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This WBF provides the perfect answer to your question. Plus it is captivating.. https://moz.com/blog/why-good-unique-content-needs-to-die-whiteboard-friday

Thanks so much Michael, all is done

There are archive tools out there.  I have not used but take a look at http://www.screenshots.com/, https://archive.is, http://www.competitorscreenshots.com/  You might find what you are looking for, but don't assume all pages will be crawled for various reasons. From Wayback: If you look at our collection of archived sites, you will find some broken pages, missing graphics, and some sites that aren't archived at all. Here are some things that make it difficult to archive a web site: Robots.txt -- We respect robot exclusion headers. Javascript -- Javascript elements are often hard to archive, but especially if they generate links without having the full name in the page. Plus, if javascript needs to contact the originating server in order to work, it will fail when archived. Server side image maps -- Like any functionality on the web, if it needs to contact the originating server in order to work, it will fail when archived. Unknown sites -- The archive contains crawls of the Web completed by Alexa Internet. If Alexa doesn't know about your site, it won't be archived. Use the Alexa Toolbar (available at www.alexa.com), and it will know about your page. Or you can visit Alexa's Archive Your Site page at http://pages.alexa.com/help/webmasters/index.html#crawl_site. Orphan pages -- If there are no links to your pages, the robot won't find it (the robots don't enter queries in search boxes.) As a general rule of thumb, simple html is the easiest to archive.

Hi Patrick! I appreciate your quick response and I will take a deep read about what Rand explains about it Best regards!!

I'm not sure there is a way to segment it because it is Organic Traffic and I don't believe that there is any identifying characteristic in Analytics, although I would love for someone to find one. While you may not be able to glean data from Analytics, you can at least use the Google My Business Insights Visibility report to find out how often your local listings are showing and what kind of actions are being taken. It's not ideal, but something is better than nothing.

Hi Overthet0p - no, I wouldn't worry about the URL shortener at all. Remember that spam score doesn't indicate whether something is necessarily spam in Google's eyes - it just tries to show features that are correlated with things we've seen Google penalize/ban. So, a Spam Score of 9/17 means that we saw ~72% of sites with that many triggers get penalties/bans in Google. But, that also means 28% of sites we saw with 9/17 flags had no penalties. If you've manually checked the site and feel it's not a problem, changes are it's fine!

Hi there Did you have any site changes on that day? GTM installed? Pages removed or updated? CTAs added or internal linking changes? Anything? Read the following: This is Why Your Bounce Rate Dropped in Analytics Explanation for a Dramatic Drop in Bounce Rate They discuss theories such as: Multiple pageviews triggers firing (being sent to Analytics) on a single page A duplicate installation of Google Analytics code Google Tag Manager installed along side of Google Analytics code Event is being sent to Analytics after pageview Hope this helps! Good luck!

It's always a tricky one when changes have been made and reverted Joel. There is an element of waiting for things to settle down again, while a part of you wants to carry on and make more improvements - but this can work against you. It 'looks' like Google is trying to figure out where you should be, but I don't think it is anything more sinister than that. It's certainly not a penalty at work as they give you a hit and rarely see movement like this. I would monitor the stats for another couple of weeks and then see where you stand. If it levels out, you at least know where you need to be heading and what changes to make next. -Andy

Thank you. It does help no end. Shows that I'm on a fools errand! Thank you we could have wasted hours trying to fix the unfixable!!!

cool cheers

Patrick has covered everything you need to know here, and most importantly, it wont hurt your rankings one bit. -Andy

We don't take phone calls from customers, but we give very fast and detailed email support.  This allows us to answer questions in writing and by kicking that writing up a notch by refining it on subsequent questions we then have an article to post on the site.   Add a few photos or drawings and its ready to go. No phone calls reduces the number of interruptions.  Then as your content library grows you get fewer and fewer questions and many of your email questions can be answered with a link to one or two articles. Our email messages to customers look like the answers to questions that Patrick Delehanty posts in Moz Q&A - and I think people appreciate that.

Thanks for the response and whilst it is very useful, it doesn't actually answer my question. We know we want to change the brand, the question is more about how much change should you make in one go. The scenarios are: redesigned site - this is a consolidation of pages, structure change, and a move to a wordpress platform. A pretty major shake up then there's the rebrand and url change My question is, should we do 1 and 2 at the same time in one huge change, or is it more sensible to do 1 first and then after x months, implement change 2. Does that help clarify things?

Yes, making the links nofollow should be implemented. BUT... I will say that outgoing links are not generally a bad thing, unless that's all there is to the site. If all you're doing is publishing affiliate links without any content then I wouldn't expect to give up your day job any time soon to retire to the Bahamas... Affiliate sites that do well, do well because the people running them provide decent content and add value. Just my twopenneth... I am not suggesting that this is your plan, just that that may be the reason you've heard that outgoing links are 'bad' for SEO. In fact, Google is more likely to recrawl more often if the site is both easy to crawl and is not a dead-end (in other words a site with no links would probably not be crawled very frequently), so it could be argued that outgoing links are a good thing. Personally, I would use magento over wordpress - it's more secure and less likely to get hacked. I hope this makes sense! Good luck with your venture.

Thanks for the responses! We only submit to decent niche or local directories but have found a few of the smaller directories have this problem. The site is set to redirect to the https version so it sounds like it is just the directories using the old scripts to validate the URL. Cheers for the help though, it has cleared it up

You will only be able to monetize them if you have ads enabled on your current channel and are targeting the channel with the real estate ads. However, this is not a good strategy. Real Estate may not share the same user base and then your video ads will not have been beneficial.