Hi Satish,

Not sure if I fully understand your answer.

Google will consider a redirect as a soft 404 if you redirect pages to non-related pages. Example: if you redirect a page about "shirts" to a page about "pants" or if you redirect this page to your homepage. If the pages are similar (example "green shirts" to "shirts") it's not considered as a soft 404. I understand that you are redirecting to similar pages - so that should be ok.

If you have pages with low quality incoming links (or a mix of high/low quality links) you can still redirect them - but in case of low quality links it's probably a good idea to disavow them (using the search console) - check https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en

Hope this helps,

Dirk

The answer from Kristen is correct. However changing 404 to 410 will just let these pages appearing as 410 in the Search Console. The fact that they are appearing is not a problem - it's just that Google wants to notify you that pages return a 4xx status. If this is intended (like in your case) you can just ignore these messages and mark them as fixed.

In your case you could as well consider another option - remove the pages from the listings but keep them published (with status 200). Update the page, indicating that the original property is sold but list some other (similar) properties as an alternative. This way, if there are external pages linking to the property page the link value doesn't get lost and if people would accidentally land on this page they still find content which could be interesting to them (as you remove the navigation links to these pages they become orphans - so little change that they will rank very high in Google)

Dirk

The crawl by Googlebot will be more efficient if it can go directly to the destination page rather than having to go trough a redirection.

There is some discussion whether 3xx redirections do have an impact on page rank / page authority - Google official point of view is that it doesn't.

Redirects do however indicate have an impact on speed (check here: https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/mobile: "we strongly encourage webmasters to minimize the number, and ideally eliminate redirects entirely" - context is mobile but is applicable on all redirects) - but again for most sites this won't make a huge difference on total load time.

I doubt that simply cleaning your site and removing the 301 will give a boost to your search traffic, but it just something you need to from time to time (idem for internal 4xx errors) to improve the general health of your site.

Dirk

PS I am a bit puzzled about the remark "auto redirects" - you must make sure if you redirect that you redirect to a page which is similar to the page that has disappeared. Google considers most other type of redirects as "soft 404". If the page never existed - like domain.com/kklfjklgjkldfjg - it should return 404 and not be redirect.

Your robots.txt file is used to give instructions to bots visiting to your site - which parts can/cannot be visited.

If your page is in the cache - you are probably allowing the bots to visit the page (else it wouldn't be there). The reason why you are redirected to the homepage should have another cause. Are you using a meta-refresh? Javascript or htaccess redirects?

You could try to check what's happening by copying the cache url in httpstatus.io - url to use is

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3A< <insert your="" encoded="" url="" here="">- to encode your url you can use http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/dencoder/</insert>

Dirk

If you want to know how much traffic this domain is getting you could easily put a filter in Analytics which allows you to see the domain name when checking the pageviews.

Create a new view in Analytics and apply a filter with following settings:
Filter Type: Custom
Select: Advanced
Field A -> Extract A: Select: Hostname value: (.)
Field B -> Extract B: Select: Request URI value: (.)
Output To -> Constructor Select: Request URI value: /$A1$B1
Mark Field A: required & Mark "Override Output Field

You could also combine all the different copies in one set in the Search Console - which would make it easier to check if there is an impact when activating the 301's.

Regardless of the traffic, the 301 remains the best option - some people say it does dilute pagerank - Google says it doesn't

As both Search Console & Analytics are not retroactive you could already make them active, wait a few weeks in order to collect sufficient data and then activate the redirects.

Dirk

You don't seem to have much options if canonicals are not possible.

To be honest - in cases like this I wouldn't use canonicals but always go for 301 redirects. They are pretty easy to implement (2 lines of code in htacess) and they are directives Google has to follow (and will pass pagerank). Canonicals are mere requests to Google that it can but is not obliged to respect.

Would also indicate in the Search Console of the duplicates that you're moving them to the main domain (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/83106?hl=en) - you need to validate the duplicate domains before implementing the redirects.

Dirk

You might want to check this thread https://moz.com/community/q/804-https-ssl-error - there are possible solutions mentioned in the answers if you scroll towards the bottom of the page

Basically Moz has issues crawling https sites using SNI - which is often use by Cloud Flare (and some other hosts)

"Our current crawl libraries do not support SNI which is typically what is enabled by default by Cloud Flare. Our engineering team is still investigating expanding our libraries but an ETA is not available quite yet."

As far as I know this issues hasn't been solved yet. If the SNI is not the issue - you might want to contact Moz directly (help@moz.com) to take a look at your specific issue.

Hope this helps,

Dirk

To be honest - I would change web designer. Making your site responsive is all about reformatting your existing content to make sure the layout adapts to the used device. The main work is done in the css - not in the HTML.As far as I understand your question your webdesigner is duplicating the same content in the HTML, which normally shouldn't be done in order to make your site responsive.

To answer your question - the content will be appearing twice - once visible - once hidden depending on the device /type of Google bot. Google could consider this as spamming, or just ignore the part which is hidden, difficult to tell. You will in any case have a bloated HTML code which could have an impact on the load times of the page.

Dirk

Are you getting a lot of traffic from image search? Are these specific images worth finding (not just generic stock photo's)?

If not - it probably doesn't really matter. Is there a specific reason why they are doing this? Seems a bit odd for normal images (as it's mixing styling with HTML) - most of the time this is done for background images.

Dirk

I guess you are referencing the geo targeting in the Search Console - there is no geo targeting in Analytics.
If you have a country specific TLD like .co.uk your site is automatically targeted to the uk market. Geo targeting is only possible for 'neutral' TLD's like .com,.net,.org,...etc. If you site is targeted to one specific country it's very difficult to rank for keywords outside the geographic area. On a .co.uk domain it's virtually impossible to create a section that targets Australian customers.

In that case - you would need to buy a .au domain or a generic domain. If you want to target multiple countries and buying different local tld's is not possible - you can buy a generic one (.com) - and target parts of the site to a specific country like

mydomain.com/uk => target uk
mydomain.com/au => target au ... etc

Don't know what you mean with "canonicalising new url's with relevant keywords" - for international content you shouldn't use canonical url's to point to your main content - rather use href lang tags to make it obvious to search engines which part of the site is targeted to which audience.

Some useful resources:
International SEO checklist (Moz) Hreflang attributes (Google)
International SEO (Moz)
Country Targeting (Google)
Geo-Targeting Your Pages for Specific Audiences (Bing)

Hi,

You should redirect the old url's to the new ones using a 301 redirect. Normally it's not really necessary to submit for re-indexing, Google is quite good in finding new url's itself.

The fact that Screamingfrog still finds the old url's is a sign that on your site you are still using links to the old url - you should update the internal links to the new url (you can easily get this info from Screaming frog - take the url's that have a 404 - check at the bottom of the page "In Links" - this will give you all the pages where the links need to be updated.

rgds,

Dirk

Hi,

Why would you do that for? A coming soon page has no value for visitors, and as a result no value for search engines.

If you're going to create a new site, I would first launch the new site and then redirect the old pages to the new ones.

rgds

Dirk

According to Google webmaster guidelines - a sitemap for users still has some value:
Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map has an extremely large number of links, you may want to break the site map into multiple pages. (source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en)

I agree with Patrick that now most people don't bother to consult sitemaps  - if they need to consult it to find their way on your site you probably have a UX problem.
For SEO purposes - it still can have some advantages:

• it can ensure that your site becomes flatter (content is less clicks away from the homepage)
• Google wants that "Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link." .A HTML sitemap can help with that as well - especially if you have a highly dynamic site where a lot of content is only accessible by (product) search

Sites like Linkedin.com still use these HTML indexes (although they are not called sitemaps but member lists) - as you can check when you visit the site in "Incognito" mode in your browser.

rgds,

Dirk

I think these names would be fine and following google guidelines for image search (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/114016?hl=en) - quote: "The filename can give Google clues about the subject matter of the image. Try to make your filename a good description of the subject matter of the image. For example, my-new-black-kitten.jpg is a lot more informative than IMG00023.JPG. Descriptive filenames can also be useful to users: If we're unable to find suitable text in the page on which we found the image, we'll use the filename as the image's snippet in our search results."

rgds

Dirk

The main reason to use internal "nofollow" links on your site if the links would go to technical pages like login pages, or links to pages that you don't want to have indexed. As Ryan says - if you link to other relevant articles there is no reason to use nofollow.

Dirk

Hi,

The difference between them

• canonical : url has a canonical url - which can be self-referencing (canonical url = url) or not

• canonicalised: url has a canonical url which is not self-referencing (canonical url <> url)

• no canonical : quite obvious - the url has no canonical.

Potential issues could be - url's that you would like to have a canonical don't have a canonical or url's that are canonicalised don't have the right canonical url. You can use the lists (both canonicalised & no canonical) from Screaming Frog to check them - but it's up to you to judge whether the canonical is ok or not (no automated tool can guess what your intentions are).
Typical mistakes with canonicals: all url's have the same canonical url (like the homepage), or have canonical url's that do not exist. You could also check this with Screaming Frog using the setting "respect canonicals" - this way only the canonical url's will be shown in the listing.

Also keep in mind that canonical url's are merely a friendly request to Google to index the canonical rather than the normal url - but it's not an obligation for Google to do this (check https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en quote: "the search results will be more likely to show users that URL structure. (Note: We attempt to respect this, but cannot guarantee this in all cases.)"

Dirk

It's always this way - if you add up the clicks of the individual keywords about 50% of the clicks are missing. Google gives some reasons here (like privacy reasons) but they can hardly explain the (huge) differences. 
See it from the positive side - at least you have some visibility on the keywords...

Dirk

Hi,

Try to answer your questions point by point:

1. You could add to your terms & conditions that sites created need to follow Google webmasterguidelines - and if they are not followed you can delete the subdomain.

2. Revoke the penalty is only possible by cleaning the site and removing the contested content. It depends on your current terms & conditions if you have the possibility to force the one who is managing this blog to clean the site.

3. Idem as above - if your terms & conditions didn't stipulate that messing with Google guidelines is forbidden, there is not much you can do at this point.

4. Wordpress is hosting the blogs on wordpress.com - the main site is wordpress.org. Weebly has terms & conditions that forbid Spam/SEO sites (probably Wordpress.com has this as well - but it's stated very clearly on the Weebly.com)

Update terms & conditions if necessary - send warning to offending blog users & delete them if necessary.

Hope this helps,

Dirk

It's not the size of the page that matters - it's the speed the page is  downloaded on the user's device that matters (although there is of course a relation between these two). In general people expect a site to load in 2/3 seconds. There is an interesting article about that on the kissmetrics site: https://blog.kissmetrics.com/speed-is-a-killer/ - with a lot of useful resources & links. If you do search here on moz you'll probably find a lot of useful info as well. I think with the increasing focus on mobile, speed will become more important as ranking factor.

To be more specific on the size, according to this article - the average page size for the top-1000 websites is increasing and was 1600K in July '14. There is a negative correlation between page size & number of visits (no surprise). I would certainly not go above the 1600K (even this number seems already quite high for me)

rgds,

Dirk

With rel next/previous you ask Google to consider all the pages with these tags to be considered as one page
With a canonical you indicate that the page is a duplicate (or variation) of the canonical url.

Your developers are right - if you put the first page as canonical for the subsequent pages your are basically asking Google to ignore the 2nd, 3rd,... pages which is in conflict with rel next/previous.

It is possible to combine both canonical & rel next/previous - but not in the way as your SEO company is suggesting. Example from Google:

The canonical in this case is used to strip the sessionid which could be a cause for duplicate content.

Please not that if your category pages are split over a lot of pages (like 100) - the rel / next previous stops making sense. In that case it's probably better to focus on optimising the first page & put a "noindex/follow" on the subsequent pages.

Dirk