Hi Michael. Sites can freely employ a NOINDEX / FOLLOW on low quality content pages or other non-critical pages. It's fairly trivial and easy to change work that can be handled in-house. Obviously other things like high quality content, linking, and freshness will go much farther in terms of overall strategy, this technique is valid.  See: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/79812.  Cheers!

Hi Danny. Most people typically deal with these by having them NOINDEXed instead of redirecting them. In that case, you'll allow them to be spidered by Google (follow) but not indexed (noindex). This should be editable within Wordpress or in a plugin such as Yoast's. That way your users can still quickly read through the archives authored by yourself, but your 'about me' page will have a better chance of ranking instead.

You might also look into your backlinks to the author archive and see if you can contact anyone that has linked there instead of your 'about me' page asking them to change. In that process you'll probably come across some suggestions on how to improve your about me page as well so it is more likely to gain inbound links moving forward.  Cheers!

I see. One thing that might help you with the customer is looking at the Analytics and highlighting the performance of the low quality pages. If they're never being seen you could make the case for getting the key information from those pages, adding it to the better pages, and redirecting.  Cheers!

In general it's a best practice to noindex the thank you pages as people landing on them from outside of your conversion funnel will trigger false goal completions. No following them is fine as well since they're a low value content wise, but ideally you want to make them as hard to stumble upon as possible. It's a good idea to remove them from the sitemap too if they've propagated there.  Cheers!

Right. That's due to updating after the Open Site Explorer update. Once Moz recrawls your site it will apply the changes and you'll see the numbers as they were previously.  It sounds like you've made these changes VERY recently. Any redirection of pages (even if they're on the same domain) take a bit of time to be fully recognized by search engines and Moz's OSE.

Right. I get that they don't exist on your site currently, but when they did Google indexed them so they exist in some form within Google, but Google had never been told they had permanently moved (via 301). The good news is that you don't have to resurrect the entire site. You can simply modify the appropriate file (htaccess if you're on Apache, IIS if Window's server) and make certain that Google knows any page it's looking for at devsite.yoursite.com is now at www.correcturl.com.  Cheers!

Hi Angelos. I agree. Having a 301 redirect that's always in place for going to /en is a bit redundant. If /en is the default option the default should be the root.

Other redirection should be handled via 302 to the various languages with all the proper href-lang and alternate attributes. Per Google, "For language/country selectors or auto-redirecting homepages, you should add an annotation for the hreflang value "x-default" as well: "  Cheers!

Hello. You can check the Submitted vs Indexed count within Search Console to see whether or not your regenerated sitemap is being picked up already, but resubmitting a sitemap isn't an issue, and fairly easy to do, per Google:

Resubmit your sitemap

1. Open the Sitemaps report
2. Select the sitemap(s) you want to resubmit from the table
3. Click the Resubmit sitemap button.

You can also resubmit a sitemap by sending an HTTP GET request to the following URL, specifying your own sitemap URL: http://google.com/ping?sitemap=http://www.example.com/my_sitemap.xml

Via: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/183669  Also from a FAQ in the Webmasters blog they state that, "Google does not penalize you for submitting a Sitemap."

I think that's an excellent way to cover some of the conversion factors for people reading about the benefits of your software. Are there channel / vertical markers within your case studies as well? For example: X Company in the Public Sector increases compliance by Y%... If so, I'd work on including some of those factors that could help drive search if applicable: company type, vertical, channel, problem type solved, and so on.