That's a good idea - you could even display a banner ad that pops up anytime a user accesses the site "Shipping on all products delayed x weeks due to global pandemic". I think people would be pretty understanding.

Depending on what CMS you're using you should be able to add a meta no-index tag sitewide fairly easily. I know with WordPress there's an option in the backend under "Setting", "Reading" Discourage search engines from indexing this site that should allow you to apply a meta no index tag site wide.

If you're not on WordPress you should be able to edit your code and apply a no index sitewide. You might need a tool like FileZilla so you can set up some sort of FTP access and edit your Header file directly.

Cheers

I would leave all the disallows out except for the /wp-admin/ section. For example, I'd rewrite the robots.txt file to read:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/

Also, you kind of want Google to index your cached content. In the event your servers go down it will still be able to make your content available.

I hope that helps. Let me know how that works out for you!

Hey there --

Blocking resources with the robots.txt file prevents search engines from crawling content the no-index tag would be better suited for preventing content from being indexed.

However, previous best practice would dictate blocking access to /wp-includes/ and /wp-content/ directories, etc but that's no longer necessary.

Today, Google will fetch all your styling and JavaScript files so they can render your pages completely. Search engines now try to understand your page's layout and presentation as a key part of how they evaluate quality.

So, yeah this might have some impact on your SEO.

Also, if you're using a plugin to cache content you should want Google to crawl your cache content. And in my experience, Googlebot does a good job of not indexing /wp-content/ sections.

So, for your example page, https://example.com/wp-content/cache/minify/df983.js it shouldn't end up in their index.

Hope this helps some.

I think the easiest way to figure out whether or not Page Rank is properly flowing to those deeper sub category landing pages is to crawl the site with Screaming Frog.

I don't remember if a Moz crawl pulls page rank for every page but if not crawl your client site with Screaming Frog and connect to Moz's API. This will pull in the Page Rank for every page and you can sort to find out if there are any issues.

How does the hamburger menu look like on mobile? I'd be curious to see what the engagement looks like when the entire menu opens by default.

Google doesn't penalize for incorrect schema but the added attributes wont show up in search results. The issue comes in when people try to manipulate structured data to add rankings and additional info in the serps when it isn't applicable to that particular category. You will be fine but I'd look into getting it fixed.

Hope that helps some.

I think the mentality behind that is it would be too easy to manipulate. People could just buy expired domains and redirect them to their website. I am going through a similar issue with a website.

I would put your old website through Moz's opensite explorer and identify the backlinks. Then I would reach out to all the domains that linked to your old website and ask them to update the link.

Also, did you do a domain level redirect or redirect each individual page?

That should help you out some.

I think the low domain authority may have something to do with no backlinks to the new domain. From what I have read and experienced domain authority is not transferable. Even though the redirect is in place your new domain does not benefit from the backlinks/authority of the old domain.

What you could do is reach out to websites linking to the old domain and ask them to consider updating their backlinks.

I hope that helps some.