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.

Install Yoast Wordpress SEO plugin and use that to restrict what is indexed and what is allowed in a sitemap.

Although Google can now get to js, I would still be nervous on choosing a theme/CMS  that is using lazy loading.

According to John Muller from Google:

“Is Googlebot able to trigger lazy loading scripts- lazy loading images for below the fold content” – “This is a tricky thing.”

On lazy loading images John says  “test this with Fetch as Google in Webmaster Tools” and “imagine those are things that Googlebot might miss out on.”

http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/john-muellers-seo-advice/

"Magento is churning out tons of 404 error pages like this https://www.tidy-books.co.uk/childrens-bookcases-shelves/show/12/l/colour:24-4-9/letters:6-7 which google  is indexing"

That page is returning a 404 header response so it does not exist.  Therefore Google cannot index it.

Without seeing Magento it's difficult to be certain what settings you have and/if you have a bug.

What you can do (maybe you have) is to add the attributes into Webmaster Tools > Crawl > URL Parameters and set to no URLs.  You could also add the directory /sort-by/ to robots.txt to disallow.

Using your example of https://www.tidy-books.co.uk/childrens-bookcases-shelves/colour/natural-finish-with-letters/letters/lowercase, well this has an internal rewrite to https://www.tidy-books.co.uk/childrens-bookcases-shelves/letters/lowercase?colour=20 which is not indexed.

It looks like not only do you need to resolve any MANAdev issues but you need to do an audit on the site as I think you have several issues.

Each domain in a PBN should leave no footprint and if you have found it then Google will find it/them.

For the 4 sites have you got any proof of relationship - contact details, whois, duplicate content, same plugins/layout, a very good reason to believe they are from the same source?

It would be very foolish of them to leave such a huge footprint as to link to all the sites.

Have you checked the PBN domains to see if they share the same C class? e.g. http://smallseotools.com/class-c-ip-checker/? or http://www.authoritydomains.com/bulk-ip-checker.php

If they were totally lazy then there is probably only a handful of hosting accounts.  If that was proven then I wouldn't have any difficulty talking to Google if the SERPs were being distorted by more than one site dominating but basically from the same source.  If it was a single site i'd tend to sit back and watch, while building a strong link profile.

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.

IMHO directories in the main are dead.  Where they do succeed is when they are very niche and actually human managed.  If you have the skills and passion in your niche then there is a good possibility you will make it work and become a valuable resource.  Using NAP in the detail will provide valuable citation for the business listing.  SEO impact will be minimal, but for the business it is still a movement in the right direction.

You'll need to heavily market the directory to the business customer base as an invaluable one stop shop for their needs.  That will then drive referral traffic to the listings and allow you to charge a reasonable fee for inclusion.

From my understanding if you have hreflang=“en-gb” then that/those pages are targeted at the UK.  If you wish to target any  English speaking countries then you add hreflang=“en”.  But if you wish to target specific English speaking countries then you'd use hreflang="en-ie", hreflang="en-gg" etc.

What you are doing is giving Google information, not a directive, as to what pages are targeted for where.  Google could ignore and it's not a ranking solution.  You are just giving Google the heads up of your intentions.