Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Bryan, Thank you very much for your feedback. We are actually already doing (or plan to do) each of the 4 points you suggested in your post. So good to see we are on the right track! However my question was more about how we should technically place the charts/graphs on our website from an SEO perspective. For example one option would be just to post an image of a graph on the website and add: alt = Graph showing Economic Growth in Dubai over the past 10 years Title = Graph showing Economic Growth in Dubai over the past 10 years But I'm wondering if there are some more tricks to effectively tell Google that the image we have posted contains actual information? For example are their some appropriate rich snippets we can add to the page to tell Google what type of content we are displaying? I know there are snippets for displaying addresses and cotnact details, for example. Thanks again Lou

I would change listings, social media information, and other external items once you've launched the new site. Think of it this way: your website is your main source, while the rest are secondary. Your website should always take precedence when it comes to change, especially when considering consistency with your users. If they go to Yelp, Google+, etc. and see "Bakery Y", but your website still says "Bakery X", it'll be both confusing and inconsistent. As for your second question, about the catering business: Facebook: you can create a new page (try to get a short and related URL!) and "merge" the old one into the new. Ensure that you clarify this change in a post, however, as not to confuse followers! Yelp: Much trickier. In this case, the only option may be to try to change the name of the current listing, rather than creating a new one. Not only are reviews something you never want to give up, the length of time your listing is up actually plays a roll in rankings on Yelp (similar to search engines for websites). Google: This is actually a combination of the two previous. You can keep the page you have now (especially good if you have reviews) and change the name and branding. If there's some reason that's not possible, or if you've yet to create a solid Google Local / My Business, then you may choose to create a new page and contact Google, asking to move assets to the new from the old. The latter is more complicated, and can take a long while, however.

Great points and very much appreciated discussion. Upon further digging it very well could be CMS driven and either as an unknown by them, or one of those "it is what it is" situations and they're moving forward. This organization I cannot see it being anything of false legitimacy by any means. I noticed it's on a lot of their top-level pages, especially navigation items and not necessarily secondary or tertiary level pages. This leads me to another speculation that they could be working on some A/B user testing also. The wwwP is not being indexed or showing in the SERPs either.

(This is Miriam responding, but I'm in Mozzer Alliance right now) Hi Aleks, You can do an logged-out, incognito search, but the usefulness of this is somewhat questionable, as each of your customers is going to see different SERPs, based on their own location, personalization, etc. Because of this, there is no absolute local rank for any business - it varies from device to device, from user to user. More on this: https://moz.com/blog/mastering-serving-the-user-as-centroid It's really important to train clients to understand that it's conversions, rather than rankings, that you are both working toward, because there are no static rankings for anyone. In terms of conversions - one thing Google has publicly stated is that the images displayed in your local results have a major impact on user behavior (see: http://localu.org/blog/your-google-my-business-profile-image-your-most-important-image/). Hope this helps!

The solution completely depends on what your goals are. Are you investing in those tag pages? Is there a reason to keep them around? If you noindex as the others here suggested, you're not only not going to rank with that page, you probably won't with the other. I'd decide what you want to support (it seems categories) and redirect the tag pages. Second best option is a canonical, but then you still have the support the tag pages, the search engines might not respect it, and you're putting a bandaid on a bigger wound. Hope this helps you think through it!

You can combine them, but not in the way you are actually doing. If I take your example: page: www.rococlothing.co.uk/boys/boys-suits/?p=2 => with this set-up you are basically telling Google 2 different things: The canonical indicates that http://www.rococlothing.co.uk/boys/boys-suits/?p=2 is in fact a duplicate of http://www.rococlothing.co.uk/boys/boys-suits/ so Google should index http://www.rococlothing.co.uk/boys/boys-suits/ instead. With the rel next/previous you tell Google that http://www.rococlothing.co.uk/boys/boys-suits/ - http://www.rococlothing.co.uk/boys/boys-suits/?p=2 & http://www.rococlothing.co.uk/boys/boys-suits/?p=3 should be considered as one page rather than 3 pages. As these messages are in conflict this set-up is not going to work. If you want to use both - the canonical can only be used to strip additional info from the url like sort order, number of items on page, etc. Check the link Dimitri gave for an example from Google. An example from your site: http://www.rococlothing.co.uk/boys/boys-suits/?dir=desc&limit=24&order=price&p=2 would have this configuration: (please not that the first url is http://www.rococlothing.co.uk/boys/boys-suits/ & not http://www.rococlothing.co.uk/boys/boys-suits/?p=1 ) Hope this clarifies Dirk

I am receiving crawl errors for squarespace website. Can someone please help. Thanks

Those particular forum links are definitely low-quality. "Black-hat" is kind of a loaded phrase, I find, but if you had a lot of links like those, you'd be potentially getting yourself into trouble. The problem is that, when most of us see low-quality links, we assume there are more like it. Right now, those links aren't showing up, so that may be an assumption. The other issue is that, if your link profile is weak right now - if these really are the only links you have - then the quality of those few, initial links can matter even more. It's very important to start out with a solid base, or even a chunk of medium-spammy links can hit you a lot harder.

Just to make sure I understand.  Can you clarify the sequence of the changes and for how long?  Do you know if one set of URLs has links to it or was ever indexed. Let me explain. It sounds like you had a site that was using http and was an asp site. So you had URLs like http://www.website.com/file.asp  (we will call this URL type A) You then converted to https so the URLs were like https://www.website.com/file.asp  (we will call this URL type B) You then updated to a PHP site so now with URLs are like this https://www.website.com/file.php (we will call this URL type C) You can setup 301s to go from A to B  and then another set to go from B to C.  Your question is can you setup a 301 to go from A to C, the answer is yes. You should do this.  Anytime you can reduce the number of hops the better. What you need to think about is, well, that about the A to B and the B to C redirects?   Well, I would say at a minimum, you need to eliminate the A to B 301s as you have now decided to skip the "B" and go right to C.  That works.  What about the B to C 301 redirect?   It depends.   If you had version B of the website out for a while, and it was indexed by Google and you have links that are built to B version URLs, then yes, you need to leave the B to C redirects.  You don't want to lose any of that equity. Likewise, let's say you have a version D of the site that comes out a year later.  You have lots of links into the C version of the site. https://www.website.com/file.html You then need the A urls to 301 to the D URLs (and get rid of the A to C 301s), you need the B URL to 301 to the D URLs and so on. In other words, go through another process of cleaning up the 301s and reducing the hops. Why do all this.  Two reasons.  There will still be links to the A, B, C versions of the site.  Google will still find them and crawl them and you want to get credit for those links to your site.  Also, Google keeps an internal log of URLs and will check them from time to time, even if no one is linking to them.  You want Google to find the right URL.    In either case, if Google hits a version A URL, it would then have to go to version B via a 301 and then to version C.  It can do it, but it would rather have 1 hop. Side note.  Try not to use global 301s, where you just 301 a bunch of pages to the home page.  That does nothing for you as far as link equity.  Try and make the 301s a 1 to 1 relationship as much as possible. Take a look at this video and this backs up what I just said.  The number of hops is discussed at about 3 min in.  The whole video is worth watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1lVPrYoBkA

I truly believe that the user is one of the most underrated signals. I wrote that, but I thought: "maybe it is more a reason than we think..."

Good luck, Pete!

I don't know that it much matters. The localization signal from just the ccTLD is not terribly strong but it should be the same for both the older .com.xx as well as the newer .xx For purely aesthetic reasons I would choose .xx

Thanks! Toby

From what I have been told, the ranking gain is less than the loss in link juice you would have by doing 301's from http to https, therefore there is no actual ranking benefit. If there was , I personally think everyone would be doing it. Like Chris says above, John Mueller said in a recent hangout,that if you had 2 identical sites in everyway and both was josling for position, then the https would take preference but personally I am waiting for ranking benefit to atleast equal the loss from 301s before I consider doing it. thanks Pete

Hi Kristen, Thank you so much for your help. Our website is run on BigCommerce - do you have specific advice regarding this platform?

Wow - hadn't thought of that!  Very creative use of resources!!    Thanks so much ~ Scott

Thanks very much Tymen!

Have you had any success initiating the process of showing their duplication?  I can appreciate that companies can make Coke, Diet Coke, Coke Zero & Coke Life.  And maybe my opinion is biased as a competitor, but I don't think it is their intention to provide a different customer experience & only to saturate the market with their brands.

Yes, change the color in places I've mentioned to whatever colors you want. Swap #fcf9f9 to whatever color.

yes, since you are not changing domain name and keeping the same content, you should be fine, since you were original author of that content