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Thank you for your input. Some of these are nofollow, those I guess if we are going to disavow them, there is no point? I was going to disavow some of the links but Google repeatedly gave a warning that you shouldn't do it unless you think it's a "considerable amount" or you're sure you're being penalized. Does anyone have thoughts on that?

Hi Ali, Yeah, I would agree that it is a spammy site. When I tried visiting it, I went through a lot of redirects and ended up on some random page.  I would disavow the domain and still implement 301 redirects.

In my opinion better to ask the publisher to create unique content related to his topic.But yes you can use the same article and apply canonical tags.But for me to get benefit both you in terms of link juice try to accept unique content .

You are best to set the link as no follow

unless you are really going ham on creating anchor text internal backlinks, I would focus on user experience first and foremost. If using the brand name in the link would make it easier for your visitors to navigate the website (and ultimately convert), do that. If links in paragraph form is more convenient than links in list form, do that. Without knowing your website, its hard to make a call but above is applicable to most scenarios.

Thanks for the input! We actually reached out to google and they admitted it's a bug on their end.

Hi Ali! H1s aren't really viewed as a strong ranking factor anymore. They just don't correlate very clearly with improved rankings (see: https://moz.com/blog/which-page-markup-tags-still-matter-for-seo-whiteboard-friday) though they provide VERY important signals to human visitors. I'm not sure why the site you are optimizing would have this tag at the bottom of the page. That's not really standard, so I'd advise rethinking this usage, for the comfort of users. Regarding SEO, in general, if you've identified a top phrase your client needs to be ranking for, yes, you definitely want it in the tags and text of most important pages. But, beyond this, modern marketing is moving towards the understanding of building topical authority to help you rank for a variety of interrelated terms. So, for example, let's say that the most important phrase to your client is "organic flower seeds". Of course, you'll have this phrase in your tags and text, but you must figure out how to move beyond simple on-page optimization if you want the company's brand to become authoritative in Google's eyes as relevant to this subject. So, in addition to simply having a page called "organic flower seeds", you'll be striving to: Cover everything that can possibly relate to this topic that customers need to know. Why choose organic seeds? What does "organic" mean? How do you plant organic flower seeds? How do you know how many seeds you needs? How much do you need to water them so they germinate? How do you package your seeds to keep them fresh for successive plantings? Etc, etc. Build recognition of your brand as synonymous with your most important search terms. In other words, I say "Mexican-style fast food" and you say "Taco Bell". I say "organic flower seeds, and you say "Seeds of Change". Linkbuilding, word of mouth marketing, old-school PR, content dev, paid advertising and a ton of other elements factor into becoming an authority. Google seems to be particularly swayed by this, as you will see very large brands getting away with very poor practices and still ranking, while small, unknown companies struggle. So, you've got to aim to become as "known" as you can, so that you become one of Google's go-to resources for queries relating to that phrase you've identified. Hope this helps!

Ok. Is there space in your H1? Also the first sentence of the first paragraph?

Thanks for the input, guys!

Thank you!

There is also brand copy beneath the brand logo introducing the brand on each page. Does anyone have an opinion on wrapping the H1 around the brand name beginning the paragraph? i.e. Brand Name produces such and such products for such and such industry.... and so on

The search engines will recognize it, only if you tell it to recognize it. So if you're dealing with a small site I think the second option is better but if we are talking about a big ecommerce more than 100,000 product maybe 3 options is better

Very helpful, thanks!

Hi, You can use any separator like |, - or comma. No removing brand name doesn't hurt you any way. I would suggest you to use Brand name in hompage, about us and contact us page and you can leave rest of the page due to character count limit. I'm sharing a latest whiteboard on Title tag by Cyrus @ https://moz.com/blog/title-tag-hacks-whiteboard-friday Hope this helps. Thanks

Make sure the redirects from http --> https are 301 redirects Make sure the canonical URLs have been updated to https Make sure your sitemap URLs have been updated to https

If this was my site, I would be fighting to keep the breadcrumbs.

I would probably want to dig a bit deeper on why your team feels there's a need to remove breadcrumbs. From what I can see on the Chico's website, they do indeed use them: https://www.chicos.com/store/category/sweaters/cat8319278/ As well as proper structured markup: https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/u/0/#url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.chicos.com%2Fstore%2Fcategory%2Fsweaters%2Fcat8319278%2F To address your question more directly: Properly marked-up breadcrumbs add another layer of meaning and organizational depth to your website, which is parsed by search engines and weighed when organizing SERPs. While I can't assume the direct impact their removal would have on your organic traffic, I would hesitate to "downgrade" your site in terms of semantic markup. This sounds like to me like the issue could be less to do with the breadcrumbs themselves, but instead a styling (breadcrumbs too distracting/prominent), or an architectural issue (breadcrumbs list too long). More helpful information on breadcrumbs and proper markup/structured data: https://audisto.com/insights/guides/2/ Hope this helps. -Brian

Thank you for your input! Very helpful!

I'm not sure why you would want to do this, you use a canonical when page A and B are more or less the same and you want Google to index only page A. When page A and page B are different, a canonical would make no sense and Google will probably ignore it.

Thanks. I was concerned about the URL because I've read several articles that state adaptive and responsive designs use the same URL whereas mobile dedicated is a different url, usually a subdomain of the root domain. The developers are telling me we have an "adaptive design", but the mobile site is a subdoman setup, where the URL structure for the homepage, some navigational pages and search are different than the desktop site. If you go to a webpage on a mobile phone and it redirects you to a subdomain with a mobile setup, that sounds mobile dedicated to me, and not "adaptive".... but maybe I am having a hard time grasping the true definition of adaptive. http://conversionsciences.com/blog/the-make-or-break-differences-between-responsive-adaptive-mobile-optimized-websites/ http://www.clickseed.com/responsive-design-vs-separate-mobile-site-vs-dynamic-serving/