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Thanks so much for saying so, Tom, and glad to hear you're feeling better. I don't travel much, so I don't have anything scheduled, but thanks for asking. Have a good weekend!

If you are using a plugin such as Yoast- you can ask to no-follow and de-index tags and category pages that would cause this duplicate content issue. This way only your blog post url will be indexed but users on the site can still access the tag links.

Good point. I didn't even consider that Twitter links are no-follow. That almost makes it a moot point right there. Thanks Monica!

My first thought is that rewriting your product descriptions will not be as effective as getting user generated content, like product reviews, on your site. Even if you rewrite the content, it will still be the same context and it won't offer anything uniquely valuable to the searchers. You need uniquely valuable content, not just uniquely written content. My second though is that flattening the URLs is not the best way to do that. Your category and subcategory names should be structured to help you get as much information into your URL as possible. You don't want to stuff them with keywords, but you want them to be progressively descriptive. For example, Category = Women's Pants / Subcategory = Boot Cut Denim / Product Name = Riders by Lee Women's Dark Wash Boot Cut Jeans URL - www.mystore.com/womens-pants/bootcut-denim/riders-by-lee-womens-dark-wash-boot-cut-jeans.cfm as opposed to www.,mystore.com/riders-by-lee-womens-dark-wash-boot-cut-jeans.cfm The first example would be the best possible URL format. Taking out the categories would only reduce your ability to target keywords effectively.

Hey Avin, Don't worry about it anymore. I flipped my personal site running WordPress over to SSL last month and I'll tell you everything I did to make it work. Thomas mentioned, "you should be forcing HTTPS", and he's right but what the Yoast plugin lacks in forcing an HTTPS redirect, you can achieve with a WordPress Plugin. If you want to see it working for my site, just go to http://www.kingrosales.com and watch it work Here's what I did: 1. Install the WordPress HTTPS plugin. I found another plugin before this one called, HTTPS Redirection, but it didn't do the job. 2. One of the thinks that you will also need to do is change all the hardcoded links to images within your content that may be calling the http version. If you don't, any images or embedded content from your site will cause the browser show that your site is trying to be https but some components are not, so you're gonna get a caution sign over the padlock. You can do one of two things to fix all these hard coded links to content within your site: Go through each page and post and change the img src to the https version. Open phpmyadmin and go run an SQL query to find and replace http with https. In the Yoast SEO plugin, check the Edit Files area so you can check the htaccess file. In mine, it looks like eventhough I disabled the HTTPS Redirection plugin, it has some lines in there placed above all the other rules: BEGIN HTTPS Redirection Plugin <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]</ifmodule> END HTTPS Redirection Plugin 3. Lastly, install the Redirection plugin by John Godley so you can manage any other 301 redirects manually. Its an awesome tool and I wish I had installed this a long time ago. It has a log of all 404 and then you can just click the "Add Redirection" and when you scroll to the bottom (because nothing appears to happen when you click it), it will give you a form where you just have to put the URL of the new slug. I hope it helps!

So glad if that will help! Good luck - you have a really important chance to help this business

Make big improvements to a few unimportant pages.  See what happens.   I think that this is relatively safe.

I see. So Moz's rank tracking tool is probably better utilized for tracking more generic terms like things you'd have at a category level, "[some county's] bankruptcy filings" vs the specific item level pages within your site. The information you can get on those is more readily available in something like Google Analytics; for example, you could run a report that is filtering just the item level pages and check their level of organic visits. Cheers!

You'll want to use pagination markup (rel=”next”/rel=”prev”) to handle this. See this article for specific guidelines.

The latter, Google News is quite different from normal SEO in the sense that it won't help you usually rank better in organic search. Although in the long run you could benefit from it as more people see your content and you could get links through it.

Hi, We have a 'Why Choose us' section on most pages of one of our websites, and it hasn't affected our SEO in the slightest. It helps inform people as to why they should choose our company as opposed to the competition. I don't believe it's 'garbage' - SO LONG as it's well executed. It drives conversion for us, so I think it's worth having. I don't think it's worth having if there is nothing to differentiate yourself (or your client) but that's a different topic. As far as SEO goes, it does no harm - so long as the rest of the content on the page is unique and useful. Good luck, whatever you choose to do. Amelia

Thanks for the help Ryan

I have a simialr problem... In December, a client site switches from http to https. Any clicks from old backlinks redirect from the http target to https, so the traffic still flows. But because the backlinks are to http, not https, the latter version has lost the Domain Authority. How do we resolve this? Is the only solution to approach referring sites and ask them to change links to https?

The only reason why I'd ever disable comments if I'm way to tired of getting them and having to approve them or I decided to stop replying to comments. I'll tell you why. Your page is ranking well for many reasons. One of the reason is likely due to that its a great piece of content. If it still continues to rank well and drive sales, then the 10+ comments per day obviously aren't harming its ability to do that, so why change the process of accepting comments? In addition, if it is a great piece of content, people are more likely to share it and you'll get more visits. I've seen many blogs where they closed comments because it was already a year or two old and it just seems they don't want to bother with the comments anymore and I really want to provide additional insight and yadda yadda; my comments are not going to hurt your post especially if it adds more unique and fresh content to that page only to help it stay fresh in Google's eyes, right? Unless you switch the position of your content and the comments around, the comments will have little effect on your page's rank and conversion rate. If you're happy with the way things are, let the comments keep coming. Use your spam filter, make sure you have "external nofollows" on comment URLs and if you really want to keep the value of your content strong, only approve the really good comments, not just the five word comments like, "wow, what a great post". Good engagement, you are correct. Fresh & unique content, Google likes. More social signals; a good thing.

With the link I see what you mean. Hard to put a variable on a listing like that. There is possibly another option that would be to use canonical with rel next / previous this defines the relationship to the search engines. Have a look at Google's Webmaster blog here. Good luck, Don

Definitely. Trackbacks wont really be a problem unless it's just flat out spam.