Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Like anything in SEO, there isn't an exact answer. It's partly because Google shows titles of different lengths depending on what size screen it's showing on. It's also because characters can be different pixel widths. For example, an "i" is not very wide, while a capital "M" or "W" is a wider character, just by the nature of the letter itself.

Yoast openly states that the optimal title length depends on what kind of result is going to be shown, so their advice is to make sure your keyphrase is within the first half of your title and not stress about exact character count or pixel width.

Moz keeps a close eye on this as well, and their research concludes that approximately 50 to 60 characters, or 600 pixels, is the optimal length, and it will show on about 90% of search results. Moz Pro reports that anything over 570 pixels is too large, though, so if you're under their 600px recommendation you can still get the warning that your titles are too long.

All things considered, as long as you're not grossly outside of either target - 60 characters or 600 pixels - I'd take it with a grain of salt and consider just marking "ignore" on the titles that are close to tolerance. There are no hard and fast rules - except the rule that Google will continue to change - and we may see shorter or longer limits in the future. Tweaking your titles to exactly within both tools' tolerance is probably not going to get you the best return for your time - see what other more high-priority issues you have, like 404 errors or missing meta descriptions. (Change case in point, Google just changed their meta description length maximum.)

First of all, a caveat: if your site is ranking even moderately well, I would not change the URL structure. Once search engines have indexed content, they really don't like it when you play around with the URLs later. The exception would be your language URLs - if you're not already consistent about those or you don't already have those set up, then by all means set up whatever works for you, thinking as much as possible about how you might need to expand in the future so you can solve for that now, and not be in the same boat of wanting to change URLs again later. At the very least, in your shoes, I would first dive deep into analytics and find out what the most-visited folder structure is. Then if you decide to standardize them all, at least go with that version of the structure, and make sure you're putting in one-to-one redirects so you can preserve as much link juice as possible.

As to your more specific questions - these are answers more to what I would do if I were setting up a new site, and not if I were thinking about optimizing by changing a ton of the hierarchy.

1. Language URL - I lean toward #2, language in a folder, for a couple of reasons. To me it intuitively feels like everything in that language would be in that folder - in your example, .com/fr/ - and thereby grouped structurally, a signal to both search engines and humans that they are in the (insert language name here) language version of your site. Another reason is that after a certain point, parameters can get truncated, so if you're using other parameters - some that come to mind are Google Analytics' utm_source, utm_campaign, utm_medium - you may end up exceeding the max characters if you go the alternate route of language in a query string.

2. I would stick with either option 1 or option 3. While search engines are getting smarter about parsing, just like with the language folder, I think there's a lot to be said for showing some sort of structure and hierarchy by using a folder structure rather than mixing category with product name. Option 3: I'd suggest .com/toplevelcategory/product-name/ - and not include any of the subcategories as in .com/toplevelcategory/childcategory/grandchildcategory/product-name/ because it makes the URLs so long. Some of the benefits of having long URLs are that your tech-savvy users will visually recognize the hierarchy more easily and can quickly jump up a couple of levels just by chopping off a couple of folders in their address bar, and of course you can include more keywords the more folders you have. Drawbacks, though, are that in SERPs the full URL gets chopped off and looks less appealing to end users. On a related note, using Schema breadcrumbs (which are also visible to the user) is a great way to give additional signals to both search engines and users about what all those various levels are.

3. Just the fact that you used the term "keyword stuffing" would make me quite cautious. It's not about stuffing, it's about optimizing for both humans and spiders. In your shoes, I would again go to analytics and figure out what is already bringing you the most success - a combination of pages with the most organic traffic along with pages that convert really well. From there, I'd see what traits they have in common. Do all of them have longer content? Do you have some sort of special tags or something that is clearly working well?

If you don't want to get into the weeds and start optimizing pages individually, look hard at your Product Detail Page template. Make sure it pulls a decent title and meta description from a template (but that you can override it later if you ever have time to do one-by-one page optimization). By far the biggest thing you can do on any of your pages, besides getting basic page structure clean and clear, is to add Schema markup. A few tweaks to your PDP template and you should be able to show price, reviews, etc. to both humans and spiders. If for some reason you can't edit the template, look for similar gains through Google Search Console. They have a content highlighting tool that will let you highlight a series of pages to show it where to find certain information, and they'll then understand (and presumably rank) your content much better.

It varies by site, but if you're using old markup (say an XHTML transitional 1999 doctype) or lots of tables or tons of nested divs, that type of optimization can give you pretty decent gains as well. Cleaning up the codebase is often a huge ranking signal because it affects a ton of pages and shows you care about modernizing and improving UX.

It's more of an accessibility issue than an SEO issue. If your visitor were using a screen reader, would it add any value for them to hear the alt text? If so, keep it. If instead you're describing "curly swash with a heart" and it has no bearing at all on actual content, leave it blank. Generally speaking, things that improve your accessibility are good for SEO.

Since it doesn't sound feasible to create new titles and meta descriptions by hand every time, I would come up with something automatic that's date-based. For example, your title could be "6/11/2015 Daily Horoscope for Cancer." Meta descriptions will be harder - if you're using something like WordPress with Yoast's SEO plugin, you could have it auto-create the meta description using the first line of your actual content. I'm sure you could find or create a similar auto-functionality if you're using a different platform. That way you aren't doing anything by hand, yet you have a unique title and helpful meta description for each page on the site.

On a related note, I noticed the horoscopes for all the other signs actually appear on the same page, just in a modal, when you click on them. This may be working against you because you have all the signs' content on multiple pages. I would try to find a way to keep only each sign's content on its page and link off to the other signs' individual pages for people who want to view multiple signs. That should really reinforce to crawlers that each page has unique content.

It sounds like part of the problem may be the sitemaps you're sending. By including duplicates in a sitemap, you're basically telling Google that each version of the page is valid. I would remove them and resubmit a sitemap with only the canonical versions you want indexed and see if that helps.

I would definitely get rid of market-stalls and redirect everything. First I'd map out all of the URLs from that site (both from your own sitemap and from Google's index, in case it has any weird URLs you're not even aware of). Then I'd map out appropriate redirects page by page and have a developer set up redirects for everything. Depending on how it's all set up, it might just be a few lines of code or it might be a drastic page-by-page redirect file. 301 redirects, when done properly, carry over most of the rankings with them. I think the loss in rankings will be recouped by having only 1 site to focus all your efforts on, especially since the other site is the one that's been plugged on social media.

Has the main site been online for as long as the affiliates? Are you driving traffic to the main site in similar channels and volumes to what the affiliates are driving to their sites? If the content and on-page optimization is roughly the same, and if the sites have been up for the same amount of time, it's likely off-page optimization that's making the difference. The affiliates may be doing paid advertising, mentioning their sites on social media, and otherwise building a lot of links to their content that you're not doing on the main site. I would give it time and try to search for longer-tail keywords - more specific ones, so if you sell widgets, try to optimize some pages for "red curly widgets" and "blue titanium widgets" rather than competing for the more basic "widget" type keywords. The more specific you can be, while still choosing language that your visitors are searching for, the more you will see traffic rise to the main site and the better they will convert because they're looking for exactly what you're offering.

Hey there Shawn,

Your screenshot mentions WordPress.com, which is a lot different than WordPress.org. The one you're using, .com, is more of a service for folks who don't want to deal with technical setup, just want to have a few options and start blogging. The one you mentioned, .org, is more of a hands-on deal where you purchase web hosting (server space) and install it on that server. That is where you're able to use .htaccess, robots.txt, etc., etc. You are also able to use a lot more themes and plugins and get into true custom coding with .org. You can do some of this kind of customization on .com if you pay for a premium package, and there are such things as virtual robots.txt files which some of their plugins might be able to generate for you, but I do not think you ever get to adjust server files like .htaccess. So you might want to look into trying out WordPress.org instead. If you're really looking to customize the site and have granular control over anything SEO-related or even functionalitywise, .org is the way to go.

I don't think there is a hard and fast rule here yet, but there are some red flags that pop up in my mind with both of your questions. Both have to do with over-optimizing, or keyword stuffing, which Google warns people about.

In both cases, you need to do whatever sounds most natural to your visitors. If you keep repeating a core keyword throughout your other keywords, you will begin to sound spammy and repetitive to humans. That also appears unnatural to spiders and they may flag your page or even your site for being too stuffed. On the other hand, it's not a problem to repeat a keyword in another keyword occasionally, when it sounds natural. Sprinkle it in. It's more of an art than a science.

In your lists, also do whatever is best for the human users of the website. If you have a long page with a ton of services and you are risking repeating yourself - such as,

SEO consultant

• Training

• Prices

Local SEO services

• Training

• Prices

then I would say it is useful to the user to have your keyword included, like "Local SEO training" and "Local SEO prices", for a couple of reasons. One, as an average visitor skims down the page, he can very easily see what these prices and training apply to. Two, if you have any visitors who may be using assistive technology, like a screen reader, they often bring up menus of say all the headings or all the lists on your site. If you have repeated content then they have no context - but including the context in the document itself makes it easy for them to skim through and not have to listen to every word of your document, but just pull out the headings or list items and understand quickly.

So again there is no hard and fast rule in either case. Always think about all your potential website visitors - with a hug emphasis on people and a much smaller emphasis on spiders - and by improving the user experience you will also be helping improve accessibility and SEO.

The best practice here is to redirect one by one - rather than redirecting everything on the old domain to your new domain's homepage. So, as you move each one over, also have your .htaccess file up and set up those redirects. This way you can make sure that Google sees you're redirecting people to the same content, and you can also make sure any of the old link juice is flowing deeper within your Shopify site - not just stopping at the homepage.

1. Which filters you use really depends on which filters apply. This shouldn't really affect SEO at all. Just focus on what will be easiest for your user base.

2. This could potentially cause an issue, but depends on how it is implemented. More info straight from Google: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/02/faceted-navigation-best-and-5-of-worst.html

3. If you don't sell retail products, don't include "wholesale" in the URL. Google and users prefer shorter URLs. Don't put them in the product titles or slugs either (slugs being the last part of the URL, i.e. /products/my-product-name = my-product-name is the slug).

4. Couldn't you put the SKU right on the PDP, so if employees search by SKU they find the correct product anyway? Seems like a lot of extra overhead setting up 2 URLs for every product and then redirecting and canonicalizing everything. There's a lot of potential for mistakes.

Also keep in mind the competition may be changing things frequently. Even if the site you're managing has been optimized and it's just sitting there without additional changes, competitors may be doing all sorts of things in the background, affecting rank.

In my experience a couple of spaces and the order of attributes don't matter at all. Google will understand just as easily and your developers won't have to jump through extra hoops.

In an ideal world, you would have unique content everywhere - category, subcategory, product detail page, etc. Of course, that requires a lot of effort to maintain. So I think the answer really depends on your goals and your stats.

I would personally check my analytics to find patterns. First, I'd determine what level most organic traffic ends up landing on. Do they all land on your homepage? Do most of them end up on product detail pages because your long tail is better optimized? Are there higher level categories that seem to do the best? This will give you an idea of what is currently working for you as far as SEO, so you can begin to answer questions like, does the long form content in the footer help drive organic traffic at all for your particular website?

Next, I would check analytics to find out: only for organic traffic, what content levels did people see before they bought a product? I would assume that in most cases they need to hit the individual product detail page to add to cart, since they must select a size etc. - but depending on your site, maybe lots of people do a Quick View and add to cart from a modal, etc. Find out what your organic visitors are looking at to figure out which level - category, subcategory, sub-sub-category, product detail, etc. - the largest portion of organic visitors who actually bought something visited.

Finally, I would check analytics to find out only for non-organic traffic, what content levels did people see before they bought a product? Perhaps you're running some successful marketing campaigns, and these folks land straight on a particular sweet spot that organic folks aren't finding, and because the marketed-to visitors see exactly the information they need, they're buying more. This will also be helpful in determining what levels of pages to optimize.

Once you've determined what levels are converting best, set those as your priorities for unique content and driving traffic.

Unfortunately, e-commerce is a tough market to be in as far as SEO and content. There are so many distributors out there that to really compete organically you need an edge. The good news is, if you're doing the work to differentiate yourself enough to earn better organic rankings and gain visitors, you should also reap the benefits of the visitors themselves having a better user experience and becoming more likely to actually convert.

Reviewing analytics and running usability tests are the two best ways to decide how much to have in each navigation system. There are several different forms of usability tests that you could use to determine the best way to organize your website and how to label each page: TreeJack is a service that will let you try out different navigation menus to make sure people can find what they're looking for; you could do card sorting which gives people a set number of categories but they physically or virtually group the cards into categories and you can then use the categories in your navigation; you can even create prototypes with a tool like Axure or Balsamiq and have people try out a few different options to see which one works best.

If you don't have the time or budget for usability testing, looking at analytics is second best. Things to look for: what content is the most visited on your website? Are people getting there by navigating through your website, or are most of them coming directly from organic search to those key pages? How long do people spend on particular pages? If some of the pages have very low time on site, it's a good idea to shorten the navigation path - you can either deep-link to those pages in sitewide navigation or just look at specific pages and add smaller nav menus within say a sidebar or a CTA button within that page's content, which gets people from that page to a deeper page with 1 click versus drilling down through several different links one at a time. Another great place to look: if you're tracking site search, see what people are searching for and what pages they're searching from the most. If 75% of people who visit the homepage search for 1 of 3 terms, then put prominent featured sections about those 3 terms right there front and center to help them get there. Also take note of the specific keywords people are searching by and use those as your navigational labels - that can be even more helpful than simplifying hierarchy, if you name things the way people use them naturally.

In my personal experience it's best for SEO as well as for users when you stick to the old no-more-than-100-links-per-page rule. If you provide too many options, people just get overwhelmed and don't know what to pick. So my own rule of thumb is to only link to about 5 top-level pages in my sitewide header navigation; under each of those have no more than 4 to 5 sublinks, and leave it at that. But I always make it very, very easy for them to drill down deeper - if the site is 4 or 5 levels deep, those 4th and 5th levels are accessible from the 2nd and 3rd directly, so they don't have to click 5 times to get down 5 levels - they can hit the homepage, go to a 2nd-level page, and from there straight to 5th-level if that's what they're looking for.

A 403 error means the crawler isn't being allowed to access that page. You should check robots.txt and if nothing is blocking there, check with your host to see if they can help identify why Roger is being blocked from those particular pages.

Related question: https://moz.com/community/q/403-error-code-but-page-shows-no-error

On a side note, those pages took a really long time to load for me, so I'd also look into site speed. Visual Composer for one is adding all sorts of different stylesheets and bogging things down.

Yes - duplicate content is exactly what I mean. If you're a human visitor, it's a good way to be able to look at multiple signs quickly. I do this too - I always look at all the signs for my family. But if you're a search engine, on each sign's page, you see the full text for all the signs, so it looks like there are 12 pages with almost exactly the same content. Yes, it would be a good idea to look at competitors' sites and see how they handle it. One option might be to have each page with only that one sign's content on it, and use AJAX to pull in each additional sign - so visitors would see exactly what they're seeing now, and be able to immediately click another sign and see that horoscope, but because spiders typically don't see much content that is pulled in by JavaScript, they would see 12 unique pages to index. It looks like this competitor is doing it this way: http://astrostyle.com/daily-horoscopes/cancer-daily-horoscope/

Another question I might ask is, why are you archiving all the daily horoscopes? Are you seeing visitors to old horoscopes, or are you holding onto them for your own records? You may have visitors looking at them, and if so, keep archiving as you go. But if you're not getting much traffic to them, I would suggest considering keeping your own backup copies offline. That way, you could have a permanent "Daily Cancer" page with a more refined meta description that ever changes, and every day you just go in and edit that sign. Same for all the other signs, and same for the weekly sign pages. Anytime people link to these pages, they would keep that value - and I think that might help your rankings. Right now, with every horoscope being on its own separate daily page, say 2 people share that link on Facebook. Those links go straight to say the Cancer horoscope for June 1, 2015. That means they're kind of frozen in time. If instead you had a "Daily Cancer" page and they linked there, and then a week later they shared it again because they liked the new horoscope, you'd have 4 incoming links to the same page.

In my experience, you create more headaches by changing the URLs than you fix. If you completely change the subject of an article, it's fine to change the slug. But I'm assuming you are probably just going to research keywords and keep the same general content, just tweak some things here and there to optimize better for specific phrases, while the overall topic remains the same. If that's the case, stick with your existing slugs.

The only exception I'd make to this rule is that if you change category names, go ahead and change those slugs to match. Just research them well so you won't be changing them again. And make sure you add 301 redirects that cover all those URL changes so you don't lose link juice or have people ending up on error pages.

If your developer is asking you to select a theme, it sounds like he wants to work directly on a theme because he's going to create a child theme. By selecting the parent theme first, the structure is already there and he can do some easier CSS tweaks.

If I were you, I would step back and determine whether you are paying him to create a custom theme for you, or just to create a child theme. There are pros and cons to both. The pros to a child theme are that the parent theme should continue to receive updates so your theme is not frozen in time; as accessibility, design, and SEO enhancements go into the parent theme, those will continue to apply to your site. The main advantage of a custom theme is the lightweight code base - your site should load faster as it only contains the elements you need, and not a bunch of extras that you may never use. Depending on how it's coded, a custom theme may also be better for SEO - again because there's simply less code there weighing things down.

If your contract with the developer does not state whether he'll create a brand-new custom theme or just a child theme, I'd take the time to have a quick conversation and get both of your expectations on the table so you can determine what will work best in this situation. If it turns out that a child theme is the best option for you at this time (perhaps due to budget, or due to a desire to have continual updates but not have to pay someone to continually update a custom theme), then I'd have no qualms allowing the developer to work directly in WP on the child theme. It's easier to adjust things on the fly and show a client an actual prototype where they can resize the browser and see all the responsive sizes, and it will save time all around. However, if a custom theme is the way to go, I would ask if he is giving you a truly custom theme or if he's working with some predetermined framework or parent theme and only making tweaks to a child theme. That really is the only reason I can think of that a dev would insist on designing in the code itself rather than mocking things up.

There is no penalty per se. The catch-22 of this situation is that when you change URL structure, even if you do everything perfectly right (and it's hard to make sure you have all the redirects perfect), you run the risk of losing some link juice. Part of this is because any external links and bookmarks are going to the old page and having to redirect.

But if you don't change your URL structure, you're not quite as optimized for your terms as you might otherwise be. So moving forward do pay attention to the slugs and use keywords, but don't go backward and try to overhaul everything.

Another couple of thoughts: spiders and their algorithms change over time. If you focus on what they like today, you will likely end up in a situation where you need to keep making changes to keep up with them. Whereas if you do what is best for visitors, you will likely end up better in the long term, because as their artificial intelligence grows over time, they will catch up to you. So ask yourself this: if you were a visitor and you liked the content, would your current URLs prevent you from sharing? If they're super long or the wording looks awkward, that might be a possible deterrent, but if they're not crazy and nothing would make you feel weird for sharing the link, it's almost always better to leave them as they are.

It wouldn't be hard to add custom postmeta to the "home" post type - a simple flag called "inactive." When you create a new home or update one, it would by default be unchecked - meaning the listing is active. Once it sells, you check the box to make inactive = true. From there, you just edit your theme (child theme or custom theme). The easiest way to ensure a link to the inactive listings won't appear anywhere, no matter what type of page you're on - archive/search/etc. - would be to add a filter to the main query. If the post type is "home", add a meta query that searches for "inactive == false". You'd then customize the "single-home.php" theme file - check whether inactive is false; if it's false go ahead and display all the details, but if inactive is true remove the price, add a "not for sale" banner, that type of thing.

This way your home URLs never change, so nobody has to set up redirects, but it's also dead simple to mark a listing inactive and have it disappear from navigation. Yet it still is indexable by Google, it will still appear in your XML sitemap if you're generating one automatically, and people who have bookmarked the listing and return to the page will immediately see that this house is sold. You might even want to use a related posts plugin so that if the house is sold, visitors (and spiders) will see links to related houses that are still for sale. That will give you even a bit more link juice out of your old pages, because they'll be funneling spiders to the newer pages, and they'll also help spider AIs determine which content is the most related.

Optimizing the current custom theme is likely to cost you more time and money than having someone develop a brand new theme for you, and it is also likely that you'll end up with a better end result starting from scratch than you would trying to retrofit an old theme. The reason is simple - trying to identify all the moving parts and adapt little pieces takes longer than just identifying clearly what functionality is needed and coding it with current standards. I've been through this process several times myself (like Alan, I'm a longtime WP developer) and every time significant changes were needed, starting from scratch was easier, faster, and less expensive for the client.

If money is not an issue, coding a custom theme and maintaining it over time is the best way to ensure that your overall, sitewide HTML, JS, CSS are as SEO-friendly as possible - for the reason Alan mentioned, which is that you can output only the code that your particular site needs. Standards change over time, as does browser support. HTML generally stays pretty backwards-compatible, but JS in particular is notorious for eventually not working. With a 2013 theme I'd suspect you may not be using HTML5, which in itself is a big improvement to making your data more structured.

Lighterweight code is good for human visitors as well as spiders. Humans have limited patience, so if your site is loading slowly, they'll tend to get frustrated and leave. It's good for spiders, too, because with much less code there's much less to have to analyze on the page - they can mostly go straight to your content and interpret it, rather than loading this and that JS file, divs nested 5 layers deep, that sort of thing. You can also build in a competitive edge if you use a custom theme because you know exactly what type of Schema.org markup would apply best to your content. For real estate listings in particular, I'd expect many in your industry to be using prebuilt themes. If you can show the same type of data but in a structured way - to make it super easy for Google to determine "Oh, this is a realty listing; here's the list price, here's the square footage, here's the address" - you have an edge over your competition.

On the other hand, this is a lot of custom code. If you do not have the money to have a developer continually update - at a minimum, I'd say every 18 months you'll want to have someone dive deep into the code and make updates based on WP Core's updates, along with HTML, CSS, and JS improvements that have become possible over that timeframe - if you can't afford that, then you should go with a child theme.

The child theme gives you the benefit of a code base that will be continually updated, while still allowing your site to look and feel different than all the other sites who are using that same parent theme. So it's basically the low-budget alternative. Do note that since your plugins have been customized, you really need to have a developer set up a new site from scratch, use non-customized plugins, and do the custom work in the child theme. That way you will not be sitting on a time bomb. Customized plugins are a problem because you then no longer receive security updates, and it makes your site much more vulnerable to attack.

I would say that the child theme approach is better than trying to adapt your current custom theme, because your codebase will be more up-to-date than if you just do a huge redesign every 5 years. But as for pure SEO value, nothing will beat a well-coded custom theme. In my experience, updating the codebase does make a tangible ranking difference. This is because spiders reward site updates (even the code behind the content is recognized and seen as an update) as it shows you are continuing to invest effort into your site; they'll be better able to understand the structure of your content as you use more up-to-date coding practices; and usually, updating means a better user experience, faster loading times, and better mobile friendliness, each of which is a ranking factor.

I had to do a similar migration, and my solution was similar - 302 redirect all the missing content. In our case, all of the missing content was contained in blog posts, so I 302'd them all to the blog. I would recommend something similar if possible - if you can group the missing content and land people somewhere similar to provide the best possible user experience, that's your best bet. If people are looking for a missing blog article, maybe they can still find something interesting to read in the 30% of blog articles that are posted. If they are looking for a missing product category, maybe they can still find something interesting in your main store page.

Alternatively, if you have the ability to keep the 70% of content within the old structure while launching the 30% of updated hierarchy, it would be a better solution. Sometimes moving from one CMS to another, you can leave old content on the old CMS and only redirect and push out new content on the new CMS. Just depends on your situation.

Google is showing "Knowledge Base" for your site because it has recognized breadcrumbs on your website. The competitors whose longer links are showing up don't use breadcrumbs, so Google has no structured data on what category it's in.

There isn't a setting to toggle "show breadcrumbs" or "show full URLs" - if you use breadcrumbs that Google recognizes, it will automatically display them in SERPs. Breadcrumbs typically improve your sitewide SEO and also can give visitors a clue about what type of page they're visiting, so if you choose your categories and breadcrumbs wisely, I think it can improve the user experience. I definitely wouldn't remove the breadcrumbs from the website just so the SERPs will show longer URLs.

I'm not sure what you mean by relevancy of 5 vs. 3, but it sounds like you're trying to measure too quantitatively.