I've heard recent claims that you no longer lose link juice when 301ing, but I've also had personal experience with taking a hit to organic traffic when doing this type of major URL restructuring. You're right, in the long run, it does pay off, but you're also right that there may be a ding in the short term.

While you're in there, I would highly, highly recommend taking the additional step of removing ",default,pg" from your URLs. There are two problems with that string - one is it contains commas, which can be problematic. Anything other than plain text and hyphens is generally discouraged in URLs. The other problem is that "default pg" part is watering down your URL and does not contribute to making the links short and easy to type and understand for humans. Since you are undertaking such a massive restructuring, now is the time to make these additional tweaks - as it's less painful to do All The Things at once and take one hit, than it would be to take a hit now and another hit later when you tackle that separately. I personally also always use only lowercase characters in my URLs as it's easier to type and depending on the server OS improper capitalization may make it so they don't reach the right page, but that is more of a UX preference than an SEO enhancement.

Another couple of tips: I find it extremely helpful to map everything out on a spreadsheet in this type of migration. Helps me make sure I have the old and the new mapped out, and also helps to have a checklist to go through systematically. I also tend to group related pages in batches, as presumably related pages will be linked to each other, and once Google comes crawling back over one page it will see the new URLs and crawl those too, faster than it would crawl unrelated pages. Finally, use a HTTP header check tool (google that and you'll find several) after you add the redirects just to make 100% certain you've set everything up correctly. And where possible, mass-redirect in a single .htaccess rule rather than one by one.

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.

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.)

Just the fact that a competitor gets away with something isn't a good reason to try the same thing. If Google explicitly says not to do something, it's wise to listen. The competitors may be fine for now, but in upcoming algorithm updates will probably suffer if they are violating Google's guidelines.

Are you sure your competitors are using Schema? I checked the two goo.gl links you provided for the competitors, and although I can see the reviews, the reviews themselves have no Schema markup. The competitors have used other Schemas like Hotel and LocationFeatureSpecification, even AggregateRating - just not Review.

Hey Paul - Xenu took a couple of tries as it found so many links it crashed at first, but when I told it to ignore external links, it was able to spit out not only all the broken images but also broken and redirected links, which I'd also like to fix. Thanks for the great solution!

Are there any free tools that will crawl a full website and report back on any broken tags? My site recently added several thousand previously archived posts, many of which contain old tags that no longer exist. ScreamingFrog's crawl is too limited to reach most of these posts, and I haven't been able to find another free tool to get the job done.

If there's no free tool, does anyone know of an affordable paid alternative?

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.