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Hi there, I can't point you in a specific direction on how to go about doing this, but as Martijn mentioned it's important that you make sure: 301 redirects are setup from old URLs to new URLs (/cat-name 301s to /prod-name) ALL internal links are updated to /prod-name (for example, in the main navigation, footer, sidebars, etc.) I believe what Martijn meant with the URL depth comment was that websites (particularly ecommerce sites) should be structured logically (mainly for topical authority). So for example, if you are a site that sells electronics, it's important from both a user and bot perspective that there is a domain.com/laptops/ page (which would be the category page). Under that, it makes sense to have a product page that would live on domain.com/laptops/macbook for example. It sounds like you are considering to remove the top-level category pages, which might result in a worse user experience and possibly a less-than-ideal setup for link equity being passed down to product pages. Martijn, is that what you were hinting at?

Hi Tyler, This is a minor issue, but still an issue. You should be consistent in your sitemap file as on what you want google to index. There will be no penalty or whatever in an SEO perspective. What can suffer is crawling in your site due to: 1- GoogleBot has a "limited" time/resources for each site, wasting time in redirections may cause that part of your site not being crawled 2- If many redirections are held, GoogleBot might leave instead of having more time/resources for that crawl. There has been said that GoogleBot gives up in the 5th hop (video with matt cuts explaining it) Hope it helps. Best luck GR

Hi Phil, Sorry for the slow response to the question - we had a hiccup with the email alerting system and so I wasn't notified as quickly as I should have been. A couple of resources that might help give you context on the general question about sub-domains vs. sub-folders: Video explainer Overview of URLs generally Recent follow-up showing that moving from sub-domain to sub-folder can result in positive movements Having said all of that, given that you reference the fact that technical limitations have caused this situation, it's worth noting that creating the content on a separate sub-domain is clearly better than not creating it at all if those are the pragmatic real-world options on the table. Good luck!

Hello,  To the best of my knowledge, and based on my personal experience, I have seen google at times throw my page to 2nd and 3rd and even beyond! Do not panic. I would recommend looking at on-page optimization first to check your content and make sure it is relevant and easy to read and understand without too many keyword stuffing in it. check out this link as well https://yoast.com/ranking-signals/, it might help.  Give it some time and see if there's any change. Good luck!

That's good to know! Thanks!

Hi There, First Question: There are robots.txt files in these locations, however both don't reference a disallow for this page so this isn't the issue: https://www.brody.be/nl/robots.txt https://www.brody.be/robots.txt I would use the new version of Google Search Console and use the URL inspection tool. This will let you know why the URL is being excluded and give you the option to manually submit it if everything is ok with it. Second Question Google can be a bit funny about meta descriptions, especially ones that contain emoji characters like the ticks you are showing within the Yoast meta description field. Sometimes if it deems the meta description irrelevant, it can rewrite it itself. If this has been changed recently, I would give it a bit more time to refresh and see what happens. I hope that helps! Kind regards, Sean

Hi Alan, If they're not willing to share their link/outreach targets with you, I would steer clear of them. What they're saying about it being their 'intellectual property' is complete rubbish. At the end of the day, the site they're building links to is your business and it should be in your best interest to ensure that links that are being built to the website are of high quality. It sounds like they're being unnecessarily shady. Find yourself an SEO that is transparent and working **with you **to create a solid link acquisition strategy, not working in isolation and secrecy. All the best, Sean

Thanks for the question. It isn't uncommon for there to be strange 404 errors in Search Console with little information/bad information. They are working hard to improve this, but I wouldn't take everything you see there as set-in-stone. This doesn't sound like a negative SEO tactic. I would just mark them all as fixed, and see if they appear again in about a week. If they do, I'd make sure they are actually served as 4xx status and not worry too much about it. If you want to do more digging... Some ideas of where you could look further Logs logs logs. This will be the ultimate truth - you will be able to see whether or not GoogleBot is actually hitting those URLs. It could be something weird happening with a plugin of yours that generates those URLs (particularly on Wordpress). Perhaps you have a filtering system setup that generates these URLs? If you have a search function on the site, sometimes weird URLs can be generated through that. Do the URLs come-up when you crawl the site at all? Just a few ideas!

Hello If you are a single product or single service website, you can definitely use the homepage to present that single product or service. However, if you sell even just two products or services, you're better off using inner pages for that. It's not that you'd get a penalty for using the homepage, it's just that it's much better site architecture to break the many products/services you may have into separate pages.

Hello Brickbatmove, Have you done a complete content and URL inventory yet? You need a list of every URL on the current site with columns for traffic by source, count of internal links and count of backlinks, at minimum. Anything with an external link does need to be redirected to the new URL. Even if you don't keep the content, redirect the URL to something similar on the new site. How to do a site migration safely is beyond the scope of Q&A. I suggest you read some guides like the ones below, if you haven't already: https://moz.com/blog/website-migration-guide https://searchengineland.com/site-migration-seo-checklist-dont-lose-traffic-286880 https://www.brightedge.com/blog/a-step-by-step-guide-to-nailing-your-next-site-migration/

Hi James, So far as I can see you have the following architecture: job posting: https://www.pkeducation.co.uk/job/post-name/ jobs listing page: https://www.pkeducation.co.uk/jobs/ Since from the robots.txt the listing page pagination is blocked, the crawler can access only the first 15 job postings are available to crawl via a normal crawl. I would say, you should remove the blocking from the robots.txt and focus on implementing a correct pagination. *which method you choose is your decision, but allow the crawler to access all of your job posts. Check https://yoast.com/pagination-seo-best-practices/ Another thing I would change is to make the job post title an anchor text for the job posting. (every single job is linked with "Find out more"). Also if possible, create a separate sitemap.xml for your job posts and submit it in Search Console, this way you can keep track of any anomaly with indexation. Last, and not least, focus on the quality of your content (just as Matt proposed in the first answer). Good luck!

Your subdomains will be treated as entirely separate websites in the eyes of Google, as Matt Cutts explains: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MswMYk05tk In simple words, if you have https://mywebsite.com https://blog.mywebsite.com These are 2 different sites or properties according to Google, so in your case, you can move, migrate or update your subdomain and this will not affect the parent domain. Regards

Hi Cristiana Answering your question, I will say that canonical-tag to a site is not an option is a requirement, almost mandatory requirement. The canonical tag is directly related to the duplicated content issues. From a technical standpoint, you'll need to understand how duplicate content can unintentionally be added to a site. Many times, it's simply a canonicalization issue. For example, homepage canonicalization causes most duplicate content issues on sites. For example, search crawlers might be able to reach your homepage in all of the following ways: https:yoursite.com https:www.yoursite.com http:yoursite.com http:www.yoursite.com http://example.com/index.php Just to give you an example on Google Search Console you need to verify these versions of a single domain for single property http:www.yoursite.com https:www.yoursite.com http:yoursite.com https:yoursite.com Google will see each URL as a different page – and it won't know which one you prefer to send users to. The problem can get exponentially worse if it exists on every page on your site. The easiest way to solve the problem is with a server-side redirect that sets one of those URLs as the “official” version of the page, and only serves that version, regardless of which URL was the destination. You can also use the rel canonical tag – it's a directive that's inserted in the header of the page. It looks like this: rel='canonical' When you're starting SEO on a new site, you'll want to check out all of the canonicalization that's been declared, so that you have a solid understanding of what's going on with the site content.

Any response will be appropriated. I started a new project for a rent a car company in Albania. https://www.albaniaonline.org/     And how about should I bay back links from freelancer or not? Thanks