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Thank you Chris for your in-depth answer, you just confirmed what I suspected. To clarify though, what I am trying to save here by noindexing those subsequent pages is "indexing budget" not "crawl budget". You know the famous "indexing cap"? And also, tackling possible "duplicate" or "thin" content issues with such "similar but different" pages... fact is, our website has been hit by Panda several times, we recovered several times as well, but we have been hit again with the latest quality update of last June, and we are trying to find a way to get out of it once for all. Hence my attempt to reduce the number of similar indexed pages as much as we can. I have just opened a discussion on this "Panda-non-sense" issue, and I'd like to know your opinion about it: https://moz.com/community/q/panda-rankings-and-other-non-sense-issues Thank you again.

LOL. Sorry, I didn't have the time for a correct answer.

Unfortunately there's no black and white answer to this one since there are so many variables involved when changing both domain and website. If you had just migrated the old site to a new domain the process would be simply using a page-to-page 301 so every page on the old site simply pointed to the same page on the new domain. If the structure was kept identical with the new site and the 301s were handled in this way it should be fine but if not, you may have lost some of your link equity if any backlinks are pointing to the old domain and haven't been redirected. On top of that, moving to a new site brings with it a minefield of potential pitfalls too. Some examples: Is the new site at least as fast as before, if not faster? Is it sitting on the same server or at least in the same country (very minor factor these days but the 1%s can't be ignored!) Is the new site being crawled successfully? By this I mean if you do a Fetch and Render, is Google 'seeing' your site as users do or are there blank patches that can't be indexed for some reason like a poorly managed AJAX element. Has all the same content been moved across to the new site? A reduction in quality/volume can alter your rankings quite a bit Can the content be seen by search engines? If it used to just sit on the page before but is now hidden behind accordions or fancy design elements that set the default state to hidden, the importance this content is given by Google is reduced by a large enough amount to make a difference This list could go on for a while but you get the idea. My best suggestion would be to sit down and go through every single change from old site to new including the ones above and even changes that may seem insignificant, then weigh that up against potential ranking factors - you'll typically find your culprit(s) quite quickly this way. Not sure if you're their SEO or the site owner but this step would require some SEO input to offer accurate feedback. If this were 2015 I would have suggested that perhaps the lost equity in the 301s was seeing a drop in strength from your link profile but as Cyrus Shephard recently outlined in this Moz Blog, that's no longer the case so I'd question any advice to the contrary there.

Hey Gavo, Looks like ShedSafe.com is such a popular company, if you search for "www.shesafe.com.au", Google thinks that you just missed the "d" in "www.shedsafe.com.au". See the different messaging at the top? If you don't include "www", it asks, "Did you mean: shedsafe.com**.au**?" If you do include it, it says "Showing results for www.shedsafe.com.au." My guess here is that when you include "www", Google thinks you're trying to use their search engine as a browser, so they're more likely to correct you. When you're not using "www", they're showing the results as you searched for them. I think the key here is more Domain Authority, time, and branding. The more Google sees that your site is respected, they'll be less likely to recommend ShedSafe. Good luck! Kristina

On-site optimization only "qualifies" you to "appear" in a SERP. Ranking in that SERP is an entirely different and separate process and a Heck of a lot harder to pull off.

Thanks Martijn and Christy!

Dot Com! When I started my business 7.5 years ago, the dot com was unavailable so I went with dot us.  Since then I have had to repeat the phrase "that's dot us, not dot com" several thousand times.  When I don't receive a promised email, and I call to follow up, they frequently have sent it to dot com. In the SERPS it doesn't matter. I dominate, but I think I would have picked a different url if I'd realized how hard it was for the average consumer to remember. And my clients are biz people!

Thanks Andy, at least this gives me reassurance that nothing strange is going on here. I'll wait for a bit longer and see what happens.

Garrett - to my knowledge Google does not use og:description if the meta description is blank.

I like Seo RoundTable from Barry Schwartz and also some of  those already list above especially for up to the minute search engine changes and trials that have been seen. As per Egol's comment - I too have probably learnt more about SEO technique and current topics from the Moz Q&A than anywhere else. To the point where I am now vastly more confident in my knowledge of the area and can now try and help others.

These posts are neither in main menu or footer menu. We show recently added posts beneath the most recent blog-post. Not related, but they will go in different categories like marketing, sales, all, etc.

Thanks but the issue is its their tour so they only want one -https://bestdevonholidays.co.uk/lavender/virtualtour.html They don't want people to leave the site but want to embed so really question is what can I do to get the most out of an iframe embed

I was advised to deindex pages that had not been visited in the recent past. I deindexed about 150 pages and had a nice bump in the SERPS. Previously I was #9 and I jumped to #4. I have about a hundred more thin pages I'm working on and #crossyourfingers maybe I'll be top three.

sub-domain vs folder - here is a whiteboard friday about the differences: https://moz.com/blog/subdomains-vs-subfolders-rel-canonical-vs-301-how-to-structure-links-optimally-for-seo-whiteboard-friday In your case i'd put it in subfolder

Hi Raymond Very nice question to ask i also see people in my industry using the same technique to aquire tons of backlinks, but as you consider about penguin 4.0 as it is now using the core alogorithm as a real time, one or another it will get penalized by google i think its not a long term strategy to sustain in market Note: the key points in seo as we are a marketers is not to rank #1 in google . we need to just build the trust, great UI/UX interactions on our website

Thanks !!

Thanks. That is exactly what I was looking for.

Same problem here on one side I get to few pages and on the other flag I get too many pages not enough links lol I have 19 pages crawled by google and my competitors have 5-10 and they do not have the flag ...

Hi there, I would proceed with caution with any of those options. First off, what is the hosting situation with each of these URL's? You are going to have to be careful since inter-connected websites linking to one-another is going to give Google plenty of red flags and might suggest a PBN is in use, which may bring on more scrutiny of your main domain. 301's are not ideal in this situation since they are used primarily for re-branding purposes. In other words, for when the content of a website is being shifted to a new domain. This is a pure link scenario, without the same brand change. 301-ing multiple domains to a single domain just isn't how they are supposed to be used. Will you be penalized? I'm unsure. Is it risky? You bet. a) If you do go the redirect route, definitely don't link everything to the Home page - 301's are meant to be page-to-page changeovers meaning your Home Page redirects to the new Home Page, the Category Pages redirect to the Category Pages, etc. If each of your websites have the same structure, then it's not such a big deal. I'd still be wary of going that route, though. b) Linking all the domains to the Home page is probably the best option assuming you aren't hosting each of these websites on the same server. If you have anything but a-class hosting (i.e. shared, etc), I wouldn't go this route. c) Linking domains to internal pages is probably your safest option, since it spreads the links around in a more relevant manner and won't impact your entire site the way the same links would on your Home page. This is due to the new updates to to Penguin. If you go this route, you will be able to test whether or not these links are hurting or helping you for rankings on specific pages without risking your entire site. d) Again, probably not ideal to 301 redirect any of these websites to your new site. The only benefit that would have would be to redirect traffic to your main site. If that is your ultimate goal, then try to use best practices outlined in a) above. However, if this is for a link juice and ranking purpose, then redirecting will not be as effective as linking. Keep in mind that redirecting also impacts the strength of that domain's link profile, so 301's are actually going to take away from the strength of the links your other websites produce. I would go with option c), rolled out gradually, opting for a couple of pages and measuring ranking fluctuations as a result over a couple of weeks. If you see gains, keep going. If you see losses, you know what the problem is and you can fix it easily. Before I did that, however, I would investigate the hosting situation and relationships between these sites to minimize the potential impact of link spam suppressions and penalties. Hope this helps provide you with some extra information. Don't be afraid to reach out if you have any further questions or need clarification. Good luck! Cheers, Rob