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Hi, I would like to know have you updated your sitemap? If not Kindly update it on the website as well as add the sitemap in Google Webmaster tool. You can block old urls which you do not want to get indexed. Yes it will affect the traffic as there are two different pages of same services which will distributes the customers.

Eric is completely right - Google does not list algorithmic penalties in GSC. Definitely try using Moz's Google Algorithm Change History to see if you can match an algorithm change to the drop in traffic. That said, you said that the rankings drop happened when they revamped the URL structure. It'd be surprisingly coincidental if an algorithm change hit them at the same time that they updated their URL structure. Here's what I'd do to figure out if the new URL structure could be the cause: Get a full list of inbound links from a site like Majestic or Ahrefs, specifically broken links (I wouldn't recommend getting this from Moz, because their lists of links aren't as comprehensive). See if they have a lot of now "broken" links that used to boost rankings of key pages on the old structure. Can you put in 301 redirects to get them to the right page? Can you reach out to those site owners and point them to the new versions of the pages? See if Wayback Machine has a copy of what their website used to look like. Is the internal linking structure really different? If it is (or if Wayback Machine doesn't have a copy of their old site), definitely do an internal architecture audit. It's possible that this new version of the site doesn't link internally as well as they used to, which has weakened their important pages. See if they had a web analytics software set up before they made the switch. If they do, find out what their top organic pages were before the change. Does the new site have a new page that answers the same questions that their old site did? It's possible that they removed key pages that were bringing in a lot of traffic. Or, possibly changed them, weakening their relevance to the keyword and ultimately losing their position. This may be more than you were originally asking for, so I'll stop there. Good luck on your search! Kristina

Finally, i decided to do the next: Delete all pages from my site with filters (i have the option and it wasn't a problem) Delete URL using GWT individually It works!

According to Matt Cutts and various other blogs etc there is no duplicate content penalty. However if it is spammy then you could incur a potential penalty.

1. Can I use the same content for the internal pages and 301 from the old internal pages to the new? Absolutely. There's no issue with re-using the content, so long as it isn't live in two places simultaneously. I suppose in theory there may be a brief window where it could be considered duplicate before the old site is removed from their index but aside from that, it's fine. **2. Should I 301 from the old to the new domain for the HP, or not? ** Yes. If you're looking to replicate the same structure on the new site and want to use a redirect, your best option is to 301 each page to its new-domain counterpart. This way, if anyone has a link saved anywhere like their favorites, an email etc they'll still hit the right page rather than what appears to be a random website. Some bad news to be weary of: At a quick glance it seems the link profile on that domain is still quite bad. When you use a 301 to point this domain to the new one, you're also pointing ~80-90% of that "value" to the new domain as well. Choose wisely 3. If I do a 301 from an internal page to a new internal page, does that have the same effect of doing a 301 from the old HP to the new HP? Also yes, in every way.

You really should be using Google's parameter tool if you do NOT want those pages crawled. If they are crawled, and you use the canonical tag in order to tell Google to pass any "juice" to the page you're setting the canonical tag to, then you won't lose any traffic. Both of those URLs (the one with the parameters and one without) essentially will be crawled, but won't be indexed.

Hi mike, we do have webmaster tools set up and I will take a look at Screaming Frog, as it looks like an efficient piece of software. I should have probably been a bit clearer in my query though. Will Screaming Frog tell me which internal links are pointing to 404 pages? The only way I can think of checking this at the moment is to go through every page on the site, checking each of the links to see if they go to the correct pages.

Hi, What ScreamingFrog is looking for is the actual UA-code on the site itself so in the code. But Google Tag Manager won't show this and will load GA itself via JavaScript which doesn't make it available for ScreamingFrog. That's why it won't show up for you. What you could do is set-up a custom filter in ScreamingFrog to check for the GTM code snippet so you can find out if you miss GTM somewhere on the site.

All the categories are based on what my customers search for in my nav or based on what discovery related keywords they search for. My worry is that this is endless, as there are literally thousands of categories that I could be creating. If you have 5 or more products that are relevant to a keyword, should you not create a category for your customers to find, rather than just a product page, (offering your customers more options)? Thanks,

Hi Brian, To answer your question directly, linking to these pages is the preferable option of the two. That said, if it were my campaign I'd be looking to cut down on the volume of these pages to make them a bit more manageable first. I've listed some suggestions below that may point you in the right direction, take from them what you may! Get Rid of These Location Pages These days, having a "Bands in Atlanta, GA" page isn't necessary to rank for that term. Your site is clearly about booking bands so if you've got a Georgia page in this example and your band's profiles list their locations, this combined with a generally well-optimised site means you can still rank for it just fine. Right now, having 750 orphan pages that are essentially duplicates of each other is not doing you any favors. Consider How the Users Expect to Find a Band The user experience on the site right now is by now means bad but if you were to remove these pages, this is the way I would go about it: Change "Browse Bands" to something more specific to their intent; perhaps "Find a Band". We're talking semantics here but "Browse Bands" suggests to me that I'm about to see a huge list of bands to sift through and I'm just as lazy as the next user. Let the filters do the work. From this band finder page (essentially your existing /bands#band-finder page), have 2 drop-down options at the top. The first one for Location and the other for Type or Genre. Again, minor changes but I would expect that most users want to find a band in a specific location so rather than putting this option in the top corner as a text link, make it the most prominent option on the page. Also stating that the other drop-down is before they click it is another minor difference but helpful. "Now Showing: All Bands" isn't entirely intuitive. Minor detail. Add a Page for Each State 750 location pages is not only hard to manage, it's also hard to offer unique value for. If you add a page for each state this is much easier to do. You can talk about the regional differences between each (most popular genres, different laws, any other common differences or booking requirements etc) You could also include the pre-filtered results for each state on these pages to give users another way to find a band quickly. ie From the California page, show the California bands by default and they can select their specific town/city from there if they like. Another great way to add unique and valuable content would be to have 1 to 3 featured bands on each state's page. This may be risky if it's going to upset other bands so it's obviously your call as well but it lets you expand a little more with something valuable and you could even include the areas they service which is a legit reason to talk about specific locations. Include Serviced Locations on Band Profile Pages The current band profile pages are excellent. Videos, song samples, a list of songs, photos, reviews etc. Great work! The only thing it's missing is the areas they service. This is redundant for people finding the band through location filters but not if they go straight to the "Select a Band" drop-down. Bonus points if this list of locations is also shown on a map rather than just a text list, though text is also important for those using Ctrl-F to find their location. Build Links to State or Band Pages Building location-specific links to either of these pages will add another signal to search engines that you offer the solution to a user's intent. This can be as simple as offering your featured bands a "featured on" type of badge that links back to their profile on your site. Something similar to "as seen on TV" where them linking to you genuinely helps their own site/image by suggesting to their visitors they're trustworthy. Don't Hide Too Much Content Be mindful of how much content is "hidden" in those pop-up windows. Bits and pieces of info is fine but if you do start populating pages with lots of content and obscuring most of it, you're devaluing your hard work! This turned into quite the lengthy response that went on a bit of a tangent but hopefully it's at least somewhat helpful to you anyway! Thin, duplicate pages bad; unique, rich landing pages good!

I think your interpretation is a bit tightly wound - in this case, you're not paying for the link, you're paying for a membership into the Chamber of Commerce. That you get a link is a bi-product, and it is not 'what you pay for', there's much more to the CoC than web links. I'm sure you're correctly quoting something from somewhere, and I'm not going to bother to do the research to debate in quote format about it.  I'm just letting you know, in all my experience in SEO client sites, that purchasing a membership in the Better Business Bureau, the Chamber of Commerce or a long list of other legitimate local business directories, that these links seem to have a very positive affect on SERPs. But maybe I'm just getting lucky. In the end, there's no need for confusion. Experiment and see what happens. That's what makes SEO so fun!

Hi Tom, this will likely impact your mobile rankings, as the smartphone crawler is the one which primarily feeds the mobile index. Best practice would say to make the mobile content as close to the desktop version as possible, but I understand that sometimes the resources are simply not available. My concern would be that if you remove all internal links to the pages, the crawler will no longer find that page in new crawls and may eventually remove it from the mobile index, or may discount the importance of the page. Of course, if it isn't mobile friendly, you may end up losing rankings anyway if competitors create a more mobile-friendly experience. A couple thoughts: is the page getting valuable traffic from that position 1 ranking? If so, I'd strongly suggest including it on your list of pages to make mobile-friendly. If not, perhaps it doesn't matter if it loses the high ranking. you could create a sitemap which includes those pages, so that the crawler can discover them even if they're not linked to internally. I don't know that this will prevent a negative impact but it could aid discovery. Hope that helps.

Hi Brian, 809 over 863 is over the 93% of the site indexed. I'd wait a little more. Also, I dont think that i will add value that you manually submit the URLs that you think are not indexed. A reminder, WMT is being realy delayed on the latest information shown. In my case, the last record is from 4th may.

Thanks for the link. I'm guessing our solution lies somewhere between #'s 2 and 5 in that post. Appreciate the help

Gotcha well I would recommend going into your analytics platform and setting up some sort of segment that just includes past job listings and see the sort of organic traffic they have brought in over the last say 6 months or so. If they are bringing in traffic I would add some sort of unique job ID etc to each listing to make it more unique. If not I would consider added a no index tag on them. I hope that helps some.

Yeah, I think we need to mess around with the template files to make it look better. Btw, the website in question is AndroidBeat.com. I will look into the schema markups, though the structure of the site is quite flat, so not sure if breadcrumbs would be useful. When your website has to depend on advertising for revenues, page speed is difficult to optimize. I keep getting told that the page load cannot be improved further because of the ads on the website. So it is important to strike the right balance. If you know someone who can help with improving page load times then please let me know. I am happy to get a second opinion. Thanks again for the suggestions. Any thoughts on this point: How about internally linking to the same page with multiple anchor text. Wouldn't we end up confusing the bots. We have seen category pages doing well in some cases. So wouldn't this approach affect the ranking for such category pages that are doing well.

Hey Chris! Thanks a lot for your time. I did send you a PM the day after your original post, I will send you another :). Thanks a lot for your additionnal advice. You're right about managing client's expectations and its crucial. You're pointing out some valid points and I will have to ponder about how I approach this whole situation. Charles,

The fact that the links are all related to what you do doesn't change that they would all be coming into the same structure in about the same way from every site. Editorial links are those placed once on a site by the owners without provocation to inform their readers about something they find interesting or useful outside of a planned relationship. Editorial links are chaotic in nature, meaning there is no pattern to them. Google has been working to find and count these links higher than crafted links which typically have a pattern. I'm not saying this is definitely going to be the case for you, but the more links are designed to appear, the more they have a pattern. You're trying to negate that, but lets just say there has a tendency to still be a pattern. That's why I mentioned not to count on these links. They might do you some good, they might not. I hope that answers your question!

Apologies for the delay in responses here. Thanks Andreas and Mike. We ended up doing just that and redirected 404 errors before doing a recrawl. Worked great! Thanks for your help.

Thanks for your reply! The intention is not for SEO, more for users to make them aware of the product page and to check it out. So it should be useful and I imagine it shouldn't be a problem then