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can you provide us with a url, it would be useful in this case.

Something to note would be what I consider as the "bedding down" period of a new site, whether 100% new or just a website refresh or a wholesale a website was here and now here is a different one. It refers to the 1 or 2 months following go live (it is similar tto the sandbox theory) where Google doesn't totally know whether to trust a site or not and nor has it indexed every new url yet.

You've done all the right things, you just need to wait and check next month - results won't be instant with this kind of thing ... remember SEO is a Journey and Not a Destination.

The base url http://www.thegreatgiftcompany.com/categories/categories_travel?sort=name_asc&searchterm=&page=1&layout=table is indexed by Google - what is evident is that the url would be classes as having too many variables to be indexed correctly. If it's a big issue just add it to robots.txt but i don't think its a big issue.

Also for clarity canonicals should be absolute and not relative, this prevents all kinds of issues.

Ok a few things here to talk about.

PA won't instantly move across, just as "page rank" and other ranking factors wouldn't. What would happen though is that a large portion of the link worth from the old urls would move the the new ones - though this raises the question... is the new website structure sat on top of old urls which are redirected to the new site or old site? ... if the first great if the later move them to the new urls and slowly watch PA move across.

In terms of images being indexed, they will remain in the index and searchable for sometime after deletion, also when they try to send someone across to the page with it on - if you've 301'd it correctly it will be a link to the new site and product anyhow and also Google will find that image again to index. (hope that makes sense).

In all honesty you set up sound a little odd, I would suggest making the move sooner rather than later to ensure you don't get a duplicate content issue too.

As tom says 404 errors are not the end of the world.

if you are concerned then as long as the relative urls have remained the same and the root directory is all that has changes a 301 in bulk should work, though if you've changed categories or something it may not work so well as a single entity and 100 would be the way to go.

Something that you should do, if you've not already, is within webmaster tools make sure you tell Google you've changed your url (configuration > change address) - it also has a mini guide on the steps you should be taking, including to register your new domain on webmaster tools.

But again, as tom says, if it's not destroying the user experience and isn't a huge annoyance for visitors don't worry too much about it.

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Just for your reference a full url redirect (aka changing say abc.com to abc.net - moving all directories and urls in one go) would look like

RedirectMatch 301 ^(.*)$ http://www.abc.net

I think what we are all trying to say is... as always with SEO ...

Quality Trumps Quantity

In addition to what Moosa has said I would advice you look at historical rankings and see when you were hit and compare this with recent Google updates to see if you have been hit by an update - that sounds whats most likely happened here.

I'd also advise doing a "url" search on google and checking your site appears, if so it's indexed and your issue is not indexation.

Hi There

I agree with Matt but would go one further and say also take a look at your title tag AND look at implementing things like opengraph on your site - you haven't mentioned social media but it could be a great thing to dip into.

Something we found when optimising a similar site for one of our clients is that Rich Snippets do work quite well - they seem to drive forward terms such as the car model name and brand names more than anything - it's also probably a safe bet that relatively few of your competitors use it and so worth getting ahead with.

cheers

I am of the belief it is bad to be "too" Google-centric. Many people have found that out with Panda, Penguin and Venice in recent years - all eggs in one basket and after one update you are out for the count (if you we're naughty of course).

Anyway, That aside I enjoy looking at are reminding myself about Google Algo Updates using the SEOMoz Google Change Log (a bit like Gina Tripani's change log on This Week in Google, but only more Algo focused) - http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change

So, my question - is there a version of Bing somewhere out there?

yeh! - sleep whats that?

in that case try to optimise things like the page titles to the country and the description if you can amend that somehow ... maybe slightly change the way urls are output (one with brand name one without) that other thing you could do is have microformats on the site you are preferring over the other.

Something I did find once a while back is that if you have 2 very similiar sites and you optimise in different ways (eg with microformats above) then you can in some ways get an advantage over competitors by blocking listings.

Hope that helps - feel free to message me more detail such as urls and i can take a look and see what else i can advise.

I would vote for their own urls if you are selling goods. That said it sounds like they would want to be related anyway and so having .com/blog1 .com/blog2 maybe of use (it can be changed later with jiggery pokery of multisite - though don't ask me how, I just know it can be done and is done by the likes of wpengine - start as subdomain and paymore to have a custom url in use)

this said if you want them to repeat the process having them set up their own site would mean they know how to in the future

it's hard to really decide, it depends on what you are wanting to do with the blogs at the end of it.

If its for businesses they should be alone

If its just as hobbies or something like that then together would work.

it's a little tricky to answer the question for a few reasons - but first there is a the question of could you not buy the .com and target both from the one site - and avoid this issue?

Other than that it maybe worth considering some mixing and twisting of content in someways as well as using rel=can - Google doesn't always see dupe product descriptions across sites as dupe content, if they did no page with a manufacturers description would rank - this translates to "if you can write your own great! if you can rewrite a bit or twist it - ok ... if you can't don't loose sleep and optimise elsewhere like hell!"

Hope that helps - though could just through up more questions

mmm odd

can you message me the urls and i will take a look and see if i can see an issue

author = person

publisher = person or place

• to your other question using the authoring "script" is an addon / seo and so would likely improve things in general but not doing it wont mean you get marked down (you just wont be marked up). The other thing to think about is linking to a persons profile ensure they list themselves within G+ as a contributor to your site (this helps activate the profile pics in search and lets google know you site is trustworthy, assuming that person is).

in GWT ensure you have removed the directory / subdomain from listings / index. (under optimisation > remove urls).

May take a week to kick in but if your 301s are working and robots is in place it will work.

In addition to these ensure you are using canonical tags pointing the the live location not dev.

ah so you want regular expressions ?

im confused - if regular expressions its not really mass writing - that would be as i described

as i say only the two options / well three including robots.txt to not index the page

both in csv?

first col = redirect 301

second col = old url (find and replace domain url with a space - remove the url)

third col = new url

save as Text (ms-dos) - jobs a good en

correction the meta tag required index instructions too

NOINDEX would prevent search from seeing that page and nofollow the links - 

page wide with the meta tag

not a perfect solution i know but its that or individually - i believe

did you tell GWT you were changing url?

that is correct

as EGOL says approach them, and also let them find you. Also be selective

I have to agree in questioning whether testimonials belong in a knowledge centre and video area... unless they are videos ... maybe worth jumping them out into a testimonials section - nice and clean

which subdomain are you talking about?

are there a number of sub-domains?

also is there anything odd about the setup they use, do they redirect from "random" places to subdomains etc....

it could be an issue if the SD is www. that links are going to non-www. and so if that isn't 301's from one to another it can cause an issue

Also something to consider is that you don't need to re-submit the sitemap ever whilst your sitemap is in the same location and has the same title it always did. Google will on a regular basis fetch that sitemap without resubmitting.

I would say update the sitemap if you've a new page or deleted it - but its not a huge issue really if you are out by a day or 14 - unless your site is very busy with lots of visitors it's not that important to google, also I find they prefer natural crawling and finding than being told there is one new page - this said a whole section change is definitely worth updating it.

long url ... could be seen as over optimisation / manipulation

also went to that page and nothing was found / out of stock - no description

it also reads like a bog standard manufacturer description that other sites would also use and so is duplicate content in some ways (i am looking at other lawnmowers)

the list in the content is not a list it's a bunch of images and text?

mega menu = lots and lots of links - could be bad

not really much to go on I know but it does seem content update would be good plus some working on cleaning out html and urls

Hi Sam,

When did this happen? (as precise as you can be)

Also can you tell us a list of a few words that were hit.

2 things - if you are sniffing a browser agent you can sniff and redirect

the other is that if you are designing a responsive website then you shouldn't need to change the content on the site to make it effective on mobiles. I do understand in some cases it can't be avoided but where that is a case you should forward to a subdomain making it easy to deal with redirects

are those links in another navigation too?

If so remove them from your footer, it wont damage internal link juice flow as SE's tend to only look at the first link to a page from another page (aka having the same link 20 times on a page has no more effect than having 1 link to that page).

If they are not elsewhere I would consider looking at moving the nav to be more effective and reduce the number of links - for example instead of city you could have region or state etc.

I would suggest not going down that route unless totally necessary - it does depend on the number of products using the same "template" in all honesty

quick answer: yes

you can point example.com to any directory you wish...

and they should be on seperate lines, not sure why moz changes that

RewriteEngine on RewriteBase /

RewriteRule ^gallery/(.*) http://www.example.com/ [R=301,L]

this sounds like a bug more than anything to me - maybe the moz team can shed some light on this.

The only time I've found a difference in ranking for caps vs non -caps is due to semantics and google knowing things like "church" and "Church" are different entities - in your own example though this wouldn't be the case ... hence i think its a bug.

mmm a puzzle

this depends how your site is set up ... for example if you are redirecting a directory (eg .com/blog/) to your root thats easy enough to do - but if they are specific files that don't have within say the root or a folder you are not redirecting in it's entirety it would be manual work I am afraid. - see below

The other option is to drop to 404 page if you are just removing the content and not redirecting to relevant content ... admitting a page is missing and hasn't been replaced is sometimes the best way to show you are working on your site and consolidating info to be valuable to users. Also you can use your 404 page to have a big of fun and explain to users why something has gone missing or changed - or even just have a search box there.

_RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^old_dir/(.*) http://www.example.com/new_dir/ [R=301,L]_

mmm odd try http://digsitevalue.org

you will find these smaller sites aren't really amazing though and are hit and miss to a large extent

sorry i couldnt be of more help

PR no longer gets updated very often, 2 times a year if you are very very lucky.

New pages these days take a while to get any PR assigned (0 counts) and to move up obviously takes longer as PR is no longer a huge thing to Google.

The attitude you are taking is not the right one to have, PR is not hugely important and you are prioritizing it. PR is a signal of link trust and it's not the best one by any length. My suggestion is you forget PR as a major factor to you and maybe use something like MozRank -http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/mozrank - which is more upto date and uses more signals than PR alone.

hope this helps

in my experience, and i've a fair bit with WP, the majority of malware comes from plugins which get updated and become infected themselves. Wordfence certainly can help with this problem, but a regular securi scan will too.

My advice is deactivate and uninstall any plugins you don't really need or use - this will make the site faster and more secure.

Once the malware has gone you can do as you have and ask for relisting or wait it out, google will come back and check. Manual reviews will take a few days to come back I believe, though it depends on the nature of the malware - if its believed to be complex it will be manual if its just one file being "naughty" a robot may scan your site to take a look that it's gone and it could be up in 24-48 hours.

my favourite is https://www.quantcast.com/

its in general quite accurate for small to medium sites (aka less than 1M per month) after that the larger the visit numbers the more wonky it becomes

how old is the site in its current being and how long have the other pages existed?

you wouldn't get penalised as such, it would just take a while for them all to be indexed - it maybe more advantageous to spread them over a few days - say 1000 per day such as to even give google a chance.

not really my point - my point is categorisation on large sites is helpful to search engines and users. WP does this very well and I utilise it a whole bunch on my sites that use WP

two limits to be aware of here

1. Google won't index a sitemap larger than 50mb
2. Google won't index a sitemap of more than 50K urls

There is no need to link in html to your sitemap if you are submitting it by webmaster tools, though a poke can be helpful from robots.txt which would look something like :

Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

and go under your various statements (should be the last thing)

Hope this helps

shouldn't make a huge difference as long as you have one-site map (in this case) and the urls are all the same - i.e. all http or https addresses you should have no issues.

• though your last line makes me ask if you have two sitemaps, in which case ... why? and do they link to your site in one as http and the other https ? in which case yes get rid of one in favour of the url you want to use.

Few things... make sure you have a sitemap that is always upto date and submitted to search engines - this will encourage them to view your content first and recognise it as belonging to your domain.

In addition to this put links in your content to other parts of your site, if it gets scraped it will probably be with the links in it and so anyone actually wanting real content can get through.

If there are thousands from the same domain coming to your site, disavow the base url and also report that url for spam (it's your copyright). In fact if you notice a small site scraping you, do that after you've tried to contact them.

If this still doesn't stop them look at your logs and see where their crawlers are coming from and block their IP's.

On one of my old site I blocked the whole of China at one point because it was constantly being barraged by scrapers and people trying to guess account passwords.

Hope that helps

As @keri has said, it would be a little odd to do it to all external or indeed internal links. (the later of which would be better suited to having no-index tags on them rather than being no-followed).

In terms of your question, it maybe better phrased as "how can i keep all the link juice and never let it go" ... many people have that question, but it's not a good idea to try and keep link juice / equity.

If you did as you suggest and have all links externally no followed then search engines will see it as some kind of manipulation and if done on a large scale will ignore that command and potentially others across your website. Search engines, like Google, don't look very nicely on manipulation and beyond ignoring your commands you may end up with a penalty.

Search engines look for rounded websites which are both linked to and from, such that they are part of the community and not a silo.

thats not always the case, consider a user may remember a number easier than a url which is descriptive (eg .com/12345 vs .com/this-is-a-blog-post-title-and-url ) however the numbers aren't descriptive and so hold no real seo value

• this said regardless of what option is choosen Google could always decide to prefer another mechanism in ranking for urls - or totally ignore them