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I'm currently using SEO category updater plugin. I have about 10 posts per category showing snippets of each not the full page. If I write a new title, and description for each page, about around 50 words of text would that be enough for google to identify the page as being unique? The problem is I have hundreds of categories so it could be very time consuming.

Could be an issue related to competition and how far you are from the centroid? Please confirm the industry, city and how far you're outside the city.

Takeshi, I appreciate your response! Having someone validate my thinking definitely helps cure my indecisiveness. I'll implement this structure and see how it performs. Thanks again and take care, -Zach

If you have access to the site, verify it in Google and Bing webmaster tools and get the list of links from each of those sites. Bing will also give you links without being a verified site owner. Both are free.

Thanks donford, that's very helpful. After thinking it over, I feel it's best to keep the urls as simple as possible and use something like /s/essay-editing for them (the 's' representing services). Thanks!

From my understanding, if you no links going to that url, it might be the crawler verifying existence of the 404 page. So displaying a 404 page is best option for that. However, if you have links going to that url, you should either fix those(if internal) or do 301 redirect as you said.

Google has not Stopped there robot.text checker you can find it in webmaster tools under blocked url's.

Thanks Dana, much appreciated. A SEO company recently suggested signing up to them as they said "Google hates 404 errors." Which got me researching about it. On a slightly different topic, I've got several hundred pages on my site and it looks like the original designer had the same title for each page. Should I got through each one and rename it, or is there a faster way? Would it be worth the time?

Hi CWseo, Yes, the 'in' search has always done that. Odd, isn't it? I've never understood why Google does that in that way, but it's been like that since 2010.

Hey There Assuming your WordPress theme isn't conflicting with any of this, so long as you select "noindex subpages of archives" in Yoast you should be good to go. No need playing around with anything else. -Dan

I've removed dates from evergreen content for the same reason (makes it look outdated) and haven't seen any negative consequences.  Does it really matter to your users when the piece of content was created?  If not, then the date is not necessary.

Yes, no need to repeat the "RewriteEngine on" line.  It's also a good idea to include the canonical tag on the homepage, just in case.

Usually the fastest way to do this would be to first block that url off with either a robots.txt or robots meta tag, but as the page no longer exists i'd recommend going to Google Webmaster Tools and submitting a remove URL request (image below). That's all there is to it! removeurl.png