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Hi there, This is odd, 4 weeks is a long time and something is likely going wrong. Are you positive that your 301s have been implemented correctly? Have you received any messages in Search Console/GWT that are relevant? I would also do as Ikkie suggests and submit prominent URLs which have yet to be indexed here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6259634?hl=en Please let me know if these checks fail or if you'd like to PM me the URL and I'll take a closer look. Hope this helps, Daniel

If I understand the question correctly, it sounds similar to how most eCommerce sites deal with sub-category (e.g. Apparel/Clothing/Pants) and you're asking if you should put unique content on those pages. There is no right or wrong answer here, but I have two guidelines for you to consider. #1 Search Volume Does the topic of the category / inventory page receive significant search volume? For example, if it is a landing page about a brand-specific product (e.g. Used Honda Accord) it probably deserves its own content. If nobody searches for the exact product assortment that page is about (e.g. blue used Honda Accord year 1989) then you may not need the content to rank for those long-tail queries. #2 How Can You Help Your Visitors? The primary goal of content on these pages should be to help the visitor. Improving your rank for searches should be a secondary concern, which will alleviate some of your trouble with pushing the listings further down on the page. Think about what the user is trying to do on this page. Most of the time they're still not sure exactly WHICH product to choose, or they'd have landed on a product page, or a deeper category. Help them choose. For example: Brand X is for entry-level shoppers and provides the greatest value. Brand Y is for experienced shoppers and has the most features. You can use drop-down divs and other display tactics to keep from pushing the listings down too far. You can also prioritize these pages so you're not writing content for all of them at once. By focusing on the top performing 20% or so first, you'll find out if the investment is going to scale out well to the rest of the pages, or if you should just leave them alone.

In order to help you, can you give us some details : which plugin do you use ? Do you minify code at deployment, before caching ? Minifying can be an issue if the result is not cached, so each time the page is loading, the server must minify the code... And perhaps if your server is on a shared hosting, it can be time consuming !

Hi lkomontt76! Any update on this? Are you able to provide any examples so Kristina can look into it?

<a class="zippy index13 goog-zippy-expanded" tabindex="0" name="10" data-tracking-impression=""></a>Anatomy of pre-fetch tags **https://ad.doubleclick.net**: These parameters are the same as in standard tags. **ddm: **This is a new parameter that distinguishes DCM tags from the legacy product (DFA). It makes no difference to how you export or implement your tags. Learn more **pfadx**: Lets the ad server know that this is a pre-fetch (pf) tag and an ad command for XML (adx). _Nxxxx.site-keyname/Byyyyyy_;kw=[keyword];ord=[timestamp];dc_lat=_N_;dc_rdid=_Czzzz_;tag_for_child_directed_treatment=_I_: These parameters are the same as in standard tags. **sz=_widthxheight_: **Dimensions of the placement, in pixels. (The value of the sz parameter is always 0x0 for VAST placements.) **dcmt=_text/xml_**: MIME stands for Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions, which tell the browser what type of content you're sending. In this case, the MIME type is text/xml, which means that the content being sent is text in the form of XML code. **dc_vast=3**: Formats the tag to be compliant with VAST 3.0 specifications. theoretically you could pass a regular tag through there as well so hopefully that is of some help

It seems like this is an issue with BLC, I don't think it will actually cause you any issues. This post suggests adding LinkedIn to the BLC exclusion list to address the issue. The only problem there is you can't actually depend on BLC to check those links. Based on a review of various reports of similar issues, this problem is not limited to BLC, but any attempt to check too much/too fast on LinkedIn.

Load time isn't that much, same domain redirects only take 16-25ms. I would be more concerned with cross domain redirects.

Hi, It's not about 'using 404 pages'. It's about removing the occurence of a 404 page when a product isn't available... So the answer is yes. It's fine to redirect what was a product page to the main relevant category page if that product is no longer available and you don't plan on restocking in the future. In fact it's recommended if you want to preserve a large percentage of the link equity the original page has built up, and hopefully provide a good user experience by allowing customers to find alternative products. The only issue is if you have thousands of products being discontinued, then the amount of 301s can affect the speed of your website. But I've managed redirects for websites with 100s of thousands of products, and 10s of thousands of error pages without any issue. I'd echo Yossi in saying that it may be worth creating a custom 404 Error Page which helps your users if they encounter it, and also improves your branding - with most eCommerce sites with large inventories, it's inevitable error pages will crop up despite your best efforts. And I'd echo Nitin in saying that if you might get the product back again, you're better leaving the pages on the site and allowing customers to register their interest when it reappears...

Can you share actual instances? Feel free to PM me those. I need to look at the actual setup. The above looks okay, but there might be something else going on. Also, remember that a canonical is a suggestion. If the SEs deem the page valid enough, different enough, or just plain don't know what to do with them yet, they can still index them. Let me know the real URLs and I'll take a look.

Thanks, we'll check all of the old URLs are redirecting correctly (though I'd assume given the htacces and WP settings changes, they would). Will also perform the other check you mentioned and report back if anything is amiss... Thank you, Lynn.

I agree ! A long time ago, before I knew much about SEO, I had a website redesigned and the traffic tanked big time.   After that, even though I am not a "designer," almost all elements of our websites are built in-house.  Not only do you have control over the SEO, but you also don't have to pull teeth and get into arguments to get things done the way you want. We keep 'em simple and they look OK.

None, the structure in WordPress shouldn't matter for Google. In the end WordPress is just a platform to create the pages and as one of the most used platforms in the world it makes it super easy but that doesn't mean it takes into account certain implications for just creating normal pages.

Hi Taiger! Just checking, did you and Daniel get this worked out?

Since subdomains are treated as a completely separate domain, your options here are essentially to go with an aged domain with backlinks vs a fresh domain that will be "sandboxed" for a little while. Before someone yells at me for it, no, the Google Sandbox no longer exists but you will still see fresh domains rank nowhere for several months in most scenarios. With that out of the way, as long as moving those maps to the subdomain doesn't provide a poor UX then this is going to be your best option. Retain the strength you've already built and keep going from there rather than starting fresh. Just be weary of the potential for existing users who may have saved favorites or emailed links to the primary domain; you don't want them landing on a functional page that looks nothing like what they were expecting!

Hi Blaze-Communication! Any way you can provide any more information, or a link to your site?

Thanks for the reply! I will certainly try to build my content up in ways that get it linked from many different sources. I was just concerned that the large amount of backlinks from one domain would negatively affect me. That's great that it won't! Thank you!

Have you reported the change using Google's change of address tool? Here's the intro from Google: If you've moved your site to a new domain or subdomain, use the Change of address tool in Search Console. A change of address notification helps you manage the transition needed by Google to index your new URLs at the new address, while minimizing impact to your current ranking in Google Search results. A change of address notifies Google about the new URLs for your existing content, so that we can update our index to reflect the new domain for your pages. This updated index status remains in effect for 180 days, by which time Googlebot will have crawled and indexed the pages at the new address.

Well, in my views yes you will get benefit out of this change. I would suggest you to run a backlink audit of your old site and make disallow list of all toxic links. Disallow all those and put a 301 redirect as soon as you can. Another tip, when you do it, try to change your onsite content. This will add up another plus point for your site. I checked your site, its look amzing i think you will not only retain but will get good result. Moreover, you second domain has more branded power than the current one along with age of the domain. So Good luck with your change.

Thx again!!

Thanks EGOL.  Still looking for additional evidence about this.