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Hi Martijn, thanks for the response. From a quick glance, it looks pretty basic, but I will dig in further when I have more free time. Also, interesting CMS options as my company is finally looking to add a CMS (subdomains have been SUCH a pain technically and logistically). I'll definitely have to check out Craft.

It is common practice to redirect one URL to another. When doing this, it is critical to observe best practices in order to maintain SEO value. A redirect is a way to send both users and search engines to a different URL from the one they originally requested. The three most commonly used redirects are 301, 302, and Meta Refresh. For your better understanding : https://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection

No this is ok. The old site will stay in the index for a few more weeks. Can you identify if the missing traffic is all organic?

Ok. Is there space in your H1? Also the first sentence of the first paragraph?

Thank you for sharing the GoDaddy response with the Moz community Andrew. How many (and which) pages/links is this affecting? Once I know that I should be able to help a little more with prioritization. If this is the way your navigation menu works, for example, then it's a 10. If it's just happening on one page that doesn't have a lot of external backlinks it's a 1. Google says they follow redirects at least five levels deep and that they treat 302s and 301s the same. In my humble opinion after seeing numerous examples otherwise, this is B.S. It can depend on the response times, how the redirects are implemented, how much trust Google has in your site, and many other things. Long story short, fix it if you can, but I doubt it's going to require switching hosts.

Merging two healthy sites with substantial traffic is a decision that requires a lot of analysis.  In my opinion, "How to do it?" is a less important question than "If I should do it?".  It can often be much more profitable to have two sites in the SERPs than one site in the SERPs.  Each of these sites can be pulling in the sales, they can operate on different value propositions and their competition with one another can displace competitors.   It might be hard on the egos of company directors to buy a competitor and then "run their site"... but that can be the more profitable decision. The "How to merge them?" and "If to merge them?" analysis  should consider many things... --  traffic overlap --  product overlap --  backlink overlap --  content overlap --  keyword overlap It could be possible to merge two sites with 100% overlap of the above and make very little gain in the resulting site  --  yet loose all of the benefit of the site that was merged.  So be careful here.  Do deep analysis.  Map out the opportunity of gain before blindly redirecting.  Don't squander one site thinking that the merger is going to be a bonanza. Also keep in mind that DA is more logarithmic than linear.  You might merge a DA 60 site with a DA 50 site and that will only move your DA 60 up to a DA 61 or 62.   No kidding.

Thanks Miriam, This is very helpful and makes a lot of sense. What do you think of towns and villages, or boroughs of a large city. Do you think the close proximity is dangerous territory re: keyword permutations? I take your point about unique content tailored to the people of the city - it makes a lot of sense. But what about locations that are closer to each other? I know it's a tricky question but any insight would be most welcome.

Hi there As you are in Wordpress, you could use YOAST plugin. There is a setting that allows you to deindex and/or set next/prev tags. Here some more info: rel=next & rel=prev in pagination - YOAST Pagination and SEO best practices - YOAST Wordpress SEO  complete guide tutorial - YOAST Indicate paginated content - Google Search Console Help Hope it helps. Best luck. GR.

Hello You have nearly 20 instances of these keywords in the pages. There is a possibility this will be viewed as keyword stuffing. The word count is not high enough to warrant this frequency of keyword. You may be suffering an algorithmic penalty.

Thank you for the replies! It is a strange plug-in, but the newest version of Magento Enterprise 2.2.3 and all 2.1 and 2.2 aren't any better. It's really messed up how they handle pagination, whomever coded Magento really didn't understand how it's supposed to work and didn't read the Google documentation. The plugin is better but not perfect either. I agree keeping the current structure would be better, I've reached out to the developer to see if they're willing to make a change to the plug-in to keep the original structure. In testing I found it doesn't 301 the old URLs to the new URLs if you switch over so  that's really going to create some issues I feel like

Yes I'm currently doing this for a number of sites An audit would be testing the current implementation Identifying new itemprops to add as you say. And identifying the snippets and serp features that the site has the potential to compete for.

The URL structure should match the menu structure. This is beneficial to bots crawling your site. You're two specific questions are open to discussion. I've heard pros and cons of both. Traditionally it's include www with trailing slash only on directories

Hi David, I've only seen this type of local sitelink for sites that are sending users to brick-and-mortar locations, so I think in part it would depend on what kind of reviews you're hosting. How different are the local/regional landing pages from each other? Do they feature local products or businesses?

Interesting UX question. Short answer; click menu is best, but its not black and white. Naturally its more subtle than that. You mention regular content. Regular content being hidden by any mechanism is naturally not too user friendly. Accordions can often be overlooked, text hidden in the hover state of images is a client favourite that is also terrible UX practice. The mechanism doesn't matter too much - its the fact content is hidden by an un-signposted mechanism. The author knows its there, but your visitor will not. Menu isn't content though; its a different beast. A menu needs to exhibit good information hierarchy. We try to keep our main menu to 7 items or less, essentially for clarity of the first tier of offerings. This can often necessitate sub-menus. Sub-menus are hidden content, we're just arguing the toss about mechanism. So first off we'd suggest a nice little signpost like a downward arrow to show which main items have sub-menus Also note we don't have hover states on touch devices, so unless you're planning on a second type of menu for that, your choice is made for you and it'll certainly need to be selection rather than hover based. Select to get something is more in keeping with how everything else on the web works; text links, buttons etc. Hover feels more immediate but if your site demographic is broad, bear in mind that the dexterity required will elude a percentage of your audience. Consider the accessibility implications of this and your site client needs. For example, hover menus can be a real pain when the sub-menu content is wider than the trigger area. This will have happened to all of you; hover over the main menu item, see the sub-menu item you want, move the mouse to select the sub menu item... o dear the sub menu has disappeared on you. You left the hover area before reaching the sub menu and the hover state is lost. As well as accidental deactivation its quite possible to get annoying accidental activation with hover too. As well as audience consider the sub-menu itself. If you have a couple of small items consider hover, a massive mega-menu will nearly always be better toggled by selection. On that note, if you're using mega-menus consider Nielsens excellent guide here: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/mega-menus-work-well/  PS: I'd encourage everyone to start thinking about selection rather than 'clicks'. I still slip up myself, but clicks are an outmoded, desktop-centric term that is very dangerous to bandy about when making responsive websites. Much as your anchor text should never be "Click here" we should always be thinking about "selection". Selection speaks to intent and action rather than physical methodology, as that methodology can be clicking, yes, but also tapping, voice command, keyboard based, etc.

For your pages, do you focus pages with similar products on one/a few similar keywords? Yes.  As an example, lets say we sell "coffee makers".  We will have a generic coffee maker page that lists many different coffee makers from various manufacturers.   When a shopper clicks on one of the coffee maker models, they go to a page that sells the coffee maker, its accessories and its cleaning products.  All of these are unique content with very little reuse of the accessory language on other pages. Do you add written content directly to these pages or focus on creating good user guides etc then link back to these product pages? We include the most important "user guide" information on the product/accessory page.  This is information that helps select the item.  We don't list the full user guide information, but give the shopper a link to a much more detailed page of user information.  Both of these compete in search and often they appear in positions #1 and #2 in Google search.  The product/accessory page might link to several "user guide pages".   Sometimes we have positions #1, #2 and #3 in Google for searches on the product itself or product information. The above is very costly to produce and it requires an author who really knows the product.  It is only worth doing where there is good money to be made on a single sale and recurring consumable/accessory/parts/etc. sales are possible. This type of presentation is intended to make you the expert in the field, rank #1 and inspire people to pay you full MSRP because they know that you know what you are doing rather than being a buy/resell merchant.

Perfect thank you.

Thank you.

Yes.  Google have said many many times (too many to cite) that schema, J-son and using the data highlighter is one of the best ways that you can spend your time optimising.  You're making their lives easier and telling them directly how they can enrich the user experience for their searchers. I have tested a number of different ways.  I have rich snippet plugins for review stars.  These are great and if I add the google review widget to a page then the star rating of that product will show almost immediately (we have 230ish google reviews at 4.9.) Then I discovered the data highlighter and found that this works really well for individual products and getting reviews (the words not the stars) in the results and also helps with all sorts of other things.  So each new page gets the full treatment from the data highlighter including local business, reviews, authors (if it's an article) and products.  You need to include the prices and availability and if these are not available on the page to highlight then use the 'add extra info' function in the data highlighter and just say that the products are immediately available and you can add a price.  This can be a 'from price' or a range. But without the price you're unlikely to get anywhere in my experience.  Experiment with adding prices.  If it's an auction add the price as "zero" or "$0" and just see whether you get featured. Its a very responsive and fast system so you don't have to wait, just add the markup, send in the spiders and wait a few hours.  Lately google has been taking longer to index so it might take a day or so but it's still a short enough timeframe to run tests.  Also if you're using shopify or wordpress then you should be appearing with site-links, hyperlinks in the SERP and reviews specific to your product anyway if you're using H1's and H2's correctly and structuring the pages properly. Then lastly there's just adding in the code to the page in the header / footer.  I've found that this trumps everything.  For example If I say i've got 230 reviews in the footer, then my little widget (that updates my reviews each day will not update and i'll still be stuck on 230 even when the widget is saying more.  When I go in and update the code in the header it will update in a day or so.  So it seems that manually adding the code is the firmest and strongest (or most trustworthy) signal. Also remember that google has to trust your site to serve up rich results so newer sites, dodgy claims or anything other then whiter than white-hat is going to end you up with nothing showing up.  Google are always trying to verify markup and if they catch you out exaggerating or being inaccurate then it's going to cause problems.  They've said this many times too.  It's classed as 'markup spam'. So get highlighting or get yourself a code-builder to make some J-son or code you can insert directly onto the product pages.  I'm not a developer but I do it with a tool called SEO Profiler where you just type the words and it turns it into J-son for the site by magic and you just paste it in there.  There's free versions of this on the schema.org site.  Also check this out from moz on schema You will start showing just give it time. And mark up EVERYTHING you can.  Always worth it, but be comprehensive or it won't show. So add in the best guess price and the best guess 'anything' that's missing.

If you only did one thing its Redirects Redirects Redirects. Make sure all your current content has a new home to go to, to maintain traffic. Keep a similar website structure were you can to limit the amount of redirects you have to do. Then monitor search console closely. Any redirects you've missed will 404. Redirect these. Redirect to relevant pages, never redirect a content page to the home page. Maintaining traffic is the priority and this process will do that. Transfer you meta information over to the new site, titles and descriptions etc. Don't overhall your SEO during a site move or it will be hard to identify why traffic is missing if you get any missing traffic. Do the move, wait for things to settle. Then consider your revamping your meta information if you currently plan to. If you're adding new content it gets slightly more complicated but try and compare like for like.