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I kind of think of text in expandable tabs like could be useful to someone, but not the majority of people.

Tom is right that it could be a better user experience. But what does it say about the text... not really super important for most people. That's a little like way way down the page.

Have you searched for your text in tabs to see if it's indexed? I did that not long ago and found that mine wasn't and since moving it out of expandable tabs it now is.

It's possible it was not the only thing going on, but it would be interesting to check.

Do pages of vehicles that are in inventory for a short time actually deliver monetizable traffic?

If the answer is no, because they are up for such a short amount of time, you would have to weigh the value of having them indexable in the first place vs creating an ever-growing list of missing pages.

Having a lot of 404s or 422s is a bit of a negative. Is there really no way to add the step of 301ing to their removal?

Making the pages non-indexable via noindex once they are indexed will not remove them. You either have to 301 and/or request removal from the G's index. Is there a programmatic way to turn their removal into a 301 to the top inventory category page?

Good luck!

I work with a site that gets lots of members and conversions from its specialty interest community forum out of organic search. The site has been around for a number of years and still has many forum pages that do well in search that are 5+ years old. Some of these discussions may have dozens of comments and a few have thousand words.

The option has been floated to end accepting new comments on specific discussions at some point. I can see the negatives, such as folks coming out of search and wanting to register to comment, but not be able to... if we closed the discussion to new comments.

I've always assumed that new comments may freshen up a page a little organic search-wise, but honestly don't know how much that matters.

Are  there any good reasons to close a discussion to new comments? Related question, what do you think is the optimum qty of unique text before paginating?

Thanks!

Making sure that the https pages are canonicalized to https pages should be relatively easy and within your control. I would get that done right away.

If the canonicalization wasn't done right in the migration, it makes me wonder what else may not be right with the move to https. You might want to look here https://moz.com/blog/seo-tips-https-ssl, especially the links under "best practices" and double check all that.

The unnatural link clean up and reconsideration request will be more work intensive and take a lot more time and is on some level not entirely within your control, as you are left at Google's mercy.

Both need to be done, but they seem like very different sized problems with very different timelines to payoff.

Best of luck! ... Mike

As Google seems to have new interest in Rel Author for articles, is there anything comparable for q&a comments, where you have many commenters?

IMHO, Google is trying to get at the quality of the authors advice via authority of some kind, especially for YMYL content.

Best... Mike

Thanks, guys.

I've adjusted alt images tags on pages that really matter to me for organic. The tens of thousands of other images/pages are just going to have to chillax.

What would be your take on how to hire a link building service. Specifically, but not limited to:

• Finding one whose methods/links achieved won't later destroy the domain?

• Define the cost for the service?

• What is a typical cost for such a service?

• Reasonable expectations?

• Any other tips for dealing with same.

Thanks!

Hi Egol,

Thanks for the clarification. I need links into these discussions, vs social, to get them to rank better in organic. The conversations we're targeting are aligned with organic search opportunities and generally perform, but not as well as they could if they had a few links.

Do you think a link builder could use non-toxic methods to make that happen?

What do you think it would cost and how how are the resulting links attached to cost?

For instance, is it like "here's some money and whatever happens happens?" Or, is it more like a clearer contract?

Thanks!

Hi,

Let me first say that I really like the tool DeepCrawl. So, not busting on them. More like I'm interested in the relative importance of two items they call as "Issues."

Those items are "Incomplete Open Graph Tags" and "No Valid Twitter Cards." They call this out on every page.

To define it a bit further, I'm interested in the importance as it relates to organic search.I'm also interested in there's some basic functionality we may have missed in our Share42 implementation. To me, it looks like the social sharing buttons work.

Also, we use Share42 social sharing buttons, which are quite functional.

If it would help, I could private message you an example url.

Thanks! Best... Mike

Yes, definitely read the beginners guide.

Okay, this is just off the top of my head about issues other than on-page content. Consider in whatever order:

• Original choice of competitive niche. If it's too tough to compete or is so nichey there is no search traffic, you can't win no matter what you do.

• Link profile https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/  Is the content good enough or are you in some other way able to promote quality links to your site?

• Site architecture. How far from the homepage is any given page? Try for two pages or less.

• Site speed (hosting + code) https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/

• Mobile friendliness https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/

• Google Search Console fixes/improvements (errors, indexability, html improvements, etc) https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home?hl=en

If you have a site that is targeted to a niche that you can/should compete in (and where there is traffic), with a good link profile, constructed properly, loading fast, mobile friendly and not too broken, you ought to succeed to some degree. And then just don't forget the good on-page content!

Best of Luck! ...Mike

Yes, I would not worry about the differences in how OSE views the different url's PA/DA This would be for the reasons already noted, plus OSE is not Google.

The main issue is to make sure your recent move to https is buttoned down.

If you haven't already, look at this on Moz, especially the links to best practices on migrating to https. https://moz.com/blog/seo-tips-https-ssl

Best of Luck... Mike

Here's an update fellows. After a couple of months of data it seems pretty clear that the unordered list content has really refreshed the majority of these old forum discussions. By including other resources in the unordered list, they also convert better. Thanks!

Here's an update. Went with LakeNameBoating.com/boat-rentals. It all worked out great. Thank you all for the help.

Hi onurcan-ikiz,

I think what the tool is getting at is trying to get you to think about the issue, which it sounds like you are.

Are these pages more like category pages? Do these pages have unique content that single product pages don't? Are you actually trying to rank these pages for some identified topic? Do these pages currently produce in organic search? Do these pages compete with other pages of yours over the same terms.

You are right to consider the difference between Google and Moz. Keyword stuffing is not a search felony like buying links. It's more like a clue about a possibly ineffective approach.

Best of Luck!

MIke

Recently started working with a large site that, for reasons way beyond organic search, wants to forward internal pages to a variety of external sites.

Some of these external sites that would receive the content from the old site are owned, admin'd and/or hosted by the old site, most are not. All of the sites receiving content would be a better topic fit for that content than the original site. The process is not all at once, but gradual over time. No internal links on the old site to the old page or the new site/url would exist post content move and 301ing. The forwarding is mostly to help Google realize the host site of this content is not hosting duplicate content, but is the one true copy. Also, to pick up external links to the old pages for the new host site.

It's a little like domain name change, but not really since the old site will continue to exist and the new sites are a variety of new/previously existing sites that may or may not share ownership/admin etc.

In most cases, we won't be able to change any external link pointing to the original site and will just be 301ing the old url to the contents new home on another site.

Since this is pretty unusual (like I wouldn't get up in the morning and choose to do this for the heck of it), here are my three questions:

• Is there any organic search risk to the old site or the sites receiving the old content/301 in this maneuver?

• Will the new sites pick up the link equity benefit on pages that had third party/followed links continuing to point to the old site but resolving via the 301 to this totally different domain?

• Any other considerations?

Thanks! Best... Mike

Yes, thanks Dana!

Best... Mike

Hi Donna,

Thanks for the speedy reply. Yes, the thing that makes me nervous about that recommendation from the article is how do I even begin to weigh the odds on it being a net gain and then convey it to management? I mean, it's one thing for me to think, "yeah, let's roll the dice" and another to convey the trade-offs to a very typical management in something like numbers.

Thank you for noticing my avatar portrait. I did it over a Summer in the south of France. It will probably be worth a fortune once I am gone and regarded as a giant of the early 21st century world of art.

I wrote Moz about the "Staff" thing and it looks like they deleted the title... all titles really.

Best... Mike

I'm working with a site that needs a whole bunch of old pages that were deleted 301'd to new pages.

My main goal is to capture any external links that right now go off to a 404 page and cleaning up the index. In dealing with this, I may end up 301ing pages that didn't have incoming links or may not have ever even really existed in the first place. These links are a mix of http and https.

Is there any potential downside to just 301ing a list of several hundred possible old urls that currently trigger the 404 page?

Thanks! Best... Mike

Thank you to everyone for chipping in their thoughts on this.

Logan, good article. It gave me a new idea and wanted to see what y'all thought.

If my main goal is to not have all these 404s from unpublished pages and to re-direct the incoming link value to pages that could benefit, what would you think of putting up a noindexed page that links to my top pages that I want to give greater authority to? Then, put in a request to de-index those old urls that have the noindexed (duplicate) content. That would mean not firing off a 404, just showing the same content on hundreds of noindexed/deindexed pages.  Given your point about re-directs, chained re-directs and speed for mobile, would that do more for me than re-directing all of these old urls to new pages?

Compounding the problem a little, this particular site has a catalog that comes out twice a year where many product pages are constantly being unpublished. So, even if I re-directed the old unpublished pages to existing urls, some of those might be going away and need another re-direct to add to the chain shortly.

Any thoughts on this appreciated. Thanks! Best... Mike

Hi Chris & Nigel,

Thank you for the considered responses. Good points about canonicalizing. A part I find frustrating is that the shared title tag across dozens or hundreds of pages will be across many different products/groups of products. So, the title tag is not a solid way to group canonicals.

Since the url patterns vary, I don't see how I could group these by which dozens or hundreds canonicalize to which one page, let alone make the change in Shopify other than one page at a time. My understanding is that this title tag manipulation is the only handle Shopify gives for making these bulk changes.

Gah!

So, here are my follow up questions:

• How big of a negative is this in it's as-is state and how much better will noindexing most of the 90% make it Google Organic-wise? I ask because even the BS title tag to noindex project is a huge time suck.

• If more is ever revealed about how to more efficiently group and canonicalize in Shopify, would adding the canonical after noindexing capture that lost authority later or would the previous noindex have irretrievably lost that?

• Given all that, would you continue as I am?

Thanks! Best... Mike