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

Point 6 seams to be the most important one - make sure they update all the logo's (most of the results I get seem to be affiliated with your company - so this shouldn't be to difficult to do).

Example: http://drellen.com/realself-reviews/ - the logo is changed in the body - but the bigger logo is still the old one.

On your site - rename your logo to real-self-logo.png & make the alt "Real Self Logo" to make it very obvious that the image = your logo

Dirk