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I am not aware of any studies showing impact of what you call "not really keywords".  Even if there were, I would ignore them as you have to ask, "Do these words mean anything to your users?"  I work in some verticals where when you use a term like "wiki" or "faq" people think I am either talking about some type of weaved basket or I just said they were overweight, respectively.  I think it is good to start from a common lexicon, with words like "wiki" etc, but you still have to ask that initial question.

We went through this exercise about 2 years ago on a site as we wanted to setup an evergreen section for the top 40 keyword concepts.  Each concept would have a single page that would contain an original article that was at least 1,000 words long, custom videos, images, etc.

We asked a similar question.  Should we call the section (and folder in the URL) "wiki", or "encyclopedia" or "info", etc?  We did not want to call it a "wiki" as we had experts editing and writing and it was not open to the public to edit, even though for the sake of organization and layout, it looked like a wiki and provided information like one.  This is when we found out that our users were generally not as familiar with wikis and the comment with the weaved basket came out.

We did some keyword research and found that the word "help" made sense to users and also with the way Google looked at our topics when you used help in conjunction with the key terms we were trying to rank for. So we ended up using a URL that was domain.com/help/keyword-topic-of-article-slug.html  It has worked pretty well for us and the traffic has followed. We have our daily blog content and ecommerce sections in separate folder.  Makes it easy with GA and Search Console as we can look at each section easily and determine what is going on.  This was key when we had some issues with organic traffic as once we noticed overall traffic changes, we drilled down into the sections, found the issues and fixed.

TL;DR - Find out what words make sense to your users and use those, ideally they would also be keywords that you are trying to rank for. After than, just follow best practices for URL guidelines.

Thanks Michael for the additional input, agree completely - thumbs up.   Pugh, I think you are just being a little myopic on the whole situation and just need to start digging as your best answer here will be "it depends" most likely.

Regarding the sitemap and if you should remove it.  Have you even looked at the sitemap?  Have you audited it.  I would not use a sitemap unless I reviewed it regardless of who generated it.  On any enterprise sized site, you have to have automation for tasks.  Automations are based around assumptions and either they can be totally or partially wrong.  You then add in automation and then things can quickly and exponentially become a problem.  I have worked with awesome developers who have added a "feature" to "help", but then did not realize the issues it would cause. I have made some  dumb suggestions in my work as well - It happens to us all.

Just sounds like some roll up the sleeves, download some spreadsheet, sort and filter time!

Use a tool like the Screaming Frog SEO Spider.  It will show you the link and all the page(s) it is on.  If you find nothing, you have a spreadsheet showing that the link is not present.  Remind the client that next time if they can possibly get a screen shot that would really help.

Short answer - no dev sites should be public to start with to anyone (let along Google et alia).  The simplest way is to put an htacess password on all your dev sites.  You can do a password per person in your company, or just one general one that everyone on the dev team shares.

If you do have a dev site in the Serps, the simplest way to get it out is to setup a GWT account for that subdomain and then e.g.  dev.yourdomain.ext  and then go into that account and request removal of all pages.  You just leave the form blank for the page to be removed and it takes out the whole site.  You then need a robots.txt on dev.yourdomain.ext (different from the www. version) that disallows all pages all crawlers - that or use the noindex meta tag on all page.

After about 1 month (or you see that the pages are all out of the serps), then I would put up a password on that entire site and be done with it.  Key point, dont put the password up until you let google try to spider and it sees the robots etc.

Also, if you have any other staging sites that are out there like  test.yourdomain.ext etc.  If they are not indexed, go ahead and put the password up on them to limit your exposure.

Public dev sites are the fastest way to get duplicate content into the index and to jack with the ranking of your current site.  It is key that all of them are locked down. If one of your developers say it is no big deal, call BS, it is a big deal and it can cause a big mess.

There is a great whiteboard friday on this here

http://moz.com/blog/fixing-the-broken-culture-of-seo-metrics-whiteboard-friday

IMHO I would not focus on rankings per se as a main metric.  Rankings are just an symptom or factor in what your actual goal is.  The goal is not to just rank better, it is not just to get the client more traffic, it is to help the client make more money.  If the client makes more money, generally you should too.  The other thing about ranking is that ranking is now all personalized and so it will vary from user to user.  It is really only useful as a relative measure.  Another way to look at this is, who cares if you are #1 for a search if you dont get much organic traffic from that keyword and or the conversion rate is abysmal.

I would setup a spreadsheet that had a sheet/tab per client.  For each client tab you would put in key metrics on a monthly basis.   I would look at Organic Traffic (# of Unique VIsitors) then look at # of Conversions from Organic, average value of Conversions from Organic and then the Total Value for all conversions from Organic.   Most clients, if they have analytics setup correctly (or you can help them) should have this data readily available or at least you should be able to look at Organic traffic at a minimum and then just report revenue improvements for those that report on that.  You should then create a master tab that aggregates all of this data into a master table.

You should then be able to look month over month for % improvement on a client by client basis in addition to your performance overall.  You can then say, we helped our clients increase on average of 20% improvement in organic traffic during a typical 4 month period resulting in, 40,000 new leads and 1.3 million dollars in total revenue!  BOOM - sign me up!

Also, you can see how long it takes to get results on average - 3 months 6 months, etc.  You can have those conversations up front with clients - here is the timeline we typically see -etc.  You may have a client that has great traffic, but conversions and revenue are down.  You are now proactive in talking to clients about landing page improvements and continue to show your value.

I once heard a yellow page exec say at a conference (paraphrased), "Most businesses don't care where they rank in Google, they don't care about organic website traffic, they don't even care what their website looks like, or how many friends they have on Facebook, they just want to hear the phone ring.  Are you helping the phone ring?"

Setting up your metrics around number of conversions and revenue will make what you are doing tangible to clients and keep them paying you.

Hope this helps!

You should separate your paginated product list pages from your product pages (as far as the URL structure) or only use main categories in the URLs for products.

Consider these example product list pages.  You have your main list of products

domain.com/category1/sub1/

Then you have pages 2-n that lets people browse products

domain.com/category1/sub1/page2-n

You could have other examples of this (your example would be)

domain.com/category1/sub2/

domain.com/category1/sub2/page2-n

In your example, you have a product that can go in sub1 or sub2 and so you dont want

domain.com/category1/sub1/product-abc

domain.com/category1/sub2/product-abc

as yes - these would be duplicates and cause issues.  Yes you could use the canonical to link to the main product, but what would work better is this

domain.com/category1/product-abc

If you get rid of the subcategory in the URLs you can take advantage of having the KW from the main category etc.  Likewise, if you had a product that could sit in multiple main categories, then it may be you need to use a the approach of

domain.com/products/products-abc

and just completely separate your product URLs from your category URLs.

It would seem that with the use of photographs you will need to always have multiple categories and so this may be your best approach.

You need to sit down with a big whiteboard and map all of this out as it will get complicated real quick.  Then run all your products through it and see if it makes sense.

As Chris points out, if you do not have a canonical link, the crawl points that out.  You may need to download the CSV file and open in excel to see what you want to see.  There is a column titled "Rel Canonical" and if you have a FALSE response, there was no canonical found and TRUE for versa vice.  I find the CSV much more more helpful than what is shown on the web page and PDF report.  The new interface has the CSV link at the bottom left of the page and the PDF at the top right.  It used to be both were top right (which makes more sense to me) and so it may be a little confusing if you were used to where things you to be.

Just for reference, the canonical tag is not required on a page, and in fact if you DO have one on a page you have to be careful with it.  Google considers a canonical link as the same as a 301 redirect (without moving the user).  So, if you had a canonical in place and it is pointed to the wrong page, this could have major negative consequences to your site. This is why there is a alert in your Moz crawl if you have a canonical link on a page due to the potential of it causing issues.

You may have the canonicals properly implemented for given pages, but Moz cannot detect if your canonical is achieving the end that you are setting out to accomplish.

Case in point for me.   I use the canonical to self technique on a lot of pages to correct for some indexing issues on a site I manage.  I get thousands of the "you have a canonical link on this page" alerts from Moz.  I ignore them as I know that they are supposed to be there.   What I have to do is to import the crawl into excel and then add a column with an EXACT function to make sure that the page url is matching the canonical url (i.e. the canonical link points to the page it sits on).   (http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/exact-function-HP010062564.aspx)  If the EXACT function returns true, I know that my canonical to self links are implemented properly.  This is a simple way that I use the CSV file from Moz as a canonical verification tool.  If there are pages with canonicals that do not point to self, the EXACT function then shows false for those pages and gives me a short list to manually check from there.

Now that I think about it, I will put this suggestion into Moz as a way to make the canonical information in the crawl more useful.  They could show FALSE if canonical is missing, TRUE if it is present and SELF if the canonical points to itself.  Would at least be a bit more actionable.

As an aside, if you really want a better crawl report, I would use the Screaming Frog Spider tool

http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/

It can also help you find all the other things you mention, it is not as user friendly as the Moz spider, but it has more options.  You have to pay for it, but I would bet 99% of people would say the cost is worth it.

Cheers!

We do this currently and include the geo specific information in the URL.  You have more than just a ranking boost, it also helps with CTR.  The user sees the title, description and URL contain the keywords they are looking for and so it supports that you have the information they need.  It has worked really well for us and also helps in organizing the site and also producing analytic reports as we can parse off the URL.

I just put on my pair of Google Glass and it overlays the numbers on top of any page I am viewing.  I also get to see any snarky comments that Matt Cutts or any other members of the Google web spam team has made on a given page from the Google private intranet.  Evidently, they like black text on white backgrounds - go figure.

Sorry - could not resist.  Mike's comment is right on.

Cheers!

Ditto +1 with ice cream on top for what Jesse said.

See the response here

http://moz.com/community/q/temporarily-shut-down-a-site

In short, the 503 is correct, you want to include a http header with a retry-after so it knows when to come back.  Also, key to set this up on your robots.txt file as Google will key off of the status of this file.  Once it sees that the robots.txt has a 503 it will wait until robots.txt shows a 200 again to then start crawling the entire site.  Note that you still need to show the 503 on all pages, regardless.

Another option (that we use a lot on our larger sites) is that we have mirrored sites behind a load balancer.  We will tell the load balancer to send traffic to www1,2 while we work on www3,4.  When we have updated www3,4 we switch the load balancer to www3,4 and work on www1,2 and then when www1,2 are done we put them back into the mix on the load balancer.  Makes it seamless for the users and for Google.

Cheers

To expand on Dean's point.

If you look at the source code on https://www.bravosolution.com/ you get a bunch of JavaScript (shown below).  It is basically looking at the users location and the sending them to the appropriate version of your website based on country.  This is why here in the US we are sent to https://www.bravosolution.com/cms/us

Many spiders/tools (and Googlebot was not really good at this until recently) are not good at (or do not do any) crawling and executing on JavaScript so they get stuck when they hit your home page.

If you want to evaluate any of your localized sites, just run those URLs through various tools like screaming frog etc.  You would then ask, "Well, how do I know that my main  https://www.bravosolution.com is working properly for SEO?".  I don't have as much background in how to optimize for international SEO, but you can do a several things to start with.

1. Google anything having to do with Aleyda Solis and International SEO.  She posts a lot of stuff here at Moz and is pretty sharp on this stuff.  There may be a more appropriate way to redirect international clients from your main page that how you are executing.

2. Run your home page through Google Webmaster Tools under Crawl > Fetch as Google.  See what the page looks like

3. Double check your robots.txt to make sure you are not blocking any folders that would contain a JavaScript library.  Based on the code below, I do not see you referencing any external libraries, but if you are dependent on JS to send Google, it would be worth having your developer check things

4. As with everything on what to do, it all depends.  If all of your local country sites are independently ranked and successful, this main website may nor may not be doing you any favors currently if it is just a pass through with no domain authority to start with.  Spend time on step #1 to see if there is anything else worth doing.

Cheers!

name="description" />

The annual price you pay to Screaming Frog is worth it.  Considering your situation, I would just go ahead a buy it.

As far as browser plugins for user agen switching the plugin I use in FF is

http://chrispederick.com/work/user-agent-switcher/

and Chrome is

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/user-agent-switcher/ffhkkpnppgnfaobgihpdblnhmmbodake/reviews

These are not spidering programs per se, they change what user agent your browser shows to web servers so you can see what they show.  You can also use this to emulate an iPhone and see what your mobile site looks like for testing.

It may or may not be that these other sites are hacked, I am just saying, if you want to see how Google sees these sites, it may be instructive to figuring out your issue.

You do not have to remove the rel=canonical before setting up the 301.  Google generally treats the rel=canonical like a 301, it is just not as strong as a signal. The rel=canonical is more of a hint/suggestion vs the 301 is a command, but they are telling Google the same thing.   So if you point the 301s to the same pages as where the rel=canonicals were pointing to, you should be fine.  Don't worry about if you need to take out the rel=canonical first.

What you do need to worry about you mention above, 301ing (or rel=canonicalling for that matter) to the "correct" page.  If you 301 to a page that is not related to the original page, then Google will not pass along any link equity.  They have to have "semantic relevance" to one another

https://moz.com/blog/save-your-website-with-redirects

Now how "semantically relevant" is the old page to the new one in your case?  You have to decide.

If the best-cat-toy page did not rank well in Google and if there are no quality links to it and you are going to take it out of your site navigation and sitemaps, why 301 it to a new page?  Just let it 404 and go away.   If it does rank well and all those good things, you need to keep it around and/or improve the page and send it to a semantically relevant location.  It may be that you can use that criterion to decide what categories your users are searching for an using on your site and what categories they are not.  Spend your time making those good categories better and lose the old categories, as nobody used them anyway.

Hope this helps!

301ing non www to www or vice versa is best practice to prevent / minimize duplicate content.  You want to have it in place.

Agree with Lesley.  1300 is excessive, and even 50 sounds like a lot to me.  Do you see any in Search Console?  Would be interesting to see if this were corroborated by Google seeing similar.

Google keyword siloing.  You can setup a structure of pages like

/widgets/pre-owned.html

/widgets/used.html

etc

You do not want to canonical these pages to each other as a canonical is treated like a 301 and so you would only get credit for 1 page.  i.e. if you canonicaled or 301 "used" to "pre-owned" you are not doing any favors for the "used" page.  Another way to say this, the use of the canonical link or 301 in your example that you are suggesting is not the way those directives were meant to be used, so you would not get the benefit that you think you would be getting.

Beyond all that - do each of these words have enough search volume for the effort?  Can you make enough original content for each page that it makes sense?

If "pre-owned" has traffic that is way larger than the other two, it may not be worth the effort above.  Add the other key words to your pre-owned page as you can sometimes optimize for 2 or 3 sets of words.  You have to make that call based on search volume and if you think you can make pages that are unique enough and are "linkable/likeable/clickable/shareable" enough to stand on their own.  Otherwise, the other pages are just duplicates and can harm you.

This is really not a question on search optimization as it is on usability.  You need to consider how easy your URL will be for users to remember so if they need to type it in from memory or if they see it on an ad it is easy to remember.

Generally, the shorter the better - less for people to remember.  The second URL with the double dash plus a single dash is not very user friendly.   I would say the at the Swedish letter “ö” may be an issue for non Swedish customers who do not regularly use that letter, but if your audience does, then it should not be a problem and I would go with the http://interimslösning.se/

As far as localization, I have not seen anything on Google looking at the letters used in URL for location optimization.  Normally they gather that from the domain name extension, what language you use on your site, the where the hosting server is located and most importantly, what you set as the website location in Google Search Console.  The Search Console setting is the most important one for localization.

Most important, once you set your domain name, I would not use any other versions of it in anything that your publish.  Set all pages on the alternate domain to 301 redirect to the proper page on the primary domain just incase the other domain leaks out somewhere.

Cheers!

Just a point here as I just ran into this thread on the "Bounty" QNA section.  Google dropped authorship pictures just about the time this thread started, so being more visual will not have the same impact it once had

http://searchengineland.com/google-plays-authorship-search-results-dropping-profile-image-google-circle-count-195163

Honestly, I agree with EGOL, I think using authorship as a tactic on product pages when there is really nothing that you authored.  That just sounds like an approach that will get you penalized down the road.

Thanks for that point Russ, that is very relevant.   I would then say find a better URL than either of them. I am not sure that a URL with seemingly random combinations of dashes is much better than the URL with the “ö”.  It may make sense to get a new domain - unless the domain with all the dashes is well established.  My impression from the post is that it was not.