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Hi, Thanks, BobGW and  Everett for your valuable suggestion. I am in talks with my customer service guys and asked them to create a sheet of questions. @Everett, I am looking into the tools you have shared.

Hi, similar response to Andreas but I suppose a bit stronger. Rule of thumb is that with every redirect you use up Google's processing power (meaning it's likely to spend less time elsewhere on your site) and that you lose some link equity at each step. So, if we're answering the question "is a redirect chain less-than-ideal for SEO?" then I would say yes - we should remove redirect chains where we can. However, the question we're answering is "does a redirect chain have any impact on rankings?" To be honest there is a huge range there. If we're talking about one redirect chain, which has two hops (the least problematic version of having a redirect chain) then it's probably unlikely to cause too many issues. It'd be a nice-to-fix but not something I'd spend 5 hours dev time sorting out. If you're talking about thousands of links on your site going through multiple redirect hops, that becomes much more problematic and I'd want to get that fixed more urgently. Unfortunately, as with many things in SEO, the answer here is "it depends". Hope that helps!

I was also noticing that tag clouds are doing better in SERPS than articles. This is surprising to me because before I was forced to take a leave of absence from the online word 7 years ago, it seemed like an original article with the term in the title would do better than a tag cloud. Even if the tag cloud had links to more articles about the same topic on the site.

Thank you for your replies José, Christy and Salience, It looks like you are right, and the ('SEF URL') is fixed: it will not change when I change the title: https://screencast.com/t/XR6lS6YdL For now -changing URLs- sounds a bit too risky for me to start with yet. I'm just trying to create the best articles, contentwise. Feels a bit odd that URLs are going to be different from the titles though. But I guess that's a better situation than having titles that are too long.

Good Answer. I completely abandoned the banner I was thinking of using. It was from one of those directories that will list your site for free if you show their banner on your site. Their code of course had a link to them with some optimized text. I was looking for a way to display the banner without becoming a link farm for them. Then I just decided that I did not want that kind of thing on my site even if it is in a javascript onload event if Google is going to crawl it anyway, so I just decided not to add it. Then I started thinking about user generated links. How could I let people cite a source in a way that the user can click on without exposing my site to hosting spammy links. I originally used an ASP.Net linkbutton with a confirm button extender from the AJAX Control ToolKit that would display the url and ask the user if they wanted to go there. Then they would click the confirm button and be redirected. The problem was that the URL of the page was in the head part of the DOM. I replaced that with a feature using a modal popup that calls a javascript function when the link button is clicked. That function then makes an ajax call to a webservice that gets the link from the database. Then the javascript writes an iframe to a div in the modal's panel. The result should be the user being able to see the source without leaving the site, but a lot of sites appear to be blocking the frame by using stuff like X-Frame-Options, so I'm probably going to use a different solution that uses the modal without the iframe. I am thinking of maybe using something like curl to grab content from the page to write to the modal panel along with a clickable link. All of this of course after the user clicks the linkbutton so none of that will be in the source code when the page loads.

No, Bing doesn't use it.  Source from Bing's Duane Forrester. Also here: "But as the engines get smarter with and about signals, and as new, trustworthy signals are grown and adopted, the SEO of yore becomes a bit less relevant. No one really cried when we all walked away from tags after they were inundated with spam. No one cried when keyword density became a passé topic, largely covered up in the then somewhat novel approach of “making quality content”."

I personally favour a) Nerdybet.com/gambling-sites-directory/stateX I find it more descriptive & I can add keywords to the URLsy Nerdybet.com/gambling-sites-directory/stateX/CityName

Thanks, EGOL! You've been very helpful!

Hi Recommend remove the / ie as follows:- http://www.londonstone.co.uk/porcelain-garden-steps/5mm-pencil-round-beola-bianca/ That should work on magento. I would add that I would also recommend a parent page - ie http://www.londonstone.co.uk/beola-bianca/ and on that page have content on the same plus link to all products. Hope that helps.

Hi, I can not see the images you attach. If you can attach the web address maybe I can help you. Regards

Hi, While there is no excessive use of keywords, you do not have to have any problems. Always look for naturalness and above all try and experiment. You can read more about keyword stuffing to avoid possible Google penalties Regards

Thank you!!!

Favicons have become increasingly complex.  Browsers store them, they come to be differentiated by the implementation of the schema etc.. ie we have one client who is using 6 favicons off the same website. So to answer properly someone has to do a technical dive. To assist each operating system has different favicon requirements - so in your instance would look at how many variations of the favicon you have.  ie favicon.ico with 16×16, 32×32 icon sizes favicon-16x16.png: Modern equivalent of original ICO format favicon-32x32.png: Safari apple-touch-icon-180.png: Apple touch icon icon-192.png: Chrome/Android safari-pinned-tab.svg: Safari pinned tab SVG mstile-150x150.png: MS tile Hope that helps. It does sound like a technical implementation issue rather than a crawl issue. Good luck.

Very good to know this ... was concerned that it is exactly as you are describing (quite a cost to remove tags)! Thanks for your response.

CTA's in MD's work, so we use them often, but usually at the end.  So a full MD with details about the page and then a CTA at the end.  "Contact us today for a free Quote" etc.  But I agree with Joe I also try and use the targetted customer query once in the MD together with synonyms if it works... Hope that assists.

AFAIK since the way images are used online hasn't 'significantly' changed in decades (as Zohaib says) - there is no factual industry standard. But this technique seems like it could yield faster page-loading speeds for mobile, which we all know Google does stand behind. Google often come up with an error on Page Speed insights which says, you are serving massive resolution images with a tiny viewport. They actually can and do regard that as an error, so surely if Google documents that the technique is acceptable to them and we know it solves certain issues, it is at least 'worth a try' IMO

A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect which passes between 90-99% of link equity (ranking power) to the redirected page. 301 refers to the HTTP status code for this type of redirect. In most instances, the 301 redirect is the best method for implementing redirects on a website.

Me too, can you upload or screenshot the actual file that you are using

For a retail site, fewer things are more killer than.... "help the visitor learn about the product, decide what to buy, learn how to use the product, learn how to fix the product, and how to enjoy".

I mostly agree with Robin here. Also, be sure NOT to mix 'noindex' and canonical tags. Google will (in most cases) end up picking rel=canonical over noindex when you use both of these. So it is very possible that even when using 'noindex', your pages will appear in search results. The approach of canonicalising all your paginated pages to the first one, is not good practice. We all just found out that Google hasn't been using rel=next/prev for a couple of years now, but most of the pagination was indexed in a correct way. So doing nothing is maybe not that bad of an option. If you see things going wrong, you can further evaluate and test other possibilities.