Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey Prime, I am not familiar with any plugins that can make a site responsive and maintain the appearance without you manually editing them. But, many will allow you to change their theme, which might be good enough for your needs if you don't mind editing them yourself. If you have the budget, my preference for SEO purposes would be to have a designer make your current theme responsive. Barring that, the mobile plugin would be an affordable alternative, but not ideal.

If I'm understanding you properly that is not a good idea. Google will potentially not be able to crawl your content that way. Regardless of the pagination you still want to be able to surface your content for search. You might consider using push state and pop state to give crawl paths and maintain the quick loading user experience. Be sure to make it gracefully degrade for lesser browsers.

These guys are all right, but John is assuming you're on an Apache server. You very well might be, but you will need to determine if it's LINUX or WINDOWS based that your site is hosted on. Also, in addition to redirects I would go ahead and remove whatever internal links point to "www.yoursite.com/index.html" and change them to "www.yoursite.com" instead. The redirect will solve the problem ultimately, but fixing these links will help ever-so-slightly and especially in the meantime while you wait to fix your server level redirect. Good luck!

Just checking in an older threads marked "unanswered". Thanks Russ for your help! Theresa, were you able to get to the bottom of this? Do you still need help?

its been about a month but ill give it a bit longer. ta

If you don't have the authority to access IIS, then your options are indeed limited. But, it may not matter. If it's the homepage root, your homepage may get all the credit for the link equity (including pagerank) instead of the individual file. For example, depending on how people link to you, the authority may actually life on example.com instead of example.com/index.htm. If it were me, I'd likely place both a meta refresh and a canonical tag in the .htm file You may want to add a 10 second delay to the meta refresh, with a message to the user that they are being redirected (you can Google how to do this). This will help prevent Google from interpreting the meta refresh as a sneaky redirect. Not a perfect solution, but perhaps the best under the circumstances!

Lets just play that out for a second. If I was going to link to their services pages then I wouldn't use "services" as the anchor text.  I would probably use the company's name (their brand name) because it's their service page.  This sort of website is perfect for that because it will have tons of links to the home URL with the brand name of the website, some with "services" some with "contact" etc.  It wouldn't be hit for over optimization because you have to link to the home page and not a sub-page for these queries.  Also, the blog post on specific topics will have their own sub-pages and those can be handled with SEF URLS and those should rank too with their own links. I'm playing devils advocate here but I'm wondering if we PURE SEO guys are missing something.

Hey Dan, I am actually not so concerned about the pages being indexed.  I don't really think they were ever de-indexed.  Unless I am wrong, I think they were de-ranked. I know others have said that when they "disallowed" large portions of their sites, their pages dropped in the rankings, and did not necessarily disappear.  This is more what I want to see recovery from. Thanks! Craig

Hmmm - good thought. I wonder if Google is giving out deliberately bad advice for dealing with paginated sets, in that they never mention <noindex, follow="">as a viable alternative to next/prev. </noindex,> If each paginated page is all unique assets (photos), why would it be dupe? J

Thank You ! You make my day

Hi there! Here's an article about solving keyword cannibalization issues (targeting multiple pages for the same keywords) that I thought you might find helpful. It's quite old, yet relevant to your situation - http://www.searchenginejournal.com/keyword-cannibalization-and-how-to-handle-it/8084/. I also highly recommend reading Moz's Beginners Guide to SEO. Chapter Five is all about keyword research. Let us know how things go!

You can always change your .htm pages to .php so everything is consistent.  Changing .htm to .php won't cause any problems. Please note that changing php to htm on the other hand will break the php code (unless you remove the php with a rewrite as donford mentioned.)

I would post this on a PHP coding forum for a better response.

Thanks for that screenshot, you definitely put me at ease to know that our anchor phrase is fine.

If you have a choice to stick up to the current version and carry on with the things then it is fine but if this is not a choice then move towards redirecting 301 to all the pages to new URL structure is something you should be doing. Obviously this affect your traffic and SERP rankings for certain keywords but along with the migration if you also working on the quick marketing campaign (as you are taking over some other website) which may includes Press Release, Blog posts about it, mailer to all your subscribers and social media.... this will help people coming and visiting your website from multiple places and this will help you retain your SERP rankings and traffic quicker than normal.

I don't know of any instances of elements hidden on mobile causing a penalty or similar issue. So I can't give you criteria/examples. With a truly responsive design, Googlebot and Googlebot Mobile are going to see the same source code. There should be no difference, just a difference in display settings based on viewport size. Google publicly supports serving up entirely different source code for mobile users on the same URL - so hiding a few things with JavaScript/CSS based on viewport is relatively tame and has become a standard for delivering a fast-loading and usable mobile experience.

Jim I agree with Jason and don't think you have anything to worry about. Where you run into trouble is when you are specifically trying to show Google (or any other search engine) something different. For example, if Googlebot was using an IP address from Kansas you'd want to show them the Kansas image just like you show everyone else. Don't complicate things by saying "Show Kansas.jpg to all Kansas IPs, but always show Googlebot the default.jpg file). That would be cloaking. What you are doing is simple IP delivery and it should be safe.

I actually never learned to enjoy coffee, so it's no sacrifice at all. But you'll have to pry my Earl Grey from my cold dead hands

Many thanks for the quick responses and this was as I had hoped. I found some websites with free in the domain with some very high domain authorities and your answers confirm my thoughts. Thanks again and I'll let the client know.