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If I understand correctly you have 10 different pages each one with different content. The canonicals should all point to the corresponding URL's. If you have **https://format /office/location-1 ** the canonical should be and so on for the other 9 pages. Hope this helps.

There were several that had good traffic and sales pre-migration.

I have never been worried that Google prefers to choose a copy from the page instead of the meta description. On the contrary, I'm happy with it. It usually makes it longer (up to 300 characters in some cases). And this makes the visible result seem a lot bigger in the rankings. As mentioned above that could really help with CTR.

Thanks Tim for your answer. Totally agree with your opinion from customer experience perspective. But most of all I was wondering how Google sees it. Is it bad if a webshop is closed for one day. Does it affect the ranking in search results for the rest of the days?

I suggest this free proofreading tool. Its works awesome.

Hi Jason, Don't tear apart your subcategories into subdomains. It is much likely to perform poorly and cannibalize your search terms. I'm working in XXXL e-commerce where there are over 30 subdomains for each country. We found that this configuration isn't good enough to compete with other big players, on google search. So, we've run some test and found that moving from subdomain to subfolder into a bigger subdomain pays in traffic. That said, I'd focus more on checking what your main competitors are doing. There might be a lot of opportunities optimizing what content you are offering users. A tip, check how their and you are rendering for mobile views. There might be a low hanging fruit over there. Unless you are already doing that Hope that helps. Best luck. GR

Thanks for the help and ideas. I appreciate you taking the time to help me out

Hi there! As long as you try this as an experiment, please don't do it. This is an issue and may cause you to lose some rankings. Or said it in other words, Google might give you less "SEO power" and you could lose the battle with other competitors. I happen to know some cases where the issue is between HTTP and https, and Google chooses merely to show in SERPs whatever they wanted. From what I remember now, most of the cases the canonical version was shown. Hope it helps. Best luck. GR

Alagu, thank you for your reply. Currently we'll be staying on the same domain, however we expect to need to migrate relevant content to the acquirer's site in future, at which point we'll need to consider the 301s. Thanks!

There are several ways to do this, some are more accurate than others. If you have access to the site which contain the web-page on Google Analytics, obviously you could filter your view down to one page / landing page and see when the specified page first got traffic (sessions / users). Note that if a page existed for a long time before it saw much usage, this wouldn't be very accurate. If it's a WordPress site which you have access to, edit the page and check the published date and / or revision history. If it's a post of some kind then it may displays its publishing date on the front-end without you even having to log in. Note that if some content has been migrated from a previous WordPress site and the publishing dates have not been updated, this may not be wholly accurate either. You can see when the WayBack Machine first archived the specified URL. The WayBack Machine uses a crawler which is always discovering new pages, not necessarily on the date(s) they were created (so this method can't be trusted 100% either) In reality, even using the "inurl:" and "&as_qdr=y15" operators will only tell you when Google first saw a web-page, it won't tell you how old the page is. Web pages do not record their age in their coding, so in a way your quest is impossible (if you want to be 100% accurate)

I don't know that there is "structure" that you can implement as far as having categorical pages. However, an easy way to fix this would be to use the canonical tag. Moz defines it as "A canonical tag (aka "rel canonical") is a way of telling search engines that a specific URL represents the master copy of a page. Using the **canonical tag **prevents problems caused by identical or "duplicate" content appearing on multiple URLs." That way you can tell google which of the two you really want them to index. Otherwise you have to change the content enough that google see's it as different content.

What if you have a client with a LOT of ugly URLs that need to be cleaned up? The plan is to create 301 redirects for every page that we change. But, let's say we're talking about 50+ product pages. In your opinion, is it a problem to make that many changes at once? Would you paste them out? If so, how many at a time? Also, is it a problem to have that many 301's on your website? Thank you!

Not I didn't leave the old sitemap.

It doesn't rank well at all no. But there is a myriad of other problems making it tricky to understand the impact of that one. <1% is not keyword stuffing indeed but if the keyword targeted and the "noise" created by the prompts and call to actions all over the place is of a comparable volume, what does it tell Google?

Thanks for confirming my thoughts. Some of these page _do _rank, but either for seemingly irrelevant terms or for terms that also rank the main lander page. Also, after checking the analytics, they drive almost no traffic.

I think that what you link to should be both relevant to the topic and superior in some important way to the information that you have on your own website.  That's my guide to outlinks.