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When I worked on the rebrand from SEOmoz.org to Moz.com, we faced exactly this situation. You can watch my Mozinar about it here https://moz.com/webinars/domain-migrations-lessons-from-the-moz-transition. In brief: You should expect to see a temporary dip in traffic and rankings, but it's totally reversible. Do as much link reclamation (reaching out to sites that link to you and asking them to update their links) as you can. Plan for a concerted link building effort to the new site to coincide with launch. Go page-to-page with redirects wherever possible. Use the Change Address function in Search Console. Make sure that pages that rank for core terms now redirect to pages that target those same terms. I've also noticed that Google has been slower than usual at indexing new pages lately, sometimes taking upwards of a week, so keep that in mind as you check for your new site being indexed. Good luck!

Thanks, Kevin. Appreciate the input. I'm thinking I'll still give Weebly a shot, because I've got a deadline and I can't meet it if I go with a platform I have to learn all over (like wordpress). I'll give it a go and see how it performs.

Thank you! I'll go for Wordpress.

There is no real issue with having multiple H1 on a page - in your case you risk that the hidden H1 is ignored. If you hide more content on the page Google could consider that you're cloaking - if it's only the H1 I guess this risk is pretty limited. Dirk

Great thanks for the responses Kate. I'll digest what you have sent me and decide there. Thanks again for the help, it's much appreciated Alex

Thanks for your info. May I get any reference?

This is something we've always done to some extent and we've been putting more of a focus on in the last few months, along with general UX. A part of our sales process these days is about gathering information on the structure of a company, their brand and "voice" and what it is they're looking to achieve from the business ideally. With that information, we can make sure our content and overall UX is on point with the rest of the company so it fits nicely. Our aim is to either integrate with or act as their marketing department and have everything look like a single, congruent package. The last thing we want is for client websites to feel awkwardly out of place with the rest of the user experience.

Thanks Thomas. Great information as usual!

Thanks Chris Ashton for your response. Yes, I agree with you on the benefit bit. I dont think there is any sort of impact apart from confusing the users.

Hi Michael, thanks for the input. I completely agree with you about content length but perhaps I'm a little confused here. If search engines aren't going to see content hidden by jquery, would that not mean the only content I'm seen to have is what's immediately visible on page load?

Thank you so much Kristina I thought there would be more benefits having it like a standard webpage, HTML. Given we already have the eBook in PDF format (72 pages done by a graphic designer), I was wondering if there was a happy medium like creating new web pages and 'embedding' the PDF? This was suggested by the web developer however we weren't sure if/how it would benefit SEO. I'm just trying to weigh up the cost vs benefit of creating many more html pages. Ideally, I don't think we would have gone with a PDF in the first place. I guess we had seen a lot of eBooks which are in PDF format. Thank you! Laura

hmm, that's frustrating! The canonicalization idea isn't going to work too well since it essentially passes the strength of one page to the other so you will still only end up with a single page that ranks. Also, it doesn't present a great user experience. If anything, it probably further confuses the fact that they're both the same thing! If you've got offices in multiple locations, you can go with a number of ideas from Rand's Whiteboard Friday on a related topic. If this does apply to you, you could use the most common term for each region. Location pages for Western states would talk about Attorneys and Western states focus on Lawyer. It's far from ideal but if Google isn't understanding the difference here, it's about the best option I can see.

I actually looked into this a little further before developing conditionals, and I noticed it is possible in Yoast.  You have to go to Products - Attributes, then the Gear icon, then select noindex.

Oh, it's year of 2015 and you still use "timthumb.php"? https://blog.sucuri.net/2014/06/timthumb-webshot-code-execution-exploit-0-day.html https://www.binarymoon.co.uk/2014/07/dont-use-timthumb-instead/ https://www.binarymoon.co.uk/2014/09/timthumb-end-life/ Also if i think that lack of alt text for images can be terrible for your page. If you're still looking for modern gallery you can use PhotoSwipe script and he is SEO and semantic friendly.

Thanks Bryan! I appreciate the time you took to respond to this. I'm sorry I didn't respond sooner! Cheers!

From what I am picking up, you are only offering translations. Be careful not to associate one language with one country when it comes to the major world languages like French and Spanish that are spoken in a number of countries. Therefore I highly recommend removing those flags and bringing a language menu up to the top. I am happy to hear you are changing from ccTLDs to another solution. ccTLDs are only meant for content targeted at one country. If you are doing translations, then Spanish would need multiple ccTLDs (example Mexico and Spain) and then the content would be duplicated across those sites unless something else changed about your offering on those country sites. Anyway, I am babbling. You are headed down the right path. Remove those flags and have a language menu up top.

Interesting. Literally none of the crawler tools I've just tried using give me anything more than a 404 for your  home page and that's where they stop. I can see the 301 from the non-www version so the domain itself is crawlable - I'm wondering if maybe it's a htaccess issue? The best I can work out from the outside is that something is wrong with your htaccess file, maybe it's pointing to an invalid path and this is generating the 404. Since the site currently just gives a soft 404, taking users to a page that looks like the homepage, it may be that what actually happens when you go to www.schoppnutritionclinic.com is that you're being handed the soft-404 and just thinking it's your home page. It's impossible to test further without access to these things but hopefully this points you in the right direction. I'd be interested to see the outcome here regardless; it's bugging me now!

Hi Stuart There could be many nuances to every situation (essentially, what type of sites they are and what type of content it is), but in general I'd go with what's most user-friendly - what will reduce any confusion, and send old traffic to the new home of the acquired company. A subdomain is fine if you want to clearly show to users a distinction between the acquiring vs acquired site. Definitely do your 301 redirects. I would highly recommend reading up on Cyrus' article here about 301 redirects. In general, the content should be basically the same from the old page to the new page being redirected to. I would try to migrate the site "as is" as much as possible to eliminate other factors/changes that could affect things. You can update things later, but this was it makes it easier to analyze if any rankings are lost. In other words, be systematic and keep track of when/what you change.

"Spanish Language but Google crawls it on English" I think this is a problem. Google should have both Spanish and English versions crawled and indexed, and then you redirect to their new respective versions. I'd say redirect english -> english, spanish -> spanish and work to resolve the larger issue.