Just to put things into perspective,

if these URLs are all already indexed and you have used "noindex" on those pages, sooner or later google will re-crawl these pages and they will be removed. You may want to remove them from the index ASAP for some reason, but it wont really change anything. Because Google will not deindex your noindex pages just because they are in your sitemap.xml.
Google deindexes a sie only when it is time to re-crawl the page.

Google never recommends using noindex in sitemaps, and google wont suggest that in their blocking search indexing results guidelines. Also Google indicates the following:
"Google will completely drop the page from search results, even if other pages link to it. If the content is currently in our index, we will remove it after the next time we crawl it. (To expedite removal, use the Remove URLs tool in Google Webmaster Tools.)"

But hey! every SEO has its own take.. Some tend to try outsmart Google some not..

Good luck

Hi

The reason you submit a sitemap to a searchengine is to ease and aid in crawling process for the pages that you want to get indexed. It speeds up the crawling process and lets search engine to discover all those pages that has no inner linkings to it  etc..

A "noindex" tag does the opposite.
So no, you should not include noindex pages inside your sitemap files. 
In general you should avoid pages that are not returning 200 also.

Good luck

Hi

Probably you have already set the country settings in Google Search Console.
+++ And made sure that all of your hreflang codes are set-up properly to let Google know.
(if you did, are you able to see them under Search console?)
This being said, unfortunately as opposed to PPC, you have absolutely no control over sitelinks except demoting them in search console.
You will always have pages like "login" or even "forgotten password" pages which you never choose to showcase but you can get rid of them. They will be replaced with others as Google sees appropriate.
You can still try to influence it by increasing inner linking and page authority.

Good luck

Well, i had a problematic case in my previous position where we had a main/big niche site ranking nicely to many sub-niches. lets call the niche "xxx" and sub niches "yyy xxx" , "aaa xxx" etc..

To cut down on maintenance we have decided to migrate all 5 sub-niche (micro) sites which all had 1st page rankings for the majority of their respective keywords. Similar to your case, the main and niche sites the had same categories and sub pages.

We chose one domain to see if everything goes smoothly, we have done the URL mapping while keeping URL renaming to minimal on the main site. 
Almost on every single page the content on the main site was better, indepth and fresh.
It was a hard debate, but after some trial and error we decided to go with minimal changes to the main site. 
Our keywords for the merged pages mostly got better rankings (however we saw some fluctuations like -20, +10 etc for a while.. and all got stable after 2-3 weeks).
For pages that didnt existed on the main site, after the redirections in most cases our losses were between 3-10 rankings. Some of them we managed to recover with regular SEO efforts and some are still moving randomly between spots/pages..

go figure

Hi Ali,

Well i think that the answer to this question is really simple...
User.. User.. User... Do you think that putting the brand name at the end of each title will add a value?
Or will it increase CTR?
Does your brand that much well-known and popular that you believe that if you add it to the title your CTR will sky-rocket?

If you can answer yes to one of these questions, i think you should do it.. otherwise i am not sure
In terms of SEO, you will gain absolutely nothing (well but if it increases your CTR.. you might get more rank boost from google)

P.S.: google is running a test to increase the serp area from 500px to 600px. 
which roughly translates into 70char increase from 55..

Hi

Well it is a practice done often, but do not expect to get the same rankings as you had with the micro-domain, you will see some drops. Some will gain their rankings back and others will need SEO push. The time it takes depends on many factors such as domain authority, site freshness etc..

Whenever i go and merge domains or incorporate them, i try to find the best user-friendly category architecture. First it should make sense to the user (how everything is lined up) and than to google.

IMO, if all the redirections are done correctly, the only problem that you might have is with the pre-existing categories. I would double and triple check all URLs, run extensive crawls on the site with Moz Crawl (limited no# of URLS though.. ) DeepCrawl, Screaming Frog etc. and look into the URLs. Its amazing how one program cant find some URLs and others do.. You will want to avoid duplicate content issues

Of course i don't even mention how closely you need to monitor everything.. I would do a list of the most important URLs to be transferred, and closely monitor them. Also i always suggest to go with very minimal content changes(also meta changes to minimal).. keeping it as close as to original and only then, after everything is good and healthy, i would go and start making improvements on the content..

I know how much time consuming robotic job it is so good luck

P.S.: Also it's a good and common paractice to go ahead and contact site owners for the relevant good and natural backlinks that you have gathered over time..

well.. yup. I know many SEOs that do think that the collapsable are is just not important enough for google to consider it

good luck

Not sure if not yet lunched meaning it is a brand new site and domain or if this is going to be a new edsign/cms etc..

so, If the site never went live you should have no concerns google spider coming to crawl your site.
But if it is an updated version of an existing website, its better to create a subdomain.
This is the most common practice, you create something like test.domain.com and use robots.txt on this test domain to block all access.

it is the safest way that i know

good luck

Hi

Mozs crawler aka the RogerBot does obeys the robots.txt and Moz states that under the help section here.
Looks like the problem you are having is connected to your robots.txt statements/directives.
In order to block a directory **and its content,**you need to use the category name following with a forward slash (even if you have a redirect from xxx.com/search to xxx.com/search/)
(Check out Google robots.txt guidelines)

if you want to block the directory "search" and its content, use Disallow : /search/ (no need for asterisk at the end)
if you use "Disallow: /hc/en-us/search/" (again, no need for asterisk) you will block all the content under xxx.com/hc/en-us/search/
So, for example if you have content that you want to block under xxx.com/hc/fr-FR/search/ it will not be blocked because your statement/directive limits it to a very specific "search" directory which is located under "en-US".

What is it that you want to block exactly?

Recently i a had related issue with a top ranking website for very competitive queries.
Unfortunately the product department made some changes to the content (UI only) without consulting SEO department. The only worth to mention change they made was to move the first two paragraphs into a collapsible DIV showing only the first 3 lines + a "read more" button. The text in collapsible div was crawlable and visible to SE's. (also it's worth to mention that these paragrap
But the site lost its major keywords positions 2-3 days later.

Of-course we reverted the changes back but still two months later, the keywords are very slowly moving back to their "original" positions.

For years i believed in what Google stated, that you can use collapsible content if you are not trying to inject keywords or trying to inflate the amount of content etc. Not anymore.

I believe that placing the content under a collapsible div element, we are actually signaling google that this piece of content is not that important (that's why it is hidden, right? Otherwise it should be in plain sight). So why we should expect from google to take this content as a major part of our contents ranking factor weight.

been there done that
but you should not have problems finding references for that all over the web..
Although i must admit, most of my knowledge on GTM is from Simo's blog.and this one can help you out too.
As i have mentioned earlier, as long as your user is coming form a browser newer than ie7 you should e fine.

cheers

Actually it is perfectly fine to add the GTM code snippet within the element.
Also this is what majority of WP users do since you do not really have a convenient way to add hooks at the beginning of a body tag in WordPress themes.
The only problem that you might have is with ie7 or older browsers (which is probably around %0.01 visitors anyway)

good luck

Hi Jay

Actually ScreamingFrog does that perfectly. It depends how you have configured the tool.
I can successfully see all external images within the report. (see attached screenshot)

Have you checked your spider configuration?

DfBkDti.jpg?1

I have been using the SEO PowerSuite for several years now and i can only say good things about it.
Looks like you are not really using it to its full potential or maybe haven't figured out yet how to use it correctly?

I use MOZ and PowerSuite daily for years and i use them both for different tasks. 
Every tool does something better than the other..

For example i find that RankTracker is the best way (painlessly) to identify what URLs are ranking for which keywords that you find through Google Search Console.