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Faster load time is questionable - its only faster cause it take less code to load but it would take a looooot to switching from table to div in order to see a significant difference in load time. Removing any image would probably save more load time.

UX-wise... you should test your website in several browsers and devices, in addition to fetching/rendering as google. If everything looks good and is easy to navigate, wouldn't worry about it.

With that in mind, especially since you wouldn't expect to see organic fluctuations, is it worth investing in recoding a whole website from tables to divs? There are probably many better ways to spend that budget.

I would keep the site in tables until you are ready for a website redesign.. at which point you should make sure it uses divs.

Long as the site loads fine in all browsers (and loads fine for googlebot - check GWT fetch & render) then it shouldn't really affect SEO.

Its just good practice to use divs and stylesheets over tables. Tables have their uses but for an entire site layout, there are better solutions.

http://offonhols.com/deals/newdealtitle/2003

Yep. 301 = permanent redirect = this page used to be here but not moved to this new location so lets pretend its always been this way (and transfer any authority to it).

Yep, seems right. I'd say you don't have enough authority yet to rank for a generic term. You would have to be #1 for "zing company" first i believe. But you are on the right path... just need to build more brand awareness and let google better learn the association between "zing" and your company.

My guess is that once you reach a certain "authority", you should see your rankings jump for "zing".

Yep, it would be essentially transferring links from one page to another. If the page with links aren't producing anything, feel free to 301 them to related-producing pages, or rework those pages to convert better.

Its a very generic term that actually has a dictionary definition. On top of that, there are dozens of other brands that use the same name. Google is getting a lot of feedback coming in for the term "Zing" so it will be difficult to rank #1. If you play your cards right, you will probably get it in NZ first. You should track brand association by genericizing your keywords and looking for improvement. e.g. "zing short term loans" -> "zing loans" -> "zing company nz" ->  "zing nz" -> "zing company" -> "zing"

How to establish your brand:

• Social media presence. go to www.knowem.com and create profiles for your brand on as many of these sites as possible, linking back to your company website. Be sure to load up a bunch of company info to each social media property and do some interlinking.
• Create a wikipedia page. This is one of the sources that Google uses in it's knowledge graph and to judge entity relationship signals.
• Create entities + relationships on freebase.com
• Create a google+ brand page and link up with publisher markup

Ultimately, you are going to have to convince google that when a visitor seaches for "zing", they are actually looking for your company.

p.s. are these payday loans?

Yep. You don't add it per link though, its just a tag you add within the section of the page.

See more info at http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html

A client had their site marked up via the highlighter tool and the snippets didn't appear in search. I double checked and it looked like they did everything correct.

I manually edited the themes to hardcode the schema and they started appearing in SERPs within the week.

yep (and those two are equivalent).

In general... tech and young/trend target markets use no www.

For older crowd, use www.

Have experience with both, found using actual schema tags into the HTML code is better for getting the snippets into search results.

301 redirect all of those (plus any /index.html url versions) to just 1 url. Which one? Base it off MOZ page authority.

Both is the way to go. Silos are essentially structuring your pages so that per topic, there is 1 master article and multiple supporting articles that link back to the master article. The topic only links to pages relevant to the topic and not other sections of the site.

You can use breadcrumbs in conjunction with a silo as the structure is suitable for them.

With that code, Google won't index any pages within that particular category.

Unfortunately, without a specific folder pattern, you cannot block via robots.txt

Wordpress Admin > Posts > Categories > Edit the category you want to noindex > Set "always noindex" for "Noindex this category" box

EDIT: looks like that just noindexes the actual category page.

Here is a workaround I found...

1. Find the category ID (WP Admin > Posts > Categories > Edit the category you want to noindex > look at URL for the tag_ID # (this is the category ID))

2. Edit your theme header and include:

<?php if (is_single() && in_category(array(###)))  { 
echo '';
} ?>

where ### is the category ID

In this case, tab = link styled like a tab using ul/li. nothing is hidden, just poor semantics for those in the industry. (i initially thought it was the same thing and was gonna link to one of the "content in hidden tabs gets less credit" posts that have been going around the past few days)

The overall value of the page increases.

1. You have more highly relevant content added to the page which improves the number of long tail keywords the page will rank for as well as improve the relevancy score for all "This Is Our Youth" related terms.

From a user perspective, if I wanted to see a show, I'd want to know who the cast is, see a video trailer/review and get venue info.

2. You keep the authority on that page instead of splitting off to several other subpages. This means more ranking power stays on the single page and it will rank better overall.

In TheaterMania's case, each tab is a link to another page, not hidden divs.

2-sided coin.

If you make it a single page, you will probably rank better for "This Is Our Youth" keywords overall.

However, if there is significant keyword traffic volume for "This Is Our Youth Videos" and "This Is Our Youth Cast", you might get better ranking by developing each of these pages out further (more content).

As they stand now, I recommend moving all the content onto one single page and make the tabbed navigation just scroll down to the appropriate part of the page.

My guess is that the port number version of the URL is what will start appearing in SERPs.

https://www.google.com/search?q=inurl:%22:8080%22

I would remove the canonical tag if possible.

Quality UGC - comments, threads, reviews, etc.

This means that the site 1) gets REAL traffic (cause its hard to fake) 2) impresses visitors enough so that they take the time to engage with the content (which means the site is high quality).

Everything else can be faked and you wouldn't catch it in 10 seconds.

1. Link to it
2. Add it to sitemap
3. Compress it and make it load faster

My guess is that the file size is too large. Why not turn it into an HTML page? Or several pages?

/index.html should 301 redirect to the root domain (www.example.com/index.html and example.com/index.html should redirect to www.example.com)

For multilingual, you will need to set up hreflang for each language via tags or sitemap. Check out https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en for more info.

shouldn't hurt your rankings, only help. might see a temporary dip as google updates its index.

make sure the www. is the more authoritative version of your site by check PA/DA on opensiteexplorer

Yep.

Are you saying you have two mobile sites? One that loads on the desktop url based on UA and one that is located in the /m/ folder?

If so, 301 redirect from /m/ to new mobile urls (which would be same as desktop urls).

If I misunderstood, a specific example would be helpful.

Follow is better than nofollow but both are good. What's more important is the relevance and authority of the site you are getting your link from.

Links should point to the most relevant page on your site given the context of the link. In general, a majority of your links should be pointing at your homepage with your brand name.

Not sure what the "fullsite=true" for distinguishing mobile vs desktop is about.. can't you link to an article that describes this?

As far as I know, Google cannot understand that. See Google's official suggestions for mobile websites here - https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/details

What have you been doing the past couple of months? Disavowing a lot of links won't bring back the authority you used to have before you were hit with the penalty, so don't expect to bounce back to your old rankings.

Here is what you should be doing:

• Create additional high quality, unique, topic relevant content that uses authoritative sources and displays the information in a way that is easy to understand and easy to share.
• Find outlets that would be interested in the new high quality content and politely present them with it in a way that would give them value.
• Rinse and repeat

Do that for a few months and let me know if you are still stuck.

I would set sitewide canonicals from both versions to the .com site. I wouldn't block any pages since people might still stumble and link back to the .us version.

I'm not positive about google auto-checking https versions of websites without any direction but it could be plausible. I know a common way that Google finds https urls is by going to the "My Account" or "My Cart" page which is https, which then changes any relative URLs from http to https, go G re-crawls all of those. Maybe that's what is happening on your end?

If they are the same model/specs but only color/band changes, it should be 1 product page with multiple options.

So you'd have the mens-rolex-air-king-stainless-steel-date-watch page and have different dropdown options for the dial (blue, silver), options for the band (stainless steel, leather)

In the actual category page, I would still display each version of the watch but link to the same page with a variable so that the correct options are preselected. Then be sure to set a canonical on the product page to avoid any duplicate content issues.

Looks like it worked.. all the newly cached pages don't have those breadcrumbs. To speed up the process, I'd resubmit your sitemaps.

Search engines can't tell the difference so all good.

Cool cool. No breadcrumb code but it still shows up. My guess is that it assumes the » implies a breadcrumb. Try changing that to something else... | or > ... and see if it goes away.

Do they have authority? If not, feel free to 404 or 301 redirect to new homepage.

If yes, that might affect ranking of the sites that they currently link to.

From that screenshot, looks like you have a G+ page associated with your website that lists all of that info.

Your best bet would be to disassociate your URL from this page https://plus.google.com/102542416695217785100/

Honestly, you are better off comparing other metrics pre/post redesign - most importantly bounce rates and conversions. If you bounce rate decreased + conversions increased, page speed report doesn't really matter.

Run a report via pingdom + gtmetrix on the new site and apply as many page speed improvements as you can.

That is the way breadcrumbs function. Those links are the categories of the Aruba page. So if you make another page (e.g. Aruba climate) as a subpage of Aruba, you can add that category to the url and you'll see the Aruba breadcrumb (but not 'Climate').

Sounds like its picking up breadcrumbs and displaying those instead. Care to share the URL?

Check out this guide - does a great job of explaining.

Basically, go to create a new page, G will suggest similar listings, when you try to claim an already verified listing, it will offer to send an email to whoever verified it to request ownership.

If you don't get any response within 2 weeks, you should call Google support and explain.

Look into plugins that set up canonicals for Magento and that should fix any dupe content issue.

My guess is that it is generating session variables for all visitors from some tracking addon.

I see his concern but think it may be unwarranted. If you are going to be getting rid of the microsites, then the 301 redirect would be the way to go to conserve all of the authority you built to them. Unless the microsites were penalized, you should be fine.

Another alternative is to leave the microsites up, copy the content over to your site and set up canonicals pointing to the new location of the content. This would transfer over the authority while keeping the microsites live.

Google has more and better servers and a much larger index than Moz/OSE.

If you want to get a better picture of a website's backlinks, run reports from several backlink tools (OSE, ahrefs, majestic, webmeup, gwt)

Yes, you should fix the duplicate/copied content on the blog. Some options:

• Remove the pages
• noindex the pages
• Rewrite the content
• Add canonical link to original articles

There could be other things affecting the penalty but fixing this seems like a good place to start.

So if you don't want those links crawled, add rel="nofollow" to the <a>tag. Noindexing the pages will still allow crawlers to follow the links (but won't index what they find). </a>

<a>All of the articles should have canonicals set up to index the file version of each page.

RE: using random post plugins... why random and not related posts? Related posts would have readers more like to click through to another article and improves the overall relevance of the page for SEO. I'd look into a plugin that links directly to a random or relevant post instead of going through an intermediary link.</a>

"if someone visits fullcompanyname.com/products/my-favorite-product, it will still work without having to setup 301 redirects." -- what do you mean it will work? Where are your parking the domain? Do you mean domain masking it over the compname.com domain?

I recommend doing individual 301 redirects for the top content pages then doing bulk 301 to a relevant category or homepage for the rest. I would also recommend transferring all content from fullcompanyname.com to compname.com as it'd be a waste to just get rid of it.

I think you should point links to http://www.rentcollegepads.com/marquette and "pre-sell" visitors to the map page.

Maybe you can add "hot deals" to the page to give even more direction for visitors.

Once you have all the 301 redirects set up, create a sitemap with all of the old urls and submit that. Google will crawl them and see that they are now 301 redirects and process the data faster. then delete the sitemap.

You should also have a canonical tag on the article pages with the new/current link that should be indexed.

"knowing that our inbound link rarely link to the actual articles" --> not sure I follow.

In general, your rankings should bounce back once google picks up on all of the fixes.