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Hi David, Not having a CMS on the old site will not cause you any issues. The main thing you need is the 301 redirects to the new domain. You should also make sure that the redirects from the old domain are redirecting to the corresponding page on the new domain. IE. You shouldn't be redirecting all pages from the old domain to the homepage on the new domain. You might see some decreases in organic traffic for a week or two after the change, but it should pick up to its previous levels once search engines have properly crawled and indexed everything again. Cheers, David

Hi, Go indeed with ScreamingFrog if you're not on WordPress. If you are running WordPress go with a SEO Plugin like the one from Yoast. That will make sure new pages will automatically get added to the sitemap instead of having to recrawl your site very often. A sitemap can contain up to 50.000 URLs. So for now with only 1300 URLs I wouldn't worry about the size of the sitemap or having multiple sitemaps.

Hi Chris! I know how you must be feeling—trying to take on a competitor that is ranking very well can be daunting. But believe me, it can be done! Here are some suggestions to get your company ranking on page one AND outranking the competition: Local SEO - I know you know how information this is, but don't push this to the back burner. Get your local citations as tight and consistent as they can possibly be. Content - This is an obvious one, but continue creating new and unique content for your website! Make sure you are generating content that is helpful for users and proves that you are THE authority in the area. The more direct your responses, the more likely you are to rank—and maybe even land a Google direct answers spot! Videos - Google likes to display a wide variety of media in its search results—including videos. A video is 60 percent more likely to get ranked in a search result than a landing page on the same topic. Images - Optimizing the images on your site can help you get on the first page of Google when it displays image results. Microsites - A microsite (sometimes called a minisite) is a website used to supplement a company or organization’s primary domain. More often than not, the microsite will have a URL distinct of the primary domain and has its own unique design and navigation. Microsites can help you target different buyer personas, appear more relevant and authoritative, as well as get multiple listings in organic search results. News - Putting press releases out for your business can potentially score you a spot in the News section of Google, particularly for branded terms. We wrote a blog about getting your business on the first page of Google, so be sure to read that for more in depth information than I shared above! Let me know if you have any other questions—hope this helped!

If you can 301 redirect the events page to your recording of the webinar, that would be the ideal situation.

Hi Brett, I've the same situation with a client. We focused on the singular and ranked higher with the plural. Of course the optimization were done for the singular keyword. The reasons we found: CTR in serps, Search volume, lower in this case Several links with the plural keyword. hope it helps.

Hi Liz, What I would do as well is go with a solution around your robots.txt to make sure the crawlers will respect it and don't go on a hunch trying to find new URLs that are embedded somewhere else. Usually it's something you shouldn't worry about too much, it's just the crawler doing a good job trying to find more content/URLs on your site. Martijn.

I agree 100% with both Donna and vcj! If you have the opportunity to get the backlink, I would take it. The more links you have to your site (from reputable sources) will demonstrate to Google that you have an influential/informative website. As long as the page that is linking to you is relevant, there is no harm from getting the link. Keep up the great work getting those links!

Hi Sam, I can see how this might be concerning. Without knowing your site, I can't confirm anything but answers to your questions: Bots have been known to "fill out forms" before and at least Googlebot has been known to find pages through the use of Chrome (a user using Chrome). There are many ways, but if you are sure that there is no link to it anywhere, I wouldn't worry about it. No. That is what header codes are there for, to let the bots know what is there, what is forbidden, etc. Other than robots.txt, there isn't any way to stop them from sending in requests. If it gets out of hand, you can try talking to AdWords directly, but more than likely, this is not causing an issue. Overall, I'd just let it happen. Let them get the 403 error and they'll figure it out. As long as this isn't showing in the organic index, you should be fine.

Hi This is great, thank you for responding Some really good examples! Becky

Hi David! Did Dan's answer help? Let us know if there's anything else we can do to help you work this out.

** I was just curious if anyone knew if the duplicate content would suppress traffic for locations that aren't in the same city.** If Google sees pages on your site that are substantially duplicate.  It will filter all but one of them from the SERPs. ** is it even possible to re-write the same 750 word service page "uniquely" 250 times? Ha.** Yes.  The reward is enormous.  Ha.

Thanks for this. Great idea. I always have my Wife take a look. Will extend that to the teenagers and my parents. That will tell a lot. Great tip! Cheers.

Whoa! I see that. That looks really different to me. It's not an old school authoritative one box. It's two businesses, side by side, that when clicked, brings up new SERPs and the knowledge panel. Something about this is teasing my brain, like I once saw an example of something similar, but I just can't place it. It's certainly interesting! What I can say is that Google is testing a ton of things right now. They've got the new image carousel, and then there's the whole local pack paid entry thing making buzz. What you've shared here looks like a test to me. And check this out. Look up 'law schools california'. A totally different display! Thanks for sharing this. I'd be curious to know if you're seeing it on other similar searches. Update: Check out Dr. Pete's article here: https://moz.com/blog/google-glossary Looks like a Rich Lists SERP with only 2 entries. Hat tip to Darren Shaw for pointing that out to me

Hey there Patrick! Glad to hear you're enjoying Keyword Explorer so far! While I can't speak to upcoming unannounced feature releases, I know this is a popular request and I'll be sure to pass your feedback along to our product team! In regards to the best current workaround to get at that local keyword data, you've hit the nail on the head with geo-modifying your searches. Feel free to let us know if you have any other feedback!

Many sites end up pruning content when a site refresh is hit. If a post has no organic traffic, no traffic at all, didn't link to anything, didn't get linked to and has no social shares, there should be no reason to keep it around. If it has any of that in the last 12 months, I'd keep it up. This is one of those topics that you have to be careful with though. Don't go overboard and don't do it expecting a major rise in organic traffic. This is more of a housekeeping item. And as with most housekeeping items like fixing internal redirects, external redirects, etc, it can all combine to help with search performance. As Mike alluded to and I've done with clients in the past, I'd take the candidates for removal, pull a list of their titles and review to see if they can be updated. Use the topic again. It's a good way to supplement your content calendar.

Hello Alastair, You have two issues to be concerned with: 1. Dilution of content, as you described above. 2. Dilution of pagerank, as Blue Corona described above. There are several approaches to consider that deal with both issues: 1. Don't worry about it because it's only 120 products/links. Pros: easy. Cons: Not optimal, and product catalog may continue to grow. 2. Create "Silos" in which only other products from that category are linked to, rather than the entire product catalog. Cons: Could be confusing to users when navigating the site. Pros: Effective SEO strategy in some cases, and would reduce the amount of product URLs linked to from each product page by about 1/5 (assuming an ~equal category distribution of products). Also, the links would be more relevant to each product page from which they're being linked - and would probably contain more relevant keywords than other categories, limiting dilution of content. 3. Rather than siloing by category, add a navigation for Top Products (or similar) so you can choose ~25 of your top products (by whatever metrics make sense to the business, such as mark-up, demand, stock...) to boost with internal pagerank distribution (or "link juice" as it was put above). 4. Don't link to any products in the navigation and instead focus that pagerank into category pages, which you then optimize by adding helpful content and dealing with typically rampant pagination/canonicalization issues those pages have. Those category pages, once optimized, will funnel some of the pagerank into the product pages. I like options #3 and #4 the best for most sites, but then most sites I work on have far more products to deal with.

Great, thanks Jon!

Hi there. Well, here is my question - how can you be sure that traffic from Bing is related to sitemaps resubmission? How about, simply, rankings? Or one of tons of other reasons?