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Hi Mike, You need to look at this 2 ways. 1. From the machine perspective. From the google bots point of view, comments, white space and formatting etc are redundant, they don't make the content easier to read as its only interested in the code itself that gives it information. The minifying effect simply makes less data to read/download making the site faster. From an SEO point of view this is a advantage. 2. From a developers point of view. From a developer point if view, having the html legible is important for all the obvious reasons. Minimising makes the code horrific to edit and develop. SEO wise this confers little advantage, as making is this way increases the size of the document. The solution. Maintain 2 versions of the files. A development copy which is nicely formatted and easy to develop and a minimised version that you recreate whenever you make changes. There are countless tools that will auto minimise your html, css and javascript quickly and easily for you. If you are using a CMS such as wordpress / magento etc then this is less likely to be something you can address, however, i do believe add-ons and plugins exist that do this for you automatically.

Hi, I work for a client who have a purpose-built CMS but they have done a pretty decent job of it. Things they looked out for and integrated plus some new stuff I suggested they add: Ability to quickly and easily remove pages and set 301's Page title and meta description fields Self canonical by defauly but ability to override Helpful 404 pages that don't leave people stuck Content block areas with dedicated H1+content & H2+content zones Custom footer areas Ability to add to the default Default GA code Those are just a few of the key points that allow them to put together nice sites that follow a logical theme throughout. As for the second part of your question "how easy is it to rank a site?" the CMS is actually only going to play a part in this becuase ranking a site isn't based on on how good the CMS is, although the points above help to create a pleasing customer experience. Ranking a site comes from much more than the CMS - the majority of your gains are going to come from your content, backlinks and how well your pages answer customer queries. Get these right, and you are starting on the right track. -Andy

Hi Benjamin, Although there is a possibility that your WordPress redirect plugin is causing this issue, it would be hard to tell without having access to the CMS. Often times a plugin will have a box that's checked somewhere that might cause something weird to occur. However, I doubt this is the case. To answer your question, I would do this in the htaccess file although I would be cautious and test it first. Here is a write-up with someone who had a similar issues (he goes into details about his solution). Hope that helps!

Hello Jim, I understand that comparing these two data sets can be rather frustrating, especially when you're trying to do quick comparisons across multiple data sets. Unfortunately, there is no way to retroactively filter this data within the Google Analytics reports. But you can create a filter to handle this issue moving forward.  To do this, go to the specific view that you wish to change this data in, select the 'Filters' option and then select 'Create new Filter'. Then after naming it as you please, choose 'Custom' as your Filter Type and then select the 'Search and Replace' radial option. Under the Filter Field drop-down, select 'Request URI' and in your Search String enter '.php$' and leave the Replace String section empty. (This is a regular expression; therefore, the beginning \ escapes the '.' variable & the '$' defines that this should only happen when the string ends in '.php') Then at the bottom of the page you should see an option to verify this filter. Do so and ensure the change being made makes your desired effect. Be sure to check that no anomalies are created through this process. Now that you have created a filter to handle this issue moving forward, the best way to handle this is to manually export the data and sort the URLs by alphabetical order, unless you are fluent in using the Google Analytics API. Then you could use the API to pull this data into Google Sheets & have it automatically clean up the data, but I would not recommend this solution if you haven't previously used the Analytics API. While I know this is not an ideal solution, this should handle the issue moving forward. Let me know if you have any further questions! Regards, Trenton

Chris, we typically recommend that you would identify Google's bot(s) and not serve up the notice to Googlebot. You can certainly also set up a popup (popover) that shows the first time someone visits within a certain period of time--and then not show it on subsequent visits. So Google would get it the first time, and maybe not get it again for another 10 days or 30 days.

Hi Mike, I think you might get a lot of different opinions again (just like in Ruth's WBF comments) but I think it is pretty safe to say that Google likes sites that are consistent and clear in their internal linking and that do not return a bunch of 404 pages due to bad linking structure or linking mistakes. So with this in mind the first thing to do is decide what your final url structure is going to be. Is it https or http? is it with www on non www? Once this is decided then really 95% of any potential troubles should be solvable with a few lines of code in your htaccess file which will 301 any queries to urls that are not in the final format you have decided on to that format. This means that if you have decided on https and non www then even if google (or any user) comes into the site on a http or www url then the redirect takes them to the https:// version and everything else that is crawled from then should be in the format you have decided on. So far so good. There are two main issues where you might still have problems and this is likely where different opinions will appear as to which problem is more likely to happen and/or be more difficult to fix. Problem 1: Bad implementation of internal relative linking The comments on Ruth's post about spider traps due to missing the / at the beginning of relative urls (and lots of other weird relative url formatting mistakes) happens quite often and on larger sites can seriously damage your crawl budget by creating literally thousands of bad links to 404 pages. This is bad news! There are ways to address this either using a base href tag or simply by editing the relevant links. The moz crawl report will flag these kind of issues so you will find out pretty quickly if you have this kind of problem. Problem 2: Having to manually edit absolute urls because you have decided on changing the final url structure of your site. You mention you have a ssl certificate in place but are not using https at the moment. It is probably safe to assume you will be at some point in the future though I would assume? If so, how many man hours are you willing to dedicate to editing all your absolute http urls to https urls if you decide to do this change? Maybe your tech team can do this by editing urls directly in the database and this is not a big issue for you (although these kind of actions need special care to make sure mistakes do not creep in) - if so then this might not be a big issue for you and in that case feel free to use absolute urls and feel good about it! The above is relevant for images as well as for pages. At the end of the day google wants to be able to crawl your site easily and to find real content/images and not 404 errors all over the place. If you ensure this it doesn't matter much if you are using absolute or relative urls (I guess I better say in my opinion) - you are returning the same content on the same urls in both cases so really why would google care? if it is easy to put absolute urls in the main menu then do it. If it is a nightmare to edit 1000's of relative urls in product descriptions then just make sure they return valid urls and you should be fine. A note on your url examples: http://www.company.com/store/pc/Rollators-c379.htm (what I see for most Absolute links) www.company.com/store/pc/Rollators-c379.htm (would this work for both http and https?) //www.company.com/store/pc/Rollators-c379.htm (would this work for both http and https?) Only the first of those is an absolute url, the second and third are relative urls of one sort or another and are likely to cause you lots of problems. Either use absolute urls with full https or http, or use relative urls with a trailing / (and make sure you do not have spider traps). Do not use those other examples, they will cause you grief! Hope it helps, I am sure others will chime in

Guys, I'd like to thank you both for your answers and help with this. I have a much better idea of the way forward now.

Dmitrii Yes it helps a lot, your opinion is valued. My designer has evolved with technology and he offered both custom with minify abilities as well as WordPress (which I'm not in favor of). He makes good points about both, but really want to hear from my Moz Community before we make the plunge later this year, early next. Thx

If you have any doubts about this.  Decide if you want to put the value of your content out there exposed to the changing whims of the search engines. The upside is what?  An artsy appearance? The downside could be lower rankings, lower traffic, lower sales. Worth it?   Not for me.

Thanks to both of you. We currently handle it via a sub-nav and intend to keep doing so. I wanted to bounce the request off of some other folks before I go back to the group who proposed it. Thanks again.

Hi Tej, If you have Google Search Console set-up for the site, you can fetch/render the page from within search console and see what Google sees when they visit. You can also try looking at the cache of the page to see what Google has rendered. Also.. in response to B above, you should create a method to access that page directly via a specific unique URL, for which you can then specify the titles/descriptions.  In the application, where you have the links to load new content via ajax, you would set the pushstate to the permanent url where that page could be accessed, so Google can find/crawl those pages.

Hi Armands, I see you are using WordPress and have the Yoast SEO Plugin installed. This is very good and can give you the ability to have the images indexed if you so desire. Do you have a google search console account? What you need to do is select the XML Sitemaps tab and make sure site map functionality is turned on, then select post types tab. Make sure Media(attachment) is selected as included in site map. Submit this new site map to google search console. Now all Media images in the media library will be indexed. Make sure your titles and alt text reference what the image is.

If the different parts of the business are unique enough I would recommend going with either separate websites. On the other hand, you could separate the business in a subfolder. I would avoid putting the other business in a subdomain. Rand does an excellent job explaining the difference between sub domains and subfolders in a Whiteboard Friday.

I agree, GA can be a little hit and miss but it at least it has given you some reason to look into it further and see if there is actually something wrong. As per Dmitrii, I would suggest running a series of tests to establish if your site is truly running slower. There could be a multitude of reasons as to why it is running slower so eliminating the issues one by one may help. Places to test your site include tools.pingdom.com gtmetrix.com Google page speed test Webpage Test. Also as per Dmitrii, in browser with developer tools As it is a new site, are there any new elements that were not included before? new scripts, images etc. Consider also using CDN's to deliver your content for added speed gains. Check the waterfall tables to see if any elements are struggling. Have you also moved to an SSL when updating redesiging your responsive site, this can also cause a slight reduction in speed. Hope this helps Tim

The only thing I can think of is if you are located in the UK. It might of affected your rankings if the firewall uses US Data centres? If this is your site: http://bearsbys.com/ You are using a .com domain for a UK website so having your IP change to US could mess things up a little. The first thing I would do is go to Google Webmaster Tools and make sure you have set your Location to the United Kingdom. Check to see if your site is hosted on a UK Hosting provider. Then check and see if Sucuri only uses US Data Centres.

Personally I would doubt that you would get penalised for it especially as these are genuine reviews. We use a similar tactic here and post individual user reviews gathered locally on site and then also feature aggregate review for an overall score located on a third party site. As you are using TrustPilot which is a Google Partner for reviews, I would imagine this will only benefit you in the long run, but check with them about featuring their logos on your site. Some review sites are quite particular about how you display their logo/artwork and may also require a link back  Due to TrustPilot being a Google Partner, you also have the added benefit of having star ratings in any Google Adwords activity you may be doing, thus helping to further increase their positive impact on CTA's and conversions when landing. Hope that helps. As per Robert, just make sure you get your schema correct to ensure accurate portrayal of the review data so it is picked up. Finally, there is a chance that you will get your review snippet on Google, but this is not guaranteed even if your schema markup 100% correct. Good luck Tim

The redirect checker website is excellent. Great find!

The biggest decision here is whether or not you want to continue to maintain two separate websites--or if it's better to spend your time building one brand and concentrating on one website. When it comes to links, Domain Authority, and Page Authority, you can easily 301 redirect the old site to the new one--so that really shouldn't be a concern. It's the overall decision of maintaining and building two sites and two brands--rather than one.

I'm also going to recommend WordPress. It's big, battle-tested, and relatively easy to set up and use. They also get security updates out quickly, and your site will auto-patch itself if the security update is critical enough. Non-crucial updates are also very simple to install, (click a few things in a web interface). For the E-commerce part, WooCommerce is the big guy in the room. I'm also happy with WP e-Commerce, (disclosure: I contribute to its development sometimes), if Woo doesn't work for you. Shopify just launched WordPress integration as well, if that's more up your alley. As for SEO: Yoast SEO will do a ton. Also, if you really like code you can make WordPress output markup in pretty much whatever way you want without sacrificing the upgradability I started with, so if you're willing to go deep enough, it's, (to me, a WP fan), the perfect CMS.

In top 10 popular platforms in 2016 in LitExtension statistics, I think Magento can be a good alternative e-commerce platform for you. It is powerful. Moreover, you can consider many different platforms such as Prestashop, WooCommerce, Opencart, osCommerce. You can see full version at http://blog.litextension.com/the-best-ecommerce-platform-of-2016/ ecommerce-platform-popularity-1.jpg