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I would go further than that and check the link profiles of all the domains. Any sign of spam, unnatural anchor text etc then do not redirect as you'll inject that problem into your site. Even if you believe them to be dormant and never used I would just check in case you were not the original owner. Always worth doing that check.
Hi Kristen, I sent you a PM.
This is the thing, it passes as mobile friendly but the screenshot shows the page 80% to the right. All physical devices tested load the page ok. My worry is that googlebot may not favour the page if this is it's perception of a true view.
So the website is displaying correctly in mobile devices and online tools. However, when using Google Page Speed Insights mobile or fetch as mobile in Search Console the page always loads as if it has moved 50% of the screen to the right - so whitespace on the left then 50% of the page in on the right side.
I've been ignoring this. The site loads fine in devices and i've put it down to a glitch in Google, but at the same time it's been bugging me. Has anyone else seen this and should I ignore?
I have had similar issues with a client. Take a look at all the information on this thread https://moz.com/community/q/hreflang-for-multple-countries-but-single-language It might help you to start untangling your particular issue.
Hi Nikhilesh,
as a matter of interest is your tool crawling as a google bot, rather than some IP? We have now set to deliver TLD depending on IP but the tool reports the following for the hreflangs not on the same domain
thanks. I'm taking a look.
This is a bit difficult. All 3 domains are bringing in some good diverse country traffic as is, but Google has said it will now ignore hreflang until resolved.
So for example, .com brings in traffic and sales from Chile, Mexico and Bahamas. So if we removed the 'global' for .com are we not risking dropping the traffic for these locations. Or will Google ignore anyway and serve? There are too many countries getting traffic to implement each one as hreflang and remove the global en, it would be massive.
But having said that if the server was setting the TLD to be served depending on location it would then be adequate to just use the 'global' hreflang's to hreflang="en"? Is that right?
I'm working on a site that has implemented hreflang.
The site is all in English but has slight differences and breaks down to separate domains, so
the hreflang implementation targets specific countries per domain.
This was tested using http://flang.dejanseo.com.au but Webmaster Tools has thrown up errors. For example,
**URLs for your site and alternative URLs in 'en_GB' that do not have return tags. **But every page refers back.Any ideas what's going wrong?
ScreamingFrog gives all the data you want. Tools for the purpose of a creating a sleek report usually don't give the full picture. It's those issues you draw out yourself that makes a difference.
You'd do best by using ScreamingFrog to check any outbound links. If they don't exist don't worry about it.
"sponsored" = paid for. Therefore if you don't want to break G's webmaster terms any links must be no-follow. But taking look at the first one you wouldn't tell straight away it's sponsored. But now you have posted here and told Google 
I second ScreamingFrog. Nothing else comes close.
I'm sorry for my late reply, i've been off the radar these past days, work and bug.
Well, 2 shared the same address, with the third at a different address which is not directly owned and the closest to the brand. Actually the 3rd domain is a plural.
We've got hold of the singular, which was available (can't believe they didn't have that amongst all the variations they've got kicking around!). It's a bit difficult to explain exactly what I mean but I don't want to post the URLS. The EMD is to be moved to this new domain, with acme-niche(dot)com redirected to it (or just shut down).
So now we will have one good core domain that is the brand with another domain out there with a different NAP but using the same logo (and to all intents and purposes appearing to be the same business). So I think we are working on trying to get this other site to change the logo and distance itself.
Does this sound reasonable?
I have a bit of a tricky situation with a client where there is some history with old domains. But this is the current situation which I need to stick to:
Business name (all made up) is Acme Print
acme-niche(dot)com and productsandservices(dot)com share the same NAP. Not much traffic and a bit of a poor domain profile for acme-niche(dot)com, so suggest just using productsandservices(dot)com. Also acme-niche(dot)com would be a bit misleading for use for the whole business in any case.
However, all content for productsandservices(dot)com refers to Acme Print. Because of all the confusion should we keep the productsandservices(dot)com referring to Acme Print throughout, or update with new productsandservices(dot)com logo, mention that it is a trading name of Acme Print and refer to the trading domain name throughout the content.
I want to know the best option for listings and citations - the trading name which is a domain name or Acme Print? I've not worked with a local site where domain name and business name and a separate business with domain are mixed up.
Yes I absolutely agree with EGOL. If the domain/page authority is good I would rather have a do-follow link. But on the other hand if that is not possible and the brand/domain is mentioned in context then I would be happy that is a signal for Google. Maybe small but still part of the mix.
The only time I could imagine staging is if the existing site is in a mess and there are spurious redirect chains already going on. So it might be worth working out the true 'original' URLs, remove the existing redirects, implement the new redirects, test and then mop up anything left over. But as I say I can only imagine in that kind of scenario.
You also need to look at the perceived quality of the links to the 2 pages. Tesco has more but not as valuable as Poundstretcher.
You could legitimately have hidden content in terms of category/URLs - maybe only made available if you sign up as an example. The guidelines are referring to manipulating on page content so there are elements within that page that are hidden and by default manipulating.
A Wordpress site has a footer widget for facebook with some images, all of which are served within an iframe. The FB CDN robots is blocking the images from being crawled so Webmaster Tools rendering tool is reporting these 8 or so images as blocked. Should I be concerned?
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 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.
Yes, that is the key - what has happened to the pages on the server? You would hope that they still exist and you can revert. If the site is in tact you can just remove any 301 or 302 redirects and restore. It may be that Google has removed the URLs from the index but these would be crawled again once the redirects are sorted.
It depends on how you work and your relationship with the client. I guess the first step is identifying issues and then finding the right person to fix.
If you look around you'll find plenty of (free) plugins that can help you if the platform is Wordpress.
That list is not complete just some main points that usually do some good, and it is in no particular order.
This is a must - https://moz.com/blog/technical-site-audit-for-2015
Secondary to John's response I would be meticulous in squeezing the very best in:
There is other stuff but these sometimes throw open other issues to look at.
Thanks guys. My feeling is also that it has been hooked onto from the organic side and not directly relevant. I'm not getting any feedback that is going to make me want to test! I'm in the process of getting a client to update their pages as the privacy policy is too thin deep within a T&C link and the question came up.
Does anyone have direct experience regarding the impact on quality score by ensuring there is a privacy policy in place on the landing page?
I am aware of the legal requirement but I have heard anecdotal evidence there could be an impact on quality score if one is missing.
Webmaster Tools is not a current accurate reflection of what is actually indexed.
A search in Google for site:yourdomain.com will show the accurate information.
Any URL that you want to remove from a particular TLD needs to be done in the specific TLD Webmaster Tools property.
If the page ia a 404 not found it will sometime soon disappear from the index. You can force this immediately by going into Webmaster Tools >> Google Index >> Remove URLs >> enter URL >> select 'Remove page....'
Patrick is spot on. Also be aware that although you have done a 301 Google may not crawl immediately and the old page may still appear in the index (redirecting when you select it).
Google reserves the right to use whatever title or description it feels is best for the potential visitor. Because you have removed from the index all the product pages and left a mass duplicated title tag - 'Search results - blah blah' it is reasonable to me that Google have decided to present something more meaningful.
I don't totally agree that it truly doesn't matter. I'm strongly siding with Rand on this one - https://moz.com/blog/subdomains-vs-subfolders-rel-canonical-vs-301-how-to-structure-links-optimally-for-seo-whiteboard-friday
"I just need some advice on how best to take advantage of this opportunity, our blog isn't getting much search traffic at the moment (despite having 300+ articles!!) and i'm looking into how we can change that. "
Your first issue is that the blog is a sub-domain which means as far as Google is concerned a new website which will have to be optimised and grow independent of the main site.
Within the blog you need to use the Yoast plugin to not index stuff like /tag/, /category/, possibly /author/ - any of these categories that is potentially duplicating your content. You have 1810 URLs indexed.
As a side issue you need to resolve your canonical domain - you have both www and non www.
The first thing I would do is look at the main menu as is is broken giving you lots of 404's.
training-courses/ and all the ?active variations
faq/
flagger_certification/
osha-violations/violation/
Personally I wouldn't be worrying about those links. I just meant wholesale links from no doubt spammed domains that are disproportionate to your whole profile. I would just continue building good links to the site.
I would say in general you could forget about no-follow. However, and some may disagree with me, I look at those no-follow and if they are screaming dire spam, have a dubious nature and there is volume I treat them just the same as any other link. Google wants to see a rounded link profile so there will be a bunch of no-follow links in there. If those links are bad i'd want to let Google know that they are nothing to do with me. If there is a very small proportion of poor no-follow links then that is probably ok as again that is probably quite natural.
That page is indexed in Google.
A bit late but just for the record.
You have a rewrite rule in place not a redirect. You need something like:
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [L,R=301]
Totally agree with Dirk. If the links offer value to the visitor and if grouped are tightly and obviously associated with the theme of the page then they should always be left as is. If there is a hint of paid for they should be no-follow, but in essence having no-follow means you don't trust the page/site so why have it there in the first place (unless there is some commercial interest in having it there).
Also to muddy the water a little further a person may physically be in Chelsea (or that area of London) but the ISP IP address is placing them elsewhere. For example, apparently I am about 60 miles north west in Bath according to Google.
So it also depends on your market, for location in this manner. Businesses may very well be exact but residential users are in the hands of their ISP and you toss a coin as to whether those users go in and manually set their location.
I have run the site through ScreamingFrog. You have masses and masses of 301 redirects going on which you need to resolve. It looks like you could have some permalinks issue going on. What do have set in Settings >> Permalinks? I'd also look at installing Yoast Wordpress SEO as I recall there are options in there to handle permalinks as well.
yes, I updated to parameters just before you posted
I would also check you have not got a spike of URL parameters becoming available. I recently had a similar issue and although I had these set up in GWT the crawler was actively wasting its time on them. Once I added to robots the crawl level went back to 'normal'.
The destination URL already includes the http:// so I assume http/:www.abcd.com is a typo on here.
It should make no difference whether you use the trailing slash or not and the data will be the same. https://www.en.adwords-community.com/t5/Advanced-Features/trailing-slash/td-p/434036
I would give the following a good read
Domain Authority - http://moz.com/learn/seo/domain-authority
Page Authority - http://moz.com/learn/seo/page-authority
In summary:
"Whereas Page Authority measures the predictive ranking strength of a single page, Domain Authority measures the strength of entire domains or subdomains."
You need to focus on overall SEO, develop good quality links to your site (which is typically the homepage) and if you get a break you'll get some links to the directory your looking to link to which will further boost your directory. don't focus on the directory and forget the rest of the site.
