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Thank you for taking the time to respond. Makes a lot of sense, I appreciate it.

Thanks, good to hear!

Hi Eric, Thanks for the update. The screenshot showing the 301 is correct - all good there. Regarding the sitemap, sorry I should have been clearer on this - can you exclude that from the redirects so that when Google crawl it, they don't get redirected and instead find all of the URLs from the old site? Cheers. Paddy

Thanks, Buddy!

Thanks for your advice. Yes, we will definitely be careful deleting pages. Thanks a lot!

Not a problem!

Well, you're partly right and partly wrong in what you are saying to your boss. What you can assuredly say is that existing ranking positions are unlikely to increase based upon increasing your keyword density / saturation. There are many forced at work within Google's ranking results. Of those, perhaps the largest two are authority (also sometimes referred to as popularity, but that's slightly broader) and relevance. No matter how many times you mention a keyword on a web-page (in the content, in the Meta data, in file names, in contextual tags or Schema) that doesn't increase Google's perception of your website's authority or the individual web-page's popularity. If a piece of content or a web-page is very relevant yet it's not found to be popular, useful or authoritative - you can bet your bottom dollar that in most query spaces the page won't rank. If the query-space is innately low quality because hardly anyone has produced decent content, then you can rank just with relevance (sometimes even on the first page). Although that's true; most such query-spaces have diabolically low search volumes (and thus aren't really worth optimising for, unless you can figure out a way to do it en-masse and soak up lots of searches - but this usually involves expensive development and strategic content deployment work). If web-pages are over-saturated with the same exact match keyword(s) over and over; the variant of the Panda algorithm now working inline from within Google's core algo-set is likely to 'kick off'. This can result in algorithmic devaluations or manual penalties from Google (be warned). An algorithmic devaluation is usually page or keyword level, whilst with many 'manual' Google penalties (where you get a notice in Google Search Console) - **you will fail to rank **for even your brand terms. So what does keyword density affect? Well - it's true that using keywords (or keyphrases) and synonyms (or synonymical phrases) throughout the various different facets of on-page content, coding, Meta etc will impact the relevance of a page. That's _which _keywords the page will rank for. But will it increase or decrease existing or desired rankings by itself? In a word - NO Thank you for your time in reading

Hi Julie Yes, add a post and a link. Right click ‘view source’ and find the link. If it doesn’t‘ have rel=nofollow in the ‘a href’ it is do follow. regards Nigel

Ok, I think I see what you're saying, but it doesn't seem to have anything to do with Google. If I go directly to a page like this one (even incognito): https://www.shelfstuff.com/book-shelf/books/where-the-watermelons-grow/?id=9780062665867 ...and then go to the home page, I still see the book title in the browser tab. The title tag itself looks ok, but the sight is highly dynamic. I'm guessing this is some kind of strange JavaScript rewrite or something else happening in your code. Unfortunately, it would take an in-depth knowledge of your site code to sort out why. Is the site using AJAX or something similar? Definitely seems like pages are being created dynamically and not loading in a typical way.

Sorry, This is the site I wasreferringg to, love to hear your thoughts on what could be improved. https://intrinsicallysafestore.com/product/intrinsically-safe-handheld-barcode-scanner-bartec-bcs-3600/

Looking for a more in-depth response specifically to https://intrinsicallysafestore.com/product/intrinsically-safe-handheld-barcode-scanner-bartec-bcs-3600/ Thank you!

Hi etakgoz, That's a huge drop. I've actually seen a similar drop in traffic before in the past, specifically due to a site redirection issue and also Google Penguin penalties. What caused a mis-diagnosis for me in the past was that our site redirection happened at almost the same time as Google core algorithm changes during the same period. Have you taken a look at the algorithm change timelines to see if it's possibly an external factor that caused the drop in traffic? Other than that, did you have any tracking tools or software similar to Moz that you were using to keep track of site issues or the backlink profile? The decrease in traffic is pretty severe and there could be a multitude of issues possibly causing this. Was there a similar decrease in search rankings along the same period of time as well? Sorry for the questions, but it'll really help if you could provide more details for further diagnosis.

Sounds like you're talking about optimization for Local Search!  Here's a resource I used to help educate myself on local search optimization in the past: https://neilpatel.com/blog/definitive-guide-local-seo/ Hope it helps!

Hi there! In my personal and professional opinion, either have a blog or you dont. If you have, you must destine the resources needed and be part of the strategy. Having a content site just for the sake of having it is useless and can tell users that you dont care and/or that you are lazy with other parts of your products/services. There is no experiment (to my knowledge) that proves the need of a blog to rank well in the principal keywords. Usually, blogs or content sites are a part in a big content strategy, where you can target other more semantic and/or answer questions about your products. I'd like to think it as you are creating a conversion funnel, where blog posts, content in other sites or any content is somewhat convincing users about your products/services. Having a correctly structured content site (or blog) could help somehow through internal linking to express more clearly the anchor/keyword intent for some specific pages. Also, always consider that if you can attract users a little interested in some of your products, you are getting a share of visibility that you didnt have without the content site. Hope it helps. Best luck. GR

Hello! You probably don't need to do anything, Google will likely know the difference. You can disavow them if you'd like just to be safe. Unless you see traffic drop and rankings drop (for no other known reason) they are likely not affecting the site.

Hi Becky If you just think of it in terms of not losing any backlinks and so that the old URLs in Google Index don't 404, then they just need the most appropriate page on your new site to be 301'd to. You won't go wrong if you stick to this approach. If there is no relevant category, then go up to department, no department? go to home. Keep it simple & logical. Regards Nigel

Thank you for your detailed reply! All clear, we will move forward with the implementation, carefully 'matching' the corresponding URL's of course :).

Hi Matt, You're welcome, we are here to help. Yes! When a migration is done, always redirection 301. Remember to map all the "old" URLs and the "new" URLs must match. PLEASE! Do not redirect all to one page. Best luck. GR