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You're homepage dissapearing is of concern.

What version domain name is connected to your IP with your domain name provider?

Have you set up search console with your preferred domain?

I'm inclined to stick with branding so all one word.

However, what would affect this decision is search data. Go into search console or connect search console to analytics.

Look in the search terms panel. Are people typing it as one word or separate words. Often it's best to display what people expect to see. That improves CTR

Don't stress everything is OK.

When google indexes your site it makes its own URL list. 404s in search console are just google saying 'hey I checked for this page from my list and it's gone'

Well that's fine. You deleted it so you already know it's gone. Google will keep checling for this page a few more times then it will deindex it. It just doesn't want to deindex without fair warning.

If these pages are still getting traffic however I would 301 them to a relevant page to maintain user experience.

Finally, if these pages targeted keywords you want to rank for. You will loose these rankings if you don't target them elsewhere.

The number of internal links you make to a page shows the level of importance you place on that page within your domain. Fact check first sentence - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/138752?hl=en

That's the lesser point here though. There's a bigger issue I need to resolve. My most important pages are the ones google perceives to have far fewer internal links and these pages are not being shown in the serps, instead the lower pages are showing.

I will progress with checking the js and robots to see if I can get this crawl sorted.

You mentioned the keywords took the client to the homepage.

Was the homepage targeting these keywords? Where they in the title for example.

If not then you've had a good run but it's time to start targeting these important keywords with bespoke pages.

Do you have a decent 404 page? Does this facilitate further browsing.

Internal links that 404 will leak page rank. So you need to fix any internal 404s. Google says 404s in search console are not damaging but many people including myself see traffic bumps from resolving these with a 301.

Have you seen any drop in traffic or rankings.

Im going to be checking the javascript and robots to see if there's any reason the links aren't being counted. But if anyone else has any insight it would be most welcome

Thanks for the response but that's not really what I'm asking.

Search console is not registering the internal links to the middle level of menu items.

It is saying that the lower pages have many more internal links which is not true. Google rates the importance of pages by the number of internal links they have.

I would do a bit of everything. Make your product pages as comprehensive and media rich as possible. Include subsections with relevant key terms.

Make your category pages comprehensive and make sure they reference and describe what the category is about. Including sub heading and relevant information.

Do good internal linking to products and link away to relevant blog articles about new developments in that type of product range.

After that just let Google do what it does. Your time would be better spend moving on to the next category than to micro-refine what is probably already a good job.

Sorry if this isn't the best answer - that's just my opinion.

Good Luck!

Hello

I have a web site with a menu structure with three levels

Top Level (Single Item) > First Level (Single Item) > Second Level (Multiple Items)

The first level pages do not rank well. The top level and second level pages rank well.

Search Console acknowledges 600 internal links to the top level.

600 to the second level.

But only 100 to the first level.

This is true across 6 top level items. It is not to do with page level links. It just isn't acknowledging all the links to the first level.

Does anyone know why this might be?

Thanks for any assistance you can give me.

If you only did one thing its Redirects Redirects Redirects. Make sure all your current content has a new home to go to, to maintain traffic. Keep a similar website structure were you can to limit the amount of redirects you have to do.

Then monitor search console closely. Any redirects you've missed will 404. Redirect these. Redirect to relevant pages, never redirect a content page to the home page.

Maintaining traffic is the priority and this process will do that.

Transfer you meta information over to the new site, titles and descriptions etc. Don't overhall your SEO during a site move or it will be hard to identify why traffic is missing if you get any missing traffic. Do the move, wait for things to settle. Then consider your revamping your meta information if you currently plan to. If you're adding new content it gets slightly more complicated but try and compare like for like.

Using your old content on other sites and generating backlinks from it is certainly a good strategy.

If your not using it on your main site and can use it on relevant industry sites and generate backlinks, then that sounds like a winner to me.

As far as I am aware google searches through it's index using the cached versions of the pages. Once the page is found it will display the most recent version.

This is were having a website structure that promotes more regular crawling is important. Try not to waste your crawl budget on useless pages. Make your website lean and don't have internal redirect chains. Use nofollow to stop bots entering pages that have no value in the serps. Regularly update your sitemap.xml.

You can also use the 'fetch' facility in search console to notify google if an important page has been updated.

I would try and incorporate the old content in the new content to get an even higher word count. Does the new content have a rewritten form of the old content? Do you definitely have no use for it on your own site?

Hello

This sounds strange. Do you know why it has happened?

Is it possible someone has reported you on google maps for having an incorrect address? Did you authorize your address with your Google postcard? (the one they send out)

I would stick to "about" or "about us". Making these pages easy to find is important. I think Google use these pages to detect where your company is located. If the site has an address this increases trust. If the same address is in the Google Business Page this improves local search.

Here's a handy guide

https://moz.com/blog/9-simple-tips-for-making-an-about-us-page-that-works-for-your-brand

It a really low portion of the sitemap though. It's of concern. I work with around 20 sites and the rest are indexed fully.

This one used to be indexed

The date you posted your content will signal to google you are the original.

If the content has been copied contact the webmaster and ask for a reference in the form of a canonical tag.

Otherwise you can report copyright infringement to google

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dmca-notice (Digital Millennium Copyright Act)

I have a website with high domain authority and high quality content and blog. I've resubmitted the sitemap half a dozen times. Search console getr half way through and then stops. Does anyone know any reason for this?

I've seen the usual responses of 'google is not obligated to crawl you' but this site has been fully crawled in the past. It's very odd

Does anyone have any ideas why it might stop half way - or does anyone know a testing tool that might illuminate the situation?

Hi Nigel

Sorry for the delay in responding. This has been so so helpful. Thanks very much.

I have people working on correcting the content issues.

The issue remaining is google will only index half of the site. I'm not sure why this is. Do you know of any sitemap testing tools?