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Hi Darcy Looking at what has been mentioned previously I would agree with the train of thought that a more focussed sitemap would generally be advantageous. Andrew

Awesome thanks, I'm on the right track then

I choose not to split it.  With all that has changed in the SEO world I am glad I did not.  The site has fared well thru all the changes and still ranks well for both divisions.

Hi Antonio, Not sure which language you prefer - but you can find some sample codes here: https://developers.google.com/webmaster-tools/v3/samples - I tried the python example which was quite well documented inside the code, I guess it's the same for the other languages. If I have some time I could give it a try - but it won't be before the end of next week (and based on python) Dirk

Glad you've got the load time down, if you've get any benefits in terms of rankings/conversion from the change i'd love to hear about it. Best of luck with the site.

I see what you're getting at. This wasn't a "normal" redirect old page to new page situation. The page being redirected to existed all along, and then they decided to 301 pages to it that were not related topically or by page type. The page with redirects pointed at it dropped in ranking. I suspect the redirects through off the topical understand of what the commercial page was "about". It's a fascinating SEO test - but hopefully not something anyone would do for real. Rules of thumb: Try to get your URLs right from the very beginning Try not not change them unless you have to after the fact Definitely don't redirect from one page to another unless the content is an exact match (or really close) and don't redirect across page types (commercial to informational, vice versa etc)

Yes, some tools like SEMRush or SearchMetrics might be able to provide you with this data if they obviously have the keywords that you are looking for.

Hi Rob Morgan, You've talked about 2 issues here, please find my views on them: "Since launching my new website design - www.advanced-driving.co.uk I am not convinced Google is seeing all the content on the page. I took a long extract of text and did a search on Google and nothing was found. Also although in the search results for "advanced driving course" I can see the new title tag, the snippet isn't showing" => Here, you can check the cached version of any given page by googling "cache:<url-you-want-to-check>" and then clicking on "Text Version".</url-you-want-to-check> As a scroll down I can see the URL changes i.e: www.advanced-driving.co.uk then: http://www.advanced-driving.co.uk/#da-page_in_widget-3 then: http://www.advanced-driving.co.uk/#da-page_in_widget-4 then: http://www.advanced-driving.co.uk/#da-page_in_widget-5 => This is absolutely fine as far as canonical URL is there, and its there in your case. So, good to go Hope this helps!

Hi Veebs, The original page referenced is 404 (gone). I scanned 250 of your pages using Siteliner.com and Screaming Frog. I didn't see any more /self/self/self type links. Do you have another page that is showing the same issue? Thanks, Don

Hi, Do you have both http and https active on the site? You can use something like siteliner.com to check this. I've noticed rankings, clicks and impressions drop off in Webmaster tools on a client site before, and it was actually just registering on the http webmaster tools property instead of https, due to a change made by the developers. Has your traffic also dropped off in Google Analytics on the same day? Or has it remained the same? I notice you say that orders dropped off also, but if traffic hasn't, I'd investigate any dev changes which might have occurred and test through your order process in different browsers/setups. You could also segment your Google Analytics data by browser/OS and check conversions, compared with the previous period, to see if any particular browser has stopped placing orders. Is your website fairly new? I definitely notice more fluctuation in newer websites, and websites with less traffic. Hope this helps, Zoe

Ok thank you for your input

Agree with Martijn.  Technically, Google does not want any pages in the sitemap that 4xx or 3xx or have any other result than a 200. I would say this, if your site is being rebuilt, having a sitemap that is accurate and that updates when you update the site is a basic requirement.   The fact that there is a high cost for fixing this issue is baloney. It sounds like the devs did not build the site correctly the first time if they do not have a way to update the sitemap automatically. You could generate the sitemap yourself You can use tools like http://tools.seochat.com/tools/online-crawl-google-sitemap-generator/ Or read tutorials on how to use Screaming Frog to create a sitemap http://www.hmtweb.com/marketing-blog/dirty-sitemaps-how-to-download-crawl/ Frankly, the annual cost of Screaming Frog (about $150 a year) gets you so much more than just sitemaps.  Buy Screaming Frog, have it generate your sitemap and ask the devs to upload it.  If you have a site with several thousand pages, just running Screaming Frog monthly would help you find issues on your site that is well worth the cost.    Search "Screaming Frog" here in the forums and you can see that this is one of the "swiss army knives" of technical SEO.

Another strange (frustrating!) thing is that there are other websites with little content, few links and a low Moz rank who outrank me for locational based terms i.e: "advanced driving courses london" "advanced driving courses berkshire" "advanced driving courses cheshire".... We all offer these courses around the UK, but Google doesn't "get" my site does this - I have even created a locational page search accessible from the homepage....

Oops - just noticed that I had an error in the first reply and didn't check the correct code. Mea culpa.

Great thank you!

@Umar: Thank you. Url D is related to A/B/C in the sense that D contains all of our products, and A, B and C are (were) product categories. So url D somehow contains the three of them. @Moosa: Yes that's the case. Url A, B and C will find what they are looking for inside url D (they just will have to look a bit more for it). And A, B and C links are clean. I do have some external links pointing to A, B and C, will change them accordingly to D. Thank you both, that helps. Will 301 Redirect these pages. Also, what about adding up link SEO juices? Cheers,

So, I don't totally agree with the statement "it's not worth it, UNLESS you have fixed every other SEO issue," although I totally see where Josh is coming from. From a purely "how well will this affect how my site ranks in Google" perspective, Josh is right, there are usually a lot of other things that you could be spending time or money on that would have bigger bang for your buck - but there are other reasons to want your site to load quickly (such as that users like it and it makes it easier to access your site using mobile devices). In my experience/testing, page load time doesn't start to affect your rankings unless your site is really, really, really slow, well over 10 seconds of page load time. So anything under around 15 seconds on average, you're not going to see a negative SEO affect. From there, it's just a matter of making things as fast as you can, for your users, in ways that make sense for you. Whenever I make recommendations to speed up a site there are always things where I'm like "this is not going to make that much of an impact so if it's going to cost a lot of money to do, you shouldn't do it." What those things are and how much time/money they'll take to fix will be different for everyone. I would say, fix the things that you can fix cheaply and easily (this is usually things like compressing images, inlining resources, and changing cache expiration). Save the stuff that's going to take more time and money and keep it in mind for the next time you want to make other substantial updates to your site.

Thank you both for the responses. The links aren't there for SEO value, more for business purposes but I'm mindful of any negative affects from Google.

Hi Matt, Many thanks for the very comprehensive answer. I didn;t realize any of this at all so thanks Pete

Hi Russ, I don't quite understand why I would need to add hreflang tags. I don't have .com versions of any of my pages,  I only have a .com dominant homepage when I do search for my branch name in serps. Or am I missing something here ? Can you please explain a bit more ? thanks Pete