Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I definitely understand. My agency works with premium themes / child themes and find that while many are very clunky and bloated, we don't notice any issues with the code not being clean enough. When using pre-built WordPress themes, we find it's important to utilize canonical tags when necessary, always check on page speed, and to noindex unnecessary pages. We also use Yoast SEO plugin, which will cover some themes' faults. Having said that, I'm not a developer, but I'm sure there are themes out there with invalid or unfriendly code. Yoast has a good post on choosing WP themes: https://yoast.com/perfect-wordpress-theme/

Let's be clear, one thing is to get your page indexed by Google and other is get your page ranked I assume that you made your homework declaring those locations to Google You updated your sitemap in Search Consoles You update location’s name, address, and phone number (NAP) Location-specific content (staff information, testimonials, news, etc.) An embedded Google Map for each location You update your schemas making your life easier and Crawler too. You should also optimize your content, title tags, meta descriptions, etc. with location-specific keywords. Apply a local business schema markup to each page so your business hours and other important information can appear in search results. Lastly, make sure these pages are discoverable by Google. Google’s crawlers aren’t always able to find a page that’s only available through a search or branch finder on your site. If you made all of that.... well base in my experience in 2 or 3 months you will see everything running smooth. But depends on the niche and competitions. In the past, I made the migration from one domain to another and it was easy (one month or less )because there were small hotels in small towns with no competitions but in other case took me months

I agree that voice search will only continue to grow and grow in 2018. The results that are read aloud as answers are primarily featured snippets. So when you ask how to optimize for voice search, what you're really asking is how to optimize for featured snippets. A few optimization tips I've come across: Utilize a Q&A format: ask questions in your headings, and then include an explicit answer in the following paragraph. Use conversational language: seek to optimize for long tail conversational questions Consider frequently asked questions: by your customers, and other searchers (check out the "People Also Asked" section of the SERP when applicable) Here's a post that answers your question as well. Hope this is helpful!

Yup, the requirement for these kinds of links is to use nofollow on them, Roger. They're worth leaving in place (assuming you have the clients' permission) for their potential referral value, but even without the nofollow, they'd have little SEO value anyway as Google heavily devalues sitewide footer links like that. Best to be safe from having them considered manipulative by making them nofollow. If you want to add another layer of usefulness, add UTM tracking to the links so you can easily distinguish visitors from those links in your Analytics. That way you can assess how those visitors are performing once they reach your site. I'd actually recommend going one step further and creating a custom landing page that is specifically optimised for visitors you know have already seen a website you designed. Make sense? Paul

Hi Niall, AMP is not the same as responsive design. It is a different format for mobile content which removes even more of the "extraneous" stuff in favor of a streamlined, simple design which Google then caches and displays from within a search result page (without the user ever needing to go to your website to view the content). The primary use case is for publishers to streamline their articles and other content, but AMP can also be used for other types of page (including ecommerce, although this is a newer development). The pros of AMP include: faster load times, getting your content featured in article carousels, and potentially ranking benefit; The cons of AMP include: creating separate versions of your mobile pages, removing certain elements to streamline the content, and the potential loss of traffic actually landing on your website. Eric Enge has just put out a blog post here on the Moz blog all about this topic: https://moz.com/blog/amp-digital-marketing-2018

It's called an unordered list and it's recommended in cases where you want to get a rich snippet for your page. Here's a recipe I use to get the rich snippet. have an H2 with a query that triggers the snippet How to get the rich snippet add a 180+ character description after the H2 to get the rich snippet for your page and follow it with any of these: ordered list unordered list table

Beware of the Login pages – add them to Robots Exclusion A lot of sites today have the ability for users to sign in to show them some sort of personalized content, whether its a forum, a news reader, or some e-commerce application. To simplify their users life they usually want to give them the ability to log on from any page of the Site they are currently looking at. Similarly, in an effort to keep a simple navigation for users Web Sites usually generate dynamic links to have a way to go back to the page where they were before visiting the login page, something like: Sign in. If your site has a login page you should definitely consider adding it to the Robots Exclusion list since that is a good example of the things you do not want a search engine crawler to spend their time on. Remember you have a limited amount of time and you really want them to focus on what is important in your site. Out of curiosity I searched for login.php and login.aspx and found over 14 million login pages… that is a lot of useless content in a search engine. Out of curiosity I searched for login.php and login.aspx and found over 14 million login pages… that is a lot of useless content in a search engine. Another big reason is because having this kind of URL's that vary depending on each page means there will be hundreds of variations that crawlers will need to follow, like /login?returnUrl=page1.htm, /login?returnUrl=page2.htm, etc, so it basically means you just increased the work for the crawler by two-fold. And even worst, in some cases if you are not careful you can easily cause an infinite loop for them when you add the same "login-link" in the actual login page since you get /login?returnUrl=login as the link and then when you click that you get /login?returnUrl=login?returnUrl=login... and so on with an ever changing URL for each page on your site. Note that this is not hypothetical this is actually a real example from a few famous Web sites (which I will not disclose). Of course crawlers will not infinitely crawl your Web site and they are not that silly and will stop after looking at the same resource /login for a few hundred times, but this means you are just reducing the time of them looking at what really matters to your users. Source Beware of the Login pages – add them to Robots Exclusion  

Always is pleasure to help

Top of the morning to you!! As long as you 301 redirect the old URL's to the current related pages, 90-99% of the page authority will transfer to the current URL. It would also be advantageous, if those old URL's contain duplicate or similar content, to set up "rel=canonical" tags for the current URL. The canonical tag basically tells search engine crawlers which URLs to index. I would also use a tool like AHREFS to research the page authority of these old URL's. If you have thousands of old URL's to transfer, it will really only benefit you, from an SEO standpoint, to transfer the pages with a higher page authority. So, to answer your question, there is not a lot of risk, if you redirect correctly. It would also help, going forward, when there is a URL change, to automatically set up a 301 redirect, that way you don't have thousands to sift through.

Yeh, I thought you'd like it. I have been working with a lighting eCommerce store and we have been looking at them a lot - they nail it with SEO Regards Nigel

Hi, An alternative approach would be to use http://michalsnik.github.io/aos/ library. It does not set the visibility: hidden or hide the content, but uses the concept of as the element is within the viewport it will apply the animation. Make sure to test AOS library though because it does set the opacity to 0 so feel free to test in a development environment and fetch as google using Webmaster Tools. If you don't want to use the AOSjs library you can write your own Javascript (JS) library to detect if the element is within the viewport and add the CSS class from the https://daneden.github.io/animate.css/ library as needed.

I did a little more research on the issue queue for Wowjs and found that it is indeed impacting site's SEO. See https://github.com/matthieua/WOW/issues/196 here. Wowjs sets the element to be visibility: hidden inline and the crawler cannot see the element as evident from using Fetch as Google from Webmaster Tools. We will have to find an alternative to Wowjs so that the solution we come up with does not set the visibility: hidden property but still applies the animation.

OMG sitebulb is epic.  There actually is an app for everything in the entire universe. Great call David, thanks.

So you believe we should identify city and state in the URL. (Possibly city and country for internation) correct? Also, does it matter to SEO if the Title and the URL match? Or should they be different i.e. URL - Widget.Rentals/Orlando-Florida-beautiful-widgets-for-rent-at-a-great-price TITLE - Orlando Florida beautiful widgets for rent at a great price versus **URL - Widget.Rentals/Orlando-Florida-beautiful-widgets-for-rent-at-a-great-price TITLE - Find the best widgets for rent in the Orlando area** The reason I ask is because it is a lot easier to code in the first scenario than the 2nd. But, if #2 is the game winner - we will make it happen.

To be clear - specifying the image dimensions on the HTML has no effect on what size of image is downloaded from the server. It serves only to specify the space on the html page that should be reserved for the image display when it does finally load. So it gives s the impression of faster speed by keeping the page from redrawing once the image dimensions are actually known by the browser.

Hey Ramon, Thanks - that's very helpful. The chat problem was actually a bug I hadn't noticed, so very glad you pointed that out. I am a big believer in A/B testing, but I haven't been able to truly move the needle yet. I will keep trying different options. We're still working on organic (we're doing well on Tenant Submetering), I knew that we're getting targeted traffic from our Adwords. Thanks for the input!

Hi Alex If I understand this, you're changing the literal file folder on your server, but to the user and in the browser the URLs and folders stay the same? If so, there's no danger here. Just redirect and URLs that do change. -Dan PS (I think James, understandably, misunderstood the question - you only need to worry if URLs in the browser change.)