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Probably not much impact at all if it's just one instance, might vaguely improve internal linking if it's more extensively used, but really I question the logic from the UX side... as a user, my expectation is that two links labeled the same will go to the same place.

Yay! Awesome!

It's been awhile since I've used Redirection (the Wordpress plugin I mentioned) but you would just copy/paste it into a field there. There's no validation check for whether or not the page currently exists that I recall. Someone else lurking around this topic may be able to confirm that.

You should still be able to do a 301. You just need to know what the URL was_, _even if it's not there anymore. In fact, you can 301 a URL that's never existed at all. It's basically just a note that says "we think the thing you're looking for is over there".

I would recreate the portofolio URLs on the new theme with the new URL structure, then 301 the old URLs to the new ones. You can do the 301s pretty easily on Wordpress with the Redirection plugin.

If you don't want to recreate the portfolios, just 301 the old URLs to the most relevant page on the redesigned site.

Hope that helps!

If you're using Google Analytics and have connected it to your Webmaster Console account, the quick and dirty high-level way to do this is to hit up the Queries report (Acquisition > Search Engine Optimization > Queries) and compare two time ranges. If your average position is unchanged (or up!) but your impressions are down, that would imply a change in marketplace demand. It's not perfect, but it's good for an at-a-glance gut check.

Digging deeper, I like to keep a rank checker running just for this kind of research. The rules here are basically the same as playing the stock market: Don't fuss over it every day. Set it up and leave it alone to quietly track and gather data for the day when you finally need it. I like rank trackers that check daily so I'm not fretting for a week or more over an aberrant result. The more granular data is more meaningful.

If it's not a change in rankings, it may be a change in demand. Use GA or whatever analytics suite you're using to view last year's traffic at this time next to this year's traffic. Are the spikes and dips happening at the same time every year? That's probably a natural seasonal fluctuation. You'll also be able to see roughly when you can expect traffic to rebound.

Another thing to look for in your analytics is which specific pages saw the biggest drops, and if any saw traffic increase instead. Demand doesn't always simply drop off - sometimes it shifts from one product offering to another. If it has, is there anything you can do to give it a boost?

If you don't have enough data in analytics to suss out your seasonal patterns, plug your top keywords into Google Trends and take a long view. Does search volume appear to fluctuate seasonally around the periods you're seeing it happen on your own site?

Hope that's helpful. Good luck!

There is a link spam technique out there that is used to hide actual links from the site owners. So, if you are logged into your WordPress site, for example, the links and pages won't appear to be there. But, if you are logged out then the pages will be there, visible to the search engines and the public.

Often those injected spam URLs are hidden using javascript. There's a Chrome plugin called Quick Javascript Switcher that will let you toggle JS on and off. Once it's off, if there are injected URLs on your site, you should be able to see them.

Don't worry about the footer link that you removed, you'll be fine.

Do the products you're shuttering have decent backlinks behind them? If not, then you probably won't see a noticeable lift. Even if you do have some good backlinks there, my guess is that any lift would be small at best. I don't say that to discourage you, mind you. Good SEO is a collection of a bunch of little things that all add up to a lot, so don't skip it just because it's small.

Also, Jordan's comments about setting up 301s to the most relevant alternative and doing what's best for the user are spot on.

I see this as three distinct steps:

1. Remove the old 301 redirects that go from A1 --> B
2. Add new 301 redirects that go from B --> A2
3. Add new 301 redirects that go from A1 --> A2

However, if there aren't any valuable links still pointing at A1, you can probably get away with skipping the last step since the only value would be for indexation guidance that would have been accomplished long ago when you first set up the 301s from A1 --> B. It won't hurt anything to do it anyway, but it might save you some time.

Indeed. I certainly didn't mean to exclude all of the languages of the world there.

The way I understand RankBrain, it's kind of like Google is learning a second language. It speaks pretty good English now, but doesn't always understand the nuance of a query. The more it practices, the better it gets at understanding what you're looking for.

That said, I think the best approach is to keep writing well-researched, authoritative content that clearly answers the question your users intended to ask. Despite all of the hyperventilation about it, I don't think it actually changes much of anything strategy-wise. If anything, it reemphasizes the call for rich, high quality content.

If you're canonicalizing duplicate pages to a single source, assuming it's the one you want to promote, then no, it shouldn't hurt your SEO. The site you're pointing at should see some benefit, and the ones doing the pointing will take a backseat, possibly drop a bit. I'm guessing that's the whole idea?

But why do you have multiple sites that have the same products and descriptions if you're not trying to drive organic traffic to all of them? Is it more for paid landing page purposes? If not, why not 301 them to the main site instead? Or, as EGOL suggested, build out content that makes each site uniquely helpful and authoritative so that those canonicals aren't necessary?

I can definitely say that keywords in a URL can make a difference in a competitive vertical. We have an article on site with a slug of "best-place-to-buy-a-mac-online" and you get one guess what keywords it ranks for.

That said, if you're talking about changing URLs sitewide, I would be very cautious. Maybe make changes to one or two pages to start and watch them for a few weeks.

This looks to me like someone who knows SEO is important but has no idea what they're doing. Russ is right, superfluous meta tags haven't worked for nearly 10 years, if they ever did at all.

I agree with this approach, but I also would be trying to dig into _why _they think they want a second site instead of just coming back with a recommendation. What do they think that will accomplish for them? Sometimes clients will ask you to do something that they think will solve a problem when really they should be asking you how to solve the problem, and the situation as he's described it totally feels like one of those times to me.

I think the key with this approach is to be genuinely helpful and to avoid actually trying to sell a product. That's incredibly counterintuitive, but the product probably isn't the endgame for your consumer. What are they using it for? Be an expert resource on THAT.

The Home Depot blog is a really excellent example of this principle in action. Instead of selling their products, they're showing very creative and aspirational ways that people can use them. They did an entire DIY series on concrete. Concrete!

So they do all of these posts about concrete, but they're never pitching you a hard sell on it. The path to purchase is there if you want it, but really they're just focused on being experts on all of the wonderful, aspirational things you can do with concrete. It's very shareable and pinnable and I want every one of those projects in my home. They've planted the idea of buying concrete without selling it to me. It's very obvious they are an authority on concrete, and it doesn't matter that they're a seller. In fact, I'm more likely to buy it from them now because their expertise on it is clear.

So I started with that instead of outreach because when the content is that good, you can push it out on social and get a good response. You can share what you're doing with influencers and they won't mind because it's obvious you know what you're talking about. Next thing you know, they're coming to you for comment as an expert. The quality has to be there or you're right, you just look like you're pushing product and that does get tend to get ignored.

I see a ton of churn with small, boutique merchants, and even the large ones have been grumbling lately about not wanting to support certain types of websites. I think it really depends on how effectively you're able to leverage your publishers, but as with everything you get a lot of merchants who join up with no idea how to do that.

This is how I see it work in practice when a merchant closes their ShareASale program:

our nice clean cloaked link --303--> shareasale affiliate link --302--> Destination URL (status code 200)

Assuming that the links you're seeing aren't cloaked, even if the user who clicks on an old ShareASale affiliate link does in fact land on your site, they're still getting pushed to the destination page through a 302. So there's not going to be much SEO value in these links, if there's any at all.

In our case, when a SAS program dies, the destination page is the front page of our site, not the merchant's site. This may be an account setting somewhere within our publisher account or something customizable, but it's not something the merchant gets to control.

So, digging deeper into this issue, it turns out that we can't rely on status code as a reliable indicator of page validity for affiliate network URLs. Most of them turn up with a 200. Looking at possible custom solutions from affiliate compliance monitoring services now. No one seems to be doing this thing that I need to do, but it sounds like a great business idea for someone with coding experience and more entrepreneurial spirit than I've got. Just gonna throw that out there.