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For the sake of my example let's use 4 URLs, 2 homepages, 2 internal pages (one for each language). www.domain.com www.domainjp.com www.domain.com/page.html www.domainjp.com/pagejp.html I am suggesting that in the of www.domain.com: In the of www.domainjp.com: In the of www.domain.com/page.html: In the of www.domain.com/pagejp.html: Using hreflang will just tell the search engines that they are the same pages, only in different languages. If that is true of the pages on each site, then you should implement a structure like the above. You would want a language change option on the sites just in case someone wants to change languages, but it's not necessary.

Hello Andy, Many Thanks for your reply, the site is UK based and for UK customers. You can view details about the webacelator here https://goo.gl/3nGlNy. Our site is not particularly slow, in google page speed it scores 83 for desktop and 70 for Mobile. We tried every bit to move the score to Green but it is fixed on current scores. Recommendation is asking us to remove imp js files which is not possible, when we implementing google minified js the pages are not functioning proper. One of the recommendations was CDN for which we contacted our hosting and they recommended webacelator instead of CDN as we are a UK based site only and they advised CDN is more for global websites Our site is made on custom PHP To the most i have read online on forums a DNS change would not affect our rankings. We may now go ahead with the transfer keeping fingers crossed Cheers! Sohail

thanks everybody. excellent advice. I will just limit to make some tests of  products for now to see how it will affect ranking.

Agreed.  Used 301s to redirect the old m. pages to their www. counterparts.  This way, not only do users get redirected automatically to the proper page with the correct content, but if there is any link equity, it gets passed along as well. Key point, do not redirect all of your m. pages to the www home page, that would be bad.  Also, bonus free advice.  If you are setting up global 301 redirects, go ahead and do some additional 301 cleanup in several areas. If your site is indexed in Google with the www subdomain included (i.e. http://www.website.com), make sure that the non www urls for all pages (i.e. http://website.com) 301 redirect to the www version. This needs to be a page to page redirect, not everything to the home page.  Reverse this if your website by default uses the non www subdomain. Likewise if you ever used https or moved from http to https, 301 page to page everything. If you have anything where you have http://www.website.com is the same as http://www.website.com/index.html or http://www.website.com/folder/index.html  etc 301 all those "index.htm" type urls to the folder ending in the slash. The idea here is to remove duplicates and have the 301s to do that. When you get all this done, run a spider (I like Screaming Frog or Botify) to see if you have any navigation, sitemap or other internal links on your site that are 301ing.  Try and think about anywhere else that you control that you might accidentally be pointing to old URLs (rss feed possibly? Your homepage in your Facebook account? etc) You may be pointing (accidentally or on purpose) to old URLs and want to update those.  That is another signal to Google that you are not using the old URLs and pay attention to the 301.  I have found issues with Google still reporting a 301 in Search Console and it was because I was still pointing to it in my navigation. Cheers!

Dynamic templates can be a great solution, so long as you're incorporating a variety of dynamic elements, not just swapping out one or two words. I have seen some debate on whether or not to set a meta description, and I think it's really a CRO choice. Google is always going to match a search query with a relevant excerpt from the page when a meta description is not available, so if you trust Google's judgment, it can be fine to go without. I don't think that philosophy is hurting Yelp at all.

Hi there Here are some great resources: Web Fundamentals (Google) Multi Design Layouts (Google) The Basics of Search Engine Friendly Web Design & Development (Moz) Designing for SEO (Moz) Information Architecture for SEO (Moz) The Process of Web Design: From Discovery to Prototype (Moz) I would also make sure that you focus on user experience not just from the design aspect, but the content aspect as well. Here's another great resource on that. When you are ready to move your site, make sure you review this resource from Google, as well as this migration guide from Moz. All of the above should help you get started - make sure that you review with your web development team and review the following on your current site: All KPIs that matter most to your visibility / performance Your site's goals over time Google Search Console performance over time (impressions / rankings) Take a look at your competitors Check your on-site SEO Check your backlinks Check your content Check your information architecture Learn more about your audience Are you capturing your audience at the right points? Do you have content to do so? Are you doing everything you can do develop your brand(s) right now? Sometimes it may be a matter of a redesign and not a new site overall. There's a great Whiteboard Friday that touches on elements of this topic called Should I Rebrand and Redirect My Site? Should I Consolidate Multiple Sites/Brands? Hope this helps! Good luck!

Hey Oksana, It's a good approach to know the related keywords before uploading a new video on YouTube. For this, go to http://keywordtool.io/'s YouTube section and get all the keywords data. You can add a long tail keyword in title but make sure it makes some sense. For the description, it's recommended to use the main keywords in the first 3-4 lines. Check out this guide from Brian Dean for better understanding, http://backlinko.com/how-to-rank-youtube-videos Hope this helps! Thanks,

The tough thing here is that you're basically asking which is the less bad of two bad options. That's rough; I feel for you. Personally, I'd advocate taking an approach like the topic-focused one in Cyrus Shepard's "Keywords to Concepts": https://moz.com/blog/keywords-to-concepts I know it's hard, but you'll be doing a great service to your client by educating her on why her tail-chasing approach is a waste of time. Otherwise, the two approaches you've described are pretty much equally ineffective, so flip a coin, my friend.

Very helpful as well --- thanks so much :).

Before deciding not to do a 301 redirect you may want to check how much traffic volume you get from these pages. If it's not significant and for some reason you're unwilling to do a 301 redirect, I would suggest trying to get the actual links going to those pages changed to your new events page. Also you should submit your new events page to those who linked to your old events page to see if you can get link equity flowing to your new page.

Hey Tony, Thanks for following up like this. I think Asian Travel Tips is a much better, more brandable, domain than the other ones you have listed. Google may tell you that you don't have a "manual action" while you may have an algorithmic one. The people on the team you contacted (at the time it was called Google Webmaster Tools, but whatever they're calling it this week) probably have no way of knowing whether your site has an algorithmic penalty, or is being given lower rankings algorithmically. Generally speaking, fewer domains is better than lots of more niche microsites if they're all part of the same theme - in this case travel to Asia. Here is a post about this concept: https://moz.com/blog/2-become-1-merging-two-domains-made-us-an-seo-killing Here's what Rand has to say about it: https://moz.com/blog/rebrand-or-redirect-my-site-consolidate-multiple-sites-whiteboard-friday I had a look at the screenshot you sent and the site looks good. Keep posting unique, useful content about traveling throughout Asia and you should be fine. I like that you're leveraging the Trip Adviser connection, as it adds trust for the user. Good luck!

Hi, Text > HTML ratio isn't actually a ranking factor and there is no penalty based on this. What you can do with it, is use it as an indicator on how big your pages are and identify those that might be slowing do the loading. There is no test or correlation that would suggest that reducing this text > HTML ratio will do anything for your rankings. You need to also try and get away from the thought process that SEO is just about search positions - you need to think about customer acquisitions and page usability as well. For example, if I look at your home page and you were to just add a block of text at the top, then this would reduce the effectiveness of the big messages and search availability at the top. it would push down the main search box and offer nothing of use that anyone would really want to read. So no, don't add text to the top of the page as this isn't needed. If this were just one big picture with nothing at all there, then it might be a different discussion. Are your search positions dropping at the moment, or is there a reason that this came about? I have clients whose Text > HTML ratio is 6-8% and in 1st position for very highly sought after terms. There is a lot more at play. -Andy

Hi there! First of all, I believe that you shouldn't use both canonical and rel=prev/next. The two techniques do not work together well: "In cases of paginated content, we recommend either a rel=canonical from component pages to a single-page version of the article, or to use rel=”prev” and rel=”next” pagination markup." (quoted from http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html" Basically you have more possibilities: Do not set up canonical or rel="prev/next", but use noindex, follow meta robots tag for pages 2+ (kind of old school, but still works as a charm) Implement Rel="Prev/Next" but without a canonical! the two elements do not work together (as mentioned above) I think the best method for you would be to have a rel="prev/next" and have the canonical removed. I hope this helps, Keszi

Agree with Umar regarding your speed question. I guess the only other thing you could do is check the forums for questions and concerns raised regarding the theme speed. You'd have to read thru them carefully though to make sure any issues raised are theme related and not something else. As to your second question, you might find this article helpful - https://yoast.com/wordpress-seo-plugin-theme-integration-guide/. It's Yoast's explanation of how to pick a theme that can be optimized.

Hi Oksana, I would start with analysing google SERP for the specific long tail keyword you want to rank for. This gives you a proper understanding of what the actual user intention is or rather what answer they are looking for. This insights give you a much better idea of how to properly use the (long tail) keyword you want to rank for. I'm quite confident this 3 guides can help you out: https://moz.com/blog/keywords-to-concepts https://moz.com/blog/7-advanced-seo-concepts https://moz.com/blog/on-page-topic-seo Generally speaking I would not focus to much on the keyword itself, but use it as a starting point, where you gonna build a topic around. Regarding the 4-5 pages you have: Use keywords wisely by building complementary pages with related topics/aspects rather than substitution pages with similar/same topics/aspects as you might run risk, to self cannibalize your efforts. Hope this helps M

I think the high ranking posts on pinterest might have something to do with the likes they get from social media, for example this one ranks first on google image search for highly searched term "24k gold iphone" but I can't see why, can it have something to do with it's high resolution? https://www.pinterest.com/pin/469429961132145600/

Great answer!

The IIS url-rewrite addon works great!

Hey, You may come up with headings like that according to your page to eliminate any confusion. And yes I agree the content length would be extended but this is what a visitor expects when he visit a particular degree page, i.e. to get all the information. If you think, the page would look ugly you may come up with cool graphics, in-page content navigation and things like that to make it more user-friendly. Umar

If they are professional writers and do excellent excellent work I might do it as a reward.  Be strict with this. Also, you need to review their Google+ profile to be sure that it does not contain content that is disagreeable for any of your visitors who might go there.  Reserve the right to remove the link and be very clear about reserving that right. This will require some administration work from you, and some traffic loss.  So you got to be getting value from it.  Overall, if it keeps content quality very high, I would not have a problem linking to a google+ page at the bottom of the article.   I have done this.  I have also linked to faculty members university page if they write an article for my site.  They enjoy this and often link back to my site to share their article with others.