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I would absolutely delete them. Take note of the products that have any external links or organic traffic and consider redirecting them.

Hi , I'm sharing two articles(one from moz) on this , might be helpful for you. Improving Search Rank by Optimizing Your Time to First Byte How to Optimise Your Time to First Byte (TTFB) to Improve Search Results Thanks

The thing is, it could be so many things. The audit will help you narrow it down and you'll learn a lot along the way.

That clearly changes my ideas about this ;-). As we're talking about a couple of million pages I wouldn't include them in the sitemaps then and to make sure they're absolutely made sure that it's noindexed.

I would add that you may find Cyrus Shepard's Keywords to Concepts a useful read. You may find you don't need to optimize for every long tail term you want to catch.

Hi Sarwan! The rel canonical will not change the URL opened in a browser. It will only be a signal to the search engines to count links for docbeans.com/index as links to docbeans.com and to threat them as a single URL in regards to ranking. Also, doing the 301 redirect shouldn't really have an impact with load times, as the redirects happens before loading any content. As they both load the same content, I guess this is because the docbean.com is really an alias for docbean.com/index. Hope this helps. Anders

Egol and Moosa are spot - a couple of things to add. I suggest do not first work on your most important pages first. With the new search analytics in WMT's you can learn a lot about your website - easy and quick now to monitor page change outcomes. Train on a few lesser important pages, some might have more traffic, then go to your most important pages. If you only change the meta description - monitor CTR on WMT's. If you change the title and meta description - spread sheet both Clicks and CTR. When changing Title often the page rank and even the CTR can drop but total clicks increases. After you have optimized a few pages and found out why people click, comfortable with the results, made your mistakes:- Then armed with that knowledge focus on your primary pages, and you will do it with confidence. We do alot of this and to jump to the most important pages first and "practice" on them, is not something we recommend. We often think we know, but every site has nuances and customers do not do exactly as we anticipate.  We got burnt a few times doing the important pages first as that is what the client always wants...  You may get it right, but why risk it. It is a ten day delay, if all goes well. Hope this assists.

I'd tend to agree. It won't harm you to go over, but since no one's going to see it, what's the point, generally. Now, if you feel thinks are being cut off arbitrarily (like the name of a product) and those keywords should be included somehow, fine - go over the limit. You can potentially rank for those terms and they may show up in other places. Some directories, social networks, etc. read the title tags, too. If it's just ego, though, like a long brand name, I'd suggest letting it go. Unless you're a really big brand, it's not going to matter that much, and you're likely to rank for your brand anyway. If the brand is getting cut off, then name recognition won't help your CTR anyway. Usability research definitely shows that people pay much more attention to the front of a headline, and even just the first two words, so even if a longer title "makes sense", people may not care or even see it. So, sometimes, I think we obsess over getting something just right that may not end up mattering that much, practically. Personally, I'd pick a different battle with the client, and maybe just keep a few long that are critically important.

Thanks yes - it was a 301 redirect not set up correctly. Regards Mike

Thank you for your reply Rebecca. I have added 'nofollow' to these links.

You can accomplish this IA with folders or with the slug, the key is how you interlink everything. That is how you can show your related articles and what the most important article is on a given topic.  The Bruce Clay article (IMHO) is still relevant, I think you do not need to get as granular due to things like Hummingbird.  I tend to think of organizing around a topic with a set of key words, vs getting super granular with the keyword siloing.  I think for the user it still makes sense that way as you need to make up an organizational structure that is simple and easy to understand vs having so many subcategories that they get confused. Cheers!

Hi Steve Yes, it sounds like if you're looking at pages showing in search for only one query they may be ranking interchangeably, or simultaneously. Have you manually performed searches in Google (de-personalized etc) to see if you have multiple pages showing, or if they are switching? Also - do you track daily rankings for these keywords? That's another way to see what's ranking there - rank trackers like Authority Labs will show you all URLs ranking for a query. Would there be any other reason two different users might get a different page? Location, language? How specific is the search query vs. how targeted/focused are your pages? Or is there overlap in content? It really depends on the types of pages and content as far as determining your next step. Normally, we do see secondary pages occasionally ranking for one query, but your percentages sound high (unless you are getting two results a page).

Hello George, Thank you for fast answer! I read that article and there is some issue with that. if you can see at it, i'd really appreciate it. So the problem is that if i do it directly from Tumblr, it will also block it from Tumblr users. Here is the note right below that option "Allow this blog to appear in search results": "This applies to searches on Tumblr as well as external search engines, like Google or Yahoo." Also, if i do it from GWT, i'm very concerned to remove URLs with my subdomain because i afraid it will remove all my domain. For example, my domain is abc.com and the Tumblr blog is setup on tumblr.abc.com. So i afraid if i remove tumblr.abc.com from index, it will also remove my abc.com. Please let me know what you think. Thank you!

Hi Alan, thanks to you, too. I agree, it's only a hint, but a more common and useful one than this strange meta tag. Take care and cheers from Germany Sven

Thank you all for the tips/answers to my questions, it was very helpful! I have spent a lot of time since my initial query reading up on/playing with Wordpress/SEO and am still confused on a few topics, any help would be greatly appreciated! 1.) For my purposes, it seemed a premium theme was the way to go. I purchased News Pro from StudioPress. When I look at my themes in my dashboard, I see both NewsPro and Genesis Framework. I think I accidentally purchased a bundle with both themes, thinking the "Genesis Framework" was the framework files to power NewsPro, but I think it's another theme name that they sell. Is that correct? Both themes are powered by this so called Genesis Framework? 2.) I've been reading conflicting information on SEO plugins: supposedly, while these Genesis themes are SEO friendly, plugins like SEO by Yoast are better/more flexible to help you boost your SEO. Is that a fair statement? I understand taht a large part of SEO is the content itself, but outside of the content, I am not a developer and don't know html/css, so was looking for something that will help optimize the areas I am not as familiar with. Can I combine a plugin like Yoast with a Genesis theme such as NewsPro or should one not have both running together? 3.) I haven't published any content yet, want to make sure I don't make any SEO mistakes that will get me dinged right away. What are some of the things I should make sure to do at my end before I launch the site? For my very first article, likely not to rank well - what are some of the things I could do to get a new site to rise up in Google rankings? Thank ou all in advance for your support and help!

Ok yes.  Thank you!  All makes sense. Long term we'd love to have people landing on the notebook page for the appropriate search term.  It would make a nicer customer journey, and the user would feel like they were 'in the right place'. But short term as you say, we'll focus on what's ranking and go with that momentum. Thanks again! Isaac.

Thank you Umar for that detailed answer with all the great rescources!

Hey John, Yes it's becoming a common practice as it looks good. The problem with the infinitive scrolling is the use of Java Script. As we all know, Google does not read java script really well so it only reads your top section of page and ignore the scrolling area. For the best practice, it's suggested to use pagination with scrolling. There is also a plugin available that take care of this issue but I haven't used it yet. It's called "infinite ajax scroll". Check out these resources for clearer understanding and implications: https://econsultancy.com/blog/63394-infinite-scroll-its-impact-on-seo-and-how-to-fix-it/ http://www.sitepoint.com/seo-friendly-infinite-scroll/ http://www.quicksprout.com/2014/05/21/how-to-create-an-seo-friendly-infinite-scrolling-page/ Hope this helps! Umar

I agree with Adam, the reason why I would recommend adding full URLs in the internal links is because if some other blog reshare (if not steal) your content and put it up on their own blog, the links (if not full URLs) will be broken. Adding full URLs will allow new audience to reach out to you without a problem. Hope this helps!