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Thanks Chad that really helps, I came across the experiment tool previously but wasn't aware this was for A/B testing. Cheers

I should clarify, I'm not saying don't make a stripped down mobile version, in fact I agree it may be a great idea. I also think setting it up to meet the standards as outlined in the post is the best way to do it. I think it is a better idea than using a conversion to mobile service, if you have to make a choice. Basically, the sooner you can meet the mobile standards the better! At the same time, if it is going to cause you to make a bad decision/put out a product that isn't finished or potentially hinder the overall progress of your website, then I think it isn't worth the rush. As pointed out below, take your top pages and really hit those hard, make sure those are up to par and move on from there. I think the hesitance you are reading in my post is the importance of "measure twice cut once in" and taking every single possible outcome into account.

It's likely that as the mobile update takes place Google will remove the tagging as it'll be redundant. Nearly everything in their mobile results should be mobile friendly.

Thanks for the idea Michael.  I am not sure this would work with a long web form submission.

Thanks for the input, Gianluca. I'm actually a dev myself and am about to abandon all these open-source platforms for a static site, but I do need a blog. It's a terrible case really, but there are absolutely no platforms built first on top of a multi-language framework. You either need a plugin, a module, a different store view, etc. Unbelievably short sided in my opinion, but that's where we're at. New open-source packages like Grav and PageKit don't support multiple languages, either. Just baffling! And SEO standards are flat out being ignored even most of the hosted platforms. WTF? FYI, Odoo is an amazing piece of software, but their new CMS is far from ready. There is no URL redirect feature; no structured data; unfriendly URLs with post IDs and underscores; dev unfriendly--you'll really need to dive into the code to make changes, override, or customizations. On performance, Odoo runs on it's own openerp server through a Nginx/Apache proxy. All-in-all, the language support is ok and the design features are pretty cool, but these very capable developers almost completely ignored performance and SEO best practices. In my opinion, it will take years for this platform to compete with Magento or Wordpress as an viable SMB solution. There just isn't an easy migration path to Odoo, and it's too much work for no real advantage over the other packages. Seems like developing a multi-lingual, multi-currency, e-commerce platform that follows current SEO recommendations would be a huge step for mankind. Still looking...

On the off chance that your client is using Adobe Analytics, here's their link as well: http://www.adobe.com/privacy/cookies.html

I had a couple of people who worked on our SEO a few times but we never really got much good advice.  The best advice I have had so far comes from MOZ and our most recent SEO guy, and people such as yourself.  Asking these questions on moz helps reduce it.

Hi, Although it seems slightly strange, I can't see any significant SEO issues which it might cause. Have you asked the client why they want to do this? As I'm sure you know, usually one page should focus on one topic and therefore require one link from a main navigation. Something worth considering would be the internal anchor text which Google will take in to consideration for the linked-to page. If you have 2 or more links on one page linking to the same page, Google will use the first instance of the link as the anchor text. This is something you may want to have a think about.

It sounds like you may already know this, but other people reading this post for advice may not.  Don't forget to make sure Google didn't take any manual actions against the website when it was compromised. You can do by checking Google WMT under "Search Traffic" -> "Manual Actions". If Google did impose a manual action you will need to submit a reconsideration request to Google. These requests can take 2-3 weeks to process. I hope that helps!

Power Mapper is another one with several visual options: http://www.powermapper.com/products/mapper/maps/visual-sitemaps.htm http://slickplan.com also has some visual options. Another useful visualization is to run some Analytics reports in the same was as you would say the skyscraper format in Power Mapper using pageviews by pages in site content. That way you can visualize which pages are most popular.  You can do the same via search visitors as well.  Cheers!

yes could be - but I just don't like errors

Ah. This explains a bit more about your previous questions. If possible you need to make sure that your client gains ownership over his older domain.  Without access to the Registrar rights you're not going to be able to edit the nameserver and registry information to show that he owns it as well as do the necessary server side work to control the old domain. Wherever the old domain name is currently registered you'll need to contact them and inquire about the process regarding gaining complete ownership of the domain. Since your client is a lawyer he can probably be pretty persuasive in this area.

In my experience, leaving the products up with links to the category page or a similar item has worked the best for me. A lot of people still search for items that were discontinued 2-4 years ago, so removing the pages didn't work well for us.  There is a meta tag you can use to tell Google the product is discontinued, but most of my customers really like being able to go to the old products and find similar models. I am in the generator industry, so years down the road someone could be searching for their model looking for a manual or something which is another big reason we keep the old products up. We also carry small parts, When those items are discontinued we redirect to category page with a message that says the product you are looking for is no longer available, please see these other suggestions or call us. If something is just out of stock, we leave the product alone and update the availability.

In that case you will have to install/use another type of light box - the two examples I menitioned offer the possibility to integrate iframes. rgds Dirk

This question was also posted here last Friday.

Hi Erica, Many Thanks for responding. You have suggested to use utm parameters in urls while doing internal linking. however the utm parameters are used to track campaigns like adwords paid program. Can utm parameters be used for tracking internal linking. If yes, what will be the campaign source & campaign medium. Will if affect the rankings if we have only dynamic tracking urls interlinked and the corresponding static urls are not linked from anywhere on the site. Regards

Ouch. The only thing I'd add to Donford's comments is you're going to want to limit the redirect chain as much as possible when renaming files and folders for a third time. If you can go directly from original folder/file to newly renamed folder/file and skip the interim non-SEO-friendly URLs, that would be best. That said, you're going to have to bear in mind and plan for any newly acquired bookmarks and/or links since the relaunch.

It is very likely that Google does discount the weight of links passing value in the footer (or sidebar). I would say if you're only linking internal links in the footer just do so naturally and without overoptimised anchor text you should be fine. Where people get in trouble is if they're really trying to do "PR sculpting" (see: http://www.seoblog.com/2014/07/attempting-pagerank-sculpting-terrible-idea/) Do what works best for your users and your site. That should be priority #1 anyways and you will be ok from there.

There are various plugins available for download to help you create a Wordpress sitemap that you can upload into Google Webmaster Tools. GWT allows for multiple sitemaps to be uploaded. You're likely missing the Google Analytics code on your blog as well which is leading to the weirdness within analytics. Yoast makes several Wordpress plugins that help with SEO which you can find here: https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/, that cover both sitemaps and Google Analytics. There are others, but those two things are what will address your questions above most likely. Cheers!

One other thing I would say is we have a managed server which was getting a little long in the tooth (old) so we upgraded to a new server. The Speed of delivery went up 10 fold and so did the Google rankings.