Welcome to the Q&A Forum

You are quite welcome.

I certainly think it would hurt you in your link building activity. Many websites will state that they don't support content related to alcohol, tobacco or gambling. Unless it is a huge money maker for you, I would purge that content.

No problem! I just did this a few days ago, so I'm not sure yet. I would imagine that if the URLs aren't linked anywhere or listed on XML, then IF they come back to them, they'll see a 404 response and move on.

Are you going to replace each of the old sites to a subdomain, to subfolders, or are you combining all of the content into a new site? IOW, have you decided on a site structure, yet?

Hi Becky, Although ALT tags might not seem like a high priority item, I do think they hold a bit of value when it comes to SEO. Without the ALT tag, the search engine doesn't know what the image is of. By adding ALT tags to all 22,000 old images on the website, we could hope that this could help to boost your rankings slightly. It will also improve the user experience (if the images don't load for them), which is important in Google's eyes. If you can't find a way to go through them quickly, then I wouldn't worry about it too much. Maybe find a way to tackle a thousand at a time, and so on. Hope this helps!

Yes, redirect as many pages to the same page or a similar page as you can. Then other pages to a more general product section if you cannot find one-to-one. This is really about the user experience more so than SEO. You don't want the users ending up on a 404 page. So long as you address it from the user experience, and it sounds like you are, then you should be fine.

Thank you both. As it happens, just now I discovered the site is already covered with a basic SSL certificate through my host. However, the secure version of the site doesn't load properly - the CSS is being loaded over http, so I need to fix that in wp-admin. Just leaving this here in case it ever helps anybody else! http://stackoverflow.com/questions/27727003/website-homepage-loses-styling-when-ssl-forced

Hi, Yes it happens. Please check last reply in below link. https://moz.com/community/q/google-sets-brand-domain-name-at-the-end-of-serp-titles Hope this helps. Thanks

Bob, It sounds like you are doing a good job so far. How about link building? I don't have much experience with ecommerce, so i am not sure how that would go. Besides SEO, a balanced approach involving social, advertising, and email marketing should help bring the traffic and let people know about your new site...And if the content is really great, you should start climbing the ranks. I know...i make it sound easier than it actually is. Good luck, Matt

Thanks Oleg, I'll do just that and will inform you as to the results. There has been no other promotion. I lost the rank for the past two weeks, so I'm not sure if this is holding me down or the latest Google updates. The post has been up for around 2 months now, so I think that may be long enough to take effect. Google loves ripping my efforts to pieces, literally any headway I make, they pull me right back down. Every. Single. Time. This then begs the question, how does one gain do-follow backlinks organically? It would seem to me to be near impossible.

If the site has low authority and hundreds of backlinks, it's probably a spam site. You're wasting your time to reach the webmaster to get the links removed. They are not linking to you to help you, but to help themselves by association with a high authority site.

I completely get it. It's frustrating. Though, I get lots of leads from Yelp because of the time I've invested in making it work for me, so I find the frustration mainly worthwhile. I teach Yelp classes for business here in Sacramento. I tell them "Yelp is like a report card, you're getting a grade whether you like it or not. If you want an A+, you have to do the Extra Credit work."

See Rand's whiteboard on this. In most cases, you will see seo benefits in placing these in a subfolder as search engines retain metrics differently between the two.

Thanks, Donna. I just came across it and was curious to know if it was as detrimental as I have once lead to believe. We will work on getting this issue fixed. Thank you for the advice -Ryan

Hi Lee! We wrote a blog post about the most recent algorithm update on our website. Be sure to check it out for any questions you might have: https://www.bluecorona.com/blog/fred-algorithm-update-march-2017 Hopefully it will provide some insights into why you're seeing a ~4% drop in visbility.