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I'm by no means an authority on this topic, but I'd definitely use .htaccess to place those redirects, myself. It won't matter that the original filenames no longer exist. That's certainly what I've done as an SEO in the past.

I can't say for sure, but I would guess that Google is at this point familiar enough with LinkedIn to be able to pull information without much markup. Plus, there are even ways individuals can pull information from LinkedIn. Check out Rapportive for GMail; it's pretty useful! As Martijn said, it's also entirely possible that Google and LinkedIn work together in some capacity.

I've been pretty happy with Comodo.  Some of their interface is a bit confusing, but their support is good and their prices are fine.  Enormous numbers of options (which leads to some of the confusion!) but with tech support help I've been able to navigate it all pretty well.  I've bought a number of simple ones from them, as well as multi-domain certs.  They've also been good at helping me move existing certs from one hosting company to another--with no extra charges.

Hi Dana, 1. We did not notice anything directly. The product pages shot up in ranking and the blog gradually faded. our traffic dropped by more than half and continues downward. So in that regard we did not notice any overall drop. 2- no. should we and why? 3- no, we are not that advanced to be honest. I occasionally check crawl frequency etc on webmaster tools. 4- we installed a new script to track the "new blog" seperately. 5- analytics and moz. the subfolder is showing less in SERPs than the subdomain before and the decrease is a far more than the increase in SERP for the store domain. So the blog lost traffic and the pages of the ecommerce store ranked better, as intended, but we did not gain as much as we lost.

Sure thing! I hope it helps.

Hi Radi! It looks like you're a Pro member, so one thing I'd suggest is to run a Full SERP Report on the keywords you're concerned with using the Keyword Difficulty tool. It can give you a better sense of what's going on. Cyrus made a great video on the report here. I hope that helps!

From an SEO standpoint, I'd say that the URLs generally follow the same principles. Unfortunately, now that Google directly caches and displays your images, image SEO isn't worth quite the effort it used to be. In most cases, if images are on subdomains, it's for technical reasons unrelated to SEO. People might do this for load-balancing or because they run a 3rd-party CDN, etc. There are more sophisticated ways to do this so that the images all live on one subdomain with the content, but they can be more labor intensive and more costly (and some platforms just don't support them natively).

I will be blunt.  It is a very bland site. It looks like hard work, as soon as see the Home page.I would struggle to make another click. There is no CTA.  So if online sales are the business a big FREE SHIPPING banner etc. some CTA is needed. If you read the below, you would keep looking for products.. somewhere else. (this is the info you have under your product) "Products are becoming increasingly complex, but as technology accelerates, the marketable window of those products continues to shrink. Producers must respond by minimizing inventory and manufacturing in ways that control costs. Scalability is crucial; companies need to increase or decrease production quickly, while ensuring repeatable builds over time and distance. In a myriad of ways, manufacturing must become more responsive to the marketplace." Overall the font is too small. The page looks cluttered. Needs to be made to look simple and easy.  Review 4-5 sites you like shopping from - and then start writing down what improvements you would like made to your site. Hopefully not to overbearing. All the best.

In regard to shorter URLs: The goal is to find a proper balance for your needs.  You want to group things into sub-groups based on proper hierarchy, however you also don't want to go too deep if you don't have enough pages/individual listings deep down the chain. So the Moz post you point to refers to that - at a certain point, having too many layers can be a problem. However there is one one single correct answer. The most important thing to be aware of and consider is your own research and evaluation process for your situation in your market. However, as far as what you found most people search for, be aware that with location based search, many people don't actually type in a location when they are doing a search.  Except Google DOES factor in the location when deciding what to present in results.  So the location matters even though people don't always include it themselves. The issue is not to become completely lost in making a decision either though - consider all the factors, make a business decision to move forward with what you come up with, and be consistent in applying that plan across the board. What I mean in regard to URLs and Breadcrumbs: If the URL is www.askme.com/dehli/saket/pizza/pizza-hut/  the breadcrumb should be: Home > Dehli > Saket > Pizza > Pizza Hut If the URL is www.askme.com/pizza-huts/saket-delhi/ the breadcrumb should be Home > Pizza Hut > Saket-Delhi

Hi there! Keeping the main brand as the domain has a few advantages: Short domain names are easier to remember, easier to share, and have a smaller chance of resulting in typos. (ex. 20 characters vs. 9 characters) It's also just a good idea to have content from one brand in one place, and not spread out of many domains. Not exactly applicable post, but you get the general idea. There are ways to move domains/brands. But there is a chance of loosing authority, brand awareness and rankings. Here's a post on how to help with the transition if you find it necessary. I hope these resources help!

Google usually doesn't like these types of links. They can result in a Penguin problem. These links are often nofollowed by the websites publishing software and will not count in your rankings. Webmasters really dislike rubbish comments that are placed simply to produce a link.

Hey, So the US v UK example you've cited isn't the same thing. A .com is a generic TLD, not a country-specific TLD - by this I mean '.com' doesn't automatically indicate a US site. Getting a .co.uk site to rank well in the US will be a challenge as Google will automatically consider the site to be UK targeted. Take a look at this SERP: https://www.google.fr/#q=acheter+dvd That's a search on google.fr for 'acheter dvd' (buy dvd). You'll notice the top 3 results are French sites, but they're hosted on .com domains. You'll see that there are a bunch of sites hosted on .fr domains ranking on the first page too. NB I'm not saying that those sites on the .com are ranking better because of the generic TLD - I'm merely highlighting it because I think it shows that it's perfectly possible to rank well with a generic rather than country-targeted TLD

There are so many answers to this. One discussed in Mozcon 2015 was, "spend less time on linkbuilding." If you focus more on building rich content that will help users on your website, links will come. "If you build it, they will come." Also here are many guides, and you can find hours of material to read on your own. Guide 1 Guide 2 Guide 3 - This one has many helpful tools in it.

Thanks Woody, Ok, any issues with adding no-index tag - Disallow: */?currency/ to robots.txt? Rel canonical would be very difficult to implement (CMS is Wordpress) to implement and super time consuming.

I have a responsive menu plugin which adds an optimised menu to the site for mobile. The homepage link in this was missing the http:// and that was causing the issue. I figured that because the issue was on every page of the site it had to be something with the header or footer.

Hi Jay, Have you tried any of these : http://www.copyscape.com/originality-check/   or http://www.siteliner.com/ .  Hope it helps

Thanks to each of you for taking the time to respond with such a great mix of information and opinions. It is very helpful. Now to plow through all the data!

Could it be because Deep Crawl hammered the site and the server couldn't handle the load or something? Correct. The server reached its max resource limit. Try to set a longer delay on requests, if this is a setting in deepcrawl.co.uk?

I will use the basics here! You have 2 website, website "A" is a total SPAM and website "B" is decent and showing some positive moments. When you shut down your first website, make sure all of its content is out of the Google index and all the links are now linking to either 404 page or some other pages other than the content itself. Also, make sure that the content is not used elsewhere. If this is done, you can reuse the content slowly on your B website and run stuff accordingly and I am sure there shouldn’t be any problem with that! Personal Opinion, my idea is to build the newer version of the content (may be by adding more facts, data and figures to it) and reuse it on the website so that it not only pleases search engine but the real audience accordingly. Just a thought!

Yes.. Same logic applies in this scenario.