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Shares on certain social networks don't necessarily have an effect from one social network to another. Google Plus doesn't necessarily have more ranking power--it doesn't work that way. What is more important to Google is the actual rate of engagement and who is sharing/interacting with it. If one post is shared by an influencer and there are a lot of comments, that will have more ranking power than a post that's made and no one shares it. Or lots of non-influencers (spam accounts or fake profiles) share it. Look for actual engagement and shares by influencers, not whether it's shared on one particular social network.

Chris, we typically recommend that you would identify Google's bot(s) and not serve up the notice to Googlebot. You can certainly also set up a popup (popover) that shows the first time someone visits within a certain period of time--and then not show it on subsequent visits. So Google would get it the first time, and maybe not get it again for another 10 days or 30 days.

I would go further than that and check the link profiles of all the domains.  Any sign of spam, unnatural anchor text etc then do not redirect as you'll inject that problem into your site.  Even if you believe them to be dormant and never used I would just check in case you were not the original owner.  Always worth doing that check.

The pages definitely don't exist anywhere. Does this mean I have nothing to worry about?

Brilliant thank you. Another question I have is, obviously titles need to be unique, so if the only difference is capacity, & my titles are something like Euro container 50L & Euro container 80L - is this just going to be seen as keyword spamming? I can't make the titles hugely different if the products are part of the same 'range' Is there a better way? Or is the alternative not to split the products?

I really appreciate the responses. Good to know I am on the right track. It helps to have confirmation so that I can make a case with the Executive team.

Angela, we usually recommend looking at each page separately and determining the value of each URL. You may end up with a new site structure, but there may be pages on the site that you need to keep because they shouldn't be redirected to the new page on the new structure. I prefer not to redirect a URL if it doesn't have to be redirected. You will need to redirect all pages from the old site to the new site, and it makes sense to redirect those to the most appropriate page. But, when it comes to a new site structure, I wouldn't necessarily redirect a page if it doesn't have to be redirected.

Bob, generally speaking it's best to redirect users to the page that's most appropriate. Think of the users and what page they would land on--and be redirected to. If they were looking for an old product page and just redirected to the home page, would that be frustrating for them? When it comes to an actual search engine ranking lift or boost, you most likely won't see one. You only would just not rank anymore for those products that you used to offer. There still may be a boost if you were to redirect an old product page to another page and there were links pointing to the old product page from external websites. Then, the boost might be passed on to the product page you redirect to.

The .co.uk domain is already geo-targeted to the UK, so unless you are targeting other countries/languages

It might be difficult to pin point it and we are still not out of the park, as we still need to get sitelinks for the normal brand phrase with the spacing. Thanks for your help!

Hey Emeka, Short Answer: You're correct. Effectively what Google is saying here is that they don't have enough statistical confidence to definitely tell you that the variation is outperforming the original at a 95% confidence level, but they do at a 93.8% confidence level. Quick Note: 95% is the lowest setting in GA Experiments. Long Answer: The math behind this statistical significance calculation is: Full credit to vwo.com for their A/B Testing Significance Calculator & doing all the work here. Link to Image One - This is simply the data of the Control vs Variation & the Conversion Rate & Standard Error Rates Conversion Rate is: Conversions/Sessions. Standard Error is: √(Conversion Rate*(1-Conversion Rate)/Visitors) Link to Image Two - Confidence Levels, Z-score, & P-value To find if something is truly significant at a specific confidence level, we need to calculate the Z-score then use that value to find the P-value and from there we can determine the confidence level. Z-score is: (Control Conversion Rate-Variation Conversion Rate)/√((Control Standard Error^2)+(Variation Standard Error^2)) For the P-value, we need to calculate the normal distribution of the z-score with a mean of 0 and a standard deviation of 1. The easiest way to do this is to use an online tool, here's a link to your specific example. Finally, we take the Confidence % expressed as a decimal (i.e. 0.90, 0.95, 0.99) and 1 minus these values (i.e. 0.1, 0.05, 0.01) If the P-value is greater than the Confidence % or less than 1 minus the Confidence %, then it is significant, otherwise it is not. Let me explain that using our example: at 95% confidence, our P-value needs to be <0.05 or >0.95. Since our P-value is .05799, it doesn't fit either of those requirements and such is not significant at that confidence level. I know that's a lot of math, but this is why Google Experiments is saying that the result is not statistically significant. Hope this helps! Let me know if you have any further questions on this! Trenton

Hm, I'd be a little concerned if GSC can see it. Maybe GSC can see that JS turns it into a link, but can't figure out what that link is? Any way, sounds like your hands are kind of tied until you can get those nofollows! Definitely make a note in your analytics platform when you get them implemented - it'll be interesting to see what effect they have on your rankings. Good luck! Kristina

As long as you're using the same Schema in both places I don't think it would hurt to have them both - JSON-LD in the HTML header and as structured data markup in the HTML where that entity exists on the page. You can play around with JSON-LD here to see what it would look like: http://json-ld.org/playground/

Hey Jeff, Good feedback from the community so far! I just thought I'd add ... you are in a tough market, because you are not a local business nor are you yet a major directory (like YP or Yelp). Have you looked at the other directories that are doing well for your core terms and assessed why they are outranking you? Age, links, content ... these can all be factors. I noticed the URLs for your pages aren't the best. They are https://www.wellpdx.com/naturopaths rather than locally optimized like https://www.wellpdx.com/naturopaths-portland but it may/may not be worth it to change these now. Best thought here is to keep your head down and work like crazy to build better content on these topics than any other competing directory can boast so that your site eventually becomes one of the top, authoritative sources for this information in time.