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Done, thank you!

I think that Google knows what (keywords) your articles are about - so there is less need to stuff them into a title tag. However, matching the keyword to what the searcher has in mind and will see bolded in the SERPs is still important. "providing variety within the SERP when compared to other results" Exactly.  You need to stand out.  Show that your content or product has special value, inspire the searcher to click on your page.  I believe that title tags can move rankings if you can get the visitor to click and hold them after they land.

A jump in 404 errors in and of itself isn't harmful to the site. I'd say as long as they don't KEEP trying to access those URLs you should be OK. Keep an eye out for "soft 404s" as well. And you could also change the status code to a 410, which means the page is permanently GONE, as opposed to just "not found" at the moment. Here's a flowchart that I hope will help: http://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/444100/Out_Of_Stock_SEO_/Out_Of_Stock_Product_Flowchart.pdf

Thanks Logan - much appreciated, as ever - that really helps - if I was to add another * to **Allow: /?resultspage= > so **Allow: /?*resultspage= - what would happen then? ****

Hey there, Sorry for the silence! Okay, a few things here: Yeah, you're going to run into duplicate content issues, since you're using English on all sites. You only need www.website.com for the US. Don't create us.website.com. For the UK and EU domain, localize with different currency, standard shipping, and legal information. (What's your plan, since the UK and EU use different currencies, to have them on the same site section?) If you have any content that's universal, like a blog post, keep that part of the site on the www.website.com section and don't duplicate it on the UK / EU site (unless you translate it). If at all possible, don't use subdomains for different countries. Subdomains split your domain value (which weakens your site) and also makes it clear that you're not a truly localized site, since you're using a .com instead of the right ccTLD for the country (not bad for SEO, but not great for click through rates). Better options are: Get the ccTLD for each country you're operating in. This is much more expensive, but better for localizing long term. Put each site section on a subdirectory, like www.website.com/uk/ Link between the different country versions of your site, so you can be sure Googlebot will find it. Moz has got a good article on this I recommend:https://moz.com/learn/seo/international-seo I hope this helps! Let me know if you have any questions, Kristina

Hi! Martin is correct in saying that it is likely that Google will be able to understand what your company does based on links and content outside of your brand's name.  Also, I would suggest focusing your keyword targeting on actual content on the page rather than in your company's name. Like, a title tag on your homepage or page could read " Widgets for work | BetterWidget " (just an example). This would communicate both what your keyword research suggests is the term your users search for as well as your brand. Also, I like BetterWidget the best as well. Hope that is helpful!

The line between SEO and PO is thinning every day as Google puts more and more emphasis on the searcher's journey through the entire inquiry>engagement>action process.

Hi Alexandre, Google should have no problem indexing URLs with Cyrillic characters, but it could be the mix of language that is causing Google to attempt to decode those characters. But even if that were the case, this should not result in a 500 error but a 404 (not found) for those resultant decoded URLs. It looks like there are 301 redirects in place for these URLs now, pointing to their EN counterparts - has that resolved this issue? Perhaps it was faulty redirect logic in the first place that caused the 500 errors? Thanks, Mike

Hey there, I don't think it's necessary to 301 redirect the article, otherwise you might lose rankings. Just insert some compelling CTA and internal links into the content to drive traffic to the conversion page. When you are already #1 with the sub-page, there's is a big traffic potential and therefore you don't want to risk the rankings. Hope it helps a bit. Cheers, Martin

Hey there, I have actually very similar issue on my website. However, it is obviously quite normal (it takes Google some time to update the data) - check the following thread for some more information about this issue, especially the last answer. https://moz.com/community/q/301s-being-indexed Cheers, Martin

Thanks for your reply We have recently updated and increased the length of the content on the top level pages and analysed the external links. It's frustrating as everything had seemed to work for a while and the correct page ranked but of all a sudden this reversed. The correct pages always rank higher than the incorrect ones but for some reason Google is confused and seeing the individual hotel pages as relevant for the terms I'll wait a bit longer and see what happens

Very helpful. Thank you so much Patrick.

Hi, No, your website will work just fine without a robots.txt file. Without a robots.txt file search engines will have a free run to crawl and index anything they find on the website.  This is fine for most websites but it’s really good practice to at least point out where your XML sitemap is so search engines can find new content without having to slowly crawl through all the pages on your website and bumping into them days later. It shouldn't go to homepage if mywebsite.com/robot.txt doesn't exist shoud go to custom 404 error page. Hope this helps. Thanks

"The concern is that, due to the http>https 301 redirects that will be in place, are we putting ourselves at unnecessary risk by effectively carrying out 2 migrations in the space of a year (in terms of loss of potential authority caused by redirects)?" In February 2016, Google’s John Mueller announced that SEO equity or PageRank will no longer be lost when a 301 or 302 redirect is used in conjunction with an HTTP to HTTPS migration. While some of us doubted this statement, Gary Illyes tweeted the same thing in July 2016 and Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land confirmed it. There is no loss of authority caused by redirects when you implement HTTPS. "Would we be better to wait, and implement https at point of platform migration instead?" I think the approach you're taking (convert to https first) is a good one. It affords you better control and is a good use of available resources.

Unfortunately, I don't think there's any easy/fast way to do this. I just ran a test to see how long it take Google to actually obey a noindex tag, and it's taken a little over 2 months for them all to be removed. I had 2 WP blogs that I added the noindex tag to all category, tag, and author pages and monitored the index count 4 or 5 times per week by running site:example.com inurl:/category/ queries. There was a lot of fluctuation at the beginnning, but eventually took hold after about 2 months. On one of the sites, I did add an XML sitemap with only the noindexed URLs on it, submitted it via Search Console, but that didn't seem to have an impact on how quickly they were dropped out. See the screenshot below of my plotting of indexed pages per subfolder: jHm7CkD

I agree with the suggestion to make the page be a helpful reference, with sales being almost a side aspect of the page. My current favorite website for examples is https://www.webstaurantstore.com/guide/541/types-of-table-tops-and-bases.html. This page gives a lot of helpful information when selecting a table top and base for a restaurant (which bases are easy to clean around, but might take up more space, and so on). They do have links to product pages at the end, but the selling is not the main focus (yet I imagine it's still fairly effective). That's something other sites can link to that has good information, and you can get links from good sites.

Hey There, Are you talking about the "people also search for section" that shows up when you see a knowledge panel? Please, let us know which specific data you are referring to in the knowledge panel. Thanks!

Thanks for the addition thoughts Mike. I'll check out that article and continue with the plan to see if these initial "test" redirects affect the site overall. I'll share my findings down the road...

Hey Cocoonfxmedia! Are you referencing a specific keyword that you are currently bidding on (AdWords, Bing Ads, etc.), or are you asking in regards to keywords that you are not advertising on currently? If you're asking about a keyword that you're bidding on, you can pull that data through the relevant report. You can see your own average cost per click on a keyword level, but not any one else's. If you're not bidding on a keyword, you cannot see the data for that keyword. The top of page bid estimates will give you a bit of insights on the average click cost. It's not perfect, but using it relative to other keywords bid estimate data can provide some insights. (i.e. Keyword A is 2x Keyword B) Let me know and I'll help you out further! Thanks! Trenton

I agree, our main page ranks for our #1 term and we have /products/ pages that do as well.