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Hi John, Are you still seeing the 'not mobile friendly' warning in the SERPs? I checked just now and wasn't able to replicate.

I think this is great! I agree with all of your thought process. I wish all migrations could be this thorough It looks like you posted this question a little while ago though, so if you've already started the process I'd love to hear how it's going!

No website in particular that springs to mind, I'm afraid. But it's not uncommon practice, and I'm sure you'll find plenty within your industry from a little competitor research. Good luck!

About three different homepages: This is my reasoning: Wordpress based website uses index.php as a home page if you use "latest posts" as your home page, Even index.php is not displayed in the url address bar. Does that mean WP sites always have 2 homepages? I have removed index.htm at the moment, but I see that as a problem as I am losing PA value for that page. Zee: So it sounds like you should create a "dynamic" front page (this link should help you: https://codex.wordpress.org/Creating_a_Static_Front_Page). If for some reason you are unable to remove both duplicate homepages, I'd say deprecate one and 301 redirect it to your main homepage, and implement a rel=canonical tag from the duplicated homepage to your main one (e.g. example.com/index.php -301-> example.com) I can see that this is a bit messy.. I did this as I wanted to preserve original htm based site URL's. Are you saying that search engines see www.example.com/dir1/dir2/page.htm and www.example.com/dir1/dir2/page as identical URL's. Zee: I can't say for sure, without seeing your site, but if they're indexed (discoverable by search engine crawlers), you could definitely be penalized. If your .htm pages have built up link equity, you'll need to 301 redirect them to their corresponding pages With my old htm based website I had too many subdirectories. I have removed some of the subs to make URLs shorter and used 301 redirects in .htaccess file. I probably should have removed .htm appendixes as well at this stage, but I did not. Is there a point to do 301 redirects again? 90% of my pages have been 301 redirected as I have removed some of the old subdirectories. Are you saying that I should again 301 redirect my newly 301 redirected pages? Zee: No, that'll result in a 301 redirect chain--you should ALWAYS 301 redirect to whatever the most appropriate, final destination is (think of 301 redirects as nonstop flights, never layovers). If I 301 redirect A --> B, but then B needs to be redirected as B --> C, you must update A's to reflect this as well, A --> C, to avoid a redirect chain. I would like to use example.com as my home page only, I am just trying to transfer PA value of my index.htm page to example.com. Not sure how to do this. Zee: You may want to canonical this one, in that case (especially if you can confirm that these pages present the same information)--you can implement a rel=canonical on your .htm homepage that points back to your main homepage.

Hi Charles, You can use either of them. Google doesn't make any difference between single and double quotes. Thanks

There are a few different things this could be, none of which are that much cause for concern, thankfully. Some questions to ask: Where are you seeing the rankings fluctuate? In the Google interface? In a ranking tool? In multiple tools? Since Google is testing things all the time and results are more and more personalized, it's pretty common to see keyword fluctuations, especially in rank tracking tools. I would check the keyword in a second ranking tool, and also Google it in a private window, to see if you can duplicate the results - if not, it may be a quirk of the tool and not of the rankings. Along those same lines - do you see your organic traffic to that page fluctuate along with the fluctuations in ranking? Since you're on page 2, you may not be getting a ton of traffic from that specific term, but it's worth checking on. If that's not the case and the rankings really are fluctuating, what other changes can you note in the SERPs during the changes? One example from my own life: I had a client who was targeting a term that Google seemed to be trying to figure out whether or not it was appropriate to show local/localized results. The presence or absence of that local pack changed that SERP a lot. Ranking fluctuations like this are pretty common, especially once you drop off the first page. If it's not seriously impacting your traffic or conversions, I wouldn't be too concerned about it. Your best defense here is a good offense - try to bolster that page's rankings and authority to get it on page 1. I know that's easier said than done, but it's a lot easier to deal with ranking fluctuations when they're between spot 4 and spot 7, instead of page 2 and page 5.

If you have access to the main server's configuration file, place there. Code in httpd.conf is compiled on server restart where .htaccess is interpreted on every http request. The best way of doing it.

Hi Raul, 'Deal of the day' ecommerce models rely heavily on email, social, and paid search, and not so much SEO. SEO is a slow play, so I wouldn't put too much energy into planning SEO efforts around this. That being said, a noindex tag is going to be sufficient in preventing the deal of the day section of the site from hurting other aspects of your site (if there are any), you don't need to worry about putting a canonical tag on that product detail page since you're not indexing it. Hope that helps!

Couple of things - 1. Have you redirected from original website to the BigCommerce site and also redirected the shopify links to BigCommerce? The last thing you want is a chain like this - original > Shopify > BigCommerce 2. How long ago was this change? If this wasnt long ago then its probably best to wait for it get back up to the same/similar rankings as your original website. If you have done your redirects well, it should take a few weeks and the rankings should get back to normal. 3. Was there a structural and content change to your pages? If the answer is yes then its not really a straightforward migration. This is a complete new website you have got now that is not just a changed platform but different architecture and structure and maybe content. In this situation, its fair to say that there will be a lot of ranking changes. Was your original ecommerce website was handcoded by you and with shopify you used their templates? 4. As for 404, if there is no organic traffic going to these pages then you dont have to redirect them. You may have to spend some time looking at Google Analytics A lot of times this happens when you switch from one platform to another, there is an impact on the organic rankings. There would be something performing differently which can impact your sites visibility. Like Jordan mentioned, I would also suggest that you should focus on improving the site speed. Malika

Screaming Frog can do that—here is more information about it. But maybe you just want to start with the Google Search Console report—you can find out more here. And yes, if you have a lot of internal links pointing to a page on your site, you are telling Google that you think it is an important page.

Hi Andre, Our sub-domains has the activity like forums where lot of users are participating. It's hard to control it with broken links, external links and some spammy content. So we are interested to move the "optimised" sub-domains to sub folders and leave the others. And if the page title repeats in pages of sub-domain, is that bad  and dilutes the website transparency? For all our website pages we have give "topic name | brand & keyword" and same for sub-domain pages like "topic name | brand & keyword". Is this hurting us? Having keyword along with brand name across the sub-domain pages hurt rankings? Thanks

Quick update: We've lost even more rankings since I got back from vacation. We've seen 200+ tracked words drop in two weeks, some from top pages to not ranked. Primary areas of concern I have are our SSL is not set up and our site is not automatically mobile responsive. We have a "mini" mobile site which I don't think is an ideal SEO or user experience. I've also found out our PR staff has been allowing other sites to use our content (scrape it). Sometimes, those duplicate content pages link to us, sometimes they don't. I've tried to get our developers to fix these over the last few months, but the company is so large it takes a lot of time to turn that boat around. Any ideas what changes were made during the algorithm update?

Usually these kind of mistakes are caused by not using a canonical URL as href in the hreflang annotation. For instance, if the url is www.domain.com/product-a?=color&id="red" and that same URL is canonicalized toward www.domain.com/product-a, but the hreflang suggest has alternate href an URL like this: www.domain.com/en/product-a?=color&id="red" as alternate URL for English speaking users, and this one too been canonicalized to its own non parametered version (www.domain.com/en/product-a), then Google will start telling that it doesn't see any return url... why, because in the canonical URL the href is not www.domain.com/en/product-a?=color&id="red" but www.domain.com/en/product-a. The same is true in the case of the self referential hreflang annotation: it must be the canonical URL the one in the href element of the hreflang annotation.

Hi Thomas, Before I ask in the community to everybody, I thought I would ask you since you know great deal of technical stuff. You helped me with Screaming Frog couple of months away. Sorry OP for putting my question here. Thomas, is it possible/good to have CDNs for different cities within the country to improve speed of loading? I just used GA to find out if there is difference in loading speed in different cities in New Zealand for a website and it seems like some of the cities have massively high page loading time than the other cities. I do understand that some cities dont have super fast connections. I would like to know can I have CDNs for different locations within a country? Or am I thinking way too much stupid? Looking forward to your response. Thanks Malika

If the blog is on your domain and has good, genuine content, and the commercial pages are on that same domain, then I don't see any problem or risk in doing it occasionally if the topics of the category pages are naturally referenced in blog article content. Now, if you start stacking and stuffing and going wild with tons of links or links on low quality pages, then it could become a genuine problem.

Most likely, one of two things happened. A) Either your site got hit by the algorithm and lost rankings..... B) Or..... your competitor was favored by the algorithm, moved up, and you lost rankings. There are other possibilities, unrelated to the Google update, but checking if one of these, and which one of these, hit you is important to understand your next step.  If you have a position tracking project running on SEMrush you can add competitors to the project and see who moved up and when. Since Google has not disclosed what this update was based upon, it is hard to know what can be done.  It might be based upon how links are valued, how content is valued, user behavior, or something else, or a big mix of things.

In theory, what you are planning is not a bad idea, but perhaps you time would be better spent removing "cruft" or underperforming pages. I think those will get you more bang for your SEO buck. Here are a few resources to check out and see if you agree with me: https://moz.com/blog/most-effective-way-to-improve-sitewide-quality-and-rankings https://moz.com/webinars/what-why-how-pruning-website-seo https://moz.com/blog/clean-site-cruft-before-it-causes-ranking-problems-whiteboard-friday Hope that helps, Matt

Welcome to International Site Expansion! This is the exact situation I worry about when people set up international structure. The answer lies in what your users need, not what you want or what marketing wants. Do users in the US need to see different content than a user in the UK or Australia? All of those countries have English as the primary language. I am not talking about dialects (UK spellings/words vs US words), but do the users need to see different content due to product set changes, price changes, different marketing tactics, etc.? There are a whole list of questions you need to go through. http://outspokenmedia.com/international-seo-strategy/ - Let me know what your end result is and we'll talk from there. Another resource: https://moz.com/blog/guide-to-international-seo (that will explain a lot)