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Not a bad idea, and I can do that right from my SEO plugin of choice. Dummy ?'s: Will that disallow addition catch them even if they are at the end of a child page? Also, for correct coding, wouldn't I need the wildcard to go after the ?=, ie Disallow: /?=* and not place the * in front of the ?=... Please clarify for me before I add this line of code. Thanks for your help Dean! Sorry for the late edit of the question.

thanks...it worked, this is what i was looking for

EdBen....yeah I know...you're prob as irritated with this as I was to learn that even Canada ain't covered....yet!

I'm sorry but I don't know if I can/should link out here. Let me see if Miriam or a Mozzer says it's OK to.

James, sorry for any confusion. I'm certainly not going to discourage you from checking out the article, but, the article is an outline from how to set up the tracking URLs in Analytics at that time (Oct 2012). As we know, GA has transformed their setup significantly. The nice thing for us is that GA still continues to track those URLs we set up as individual "Goals" so that saved us and many clients from having to redo or modify anything as GA evolved. The Google link Lynn referenced is your best bet for setting up now Patrick

Thanks, Rajeev. That's really nice to hear!

Tag pages can be valuable if they are unique and substantive. If your tag pages are all short like these then I would 301 them.  You also might be able to disable them in your content management system. I don't use tag pages.  Instead my blog has a homepage, post pages and hand-built category pages that are outside of the content management system.

That sounds like a reasonable approach. If you wanted to be extra careful you could also ad a robots follow,noindex tag to the header of the paginated pages since they all have very little unique content to add. A third option, which I would only use if people are linking into those paginated pages (very rare), is to rel canonical the paginated pages to the first page.

Thanks All - seems as though there is no good answer here, which probably means they control the tabs and won't allow us to change the order...

It depends on a lot of factors, but in general, I don't like to put category subdirectories in unless they are necessary. For example, if a category page is useful to your audience, then it might be a good idea, but in this case it doesn't sound like one would be. Also, consider how your audience will react to the URL: domain.com/attorneys looks a lot better to people, I think, than domain.com/industries/attorneys, which implies you're marketing to a bunch of different industries and may lead them to believe this is solely a marketing play and you don't actually understand their needs. A page right off the root seems more exclusive and like you care more about their industry. These are just my opinions. From a strictly SEO perspective, you're fine either way, but I'd still go right off the root.

All you need to do is update the XML sitemap URL: https://www.keycdn.com/blog/http-to-https/#gsc

Hi! Even if it's true that Google determines the importance to give to content - especially internal and external links - depending in what section of a web page it is (header, sidebars, footer, main body), it is quite a myth thinking that "additional" content explaining, for instance, the league table, should be put before for obtaining a better impact. Moreover: is it the table the most important element of your content, the one your users are interested the most? Then burying it under a "text" explaining it would be offering your users a poor experience. Topic modeling should be not perverted into a something needed just because so "Google" will make the page rank better. The consequences will inevitably be horrible, as creating "SEO texts" with almost no value for the user, and even dangerous, because Google could start applying spam filters as keyword stuffing et al. Write naturally, as if you were describing something to someone speaking. If during the description make sense using synonyms and/or introducing related concepts (i.e.: electric guitars in a page about acoustic ones), then go for it. If it doesn't make sense, then don't it. Finally, if with topic modeling you mean "LSI"... then know that LSI is another myth.

Hi Jesse, Looking through our change log, it seems like our marketing team removed  "| Mobify" from all title tags on July 2nd. They did it because "Mobify" is already in the domain name and is generally mentioned on all pages, so they didn't feel like it was necessary to call it out in the title tags too. I'm going to add it back and see what happens. Will keep you posted! Best, Peter

Harriet, It looks like you're  doing a good job maintaining a posting schedule but I'd say that with your broad topics, you may be biting off more than you can chew, as far as defining and speaking to a target audience. If your blog doesn't have an audience that is engaged enough to comment on posts and share post content with others, authority for the domain will remain low. Your posts cover topics from home decor/accessories to dating, to makeup, to gyms, to love, to wishlists and there's no doubt that these topics easily fall within the realm of health and beauty and are relevant to a broad audience. But authority and pagerank are about audience engagement and links, which are hard to get unless you're able to communicate on a intimate level with your audience.    Big time publishers with staffs of writers are better able to do that on the scale of diverse topics that you are attempting. I recommend choosing a core topic that may overlap into the various areas that you like to write about but which, by itself, is far less competitive and far more focused. Focus on you, for example.  Focus on what makes you interesting and then on how dating, gyms, love, wishlists, decor each/all make you more interesting to those you wish will find you interesting. You're much more likely to gain authority like that.

Just asking.

Oh nice!! Thanks for sharing Ken! I'll take a look into them for sure.

EGOL, I am once again surprised and thankful for your common sense and words of experience. I will take all of your advice. Thank you.

Thanks, Marie. That's a big help. It's your third point that I'm most worried about. Not all of our backlink profile consists of spam. We have some really good links - from the BBC, various other UK media like the Guardian, the Independent, even from wikipedia - but these links are mostly years old, and there isn't that much beneath them. We have a handful of good links at the top, and then a whole mass of spam, with very little inbetween. By the time I finish disavowing, there will probably only be about 30 or so legitimate domains pointing to ours. Google used to rank our website well,  even before we employed an SEO. We've kept some of these rankings, particularly in image search*, so I've some hope that we'll make a recovery from penguin in other areas, but I also know that penguin hits can be permanent. *This is, or rather was, our one bright spot, even after penguin hit us. You used to be able to type in just about any region or game park in Africa - our main business - and our images would come up first in the results. We lost these rankings not with penguin but when we changed our website dimensions a year or two ago and had to upload new images to replace the old. Those that we didn't change still rank well - type in Serengeti, for instance, and we're still right at the top. I've never been able to understand why we do so well in image search and so poorly in the main search results. Not sure if there's a question anywhere in there. I think I'm just waffling now. Thanks again for the advice.

Hi bchilders22, Great question and hope I can add to the discussion points. I'd like to approach from 2 angles: To answer your question directly, assuming your goal is to optimize the website (no matter the industry), then yes your SEO ranking will suffer with a lack of content on the Home page. Just like everyone else has stated. If your goal is to optimize the site for other keywords outside of the brand/company name, then the content on the Home page becomes extremely important. If you are seeking to optimize the brand, then you may not be in so much trouble. BUT, if that is your goal, then I would recommend a couple minor items to implement to help. Create a paragraph on the Home page which hits the branded name, maybe placed just above the Footer under the Slider. Use that as your foundation and then create your Title and Description to be relevant to that content, again tagging/referencing your brand and location to coincide with your Schema markup. If you want to hit more keywords, then you'll need more content and maybe focus to section off the content. For example, if this is a restaurant, then hit on sections of the menu or meal time frames ie: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Drinks, etc. Then link to those inner pages. I'm only stating this because we have several clients with ZERO content on the Home page. It's exactly as you mentioned. Social media buttons, logo, large slider, address and navigation tabs. This is all great because these clients do not care a thing about SEO and investing in SEO. They are shopping centers and their brand is very strong, so keeping the Home page clean and simple and directing their visitors to their Directory and Map and Events is their main focus. In conclusion, it's all about what your client wants. If they want to rank, then get some good, original content on the Home page and tagged appropriately. If they are focusing their efforts on having a cool Home page to highlight their logo/brand and some nice images, then having content may be "too much clutter" for their tastes. Looking at it from both perspectives, it's asking those questions upfront before the design and development begin are highly important. Hope this was helpful! - Patrick