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This is actually more common than you might think, though you probably don't even realize it sometimes.  I've only seen this with forums, blogs, multi-language/geo sites, etc.. that are hosted with different technologies on different servers (Cart on IIS, Blog on LAMP, etc..) and the SEO/Dev team has agreed this is better than a subdomain path. The biggest challenge will likely be in ensuring the load times aren't affected, but this can generally be easily overcome by hosting the different servers in the same datacenter, caching elements on the master server, etc.. Cheers, Jake

I would suggest not disavowing a list of this size. My suggestions to you would be to create a robots.txt file and upload it to Google search console. This way you can continue to get traffic from the affiliate site, but it will tell Google not to crawl the domain. Hope this helps, if you have additional questions please feel free to ask. Chris Hickman GetBackonGoogle.com

Noindex + follow on your low quality pages will just allow your crawl budget to potentially be better spent on the content that you want Google to crawl and index. It's not going to boost the value of pages that are already indexed. So if you have quality pages and product pages that Google isn't seeing due to wasted crawl budget and low quality pages, then noindexing them might be a strategy to consider. I'd also make sure the quality of the pages you want to have indexed is unique and of high quality.

I recently came across a great article that might be able to help you out. Ideally, you would want to organize individual content pieces within their appropriate categories to help Google and other search engines easily decide what it is about. I would recommend updating your site structure. Bruce clay talks in depth about how to silo content and I think it will answer alot of your questions.

Shockingly, when asked point blank if affiliate programs that employed juice-passing links (those not using nofollow) were against guidelines or if they would be discounted, the engineers all agreed with the position taken by Sean Suchter of Yahoo!. He said, in no uncertain terms, that if affiliate links came from valuable, relevant, trust-worthy sources - bloggers endorsing a product, affiliates of high quality, etc. - they would be counted in link algorithms. Aaron from Google and Nathan from Microsoft both agreed that good affiliate links would be counted by their engines and that it was not necessary to mark these with a nofollow or other method of blocking link value. But note the point they had not mentioned what will they do with low quality links. From the above points it clear that Google will passes a link juice. But still many of us in affiliate industry uses a parameters and redirects in affiliate urls. Reason is just simple not all the affiliate are as genuine or reputed as Amazon. So if your links in 50 sites and may be 40 site can be those which Google does not like so links from those site may harm your site. So as I said above its always good to save website's image while leaving some link juice.

Hi Chris, Thanks so much for taking the time to answer my question, I find it helpful. Cheers Sean

Hey Alex! Christy invited me to pop by. Your 2 businesses exist in two totally separate categories, in Google's eyes: 'Air Duct Cleaning Service' and 'Car Detailing', so provided that you meet the following requirements, you should have no problems with running 2 legally separate businesses, even if they are both being run out of your home: Have a separate phone number for each business that is always answered with the correct company name. Have separate websites for each, with completely unique content on them (no shared content). Do not interlink your sites in an attempt to cross promote them. Build a unique citation set for each. Don't try to piggyback one business onto the other in your local business listings. If you can meet all of the above requirements, you'll likely be best served by going with 2 unique businesses. If your categories were related (like Car Detailing and Car Wash) I'd be giving just the opposite advice, but as your two service types have nothing to do with one another, I vote for running two legally distinct companies. Hope this helps!

Hi Ricky, Rand did a great Whiteboard Friday on 'How to Optimize for Competitors' Branded Keywords' in February this year that I think you'll find helpful Both options you suggested could be successful. I think it really comes down to two things: How much your client is willing to spend. If they want their company site openly targeting competitor terms. If they have no issue with openly targeting competitor brand names, I'd say do it on the current site. This will also be the cheaper option. If they want it to appear as an anonymous product comparison, obviously, you will have to build a separate site - which will require more budget. You don't need to worry about a Google penalty with either of these options. Cheers, David

Thanks for writing in - I think I can help here! Any items listed as "notices" in the Site Crawl section aren't necessarily errors or issues that need to be addressed; they are just pieces of information that might be helpful or interesting for you to know. In this case, it looks like the tools are just letting you know that there's a rel="canonical" tag in place on the page. There's nothing wrong with that, and in many cases it's a good thing, as it tells search engines which page to prioritize and index if there appears to be duplicate content or more than one version of a page. This isn't an issue you need to take an action to resolve, it's just some information that might be useful to you. I hope this helps! Let me know if you have any other questions or if there's anything that needs clarifying!

Hi TapGoods, In Search Console, next to the red 'ADD A PROPERTY' button, there is a grey 'Create a set' button. Click this button and you can group your accounts and be able to view a combined data from these accounts. You can read more about this here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6338828 With the Moz data, once you've created your property set, give Moz access to the set instead of the single account it would've had access to. About the sitemap, assuming that the four URLs resolve to a single URL (which they should), you only need to submit your sitemap to the account for the URL that your site uses. Cheers, David

Nothing is guaranteed when you move domains.  I see the following risks.... we are launching all the pages again with new content, redeisgn Yikes!  New content might not be received as enthusiastically by the search engines.  It might not be received as enthusiastically by visitors and they will bounce - sending a bad signal to search engines.  If this was my site I would keep the content and the internal linking among the pages the exact same as it is now.  If the rewrite is not done in a way that preserves the visitor's pleasure your rankings might fall. These original sites... if they are popular and have a lot of type in traffic, a lot of branded traffic, a lot of brand mentions, a lot of domain mentions, a lot of good will, a lot of navigational search, then you will be walking away from that.  Rankings can be supported more by these signals than by links in many cases.  No guarantees. We are in the process of moving 2 sites with higher page authority to another site we own I believe that (generally) best SEO practice is done when the strongest domain becomes the host of the content.  It then has the ability to pass its authority and reputation into the content being moved there. **What is the health of these other domains? ** If you can't say that these other sites have clean link profiles, healthy content profiles, etc. then merging them could have some risk.  It might pay to check these things out before merging.  You know the story about "one bad apple."

"P.P.S. Just noticed that there is noindex x-robots-tag in headers" That will do it.  You are telling Google to take all of your pages out of Google. You set that at the web server level and so you will need to get into your apache or nginx setup https://developers.google.com/webmasters/control-crawl-index/docs/robots_meta_tag Get on this ASAP!

Hey Anirban - internal linking is definitely a good tactic for the right sized site. There's a pretty good overview of internal linking over on this Quicksprout video, one highlight: "But, to find out how to get the most bang for your buck, you want to find the pages that have the most authority. Those are the ones that you want to link from to the pages you’re trying to rank. Let me show you what I mean. We’re at Open Site Explorer. What I did is, I put in the home page of my site and pressed the search button. When you’re here, it’ll automatically rank inbound links coming from other sites, but that’s not what we want. We want pages from within our site. So, click on the “Top Pages” tab. When you do that, you’ll see the page authority of all the pages on your site. Starting from highest to lowest, these are the pages that you want to build internal links on, pointing to the pages that you actually want to rank." Brian notes that you can automate some of it if you have thousands of pages, but you shouldn't rely on it too much since there's not enough anchor text diversity: "I’m not a huge fan of doing the automated, because if you do it like this, you’re not going to have a lot of anchor text diversity which may get you dings for over-optimization. If you have a site with thousands of pages, you will need to maybe do some automation and at least have some of your internal links done by a plugin or some piece of software." This Moz Academy lesson also has some good tips on internal linking: Make links relevant, and useful Don't stuff keyword into anchor text too much, and don't overuse footer links For huge sites, you can use sitemaps well and include them in the footer (see 5:00 into the video) I recently wrote up a summary of ecommerce internal links best practices, but the ideas apply to non-ecomm sites: Link product pages together via the description if they're related Tell a story in blog posts of your products and link to those product pages Link blog post content to relevant category pages (underutilized) Make category pages more user-friendly with content, and link liberally to relevant internal pages Use user-generated content/curation pages to help you naturally build internal links at scale Hopefully these ideas point you in the right direction, let me know if you have any followup or more specific questions! If you haven't used Screaming Frog's SEO Spider to scan your site and show internal linking pages, that can be another great tool to help you out.

I wouldn't go beyond 2 levels deep on any sub-directory except on rare occasions when it's still a short URL. The directory structure does not matter so much for SEO if done correctly. However, with WordPress, the breadcrumbs, navigation and site-wide links will end up with poorly prioritized interlinking. This could be bad if you do have important pages in sub-directory structures such as yourself. For example, your 1st level directory pages such as /guides/, /treatments/ and /social/ are cannibalizing page authority simply because they are linked to more (and in better positions) than your Men's Guide page is linked to. I recommend beefing up the internal links to the Men's Guide page and improving a lengthening the content on that page as you mentioned you plan to do. Instead of linking to the page with the anchor "Introduction" use "Men's Hair Loss Guide." It's a good idea to keep URLs as short as possible so that your keywords have the opportunity to appear in bold in the URL of a search listing. This makes the listing more attractive. You may also want to consider placing the Men's and Women's Guide at the top level of your menu instead of the sub-menu if possible. I've also noticed you have a lot of old content being indexed with a different website design, such as the About Us page. I'm not sure if this is intentional, but I would suggest migrating it to the new design or redirecting where appropriate. I hope these suggestions are of some use. Feel free to get in touch if you would like to discuss this or more advanced SEO further.

Also, although not directly related to your question, this was a really helpful article to get to the bottom of how GMB insight metrics are calculated. http://www.joyannehawkins.com/interpret-google-business-gmb-insights/3/

This is a great metaphor: "Finally, will moving all of this content damage Site A?   Yes.  This is cutting out body parts similar to arms and organs.  When this content leaves the traffic flow into Site A will drop.  The number of linking domains and pages will drop.  The offer of this content to entertain existing visitors will be gone.  The size of that loss will determine the impact.  Rankings of remaining content might fall if the loss is great.    If arms and legs or heart or brain are extracted then expect Site A to suffer.  But if lesser things are lost then the damage will be lower but some damage will happen.  Search engines and visitors will all notice.  Enthusiastic visitors will find the content in its new home and they might move with it." Will definitely be using this for future explanations!