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Thanks, I also got a pretty thorough response on the Google Webmaster Forum

There are many ways to hide things and Google's response to them can be different.    If you want to learn if Google is viewing and indexing, then place some unique text in the hidden area and search to see if it is findable. Also, if content is hidden, google might decrease its value in search.  We had visible content that was placed behind a hidden... Google still indexed it but it was almost worthless for pulling in longtail traffic.  We brought it back out into the open and it (after many months) returned to its former SEO value.

Hi, I recommend you look closely at the permanent links when passing it to Webflow, that can cause 404 errors and it can affect SEO negatively. I have read people who have had problems with that, which implies having to do redirects 301 per page of your web Regards

Hi, If you're new to this the best place to go would be https://schema.org/docs/meddocs.html this will help explain the markup used along with examples. Thanks Darren

Hi Michael, SEO Text book and best practices, if there are any, say that whenever there are multiple pages that serve the same content ,and you acknowledge that only one of them is critical: redirect other pages to the primary. Thinking like this: redirect /index.asp to the root page. Just for the sake of clearing a little about the "there is some extra juice": Analyzing both pages through Moz's or any other private metric could lead you to wrong conclusions. Here, Moz creates its metrics with an algorithm taking into account links and some other magic.  Here some information about Moz's Page Authority Thinking like that, its perfectly normal that some other page gets more links and have different PA, even though being canonicals of each other. It also reinforces the idea that it should be redirected. On a side note, Google publicly said that doesn't use metrics like Moz's to rank a website/page. Just having a canonical is almost enough to transfer its authority. Hope it helps. Best luck Gaston

Unless I've misunderstood, I'm not sure that aria-hidden is going to be able to deliver what you are looking to do - I don't think you can use it to hide the alt attribute of the image without hiding the image as well. If you mean adding non-alt-attribute text to the page so that it is visible to sighted users, I would expect that it would make sense to keep that accessible to screen readers as well - it should be useful to all kinds of site visitor, I would have thought. In general, I would tend to suggest that alt attributes should primarily be used for their intended accessibility purpose, and that this should tend to include more valuable content on the page which the search engines may find useful. I found this guide to be one of the best I have seen on the subject. As a sidenote, I tend to think alt attributes are over-rated for SEO purposes anyway. In our testing, we have not yet detected a statistically significant uplift from adding alt attributes to images that did not previously have them. Good luck!

Hi, I'm also very interested in what the new best approach for pagination would be. In a lot of webshops, option 2 is used. However, in this article the possible negative outcome of this option is described (search the article for 'Canonicalize to the first page'). In my opinion, this is particularly true for paginated blog articles, and less so for paginated results of products per category in webshops. I think the root page is the one you want to rank in the end. What you certainly don't want, is create duplicate content. Yes, your products (and of course their links to the product pages) are different for each page. And yes, there will be also more internal links pointing to the root category page, and not to the second or third results page. But if you invested time in writing content for your category, and invested time in all the other on page optimizations, these will be the same across all your result pages. So in the end, we leave it to Google and hope that they do recognize your pagination. Is this the best option? Maybe, maybe not. Anyway, we didn't know that they didn't use rel=next/prev for several years, and mostly it worked fine. So I think in the end EffectDigital is right, just do nothing. If you see problems, I would try option 2, using your first results page as canonical.

"most provincial level domains are reserved for government institutions" - I didn't know this, very interesting bit of info there! It would be very hard to say if they had been definitively hindered but IMO it's seeming more and more likely

If you no longer carry that specific product, you can redirect the dead URL to a collection related to that product on your website. If there is no related collection, then redirect it to your homepage. Read Shopify's instructions on how to do a redirect in there platform here: https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/migrating-to-shopify/considerationsd

Oh lord I really don't like working with Shopify haha! Basically I avoid it like the plague, although I will admit it is slowly, slowly improving We have one or two clients who run Shopify and we absolutely do the best we can for them, but the truth is usually their results improve 'more' after they leave the platform. I can say that, Shopify is a good product for one-man-bands and people who 'just need a site' that looks professional (for their business cards etc) but no, it's not SEO-competitive (at all) I don't make a huge effort to keep up with all of Shopify's changes and stuff, because what I have realised is that the fundamental philosophy of the platform (which is unlikely to change) goes against the competitive art and practice of SEO. When the platform stifles and limits 'what you can do' - how can it ever be bleeding edge? You end up confined Email is on our Moz profile here if you want to have a chat about it. If you're moving 'away' from Shopify, there may be some pains there in terms of redirect limitations - but I'd need to look again and familiarise myself with what they can currently offer in that regard

Hi Bob, Have you looked into 99 Designs? I find the graphic designers on this platform are at a higher caliber than Fiverr. My favourite feature is that you can start a contest. So you'll brief the community on your concept and designers will submit their designs so you can pick your favourite. Hope this helps, good luck. https://99designs.ca

my option is to advise you to wait, and migrate the sites during the redesign process.

There are no cons (that I can see) to losing the "/shop-by-department/" folder, the new URL structure you illustrated is better as it offers an opportunity to add pertinent keywords. Just be sure you have your 301 redirects set up correctly.

Hi, What happens when using HTTP? Are you able to share the .htaccess code? The same .htaccess setup should work for for both protocols, but with .htaccess the devil can be in the details sometimes. A good tool for testing it is here: https://htaccess.madewithlove.be/ Do other redirects from HTTP to HTTPS work ok? I'm wondering whether your Apache setup perhaps has a different virtual host setup for HTTP and thus a different .htaccess file. Best, Tom

Thanks again AL123al! I would be concerned about my internal linking because of this problem. I've always wanted to keep important pages within 3 clicks of the Homepage. My worry here is that while these products can get clicked by a user within 3 clicks of the Homepage, they're blocked to Googlebot. So the product URLS are only getting crawled in the sitemap, which would be hugely ineffcient? So I think I have to decide whether opening up these pages will improve my linking structure for Google to crawl the product pages, but is that important than increasing the amount of pages it's able to crawl and wasting crawl budget?

Hi Alan, Kinsta is the host and company that offers a container which is more powerful than a VPS in most cases. You get amazing support for things that you are asking questions about here. They will set up to github for you they will do most of the things that I think you want to have a  really authoritative opinion on. Kinsta will make code change for you ServeBolt will tell your developer what to do ServeBolt  offers Bare metal hosting  on  their custom COLO NVMe drives that are on a VPS  are extremely  customize and much faster than  and your current host  is far superior support. I’m sorry to hear that you have paid in advance you may want to ask if you can get out of that if you cannot You can  hire a company like Performance Foundry to do a lot of the work correctly. It sounds like your server is loaded with plug-ins and is not being run correctly by you’re  Developer to be honest  you may want to contact codeable and have a simple code audit done for $400. **https://performancefoundry.com/ is great ** https://codeable.io/ has hundreds of great Your question about Plugins After briefly looking at your site I can tell you the code was not done very well but I would like to login before saying that See below: https://codeable.io/how-many-wordpress-plugins-too-many/ https://wp-rocket.me/blog/wordpress-plugins-many/ https://torquemag.io/2018/02/wordpress-plugins-many-many/ How Many Plugins is Too Many? There’s not a number of plugins that’s set in stone for all users. It depends heavily on the kind of web host you use, though. For shared or budget cloud hosting, stick between 0 and 5 plugins. If you use cloud hosting, VPS hosting, or a dedicated server, you can run anywhere from 5 and 20 plugins on your site without many issues. Dan Norris, co-founder of WP Curve, recommends to never exceed 20 From what I understand of your site and I have to be honest I wish I could log into it and give you more insight. It does not look like it was built very well. It definitely is not being maintained very well by your daughter no one should have 50 plug-in is never a need for that even on site that has 4000 jobsite I have never seen anything over 25 ever. The fact that your developer is not removing the plugins is a really bad sign Hope this helps, Tom

HI Everett, Thank you again for the response. Do you have information on how to block robots.txt in confluence? I have been trying to find out how to block Moz from crawling them, but would definitely consider blocking more. Thank you,

Interested in an update to your question.

Hi Bob, Can I ask what you mean by MIS - Management information system? I can't specifically answer your question but I assume you have seen the official Google documentation here: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/reporting/core/v4/ Also, I don't suppose you've considered Google Data Studios: https://marketingplatform.google.com/about/data-studio/ or a connector with Google Sheets? Both of these platforms are growing increasingly popular within the Digital Marketing Community. Kind regards, Nick