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I would be interested to see whats going on with your "long tail game". Long tell keyword for me = money, So... I wouldn't jeopardize ranking for "Red Polo t-shirts" just to rank better for Polo t-shirts.  I would suggest maybe boosting up the unique content on your Product pages to make them rank better for specific long tails. I like the fact that all of my product pages are indexed individually just for the simple fact that I have a customer base that google's Part numbers. Those product pages show up every-time and almost every-time it rings the cash register.  This just might be something to think about... but if all of your product pages are duplicates then they are not helping with the long tail so I would say canonicalze them and redirect them to get rid of the dups and see if it helps with those head terms. Hope this helps Chad

Read through this post by Rand: https://moz.com/blog/google-says-yes-you-can-still-sculpt-pagerank-no-you-cant-do-it-with-nofollow . Quite old, but still valid in my opinion. So if you want to nofollow the tags only because of sculpting the follow links value, then there is no sense making it. We are using a similar approach with pages we do not want to index, but they are beneficial for our visitors. (similar case to yours)

for the subdomain to domain issue: From a SEO perspective a subdomain is less favorable. From a user perpective: Please explain to my father the domain zoekmachinemarketing.stramark.nl how are you going to explain that there should not be a www. in front of it? how are you going to explain the fact that it is not only stramark he has to go to, but actualy the subdomain because it has a different offer? I think young people can adapt somewhat better, but they are very used that they do not have to think. They just search from the adres bar and need the top result.

Hi Mike, Your solution is pretty common and effective. Like James said, this doesn’t transfer all the linkjuice (wide spread misconception). In the original pagerank system there was a damping factor of 0.85. So through every link or redirect 15% pagerank was lost. Although it’s unknown if these rates stayed the same during the years you can expect a small lose in linkjuice. This is why people do outreach to change their backlinks after a sitemigration. In most cases I recommend to only try to change your most important backlinks since it’s probably not worth your time chasing down every link you got. Hope you this helps you plan your next steps.

Hi Gary, Many thanks for assistance and help with this. I will take a look at doing that. Kind Regards Pete

Hi there You can, but it's not often that people link to a mobile site since it's configured to redirect. As long as your site is properly tagged and redirecting, I wouldn't worry too much about it. If you have a disavow file for the desktop site, you should be fine, but run through your backlinks to make sure. Hope this helps! Good luck!

Hi there It really depends on the purpose of that page and if it exists. What is it supposed to be? Is there another page on your site that has the content contained on this page previously? Content lives elsewhere - 301 redirect, remove from sitemap, and update internal links / backlinks  Page is gone for good and has no where to go - Create a 404 page that's useful. Remove from sitemap and update links / backlinks to a new page Hope this helps! Good luck

Many thanks All , some very good points raised. thanks Pete

Chances are that this site is part of a  private network of sites being prepped for link building. They start by doing little wrong but building good PA/DA etc... and adding content in a specific genre Then suddenly links will start appearing on there in a short period of time and then eventually it will get caught by Google and possibly any sites linking from it will have their gains taken away or worse they may also get penalised in some way. There is NO secret sauce any more in link building. If they wont tell you then its grey/black hat and will get you penalised somewhere down the road. You can use link discovery tools to keep an eye on new links, like Majestic. But I would only go with transparency from an SEO company or your in for a a quick win and a terrible end.

Hi there Here are some great resources for you and your time to explore: Thin & Duplicate Content: eCommerce SEO 7 Critical SEO Errors of E-commerce Websites The Ultimate Guide to SEO for E-commerce Websites I would also suggest looking into Google's duplicate content resources as there are tons of great tips for you to look into, including pagination, parameters, and canonical tags. I would make sure that your on-site SEO is unique for each product as well. Hope this all helps - good luck!

Yes, your own second guess is the correct one. The hreflang in URL based, not domain base, so you have to specify it for every single URL that needs it.

Hi there A rebrand is a business decision. I would take advantage of all the information from Umar as well as a few more points for good measure: Content Audit - Find what current content can be updated, consolidated, removed, and migrated to the new website. What other opportunities do you have for your content? Website Migration Guide from Moz - This will help make sure that your transition to the new website will go smooth and cover your bases. Backlink Audit - This will help you on a couple of fronts. First, you will find backlinks that you will want to update to the new domain once it is live and ready to go. Second, you will find links that you can either remove or disavow so that when you redirect, it won't be a factor. Change of Address - You will want to use this so that Google knows your site moved to a new address. Google also has a resource for when you move a website. Local SEO - If you have listings or citations, make sure those are updated. Perform an audit so you can make sure that any mention of your business is corrected and now points to a new domain. There are a lot of opportunities in rebranding, but you want to make sure that you take care of everything that you can to help users and search engines see that your site has moved and you are now a new brand. Hope this helps! Good luck!

Many thanks Patrick and Gary, Very comprehensive and some great tips here with some good articles links to so I will reading these before I proceed. Many thanks Pete .

Thanks so much, Gary. This is exactly the information I needed. I suspected this was the case but it occurred to me I hadn't actually ever read it anywhere.

My site got a revoke in May 2013 and took until the refresh in Oct 2014 for it to show recovery in SERPS One way around this is to use hreflang and set your main site to x-default and create a new site that targets your main language. Basically set your new domain to hreflang "EN" and you should see an instant recovery!

Eric I think there may be three main factors getting "for rent" to rank just brand searches (without "rent" or "buy") Internal architecture - if you link to 'for rent' more often and closer to the homepage more often, compared to 'buy' - you should send more authority to 'for rent' and maybe they will rank better. You can use a tool like Screaming Frog SEO spider to see how your internal linking is. Think if it like trying to optimize for users to internally click through to "for rent" more, and you'll sort of optimize architecture at the same time. External authority to those pages specifically - external links directly to those pages and people searching and clicking on those pages. In other words, link building and external traffic to those pages should help them grow in authority. Not sure if they are the type of page you can build links to directly, but you should be able to build links to pages that link to them - like External site-->article on your blog-->brand "for rent" page. Time - I think to some extent it will take time. Google needs to gain trust in these pages, crawl them multiple times, see users interacting with them etc etc. Set it up for success with the suggestions above, and then give it time!

Examining the server logs yourself probably wont help your understanding of the issue unless you know what your looking at specifically. On the Yahoo note, i have found Slurp to be really bad in the past, but no legitimate bot should be able to bring down a properly configured web server, especially an 'enterprise-level' one. I would check your .htaccess and apache settings for bad redirects (or web.conf if on windows) before considering banning the bot. Other things to check would be website code or if a bot hits a massive and horribly optimised Database Query for example, that could bring the server down. Ask IT exactly what the bot did that caused the server to go down, they should atleast be able to tell you that. If not then they need to run load tests against the website itself to try and reproduce the scenario and thus debug the issue, if indeed there is one. Tl;dr :- Normally bad config or code / queries are to blame for this kind of thing. I'd review that before blocking a bot that crawls hundreds of thousands of other sites without issue.

Great advise here, Just to add Google Search Console seems to update it's index slower than the search index so it is possible to see old errors longer than they exists until it is re-indexed. Kind Regards Jimmy

Jimmy, this is why I am leaning towards a sub-domain. Though the previous posters seem to have very valid points about why a subfolder may be better for us... As for making it easier for the devs, that wasn't exactly what I meant... They've said they need to know which way we want to go in order to put together a plan. I think it will impact how they set certain things (I don't understand) up so will make a difference to the time scales etc - which is what our boss is asking for!

Hi Patrick, That's the problem. I advised them to not use any extensions. This makes no sense in Holland as they only speak one language over there. The agency responsible for the creation and the maintenance of the website says it is technically not possible to set up the website in Holland without an extra extension. I'm not that technical. What if there is no other way? Or is it not possible that there is no other way? Thank you so much for your help!