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Thanks for the response. The link profile is something I am currently working on - but I am new to SEO and am struggling to find good relevant links. Any tips? Thanks

Thanks so much for listening my tweet and coming in here to drop a few lines Marie I think i'll do a mix of both techniques. First, an extensive link cleanup. Then follow my first post's steps (adding the noindex meta tags in all pages as you suggested below) and then do the 301 redirect. Will also add to the mix a redesign, just so the site looks renewed for both users and SE. Will share insights once we complete the migration. Thanks again! PS: will keep an eye for the article on SEW

An 'aged domain' is desirable for SEO. However, don't put too much clout into the age of the domain, focus on the content, usability, and accessibility. With those taken care of AND an aged domain, you should benefit a little from its 12 years. Being parked is indifferent - just make sure to connect with Google through GWT (and all its other services) so G knows the domain is starting to be used for value-added content (and no longer parked).

410 means "Gone" and is used to indicate a resource no longer exists. If it exists use 200 (OK). If it is out-dated place a notice to that effect but still leave it as 200. Putting a noindex instruction in the robots meta element should be sufficient to remove it from the Google index, though it may take some time. Nofollow is probably not what you want to do as this will destroy any link value flowing through those pages. If it is so out-dated that it is considered valueless then it should be deleted and 410'd. A 301 redirect can be used where a new resource that substantially replaces the old resource has been created. Not sure why you would want to keep Google's index of your site 'lean' unless you have a lot of resources competing for the same keywords and are concerned about cannibalization.

It's a one off campaign so I won't be spending time ranking for that domain. Or at least not for now.

Still doubt if this technical requirement is still a requirement as I work with multiple sites that are listed in Google News without having the digits in the URL.

Hi, This is a good one. The description showing in the serp's is depended on the keyword people are looking for, the metadescription and the content on the page. Google decides what best fits to the keyword. If the metadescription fits in, Google will show that. if not, Google will search the content for that fits best at the keyword in the search. In your screens you search for little wannahaves, but in your description there is no use of "little wannahaves" so google is searching your content for a match with "little wannahaves" put little wannahaves in your description. I also advice you to shorten your description tot 150 characters. Grtz, Leonie

Thank you, all!  Your answers are what I thought was okay to begin with.  When I started reading Penguin articles, it was seeming that many things I thought were okay were not and it was really confusing. I did read that Point Blank article several months back and made a strategy to employ many of the concepts in there. I have around 14% anchor text that isn't just my company name and is some kind of keyword phrase.  Is that okay? The rest is some form of my website or company name.

thanks! very helpful!

Your mistake is that you probably used relative URLs and not absolute ones (these are the ones like: http://www.domain.com/) So, the hreflang in sitemaps.xml for your home page should be this (please note that I put /it/ but you should put the real italian version home page, and that is valid for all URLs: <url><loc>http://www.domain.com/</loc></url> As for your second question - mixing matching and not matching URLs in the hreflang annotations - I would not suggest it.

That makes sense!  Thank you for taking the time to clarify!  

I would stick with what you have then optimize. I would also remove the english articles and come up with a separate content strategy for that. Itll save you time and keep things within a strategy so you can track performance better (but youll have to check if those articles already get traffic and links first) Other options i could think of will need more time and a lot of changes (and cost)

It seems that its still not showing sitelinks, even though the site gets somewhat significant traffic... I know the timeline for getting sitelinks can vary widely, but the site has been live for almost 6 months and no sitelinks.. is this unusual?

Great question. Search engines presently don't index highcharts or other graphs presented using HTML+JS combinations. However it can't index the information in images either, just the image itself. Search engines have become increasingly sophisticated at indexing content rendered/presenting using Javascript so the day may well come when these charts do become indexed. Extracting information, especially structured information, from images is probably going to remain a harder problem to solve than traversing the DOM and interpreting the structure of the charts. Another factor is the native format of the data. If you use a dynamic charting solution like highcharts to render data present in the document then search engines will already be able to index the table and access the data. That isn't going to be the case for images. So I would recommend, wherever possible, putting the data in the document as a HTML table and using Javascript to present this as a dynamic chart. This will also mean those folks who browse without Javascript enabled will get to see your data, albeit in a different presentation.

I believe Google have started considering sub domain as part of the main domain so multiple links of the same domain in the search results is hardly a chance and if you are seeing it, it’s a matter of time when this will change. If you 301 redirect two pages the preferred version will get the links and authority of almost two pages but I am not sure how Google will take it when it comes to rankings as there are 200+ other signals that Google uses when ranking a website in search engines. Ideally what you should be doing is considering your audience in mind before taking any action. If consolidating two pages as one will make a positive difference to audience, I believe you should go for it as audience comes first and search engine comes 2^nd. Hope this helps!

Wordpress is the most vulnerable platforms that can be easily hacked info. If you connect your magento store to wordpress via fishpig or any other extension its only a matter of time before your store gets hacked. BEWARE

Good post. However be aware that "UK" is not the ISO 3166-1 Alpha-2 country code for the United Kingdom - it's GB so en-GB for English speaking users in the United Kingdom.

Hi, Yes, Justian is absolutely right, knowing your competitors is fundamental when want to do good SEO! Checking out your competitors‘ backlinks is definelty the best way to start looking for healthy link opportunities. I would go for the LRT’s competitive link detox (CDETOX). The tool checks yours and your competitor’s (up to 9) backlinks and tells you, which ones are healthy ones and which ones are not. You can sort the links by their power and their link risk, so it is a good way to decide on which sites you’d like to build a link. I think knowing if the links are bad or good ones is essential when trying to copy the competitors‘ links, caus in the end it doesn’t help having the same links as your competitors if they are bad ones! Also the tool calculates your total link risk and your competitors‘ total link risks‘ so it is a good way to see what kind of link risk is normal in the particular niche or you can see if it is likely that some competitors will be punished by a penalty in the near future. This is also good to know when planning your own link building strategy. Regarding the recommended amount of backlinks created per week I have to say that the most important thing here is that you link growth is steadily and increases slowly! Everything else would look highly unnatural. Of course, some seasonal fluctuations might be normal for a particular industry, e.g. a higher link growth some weeks before christmas and so on … Hope this helped a bit. Cheers, Harry

I would suggest following Google's guide to the whole thing. I agree option 1 is your best bet of the 2. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/76329?hl=en

Thanks for the response. I have submitted to GWT and done the fetch and render. The site has been live for a few years - but this is the first time that I have started doing work on it for SEO. I will change the tags too. I have just googled the term JL Engineering and it doesnt find the site at all? Any ideas? Thanks