Welcome to the Q&A Forum

We are planning a series of large site migrations over the next 12-18 months, moving from one platform to another. It's likely the first will be completed by around Aug this year, with the process running until the back end of 2018. The sites are currently on http, and the plan is to first of all migrate all sites to https in the next couple of months. The concern is that, due to the http>https 301 redirects that will be in place, are we putting ourselves at unnecessary risk by effectively carrying out 2 migrations in the space of a year (in terms of loss of potential authority caused by redirects)? Would we be better to wait, and implement https at point of platform migration instead? Thoughts appreciated.

I have two live websites, which have both been live for over 10 years, so we have plenty of backlinks to both...domain1.com & domain2.com. Domain 1 and all urls is being merged into domain2.com. So 301 redirects will be setup for every page of the site....domain1.com/abc-1234/ to > domain2.com/abc-1234/ In Google analytics for domain2.com we want to be able to see which visits we have received as a result of a redirect from domain1.com. It is possible to see these visits that come in via organic, referrals and social etc, as those will come to us with the referral as domain1.com. However, with direct traffic, i.e. if someone types domain1.com into their search bar, these visits will be assigned as direct and we are not able to tell in GA if those users have typed in domain2.com, or domain1.com to get to our webpage. There are some suggestions in forums of adding utm_source tracking to all redirects (and add canonicals to those urls pointing to the non utm_source version), but my concern is that Google is going to have to go through one extra step to reach the page on the redirected domain. So without the utm source code Google will follow this route
domain1.com/123/ to domain2.com/123/ With the utm source code Google will follow this route
domain.com/123/ to domain2.com/123/?utm_source... then see's canonical, so moves to domain2.com/123/ So essentially I am giving Google one extra step to follow before it gets to the equivalent page on the new site. Is this an issue, and/or are there any other ways to track this redirection without adding extra parameters to the url?

Hi, We seem to have a slightly odd issue. We noticed that a number of our location category pages were slipping off 1 page, and onto page 2 in our niche. On inspection, we noticed that our Arizona page had started ranking in place of a number of other location pages - Cali, Idaho, NJ etc. Weirdly, the pages they had replaced were no longer indexed, and would remain so, despite being fetched, tweeted etc. One test was to see when the dropped out pages had been last crawled, or at least cached. When conducting the 'cache:domain.com/category/location' on these pages, we were getting 301 redirected to, you guessed it, the Arizona page. Very odd. However, the dropped out pages were serving 200 OK when run through header checker tools, screaming frog etc. On the face of it, it would seem Googlebot is getting redirected when it is hitting a number of our key location pages, but users are not. Has anyone experienced anything like this? The theming of the pages are quite different in terms of content, meta etc. Thanks.

I've been wondering for a while now, how Google treats internal duplicate content within classified sites. It's quite a big issue, with customers creating their ads twice.. I'd guess to avoid the price of renewing, or perhaps to put themselves back to the top of the results. Out of 10,000 pages crawled and tested, 250 (2.5%) were duplicate adverts. Similarly, in terms of the search results pages, where the site structure allows the same advert(s) to appear under several unique URLs. A prime example would be in this example.  Notice, on this page we have already filtered down to 1 result, but the left hand side filters all return that same 1 advert. Using tools like Siteliner and Moz Analytics just highlights these as urgent high priority issues, but I've always been sceptical. On a large scale, would this count as Panda food in your opinion, or does Google understand the nature of classifieds is different, and treat it as such? Appreciate thoughts. Thanks.

I know that e-commerce sites usually have SSL certificates on their payment pages. A site I have come across is using has the https: prefix to every page on their site. I'm just wondering if this will make any difference to the site in the eyes of Search Engines, and whether it could effect the rankings of the site?

Hi guys, Just a simple one really. Our in house company has seen a significant improvement in rankings and traffic over the weekend period for 4-5 classified niche sites. However, so far there seems to be little out there in the blogosphere. I did find this article by Barry Schwartz, and it seems some on WMW agree: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-update-possible-17065.html. Has anyone else seen signs of an algorithm update around the 14th July? Cheers. (UK)

Hi Guys, I am relaunching one of my sites, and one of the categories has 746 links on it due to a list of boating manufactures. Ideally I need to cut this down - anyone got any tips on how I can do this without losing the user experience but still allowing google to crawl all the manufactures? Cheers

Hi All, I have seen a increase of direct traffic from hostname amazon.com inc. This only happened on one day. Any ideas what/why it is? Thanks

HI all, I need some advice about displaying content in different languages. Currently I 301 to the correct locale based on IP. e.g. German 301s from site.com to site.com/de En 301s from site.com to site.com/en Is this the best way or would it just be better to change the content based on browser and keep the URL the same? I have href="/hr" hreflang="hr" rel="alternate" /> tags implemented for all locales on site Thanks

We're looking to rank for competitor brand terms and have created competitor brand pages for some of our main competitors. My question is where would be most effective to place these pages on our site? Also, would this be classed as grey hat?

We are currently coming towards the end of migrating one of our retail sites over to magento. To our horror, we find out today that some pages are already being indexed by Google, and we have started receiving orders through new site. Do you have any suggestions for what may have caused this? Or similarly, what the best solution would be to de-index ourselves? We most recently excluded anything with a certain parameter from robots.txt - could this being implemented incorrectly have caused this issue? Thanks

We are currently coming towards the end of a site migration, and are at the final stage of testing redirects etc. However, to our horror we've just discovered Google has started indexing the new site. Any ideas on how this could have happened? I have most recently asked for robots.txt to exclude anything with a certain parameter in URL. Is there a chance this, wrongly implemented, could have caused this?

Hi Everyone. When implementing rel next and prev on pagination pages, should I make the pagination links themselves no followed? Have seen people saying yes and no so just want a final answer! Thanks

Hi, One of our sites got hit with malware in November. We cleaned it up and sent a reconsideration request and no malware warnings are in WMT anymore. We still haven't seen an improvement in rankings even though people say it can take up to 90days? Organic traffic is down 40% and still dropping. Any advice? Thanks

When running a classified site, what is best practice for what to do with expired ads?  Should they stay on the site with a sold stamp perhaps? Or should they be moved to an archive subdomain, with the original URL 301 redirecting to the new archive ad? I'm kinda thinking the second option but I suppose the only issue with this is you would have to have a consistent flow of new ads on the site to prevent categories from getting too thin. Thoughts on this and any other/better solutions would be much appreciated. Thanks.

We're building a new website platform and are using Ajax as the method for allowing users to select from filters. We want to dynamically insert elements into the URL as the filters are selected so that search engines will index multiple combinations of filters. We're struggling to see how this is possible using symfony framework. We've used www.gizmodo.com as an example of how to achieve SEO and user-friendly URLs but this is only an example of achieving this for static content. We would prefer to go down a route that didn't involve hashbangs if possible. Does anyone have any experience using hashbangs and how it affected their site? Any advice on the above would be gratefully received.

It seems Google's Panda update is targetting low quality sites with little unique content (I know there's more to it than that).  It makes sense that they may want to do this but what about classified sites.  They may use some scraped content as well as unique ads, and the ads may lack content as they rely on the users writing the ads.  However, they are helpful to the people that use classifieds. Because of these factors, these sites are suffering with the release of the latest Panda update. Any advice for classified sites and how they can combat the rankings drops???