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Great question! We do often see a positive correlation between the number of followed outbound links and higher rankings (though I'm not sure we've scientifically measured this recently). Anecdotally, we hear this often as well. Most famously when the NYTimes made external links "followed" which was followed by an increase in traffic/rankings.

Hi Kate, Yes, my whole concern is organic and running afoul of their ad guidelines for organic's sake. Thanks! Best... Mike

Your domain is already ccTLD. Also in HTML you have code as:

Hi, Sure I'll give you an example, our menu has 6 main categories: Storage, Office Trucks & Trolleys, Shelving & Racking, Pallet trucks + More Categories. within more categories, we have 18 more category pages - one is Kitchen & Catering equipment, this has within it 10 subcategories, these don't appear in the menu. You get to these once you click through the kitchen and catering page I'm wondering if we should include these to the menu, so when you hover over the main category, the subcategories appear. Would having this many links in the menu however, cause more issues for SEO

Hi Chris Thank you for the detailed response, would you say have more subcategory pages is better? I wanted to make sure the product titles were in some way relevant to the category to help with optimisation. I'm trying to improve category page content, but at the moment it's a struggle. The focus is on the products so its not a priority for the business to have lots of content on the page. Becky

As Matt mentioned above, this is very vague and would require a good amount of research. There are many tools and blogs available that help new and old sites begin the process of optimizing a website. I can give some advice on what I would do to get the initial setup going. Site audit - Run a site audit and find where issues may be. This means search for broken links, broken images, missing tags, duplicate content, etc. To begin ranking a site it's important to make sure the site is running on search engine's requirements. Review your link profile - Do you have spammy links to the site? Is the competition blowing you out of the water when it comes to links? Given your niche, there's going to be lots of competition, chances are you are far behind in the link area. Blog - In many cases this is a given, however, many people don't understand the importance of this step. Add new, compelling content people will want to link to. Research long tail terms people may be using to find products. This will give you a better chance of ranking rather than generic terms like 'guitar' which will have incredibly high competition levels. Syndicate your content - You've posted a blog, now what? Get it in front of people! Share it on social media and social bookmarking sites. Back link - I don't need to go over the importance of this step. Just remember, quality over quantity. I hope this will help you get started, there's lots to do, but stay vigilant. -Nick

As for an SEO checklist, I'd suggest the Web Developer's Cheat Sheet. It's a good idea to read the Beginner's Guide to SEO, too.

"two pages that I've managed to get ranking have ranked between 20 and 23 for the specific term. However, today on the email one of the pages for one search term has bombed out of the top 50 while the other page has remained unaffected." Sometimes, if you have two pages that are ranking for the same search query it's not uncommon for Google to decide that only one of the pages needs to be presented to the user. If both are serving the same user intent then essentially Google may consider it (semantically) duplicate content, despite the fact that both pages may be worded differently, etc. From my experience of having multiple pages ranking for the same keyword, the pages will keep battling it out in the SERPs bouncing up and down. One week, there'll be a cluster of 3 ranking terribly. The next week one will shoot up, while the other is nowhere to be seen. Personally I've found that Google seems to prefer it if there's only one page ranking for the term (it's an easier decision for Google to make and it won't get so confused which one to rank as more relevant to the query). By merging similar pages, I find that it ends up being stronger in Google as it's not having to compete in the SERPs with similar pages on your website. I hope that helps at all, even if it's only from anecdotal evidence.

Thanks Peter, very helpful!

Assuming the links have been removed completely, then not really. It can take anywhere from hours to months before Google will "react" to those links having been removed. If you're still seeing those links as valid in something like Open Site Explorer then don't forget these tools use their own methods for producing this list so it doesn't necessarily mean Google is still seeing the links. About the only thing I can suggest is if subdomain a is still up and running without the redirect, submit it to index via Search Console; anecdotally, this really does seem to promote it being re-indexed faster so theoretically the removal of those 301s may be picked up faster if they haven't been already. This can be found under Crawl > Fetch as Google.

It's not necessarily bad for SEO, and in fact could be useful to the user. What you need to do is make sure you're marking them all up in schema.org markup to make sure the bots can understand the information a little easier. The best scenario is to create a landing page for each location - that way you can have a better shot at ranking for each market. Write unique copy, add a map (embed a Google Map), make sure you have complete contact information (name, address, phone, hours of operation, etc), and list unique products/services for each location.

Nope, you'll be perfectly fine. The only way you'd be in danger is if any of the following changed: Server latency/performance Server geo-location Server stability Your new package being too restrictive and throttling you somehow for reaching a cap Speed, stability and location are the only things that really matter with a host from a ranking perspective so you should be just fine with the change. Good luck!

Hi Kristen Thanks for the heads up.. I have found the cause... Wordpress v. 4.4, on my test site i rolled back to 4.3.1 and it all works fine. So I think it must be an issue with the plugin which has not been updated to wordpress 4.4 Thank you for your help.

I would keep collecting reviews.   I would look at the stats to see if visitors are digging into them.  I might increase the number on a page.  Ten is really low.

Not an expert on this but Google will crawl and index these dynamic URLs if they are being used (generated by user query) a lot. Here are some methods you could use - 1. Link building for these dynamic URLs - You could do some link building for all the combinations of filters (dynamic URLs. This could be time consuming but well worth. Ideas for link building includes - press releases, blog posts (if you have a blog then can you do internal linking), business directories (if your business has got a physical store then you can create business listings and mention your products strategically (dynamic URLs) etc. 2. Update .htaccess file - Maybe there is a way to set canonical for some URLs to your preferred dynamic URLs. - Okay, as I said I am not an expert on this so I am just throwing this idea out there for if someone is aware of a way.

I doubt, but hey, if you are in the computing industry maybe it is worth the good will.. https://www.google.com/search?client=opera&q="become+a+mirror"&sourceid=opera&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

Hi Malika, From the info you've provided, removing those 301s is going to be a good idea. Below is a relevant section from a Google Developers article. The article is specifically referring to mobile site speed but the point applied to desktop as well. "(2) Number of redirects should be minimized Additional HTTP redirects can add one or two extra network roundtrips (two if an extra DNS lookup is required), incurring hundreds of milliseconds of extra latency on 3G networks. For this reason, we strongly encourage webmasters to minimize the number, and ideally eliminate redirects entirely - this is especially important for the HTML document (avoid “m dot” redirects when possible)." If you're 100% sure there are no backlinks or traffic heading to those old domains, there's no reason to keep the redirects in place, particularly if the redirected pages are old enough that it's unlikely anyone has them saved in an old email or under their browser favorites.

This sounds like a trust factor to me. When you search for a query and another very similar query is very common in the search data, Google suggest the common query instead of your exact query. I am not sure what kind of domain you are fighting for but if you get more links or somehow you can manage people to search your brand more, I think this can be eliminated. I guess!

There is some level of SEO value to be had from these but as the other comments have touched on, they're not necessarily the best ways to go about it. Done correctly, each of these methods are perfectly fine, just make sure you're doing it for the right reasons. For example, don't just start dumping links all over Reddit and play the numbers game. You risk getting banned but more importantly, the best you can hope for is a negative association with your brand name. On the other hand, if you have a resource that is very relevant to a particular topic then by all means, link to it. As an example, if you find a thread looking for specific data on a topic and you happen to have a (quality!) infographic that addresses the query perfectly, you're going to genuinely help answer the question and this is the key factor. Also, each of these should be used sparingly. If 80% of your link profile consists of Stumbleupon links, you're not going to gain all that much strength.