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Thanks. Very helpful!

Hi there, thanks for your question! Monica is correct in that Google will pick snippets out of content when they feel it is more relevant to the search query than your meta description. In this case, you don't have any header tags, and I'm not sure where "teaser" is coming from, exactly, as you do not have any crawlable text on your home page. If you read the documentation Ryan linked too, though, it will confirm that Google can pull descriptions from many different sources, including references to it elsewhere on the web. What I would do is thoroughly read the documentation Ryan linked to, and work on optimizing both your title tag and meta description according to Google's recommendations. Think about what would be most helpful to someone searching for your brand in the search engines. Along those same lines, you may also want to consider using a different coming soon plugin, beefing up your placeholder content, and collecting email addresses for people interested in receiving an email when the new site launches — which could include a coupon, etc. The plugin you are currently using is for new websites (not established sites temporarily down for a redesign), its text is not crawlable, and the content (displayed in a single image) is not very useful for human visitors, either. If this is an established site, I'd recommend looking into the Coming Soon Pro Plugin by SeedProd, which is more SEO friendly (including crawlable text) and reading up on the difference between its coming soon and maintenance modes. Hope that helps! Christy

Glad to be of help. Check out this Google link to confirm you picked up the 180 day crawl https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/83106?hl=en Second URLs helpful as well. http://blog.raventools.com/moving-site-from-http-to-ssl/ all the best, tom

Ryan - thank you too for taking the time to respond. Had a quick peek at the blog you noted - going to go back and read it v-e-r-y slowly!  Ditto, many thanks re the webconfs link - plenty of fun tools to try out there. Am sure it will all deepen my learning / confusion! Thanks again!

What difference in the meta description do you see ? Is the SERP page showing up different meta description that the one you have entered ? Or, SERP is showing different meta description when you search for "yourdomainname.com" and "search terms" ? I would suggest you to manually check with the meta description from the source code to see if it is the same meta description you are using. Don also has suggest you a very useful link.  Additional help can be from https://yoast.com/google-page-title/ http://moz.com/blog/why-wont-google-use-my-meta-description Cheers

So which way would be the best to do it?

I would tell you MD about over optimisation, there is nothing natural at all about creating  tons of content all about one keyword "liquidation"... maybe you are trying to hard. Sometimes our SEO skills are our own worst enemy as we fill in all the cracks and make everything perfect and Google turns around and says "this is too perfect". Turn his focus to conversions/goals and away from a keyword you will likely not hit for a while. Rather try get your users into your conversion funnel and to the products/services that are important. As Ray-pp mentioned, if your MD wants instant results he needs to put money into Google AdWords. On a side note, if we are talking about the "wilsonfield.co.uk" website and you want to have good ranking on the word "Liquidation" then the word needs to be in the home page title towards the front of the title: HOME PAGE Not Optimised for Liquidation : Business Recovery, Insolvency & Personal Debt -Trust Wilson Field Optimised for Liquidation:  Liquidation | Business Recovery | Insolvency And Personal Debt -Trust Wilson Field Then, on your Liquidation page the title should be: LIQUIDATION PAGE Not Optimised for Liquidation : Liquidation does not have to mean the end of your business! Optimised for Liquidation: Liquidation | Company Compulsory And Voluntary Liquidation Hope that helps, will not get you first but you will jump quite a lot.

Having a date in the URL is effective so long as the SEO friendly structure takes place before the date exactly how you mentioned "/dangers-of-sharing-KM-knowledge-01-11-15". If you change the order you run the risk of priority keywords being ignored "/**01-11-15-**dangers-of-sharing-KM-knowledge" . Also try to keep the URL short as the browser and Google will truncate the URL if it is too long which will defeat the purpose of it being visible for users. Will it hurt your SEO? ... no way, so long as you are not updating the URL when you update the page. On a second note, the same does not apply for your titles as this is valuable real estate for primary keywords. IDEAL : Your Primary Key Phrase | Your Secondary Key Phrase | Your Tertiary Key Phrase  IF YOU HAVE TO:  Your Primary Key Phrase | Your Secondary Key Phrase - Your Company Name **NEVER : **Your Primary Key Phrase | Your Secondary Key Phrase - **01-11-15 ** Reason: The main reason we do not add it to the end of the title is because that space should be used for Keywords that best describe your page only. Even when it comes to you brand, I would rather replace the company name with a keyword if I can as Google in most cases already knows who you are.

Using 301 is that standard way of proceeding if you need to change the structure of your site. If done properly, there is no impact on your rankings (always make sure to update your internal links - avoid 301's on internal links). As a rule of thumb, don't change your url's too often, because the redirects can get quite messy after a few years. For the ranking question, I wouldn't know how long it takes, I mainly track traffic, not really page authority, so can't help you on that one. Unrelated to your question, but could have an impact on your SEO: I was a bit surprised by your choice of Magento for a smaller shop. Magento is known for being quite hungry for resources, and normally requires a dedicated server to run on. I sometimes had difficulty accessing the pages. When I did a speed check the final result was ok, but 'time to first byte' was quite long, which could indicate that your server is not really up to its task. Another strange finding was that a very large part of the content that is downloaded are javascriptfiles (65% of total weight of the page) and css files (20%) - you should try to regroup these files & minify them. Also try to tune your caching settings - a lot of static resources could be cached. Full details can be found here: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150204_1H_1A91/ - you should also check the Page Speed Insights tool from Google: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fhippemamashop.nl%2F&tab=desktop. On your productpages, some of the descriptions are quite short, and maybe not 100% optimised for search (and for your target audience). Additional info is not always correct 'Materiaal: Nee' (Lief sokjes). Try to find a unique tone of voice for your site - you are trying to attract young fashionable mothers - so you probably should adapt your descriptions to that target audience rgds, Dirk

Thanks so much for the insight Dirk, that seems like a good course of action for us

Whether or not you're allowed to copy and paste the article verbatim is something you'll have to determine from the site you copied from, but even noindex wouldn't address the problem of plagiarism if that's what you're worried about as the article would still be on your site.  Basically what you're doing is the reverse of what's in the Google guide on Canonical: _Content you provide on that blog for syndication to other sites is replicated in part or in full on those domains.    _ http://news.example.com/green-dresses-for-every-day-155672.html (syndicated post) http://blog.example.com/dresses/green-dresses-are-awesome/3245/ (original post) So in this case the News site (The Daily Business Review) is the source of the article, and you're one of the sites syndicating what they wrote so you point back to them as canonical. Still the questions you bring up are part of the reason why several sites--HuffPo, The Verge, SlashDot, etc--write their own take on a source article instead of reprinting verbatim when linking back.  It's more of the annotation model I mentioned above.

Depends a lot on how you configure your site. If your site isn't deep (meaning the number of pages to navigate to a given page) then breadcrumbs don't make as much sense. If you use broad categories with a drill-down into increasingly specific categories before you reach a given content page, however, then it makes a lot more sense to offer breadcrumbs, The purpose of breadcrumbs is to show the navigation path to that page. I wouldn't worry about the duplicate links. A site may link to a page internally multiple times. Internal links are not counted as votes like external links are.

Thank you, I will try that out.

I agree with Ray. However, I tried to crawl both your old url & new one always got a "Connection refused" error in Screaming Frog (even when reducing crawlspeed & increasing default response timeout). . Maybe this is completely unrelated, however never had this on other sites before. Did you try to fetch the new pages in Webmastertools? Your robots.txt is quite long - you're sure that all pages that need to be indexed can be indexed? (completely unrelated to the indexing problems - I used webpagetest.org to see if your site was accessible by other automated tools - it worked, but also revealed that your pages are extremely heavy to load) Dirk

Hi Miguel. How recently did you make the switch?  The reason being, it takes Google some time to crawl all the changes, index, and then finally pass along old authority.  Here's an older Q&A that speaks to this: http://moz.com/community/q/how-long-for-authority-to-transfer-form-an-old-page-to-a-new-page-via-a-301-redirect-moz-pa-score-update. Especially Dr. Pete's answer of... It can vary quite a bit. The page has to be recrawled/recached, which can take anywhere from hours to weeks, depending on how much authority the page has. That's usually the big delay. After that, Google may on occasion delay passing authority, but we don't have proof of that (there are just cases where it seems like they do). If it's just a handful of pages, re-fetch them through Google Webmaster Tools. It never hurts to kick the crawlers. Hopefully this helps you out.  Changing things back early on might cause even more delays, so it's better to stick with the change if it hasn't been very long at all.

I'm interested to know answer to this question too. I'm about to introduce a CDN as our company is a global one and i'm hoping a CDN would reduce the page load time and thus reduce the average load time GA reports.. Curious why GA is recording worse for you.

Questions This type of behavior is considered a temporary redirect. Maybe it's better to think of the name as a conditional redirect. In which case, "Oh, your browser is in FR, with that condition let's send you here..."  The 301 is supposed to be used as an unconditional redirect, telling crawlers that you're trying to migrate from URL A to B permanently, so get rid of URL A. Not necessarily. VS a 301, yes. but scrapability is mostly down to linking and sitemaps. Yup. Nope. You'd want to interlink directly to the other languages anyways though in case the 302 doesn't work for whatever reasons. Then the link is passing authority and the user has an option available to them if they'd like to get there on their own. Right. It'd be best to interlink with hreflang on each as you never know for certain how someone arrives at those pages.  Best to give them and crawlers the guidance to where the other translations reside. You're welcome! Hopefully that clears it all up for you.

The question on stackoverflow was regarding the second question. One link with two rel attributes, one invalid ("sunshine"), one nofollow. Html5 spec dictates that the second (valid nofollow) attribute must be ignored, thus leaving the link dofollow. I understand your logic with this statement, but I do not believe that you are correct in your assumption that a double no follow will leave the link as a follow. Most likely the erroneous code will leave the link completely ignored by the bots and even cause them not to crawl passed it. Can you correct the link to remove any unnecessary REL properties? one two If the second link is ignored, can this behaviour be changed by adding #foo or ?foo to the url? In this case, I would remove the first link if possible. Again, if this information is no follow, or contains duplicate links it will really cause more problems than solutions. If these links aren't on your site, but in a linking sources site, contact the webmaster and ask them for help correcting these links so that you can receive the full credit for any link juice.

Hi Bas I have seen most of this case with CMS like Wordpress. I haven't yet faced this with Magento yet. But with WP i am using some SEO plugins and maybe that can be one reason. But i manually checked meta title and description of each pages via the source code view and it is the same as i used. But the meta description that is being displayed by google is obvious threat for CTR. I am trying to find if i can find any answer to this issue ( if it is really an issue ). You must  have a look at this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3HX_8BAhB4

Thanks Ryan.