a toxic link profile you have an issue you need to address and resolve as quickly as you can, so if you determine there are 100 toxic links/domains you will want to add them to the disavow in one hit and hope that you have captured them all.

But please be aware that if some of the links are just a bit spammy/low quality then Google looks like it takes the view to ignore those links anyway.

Some things you need to manually check are:

• the relevance of the link
• the quality of the content
• the anchor text (e.g. have you got exact match, close match anchor on multiple dubious quality posts)
• the ranking of the page/domain
• the placement of the link on the page (e.g. is is a site-wide footer link).
• the quality throughout the domain
• is the link paid for but dofollow (e.g. are there signs on the site that content can be somehow 'purchased', advertorial)

yes, if the date of the cache is prior.  So I would suggest disabling javascript in the browser reload the page and see if the expected text is displayed.  If not that's what Google misses.

...and yes Google should show all the text in the cache version (text only) if the cached version is subsequent to your amendment.

"Other SEO's have never had a problem with this arrangement, but this SEO claimed what they do is secret and for no one else to see."

Run a mile!!!