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Let me ask a counter-question: If a website is bad quality, why would you link it at all in the first place? (Barring that you want to give a negative example ...)

Imo the use of "nofollow" should be clearly restricted to paid links and ok, maybe forum/comment links. It is somewhat idiotic to slap a "do not follow or count this link" on a link you set yourself. A link you set yourself with a purpose, because it is relevant to the topic, gives additional information etc. If I was a search engine, I'd really consider NOT honoring the nofollow tag when somebody puts it on every link. To me it also feels somewhat dishonest: You point to a good ressource and also say "but do not give them any credit for me linking and recommending it!". Never mind the human visitor does not see or feel the nofollow in any way at all... and when user signals get more and more important, why exactly should search engines (continue to) honor something that has no bearing on human users at all?

In short: IMO nofollow belongs on paid links and on links the website owner has no way to endorse/influence (comments &c.) if necessary. If you set links yourself, it should be a normal follow link. If you want to put nofollow on it, question why you want to set this link in the first place.

Nico

Provided you mean Google PageRank: Then, because it is discontinued (or more exactly: the displaying of page rank is discontinued), cf. https://www.seroundtable.com/google-fully-turns-off-toolbar-pagerank-feed-21946.html . So I would not expect Google PageRank to show up anywhere any more.

Regards

Nico

I would not use a canonical here. I'd implement a logic that sets empty categories on noindex as long as they are empty IF they are really, really useful and needed there, which I kinda doubt. Might be if you display a "no entry yet - place your location here" registration form or something like that. Nearly as likely I'd just kill them and recreate them when/if there is actually useful content for the page. Core question I'd ask is: What exact use DO such pages have for users/search engines? (and NOT: What future use might they eventually have some day for you/others?)

Nico

You can even have it appear, be totally valid, then suddenly disappear at some point with no visible reason. By now I think of schema.org as offering google extra data for inclusion - after that it is hope and pray...

This happens quite often to my own review site which aggregates reader reviews - right now, no single aggregate review is displayed. Breadcrumbs did prove rather weird, too: sometimes schema.org works fine; at other times it does not work at all and you have to include different markup - then it works almost instantly. (Google admitted problems there at some point; does not make it less weird, though...)

Also, the "common standard" of schema.org time and again seems less common and less standard than it is oftentimes presented. (e.g.: 'till shortly google's testing tool declared isPartOf and hasPart as invalid for CreativeWork/Book ... which is, frankly, stupid. The new tool accepts it.)

Nico

My take: Do not use bold/italics/underline to mark keywords; use them to mark up important parts in your text in a consistent way. That can be the same but needn't be. For example, I tend to italicise proper Names and quotes; I tend to bold the most important points of a text so somebody can skim the page, immediately see the most important points and decide to read the rest or not (in addition to subheadings); I outright avoid underlines. Those are for links.

Nothing of that has to do with search engines. Its aim is improved legibility/"scannability". I doubt google would directly penalise for marking keywords up like this - it might worsen the user experience, though.

Nico

More than "minimal", "working" html, css etc is probably a ranking factor - if not directly, then via good UX.

"Minimal" is a somewhat  problematic attribute in my opinion. In some context, you can have really minimalised code; in many contexts, best practices should be applied - if only to better maintain code, markup etc. Sometimes you do face technical or ressource restrictions and sometimes, non-minimal practices are just better. (All-time favourite: A certain wordpress plugin that minifies code, in theory speeding up loading time; in practice it oftentimes quadruples the loading time due to its own execution. Nothing won there.)

Moz has now taken to see  small markup as a spam signal (whyever) - one of my pages gets the warning that  "Site Mark-up is Abnormally Small There's a high ratio of visible text compared to HTML, JavaScript, etc." Well yes, it is self-coded and has pretty much nothing that is not needed, making concessions only for having source code that is readable by humans as well. This should for sure not be seen as a call to make bigger source code when it is not necessary.

TL;DR: Clean code without unnecessary stuff helps in maintenance and with finding errors should they appear; more than minifying code, I'd worry about page speed and functionality.

You can also very likely change this directly in the wordpress settings without fiddling around in plugins. Normally this Suffix comes from the "website name" you enter in "Settings" > "Tagline".

Many people tend to enter the whole, long name of their business here, which is quite commonly very, very long and thus exceeds the displayed title limit.

Nico

I recently posed this question the other way around, i.e. a site had different pages (technically totally unconnected) for each product variant and it caused certain problems: https://moz.com/community/q/duplicate-content-through-product-variants

I am not sure if this 100% applies to you: I would not use "different model" and "variant" as synonyms. If they are different models, they are different, unique products and have distinct features, advantages, maybe extras etc. Variants, to me, are for example different colour, maybe the same model with different extras or similar. There might be some grey zone where different models might actually be quite like variants, differing little from each other - then I'd ask if they differ enough to say something about each and/or contrast them.

For different models I would in fact chose different pages that go deeper into details. (Think of different books from the same publisher!) For variants, having more than one page is problematic. If I had the free choice, I'd bundle all variants on a single page with dropdowns to select the variant. There is also the question if variants are sufficiently different to write unique content for each - if that is the case, it could justify separate pages. A definite benefit of those is that they can be linked directly.

Regards,

Nico

I think that page anchor's importance is increasing. Moz has pointed out that long content tends to rank better (for in-depth articles) than short content. The (shortened) logic being that it is better to present one articles that gives readers everything (and maybe a bit extra) rather than forcing them to do another search.

Personally I am a fan of a Table of Contents that links to the sub-headings in an article. (For Wordpress there is the rather good plugin Table of Contents Plus. It ads an anchor to all <h[1-6]>with an id that equates to the heading, replacing certain invalid signs.)  Google also likes this and USES the anchors: When you Google for https://www.google.com/search?q=wikipedia+en+SEO+Methods&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 , for example, you will get an extra "Jump to"-link that gets you directly to the relevant paragraph (or what google thinks is the most relevant paragraph for your search query anyway). This, of course, needs anchors.</h[1-6]>

I do not know how many people actually use these anchor-links and would be very much interested in that data. Personally I find this very nifty and would recommend it. It is not that much extra effort in most cases and it adds a very useful feature - also for linkbuildling and sharing.

You should of course consider possible implications for tracked scroll-depth and such stuff!

And for exactly that reason I would here chose different pages for tables, chairs etc - how would you know what people were searching for exactly? (So far I mostly used anchors for articles, not for different product sections). As I see it, that starting page is more a "furniture" landing page than a dedicated "tables" or "chairs" landing page.

I would chose variant 2. Less for an omnious Ranking Boost and more for segmentation of the site. With a subdirectory like /business/ you can analyse the behaviour in that content/business section much better than if you just put everything in a "no-subdirectory url".

No subdirectories are, imo, only useful if you have no clear sections or topics - or a single one defined by the domain.

As Marcus Miller mentioned, this has the added benefit of making sense in a vacuum. At least in my opinion.

Nico

It should not make any difference and is a question of style/syntax. The forward slash at the end is XHTML-Standard-Syntax. Sometimes, some validators may complain about one way of writing it or the other. Compare other Elements:

works if you write it just once at the start of a new parapgraph. Properly, a paragraph should be encased by

TextOfTheParagraph

, a DIV goesDivContentetc. Some elements ("void elements") do not have a beginning and end as such, for example a line break (
) or an image () or meta tags. Those can be written just like before or in XHTML-Syntax
indicating that the element is opened and then closed/finished by itself - there will not be a closing tag for it later on.

Main point speaking for XHTML (HTML+XML) is that it is really well structured. Cf. http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_xhtml.asp

Regards

Nico

I did a migration in December 2014. The old domain was <old_brand>.TLD . It moved completely to magazine.<new_brand>.TLD which was previously empty - for non-SEO reasons mostly. (So no moving via WMT).</new_brand></old_brand>

Results was a somewhat reduced traffic for the first ~1 month or so. Afterwards the rankings transferred well to the new page. So, yeah - it definitely does help rank up and relatively fast. Note: I redirected each article to its equivalent - the structure was not changed in any noteworthy way, just the (sub-)domain. The old domain was ~11 months old, had close to 4-digit traffic per day and had hardly any external links at that point - those it had were set without request.

What I find funny: the URLs of the old domain are STILL within google's index, despite 301-redirecting to the new domain.

Nico

I am wondering what exactly you mean by "not considered for SEO"?

For many purposes, subdomains are considered as independent domains. If they are excellent landing pages for a specific search, I see no reason to exclude them from appearing in organic search; else a noindex might be wise. But I cannot really imagine a good page deserving that, assuming linking to your regular page and no cannibalisation.

In general I would slap on the basics - proper description, title, maybe social media data and be done with it unless I have a really good reason to assume they are actively harmful somehow.

Regards

Nico

There has even been a Google Webmaster Guidelines Update in February 2016 which states

"Limit the number of links on a page to a reasonable number (a few thousand at most)."  (Source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en)

So I really would not bother too much, especially not in a navigation - it often makes lots of sense to have lots of links there. (For example I have several alphabetical selections available on hover from main categories. It would not make sense to remove them just to have fewer links.)

More links are of course not always better - consider what the user is likely to expect/need in navigation etc. Of course, more links mean that the relative importance of each link decreases; but google is able to identify navigation and repeating elements that appear on every page. I'd assume that they treat them different to main-content links. Because, well, they feel a lot different.

Regards

Nico

You cannot set en-be in any way? This would be correct for targeting "people with English settings in Belgium" or "English content for users in Belgium", regardless whether it is in the ISO standard or not. Cf. Google's help document: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077

Personally I'd use Screaming Frog for this. The URLs for prev/next elements can be found in the "Directives" tab and can be exported to excel for easy comparison.

Regards,

Nico

... ah, too slow and essentially same answer

Actually, you have just one option to not index them - the second one. The first will, still keep them in index if google can find them. I currently have roughly 27k URLs indexed that were blocked via robots.txt from the start (generated with a time-based parameter; yeah: ouch.).

Those results do not usually appear in "normal" search but can be forced (currently you may try site:grimoires.de inurl:fakechecknr and showing skipped results to see the effect of that). So basically I'd advise against using robots.txt - it does not prevent indexing, only the visiting/reading of that page.

Regards

Nico

I don' think Martijn's statement is quite correct as I have made different experiences in an accidental experiment. Crawling is not the same as indexing. Google will put pages it cannot crawl into the index ... and they will stay there unless removed somehow. They will probably only show up for specific searches, though

In September 2015 I catapulted a website from ~3.000 to 130.000 indexed pages (roughly). 127.000 were essentially canonicalised duplicates (yes, it did make sense) but also blocked by robots.txt - but put into the index nonetheless. The problem was a dynamically generated parameter, always different, always blocked by robots.

The title was equal to the link text; the description became "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more." (If Google cannot crawl a URL  Google will usually take titles from links pointing to that URL). No sign of disappearing. In fact, Google was happy to add more and more to its index ...

At the start of December 2015 I removed the robots.txt block - Google could now read the canonicals or noindex on the URLs ... the pages only began dropping out, slowly and in bunches of a few thousand in March 2016 - probably due to the very low relevancy and crawl budget assigned to them. Right now there are still about 24.000 pages in the index.

So my answer would be: No - disabling crawling in the robots.txt will NOT remove a page from the index. For that you need to noindex them (which sometimes also works if done in robots.txt, I've heard). Disallowing URLs in the robots.txt will very likely drop pages to the end of useful results, though, as Andy described. (I don't know if this has any influence on the general evaluation of the site as a whole; I'd guess not.)

Regards

Nico