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The question that isn't being asked here is if rebranding to establish a brand is the better play.  As you are finding out, when you register domains and build out sites determined by your offering/product your site is a bit limited.   So why not reconsider the rebrand with a new domain that doesn't put you in this situation again.  Then you'll of course want to migrate the appropriate content add the 301 redirects etc.

Good Luck

While I don't see much of an issue of pointing them all to the new server, why not have a global 301 redirect implemented from your registrar?  That way you can bypass even needing to set up each domain within your server configs.

This is a great question.  You will likely get a few different opinions as well.  I for one am a fan of using the Google Text Cache as my primary source to determine if something is crawlable.  However, I do tend to support my hypothesis with the fetch and render tool as well.

Screaming Frog recently launched an update to their toolset which includes rendering.  Consider downloading and seeing how their toolset displays your pages content.  It can be another good source for validating if everything is crawlable.

Nick

Good to hear no performance issue. Obviously that is priority number one.   Definitely don't sweat the render.  You might want to refetch and see how it looks. also give it shot with mobile fetch to see if you get anything different.

A lot of us are chasing the position zero snippet.  I didn't look at your site closely but i would start by making sure that every single item (as appropriate) is marked up with schema.org.  That will put you closer to your goal

Hi Christian, my apologies, i should have noted that.  The CSS does not render in the text cache version.  The value though is that you can see if something is crawlable/displaying properly.  So for instance, if you looked at that cached version and didnt see any of the content on your page, you know you have something stopping the search engines from properly crawaling and indexing the page.

edit. noticing when looking at the link that the full version doesn't show the CSS either. That's a bit weird.  I wouldn't worry about it too much as it seems other pages on your site are rendering properly in the full version.

are you seeing any performance issues with the page or is the concern originally due to just the fact that grey box was displaying in the search/render feature of console?

Without knowing the URL its really difficult to audit this situation.  My first thought is to ask if you have a pop up that loads when a user comes to your page.  Google could be rendering the popup without its content.  To your point the content on the page is still shown but only behind the popup.

When you look at the actual text cache of the page are you seeing the actual text of the page?  If this is the case I would rely on this more than the rendered version.  Honestly, it could be multiple things but without the URL it really is nearly impossible to tell you why.

I'm assuming by link label you are referring to anchor text?  My first question is if both pages your linking to are both equally relevant to the anchor text your using?  For isntance, if your using the anchor text "red dresses" do both pages your linking to offer "red dresses"?

Second question, assuming the answer to question one is "yes".  Why do you have two extremely similar pages on your site? Is there an opportunity for you to combine both pages so that you can have one super relevant and authoritative page? Or maybe there is a distinguisher between both pages, for instance, plus size vs core red dresses.  If the latter is true, consider editing your anchor text to read "plus size red dresses" for the core page and then just "red dresses" for the core page.

Best practice suggests you would want to avoid sending similar ranking singals to two pages (especially if their duplicate or near duplicate).  Either look to combine the two pages or consider more descriptive anchor text for each link on the page.

Hope this helps!

If your an established business/brand the odd-ball non thematically relevant content is just going to be weird and could have negative effects on your brand reputation - regardless of the quality of content.

While what your saying does indeed work for increasing domain authority - it's not something I would suggest doing for a long lasting business.  I bet you could create equally if not better content within your niche that customers/users in your space would find 10x more valuable then your on-off content for a few unrelated links.

If this is good content why not host on your site and use the money from syndication to promote it via Facebook ads or another medium targeting valuable customers?

I'd stay clear of all article directories.

Not worth your time - especially if your doing it soley for the value of the link. Can't see how it would be helpful from a referral traffic standpoint either.

Your time is best off doing other tasks.

Not worth your time - especially if your doing it soley for the value of the link. Can't see how it would be helpful from a referral traffic standpoint either.

Your time is best off doing other tasks.

I'm assuming by link label you are referring to anchor text?  My first question is if both pages your linking to are both equally relevant to the anchor text your using?  For isntance, if your using the anchor text "red dresses" do both pages your linking to offer "red dresses"?

Second question, assuming the answer to question one is "yes".  Why do you have two extremely similar pages on your site? Is there an opportunity for you to combine both pages so that you can have one super relevant and authoritative page? Or maybe there is a distinguisher between both pages, for instance, plus size vs core red dresses.  If the latter is true, consider editing your anchor text to read "plus size red dresses" for the core page and then just "red dresses" for the core page.

Best practice suggests you would want to avoid sending similar ranking singals to two pages (especially if their duplicate or near duplicate).  Either look to combine the two pages or consider more descriptive anchor text for each link on the page.

Hope this helps!

Assuming the mobile site is a "m." make sure your using the rel=alternate tag to tell google the different versions.

If your an established business/brand the odd-ball non thematically relevant content is just going to be weird and could have negative effects on your brand reputation - regardless of the quality of content.

While what your saying does indeed work for increasing domain authority - it's not something I would suggest doing for a long lasting business.  I bet you could create equally if not better content within your niche that customers/users in your space would find 10x more valuable then your on-off content for a few unrelated links.

Hi Mark,

You could use a canonical tag on the shortcut URL but what I would really suggest you do is redirect the shortcut with a tracking parameter.  This way all your traffic stays on your main site but you can still track your marketing efforts.

example:  ashortcut.com --> 301 redirects --> a.com/newslettersignup?ashortscut.com

just make sure that the a.com/newslettersignup URL self canonicals so that any parameter based URLs don't get indexed as duplicate content.

Good to hear no performance issue. Obviously that is priority number one.   Definitely don't sweat the render.  You might want to refetch and see how it looks. also give it shot with mobile fetch to see if you get anything different.

A lot of us are chasing the position zero snippet.  I didn't look at your site closely but i would start by making sure that every single item (as appropriate) is marked up with schema.org.  That will put you closer to your goal

Without knowing the URL its really difficult to audit this situation.  My first thought is to ask if you have a pop up that loads when a user comes to your page.  Google could be rendering the popup without its content.  To your point the content on the page is still shown but only behind the popup.

When you look at the actual text cache of the page are you seeing the actual text of the page?  If this is the case I would rely on this more than the rendered version.  Honestly, it could be multiple things but without the URL it really is nearly impossible to tell you why.

Hi Christian, my apologies, i should have noted that.  The CSS does not render in the text cache version.  The value though is that you can see if something is crawlable/displaying properly.  So for instance, if you looked at that cached version and didnt see any of the content on your page, you know you have something stopping the search engines from properly crawaling and indexing the page.

edit. noticing when looking at the link that the full version doesn't show the CSS either. That's a bit weird.  I wouldn't worry about it too much as it seems other pages on your site are rendering properly in the full version.

are you seeing any performance issues with the page or is the concern originally due to just the fact that grey box was displaying in the search/render feature of console?