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I agree with this.   I would just add, make sure, that whatever company you work with, they can explain themselves to you in plain English vs Geek Speak.  You need to understand what they are doing and why so that you can work with them on this project.  Ideally you can learn and collaborate with them.  SEO is not about sending the company off to work on stuff you dont understand and then they come back with results.  They could be buying links on spam sites and while you get a short term gain, you end up with a long term ruined site reputation with Google.  If they have issues being transparent, then walk away.

Not sure what method you are using to setup 301s.  If you give more specifics around that, it would help as obviously the 301 redirects are either not setup correctly or for some reason on the parent site is not configured correctly.

This is a stab in the dark.  You mention that some 301s work well and some do not.   In your example, are you sure that _https://www.parentsite/category/widgets/ _ is a good page that does not 404 already or already has a 301 in place on the parent server?   The adding on of the directory from the old site to the new URL looks like behavior when on the parent site you are hitting some sort of 301 loop/multiple hop or other error.   You need to use a 301 tool that will show all the hops in a 301.  Don't just assume that because the old URL got you to a new URL that the 301 worked perfectly.  There could be a temporary redirect or multiple 301s or something else wonky happening in the mean time.   I use a Chrome plugin called Redirect Path by Ayima that is handy for spot checking these things.  Try that and see if it gives you any insights.

It might or it might not.  I would test it on a single page and see.   The other thing you have to consider is that on the current category page you are just reposting duplicate content (descriptions) from the product page.  Google may not consider that to be exceptional to start with.   See if there is a way on the category page to post some original text on the category itself.  Make it a real hub information page that people would want to share and link to.

You want to block Google from any URL that produces a search result that is essentially a resorting or refiltering of a master list of search results that they have already crawled/indexed.

If you already have a set of pages that lets Google crawl all the pages in your site (could be all the products in your store, all the articles in your blog, etc), having Google crawl through variants of that same page causes a couple of problems.  1) You are wasting Google's time in spidering pages that it has already seen, vs having Google crawl your more important pages.  Depending on how you have these setup, you may end up sending Google into an endless loop of non-important pages to crawl 2) You are creating pages that are generally low quality, have nothing truly original on them, they will not rank for anything anyway and may give the impression that your site consists of primarily low quality pages.

What I show Google is a single simple path to browse my content.  For a blog this would be a chronological listing of articles that is paginated so that Google and the user can browse from my most recent to my oldest articles.  For an ecommerce page, I might setup basic category pages, make sure the category pages have great content on them and then allow Google to crawl back through all the products based on those main category pages.   If I have some products in 2 or 3 categories I do not sweat it.    If on either of these examples, I show the user options to resort, filter, etc the results, I block Google with a nofollow or with robots.txt.

In your example, you already have "pretty" URLs by country and town, keep those, that will let Google and your users find your content and also provide context around that content.    The crazy a$$ search URL you show is handy for your PHP code to give a search result, but would just waste Google's time.   Unless you think it would be useful for a user to save the search URL results, I would see if there is a way to simply hide all the parameters from the user (submit the parameters using a POST vs a GET request for example) so that all they see in the URL result is /search/search.php

Good luck!

Yea.  If you cannot do it dynamically, it gets to be a real PIA, and also, depending on how you setup the 301s, you may get an overstuffed .htaccess file that could cause problems.

If these pages were so young and did not have any link equity or rank to start with, they are probably not worth 301ing.

One tool you may want to consider is URLprofiler http://urlprofiler.com/  You could take all the old URLs and have URL profiler pull in GA data (from when they were live on your site) and then also pull in OSE data from Moz.  You can then filter them and see what pages got traffic and links.  Take those select "top pages" and make sure they 301 to the correct page on the new URL structure and then go from there.  URL profiler has a free 15 day trial that you could use for this project and get done at no charge.  But after using the product, you will see it is pretty handy and may buy anyway.

Ideally, if you could have dynamically 301ed the old pages to the new, that would have been the simplest method, but with your situation, I think you are ok.    Google is just trying to help to make sure you did not "mess up" and 404 those old pages on accident.  It wants to give you the benefit of the doubt.  It is crazy sometimes how they keep things in the index.

I am monitoring a site that scraped one of my sites.  They shut the entire site down after we threatened legal action.  The site has been down for weeks and showing 404s, but I can still do a site: search and see them in the index.  Meh.

Forgot to add this - just some free advice.  You have your CSS inlined in your HTML.  Ideally, you want to have that in an external CSS file.  That way, once the user loads that external file, they do not have to download it multiple times so the experience is faster on subsequent pages.

If you were testing your page with Google site speed and they mentioned render blocking CSS issues and that is why you inlined your CSS, the solution is not to inline all your CSS, but to just inline what is above the fold and put the rest in an external file.

Hope that makes sense.

This may not be you, but simply due to what has been called "The great firewall of china" that slows things down.  This is an article that looked at a bunch of sites that were non-Chinese companies that hosted outside of the mainland and did a lot of business in China.

https://www.internetretailer.com/2014/08/14/foreign-retail-web-sites-load-slowly-china

Catchpoint says sites hosted outside of China often load slowly, because they are slowed by the so-called Great Firewall of China. For example, sites with the .cn domain—which are almost always hosted within China—typically are more than twice as fast as sites with .com in their domain names, Catchpoint says.

Regardless, I would not disable GA as you need that data to improve and understand your site traffic.  Facebook widgets can slow you down, but you have to determine if they help with your sales or not.  Your best bet is to try and design your site to be as simple as possible.  Cut down on all the Javascript menus etc.  Design your site for a mobile experience, then expand out from there.  Trim down your CSS file as much as possible.  Don't use typekit or other services with custom fonts.  Get lean and mean.

Just to clarify what is happening here, I looked at your examples links and here is what I see.

Your website has a home page (e.g. homepage.com) and site wide links in navigation etc to various categories such as

http://www.website.com/category-keyword1/

http://www.website.com/category-keyword2/

http://www.website.com/category-keyword3/

As I look at these what I will call "original" category pages, they have canonical links that link to the following pages (note I do not see this on any of your product pages or other pages on the site)

<link rel="canonical" href="http: website.com="" category-keyword2="" limit:9999"=""></link rel="canonical" href="http:>

<link rel="canonical" href="http: website.com="" category-keyword3="" limit:9999"=""></link rel="canonical" href="http:>

The URLs with the limit:9999 also show a 200 if you visit them, are a duplicate page and canonical to themselves.

This is not good.  What you are telling Google is that for each of your "original" category pages that you link to extensively with your internal link structure, that the actual (aka canonical) page is the URL with the limit:9999.

I would say that you did not need the canonical to start with, but now that it is there, here is how you fix it.

1. on all the original category pages (i.e. http://www.website.com/category-keyword1/) you need to add a canonical to self.  Just update the canonical tag and remove the "limit:9999"    There is somewhere in your CMS that is doing this, you may need a dev to help.  You have to absolutely do this.

2. on all the limit:9999 pages you have 4 possible options that you can do.  I put these in order of preference with option a being your best approach, option b your second best, and so on.  Therefore, if you cannot do option a, then try option b, and so on.

a) 301 redirect the limit:9999 pages to the original category pages

b) set the canonical on the limit:9999 pages to the original category pages

c) 404 the limit:9999 pages

d) block the limit:9999 pages in robots.txt, but be careful that you do not block the original pages.  Search Console has a great robots.txt testing tool for figuring this out.

Good luck!

General rule of thumb, if a page 404s and it is supposed to 404 dont worry about it.  The Search Console 404 report does not mean that you are being penalized although it can be diagnostic.   If you block the 404 pages in robots.txt yea, it will take the 404 errors out of the Search Console report, but then Google never "deals" with those 404s.  It can take 3 months (maybe longer) to get things out of Search Console, I have noticed it taking longer here lately, but what you need to do first is ask the following questions

1. Do I still link internally to any of these /product/ URLs?  If you do, Google may assume that you are 404ing those pages by mistake and leave them in the report longer as if you are still linking internally to them they must be a viable page.

2. Do any of these old URLs have value?  Do they have links to them from external sites?  Did they used to rank for a KW?  You should probably 301 them to a semantically relevant page then vs 404ing and getting some use out of them.

If you have either of the above, Google may continue to remind you of the 404 as it thinks the page might be valuable and want to "help" you out.

You mention 5,000 URLs that were indexed and then you 404 them.  You cannot assume that Search Console works in real time or that Google checks all 5,000 of these URLs at the same time.  Google has a given crawl budget for your site on how often it will crawl a given page.  Some pages they crawl more often (home page) some pages they crawl less often.  They then have to process those crawls once they get the data back.  What you will see in a situation like this is that if you 404 several thousand pages, you will first see several hundred show up in your Search Console report, then the next day some more, then some more, etc.  Over time, the total will build and then may peak and then gradually start to fall off.  Google has to find the 404s, process them and then show them in the report.  You may see 500 of your 404 pages today, but then 3 months later, there may be 500 other 404 pages that show up in the report and those original 500 are now gone.  This is why you might be seeing 404 errors after 3 months in addition to the examples I gave above.

It would be great if the process were faster and the data was cleaner.  The report has a checkbox for "this is fixed" and that is great if you fixed something, but they need a checkbox for "this is supposed to 404" to help clear things out.  If I have learned anything about Search Console, it is helpful, but the data in many cases is not real time.

Good luck!

Option 1 - If you want to reach out to the mainstream - Tier your information out.  I have a site that is meant for the general public on a given health issue.  If you have the health professionals write the articles, they are way too technical for the general public, but it is information that the public needs (and ultimately wants).  We hired a journalist/editor to work with editors on writing things that go on the everyday blog type items and social media.  The health professionals give input into the topics etc, but we let the journalist/editor do the writing.  The articles are fact checked to make sure that they are accurate, but we try not to edit too much.   We then have a second level of content that is more advanced and is really the reference section of the site.  When topics get too complex for the blog, we link to the reference articles if they need to read more.  It is a classic hub and spoke type setup, but we find it works for blog vs reference type of articles.   On the reference articles, we do get a little more technical, some more than others.  We do not feel that this is "dumbing it down" per se, but making it more accessible.

Option 2 - If you only care about the experts, play to that niche and see if you can find topics that may have low search volume, convert really well.  Give the site more of an exclusive feel to it.  You actually may be surprised at how "non-experts" want to find and read that information.   If you layered this in with Option 1, you could hit both audiences potentially.

Good luck!

Go through everything on your website navigation, content, XML sitemap and find links to those URLs.  Make sure that your internal links are all updated in addition to having the 301s in place.

Lets say all the old URLs are in the folder /stuff/.  You can setup a spider like Screaming Frog to spider your current site and let you know all the pages that link to internal URLs with /stuff/ in them using the Custom Search Feature.  This will let you know all the pages internally that you need to update the links on.  You can also generate a list of all the /stuff/ pages you link to internally for testing later.

Once you make updates to your site with the links and 301s you can the use the spider to check things 2 ways.  Ideally you would first do this on a development server, test and then go live and test again once you are live.

1. Have the spider go through your site (spider mode) and your XML sitemap and make sure there are no links to /stuff/ and/or that it finds no internal 301s.

2. Have the spider go through the list of old /stuff/ URLs (list mode) and make sure they all 301 to the correct page.

You could go a step further and use OSE (Majestic, ahrefs, etc) or the data from Google Search Console to find external sites that link to your old /stuff/ pages and do two things. 1)  If the link is from an authoritative site ask them to update the link. 2) Cross check all the links to /stuff/ pages to see if there were any that you missed in your internal audit to make sure that those 301 to the correct page.

This all assumes that you are doing a 1 to 1 redirect from your old pages to new pages, i.e. you are keeping the content all the same on the old and the new pages and just updating the URL. If you have any old content that may not have links or are of low quality you may want to consider a content audit and let those 404/410.

I would really need to see the page you mention to make sure I am following you, but I think one approach would be that when the page is called via AJAX, call the actual URL, not the one with the parameter. That way you do not have the 2 URLs that need to be canonicalized to start with.  You would still need to test this with a spider program to make sure the URLs are found.  I am thinking you would also need a sitemap or alternative navigation to allow the spiders to find the pages and get the cataloged.

All of that said, I have to be honest, my gut is telling me that if you are having to work this hard to get the spider to find the URLs correctly, then you may also have an issue with this design being too clever for what it is worth.  You may need to rethink how you approach this.  USA today uses a setup that seems similar to yours check it out http://www.usatoday.com/  When you click on a tile to view a story, there is an AJAX type overlay of the home page with the article on top.  It allows you to X out and go back to the home page.  Likewise from the article you can page through other articles (left and right arrows).   While you do this, notice that USA today is updating with an SEO friendly URL.  I have not tested this site spider wise, but just by the look of it they seem to have the balance correct.

Good luck!

I agree with all of the above, just to add another layer, if you take this from a Yelp perspective, they actually specify that you are not supposed to solicit reviews to start with so that the reviews you get are more objective and less biased.

http://www.yelp.com/guidelines

• Don't ask customers for reviews: Don't ask your customers to review your business on Yelp. Over time, solicited reviews create bias in your business listing — a bias that savvy consumers can smell from a mile away. Learn why you shouldn't ask for reviews.

I really like the option that Tim mentioned to put the reviews on your own site and mark up with schema so you get the chance at the rich snippet.  We have seen some nice increases in CTR when we have done this.

If you wanted to look at relative search volume, you can look at Google Trends https://www.google.com/trends/   I would also see if you notice any trends in Google Search Console under Search Traffic > Search Analytics > Impressions

What your graph has me wondering is if this is an attribution issue with GA?  On the grey line, Moz is simply taking your GA traffic that is tagged as organic and showing it in the graph.  If you have an attribution issue in GA, organic traffic may be showing up as direct traffic.  If there is anything wonky in the traffic attribution, GA will put it as Direct. You have this classic article by Groupon that was a good example of how organic can be attributed incorrectly.   http://searchengineland.com/60-direct-traffic-actually-seo-195415

Look at your overall traffic in GA and then add a segment for organic traffic and then direct traffic.  If your overall traffic is constant and you see organic going down while direct traffic is going up, you have your answer.    As I understand it, this phenomenon is due to browser issues, so see if you have had more traffic recently from a given browser and that may give you another clue.

Another thing to check, you should be able to look at your organic traffic in GA and see if it is the same as Moz, or not. If not, ping the Moz folks to make sure your data from GA is coming in properly.  May be some data import issues there.

My other guess here is that your ranking is ok, but your click rate has been jacked.  Google Search console will show you CTR over time, and that may help.  Look and see, did you change meta descriptions?  Did you change up your schema markup so previously you had rich snippets in the SERP, but now you do not.  You could potentially keep ranking, but loose CTR.

These are all things I would look at, but at this point, your guess is as good as mine.  Looking through the above will probably prompt you to check other things that might give you an answer.

Good luck!

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/to-slash-or-not-to-slash.html

Rest assured that for your root URL specifically, http://example.com is equivalent to http://example.com/ and can’t be redirected even if you’re Chuck Norris.

Note the quote from John Mueller in the comments

_Lots of good advice from an older blog post that's still valid & relevant today. _

There may be some technical merit that Googlebot starts at the slashed version on the TLD, but I do not think there is any type of SEO advantage with that (if that is the case).

Trailing slash or no trailing slash - it does not matter, you just need to be consistent.  I would also make sure that the no trailing slash 301 redirects to the URL with the trailing slash (or vice versa).

The only reason you need to look at trailing slashes is when you have a reporting system that needs the trailing slash to differentiate between folders.  i.e.  website.com/folder vs website.com/folder/  The first without the slash is a page within the root folder and the second is a foler within the root folder.

I am not aware of an "advantage" of having the slash vs not on the home page URL, per se though.  You SEO company may reason that more people with link to you with a trailing slash (I am not aware of any data on average to support this - your mileage may vary), and if that is the case you are losing link juice through the 301 from the non slashed version to the slashed version on those links to your home page.   301 redirects work and pass equity as long as the two pages are semantically related, I would not think that a 301 from a non slashed to a slashed would cause any issue.  Getting back to above, I am not sure that I see any reason to change what you have.  Ask the SEO company what reason they have and have them make a real reason vs a generic "best practice" answer.

I am seeing a double hop on the example 301

http://startupfashion.com/product/fashion-brand-line-sheet-template > 301 redirects to > http://startupfashion.com/shop/product/wholesale-line-sheet-template > 301 redirects to > http://startupfashion.com/shop/product/fashion-line-sheet-template > and the final page sends a 200.

I made some assumptions on your original URL structure (took out /shop/)  looked around and found something similar on

http://startupfashion.com/product/fashion-designers-guide-creating-websites-sell >301> http://startupfashion.com/shop/product/fashion-designers-guide-creating-websites-sell/ >301> http://startupfashion.com/shop/product/fashion-designers-guide-creating-websites-sell > shows 200

The second instance is redirecting a slashed to a non-slashed version.

Your "category" URL has a typo in it

http://startupfashion.com/shop/catgory/fashion-business-guides-and-ebooks

I checked your sitemap

http://startupfashion.com/product-sitemap.xml

Does not have any links to the new product pages.  They all reference the old.

You also have a category sitemap with different URLs than your new catgory URL

http://startupfashion.com/category-sitemap.xml

Just on my quick 10 min look, I think you need to

1. Double check your 301 redirects

2. Make sure there are no "old" links on your site to the old urls

3. Make sure the new URLs are properly linked to in your site structure (menus and XML and old blog posts).

It looks like your update may not be as "clean" as you realized.

I have not used this tool in this way, but have used it for other crawler projects related to content clean up and it is rock solid. They have been very responsive to me on questions related to use of the software.  http://urlprofiler.com/

Duplicate content search is the project next on my list, here is how they do it.

http://urlprofiler.com/blog/duplicate-content-checker/

You let URL profiler crawl the section of your site that is most likely to be copied (say your blog) and you tell URL profiler what section of your HTML to compare against (i.e. the content section vs the header or footer).    URL profiler then uses proxies (you have to buy the proxies) to perform Google searches on sentences from your content.  It crawls those results to see if there is a site in the Google SERPs that has sentences from your content word for word (or pretty close).

I have played with Copyscape, but my markets are too niche for it to work for me.  The logic here from URL profilers is that you are searching the database that most matters, Google.

Good luck!

You need to look at the CSV version of your Moz crawl.  It will show what pages link to it.

How is http://domain.com/404 being found?  You should not have any links to that page to start with.

P