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Hmm... what is your process for trying to reproduce the bias?

Absolutely get those 301s into place as soon as possible Beth! Not only will you likely see some increased traffic from links that are out there to the old pages, but you'll also likely see a nice rankings boost. Right now, any links to the old pages are essentially "lost" to your site for ranking influence purposes. Getting the redirects in place will allow that ranking influence to again be credited to the client's new pages. When you do start adding the redirects, make sure to add an Annotation to the related Google Analytics profile. Depending on the number and quality of the redirected pages, and on whether the site's 404 page currently has Analytics tracking, you're going to see a bit of a shift in engagement metrics. If there's no tracking on the 404 page, you'll see an increase in visits as visitors land on "real" pages instead of the 404. If there was 404 tracking before, you'll see a decrease in Bounce Rate and increase in pages/visit as far more visitors stick around the real pages instead of just bouncing from the 404 page. You'll want to be able to refer back to the date the redirecting started so you'll always be able to put stats changes into context around this process. (e.g. a year form now when the client is trying to figure out why there was a site improvement around this time) [Hint - make sure you've got solid 404 page tracking in Analytics and keep checking it as you go along. It's an essential addition to just watching for what's showing up in Webmaster Tools, for example.] Some more suggestions for the process: Use Analytics to track improvements in the metrics you expect to benefit from this process. This is how you'll demonstrate the benefit of the work, and get credit (and therefore reputation) for your efforts. You can even set up Goals around the expected improvements to make them easier to track. Use Screaming Frog, Xenu Link Sleuth or equivalent tool to run a check of all internal pages to ensure none of your own pages include broken internal links. Screaming Frog (paid version) can also be used to bulk-test your redirects immediately after implementation. Watch for any high-value incoming links to old pages that you think you might be able to get corrected at source (i.e. an external site you have any sort of relationship with). Since each redirect wastes a bit of "link juice" you're even better off getting the original link corrected to point to the right page, instead of having to go through the redirect. Only worth it for strong links. Watch for opportunities to use REGEX to combine several redirects into one rule. Fewer rules is better for site speed. If you don't have a copy of the original site to extract the URLs from, you can use the Wayback Machine to see a version of the site form before the migration. to create a list of the old URLs that are still indexed, use the site:mydomain.com search operator to find the majority of still-indexed URLs. You can then use the SERPSRedux bookmarklet to scrape all the results into a csv and use Excel filtering to find all the old URLs (tip - set your Google Search results to show 100 results per page to make the scraping faster) Set up an ongoing and regular process for checking for and dealing with such 404s. Any site should have this in place, but especially one that has been redeveloped. Lastly, since you know you've got a lot of 404's coming in, make certain you have a really top-notch 404 error page that is designed to capture as many visitors and possible and help move them to real content without losing them. Again, important for any site, but well worth extra attention for any site that knows it has a 404 problem. (This is far better than "soft 404ing" to a home page, for example, for a number of technical and usability reasons.) So bottom line on "whether this is worth my time and effort?" You better believe it is. probably one of the best things you could do for the site at this point. I have direct experience doing this for several sites and the improvements are significant and quite gratifying - both for you and the site owner. Hope those are useful ideas? Paul

Hi there! My name is Erin, and I'm on the Moz Help Team. Sorry for the confusion here. There was some miscommunication in our FAQ, and this isn't actually a bug. Chris gave you some great advice on how to fix this though! I know you have a ticket open with us as well, so if you have any other questions you can follow up with us there! Happy Monday! Erin

Possibly.  This is on DNN which seems to be like a big old clunky dinosaur.

I'd go with the umbrella brand pages. Your reservations all make perfect sense, and managing content for 10 pages sounds miserable, plus they'll all take a ton of traction to get started vs a single page. Most users are tolerant of a brand that has products they may not care about. Unless they're seriously different (like a plastics company selling kid's toys, garden equipment, and medical devices) it makes more sense to keep them together.

Radically changing rankings are normal for a new site, or a site with little authority. Established sites with good off-page optimisation rank more steadily, holding the same or similar rankings week after week. We would need to see your site to decide if you had an over-optimisation problem, but I find that unlikely - the ranking issues you describe sound more like the site lacks strength. Generally, social media sharing, bookmarking and forum promotion are not enough to make a big difference, especially in more competitive markets.

My personal rule of thumb - as few redirect jumps as possible. Three main reasons: 1. User journey + Browsers - Sometimes when there are too many redirects taking place, some browsers find it difficult to follow through and would simply not load the page.  Also, even if there were only 2-3, the browser may load, but users on slower connections may find it tiresome waiting for content to load. 2. As ThompsonPaul highlights, you COULD lose some link value due to dilution through 301 redirects. 3. Multiple 301 redirects are often used by spammers and I foresee in the near future these causing a lot of ranking headaches. The older the site, the longer the chain might end up - for example, imagine you had a product at: https://domain.com/product1 Links to that page exist at domain.com/product1 The journey would be: domain.com/product1 >http://domain.com/product1 > https://domain.com/product1 Now imagine a year down the line, product 1 is discontinued and you decide to redirect https://domain.com/product1 to domain.com/product2 Imagine your journey now: domain.com/product1 >http://domain.com/product1 > https://domain.com/product1 > domain.com/product2 >http://domain.com/product2 > https://domain.com/product2 This could carry on indefinitely in the lifetime of the site... Best solution: Decide what version of the site you want to use and simply try and use only one redirect, not a chain. Periodically check for chained redirects and resolve as you go along. (I try and do this bi annually).

Thanks a lot Jane

Content needs to be good enough to share, and to be shared in the first place you need to be aggregating that content through social channels relevant to your target audience. Try - Wow, Why and How Content to "Wow" and stop them in their tracks - A big enough "why" to stay - A big enough "how" to meet their immediate need. I agree with much of what has already been said here, however quality is not always engaging! Its nice, but it has to be attractive enough that it wows your visitors in the right way, and this is not easy, but definitely worthwhile. Another problem with content that answers questions to quickly is bounce rate - if the answer arrives to quickly your audience will leave too quickly. finding content that slows down a visitor and holds their interest is important, but its a fine wire to walk.

Yes I know what you mean - the external links are not directly explained, but there are signals on the site to keep visitors shall we say relaxed. I don't like it but i'm not in the position to advise on that site at the moment. It's possibly something on-site going on - same server for both as it's IIS (DNN).  If I overlay the GA organic results  for both sites they are identical (good and bad) apart from the second site being far more accentuated. At least if we separate link wise then that will remove that possibility.

Hi Conrad, What a tricky situation. Ultimately, these kinds of issues are hard to call perfectly because it's never pure search considerations in play and, especially with each business being different, it's impossible to be certain how search engines will treat you. With those caveats in mind, here are my thoughts: Question 1 Your thinking is solid. Whether it is the right call or not is impossible to know (even in hindsight) because there are simply too many moving parts. Nonetheless, I think you have sensibly weighed up the pros and cons and made the decision with open eyes. Just for completeness, I believe that point #2 is only a small benefit if at all (and probably declining) but the only part I'd really challenge you on is #3. I would personally only go down this route if the company truly is a specialist in each destination. If that is true, then great (and they likely have specialist country managers who can push forward the marketing of each site). If it's not really true and you're more just "seeking the perception" that it's true, then I might stick with the benefits of an integrated site. Question 2 Errant 404s are a nasty and annoying problem precisely because errors do not necessarily undo quickly. I would be prepared to wait 6-8 weeks to see a recovery. You need to bear in mind, of course, that the drop could be associated with the downsides you identified in #1 (lower aggregate domain authority etc) and so you may not see a recovery from the 404s specifically. If you haven't seen a recovery after 8-10 weeks, I'd believe this was the "new normal" and would be looking at growth from there rather than "recovery". Question 3 It's impossible to be sure. The number of "reversed migrations" that any of us have seen is tiny and they're all different so I'm afraid that your guess is as good as mine. If it turns out that improvement isn't on the horizon, then I might be tempted but I think that my approach would be to stick with the decision if you think it's the right one - see my comments in answer to q1 above. I'd change (back) only if you think benefits you expected haven't come to pass (e.g. Has conversion rate increased on dedicated sites versus how it was on an integrated one?) and the balance of benefit has shifted. I hope that helps.

Hi, I would use a canonical tag and point to the first page of the event to make sure you don't get into any issues with duplicate content. I think it has some value for a user to have all the 16 pages online but for Google it's pretty useless to leave them out there and also notify them that they all exist. Using a canonical will 'merge' them a bit into one.

I would update the meta descriptions, page titles, meta keywords, and the body content to eliminate the stuffing. You shouldn't see a drop in ranking by removing extra keywords from the page titles.

Frankly depends on the depth you want to take and your CMS and its automation features. So take for example your page : www.mysite.com/dog-training/whistle-training/ An automated title tag and meta description set up would take its data from the URL and Page titles and categories: Whistle Training for Dogs > Dog Training Guides > MySite.com Whereby you have the rules: {Page Title} for Dogs > {category URL} Guides > Mysite.com In such instances it is better to use clever set ups that work with most keyphrase combinations, and the added "Dog Training" in the title, URL and page description helps strengthen the overall site or section focus when it comes to the primary keyword such as "Dog training" So in the example Richard has given above: www.mysite.com/dog-training/whistle-training/ Title: Whistle Training for Dogs > Dog Training Guides > MySite.com www.mysite.com/dog-training/triball-training/ Title: Triball Training for Dogs > Dog Training Guides > MySite.com www.mysite.com/dog-training/fetch-training/ Title: Fetch Training for Dogs > Dog Training Guides > MySite.com This shows that you have plenty of "Dog Training" pages in that category and you can start to see how the repetition would help the section on the site. However, if you DONT have automation, I prefer a flatter hiearchy: www.mysite.com/whistle-training/ www.mysite.com/triball-training/ www.mysite.com/fetch-training/ You can still have the same title tag set up to strengthen the relevancy. The reason why I prefer the flat URL hiearchy is that in your case the flowed hiearchy works, but on many sites a page could be part of two categories, and as such can cause havoc or multiple URLs when trying to fit into URL.

For the schema.org markup, you'll find Google's schema tester here. I would use schema.org/LocalBusiness but you can see an example of how to do the markup on one of my sites.  Start at line 447 of the source where you see schema.org/Corporation, and use LocalBusiness instead of Corporation.  I think most of the other fields will be the same, but refer to the link to schema.org/LocalBusiness above to be sure. In my example, I've used a CSS class schemaorghide that's got display:none in it, as while I want to include a bunch of these fields in the schema I show Google, I don't necessarily want to show all of them in the footer (and note that some of the fields are elements of multiple entities within Corporation, so I don't want to show my phone number twice, for instance). Pay attention to all of the places you see itemscope or itemprop.  And it's all done where you see the comment:

Michael- Thank you for that very helpful response! This provides that context that I was looking for to approach the issue. I'll report any additional findings back to this thread. Thanks again! -Chris

Hi James, Don't worry too much about visual aspects - Matt Cutts once said that Google doesn't pay a lot of attention to this themselves as there are some amazing white-papers out there with amazing work, but they are just pages of text and have none of the latest visual wizardry that we tend to see. Have a look through the site. Does the content read well? Does SEMRush throw up any concerns? Does the content seem unique (check this through Copyscape or pull some sentences out and search for them through Google)? Where you can, just try to get a feel for what the site has to offer and how you can envisage trying to get a link from them. -Andy

Oops, good catch Paul, you're correct!

Clearly, "up to 4 weeks" is a mistake, right?  Perhaps the question should be rephrased - "How long before Moz Local shows as 100% Complete?"