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It depends.  See my points above.   If the other "non best" pages don't have any link equity or other worth, then you may just want to 404 them.  If they do generate traffic and/or links and are all semantically related then you can 301 the other pages to the "best" page.

The canonical to self is used by some sites if they are trying to make sure if there are any URL parameters added to the end of the main slug that all the link juice is consolidated to the main slug.  You can canonical to self on all your pages, just make sure that you have a way to QA the process so that you dont mess up any canonicals that should be pointing to another page.

If you are unsure on if you should use the canonical to self technique or not, I would not use it.  The 301s are more important at this point to consolidate across pages.

Re pointing to a different page.   Ultimately does not matter where it was pointing before.  If you can point it to the most semantically relevant page with the 301 (and the page is worth 301ing for the reasons above) then you are good.

Re pointing to itself.  If it points to itself, you probably should not be redirecting it with a 301 as it is its own canonical page.  If that was an error to point to itself and you need to redirect it, then use the rules above.

There are lots, but I would not use them.  You would just be copying articles from other places and would not be able to gain any good rankings with copied content.   Tell them if they want a site with helpful articles, content and news, they need to invest in resources to produce that content.   Google does not want to rank content/pages that it has seen in a bunch of other places.

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!

Title tags - put your main keywords for the page first, or near the beginning.  That helps google know what the page is about.  The number of characters varies as Google does not look at characters per se, but pixel width.  Good article by Dr P.

https://moz.com/blog/new-title-tag-guidelines-preview-tool

You just have to watch what gets cut off at a certain point.  Beyond that length the title is getting too long for readability anyway and if you need a longer title to explain a page, just put the longer one in the H1, but try and be sensible.  If the client insists on putting the company name and you are not trying to rank for the company name just do something like

Keyword and keyword is really key here because it ranks good! | Company Name

The company name is at the end and will get hidden in the serps anyway, and you have your key word(s) or phrase in at the start.

Meta description is about conversion and click through rate vs ranking.  Focus on getting the best call to action with a keyword somewhere in there first.  I would say, this could be a good place to sneak in the company name, after you get your call to action right.  Your limit is larger there (about 150-160) so you have more room before the cutoff.   I tend to worry less about keywords and think about searcher intent and see if I can match that to get them to select my page among others in the search result.  Another good article by Dr P

https://moz.com/blog/i-cant-drive-155-meta-descriptions-in-2015

Cheers!

Go Dan!

WMT is slow as heck to have those things go away.  it may take 3 months to roll off.  FYI, if there is a 404 error and it is supposed to be a 404, do not mark as fixed.  Otherwise Google will think you "fixed" the 404 back to a 200, recrawl and then put the 404 back in the GWT errors.   Just let the 404s roll off over time.

You can accomplish this IA with folders or with the slug, the key is how you interlink everything. That is how you can show your related articles and what the most important article is on a given topic.  The Bruce Clay article (IMHO) is still relevant, I think you do not need to get as granular due to things like Hummingbird.  I tend to think of organizing around a topic with a set of key words, vs getting super granular with the keyword siloing.  I think for the user it still makes sense that way as you need to make up an organizational structure that is simple and easy to understand vs having so many subcategories that they get confused.

Cheers!

It is hacked, you just have to look at the page as Googlebot.  Sadly, I have seen this before.

If you set your user agent as Googlebot -  you will see a different page (see attached images).  Note that the  Title, H1 tags and content are updated to show info on how to Buy Zithromax.   This is a JS insertion hack where when the user agent is shown as Googlebot they overwrite your content and insert links to pages to help gain links.  This is very black hat and bad and yes scary.  (See attached images below)

I use "User Agent Switcher" on FF to set my user agent - there are lots of other tools for FF and Chrome to do this.  You can also run a spider on your site such as screaming frog and set the user agent to Googlebot and you will see all the changed H1s and title tags,

It is clever as "humans" will not see this, but the bots will so it is hard to detect.  Also, if you have multiple servers, you may only have 1 of the servers impacted and so you may not see this each time depending on what server your load balancer is sending you to.  You may want to use Fetch as Google in Webmaster console and see what Google sees.

This is very serious, show this to your dev and get it fixed ASAP.  You can PM me if you need more information etc.

Good luck!

mI1yZjN.png qMLv3Wa.png?1

Great point Marie!

Addendum to this.   You may actually want to look more at the pages you are targeting for those keywords and the amount of organic traffic going to that page.  Why?  This encompasses more than just what your ranking is, but are people clicking through.  We have run experiments to change the meta description and looked at traffic vs ranking.   While ranking and click through are related, they are still two different things.

Finally, you have to look at what converts.  I like to use Google's page value parameter.  I can look at not only what content is ranking and getting traffic, but also what converts.  I then use that to better plan my content or what content needs to be updated etc.  Get your metrics to tie out to the bottom line and that is what really ultimately what matters.

Cheers!

Typo fixed on penguin vs panda.  There have been a lot of Panda updates lately and I have that on my brain.  Regardless of the algo mentioned, Google is not perfect and things slip through and they are not all rolled out in all countries at the same time.  Just a general FYI.

I did not think you meant to be rude, just letting you know as some people may take the wrong way.

Cheers!

1. The site is ranking due to spammy links, this is why the site, despite having a "large" number of links has a low DA etc.

2. Why is it not hit with Penguin (corrected from Panda sorry typo)?  While Google is pretty good, it is not perfect.  People can still get away with this stuff (sad to say).  Also, Google does not roll out all updates to all countries that Google works in at the same time.  They have to account for things like differences in languages etc.  So, it could be possible that this site would not rank in Google US at this time, but maybe in other countries.

3. Word of advice.  Beggars can't be choosers.  Your question qualification of "expert answers only please", could be considered a little rude as most everyone on here is doing this for free and because they want to help other people in the community.  If you want expert advice only, then pay for a consultant, otherwise just be appreciative of the nice folks who are willing to chime in and hopefully point you in the right direction.

Cheers!

Your question here is accuracy, but I think you are missing the bigger picture on rankings.   Google does so much personalization on search results, there is no single "rank" for a given page on a given key term.   If you are signed in, Google will rank pages higher that you visit a lot.  Even if you are not, Google may rank pages higher that relate to your geographic location.  Whenever a tool is pulling a KW ranking, it is doing so with a set of parameters that may be different than another tool and so the results may vary.  Some people have even called them useless  http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2014/08/11/seo-rank-checking

Dr. Pete did an article on this recently to compare different methods of measuring rank

https://moz.com/blog/comparing-ranktracking-methods-browser-vs-crawler-vs-webmaster-tools

While he found differences, they were not that huge across tools.

Your best advice is to find a tool that will report what you need and stick with it.  Consistency is the key. That way you can at least know that if there is a change that the change did occur and in what direction. You want a baseline and then to know once you make a change are you doing better or worse.  You will find discrepancies if you were to compare Moz, Keyword Planner, Google Webmaster Tools, CognitiveSEO, Authority Labs, etc etc.   Everyone measures it slightly differently and you see some differences due to Googles personalization.  Heck, take a read of the Search Console Help Google calls is an "average position" due to personalization of results when they show ranking results  https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35252?hl=en

• Average position: The average top position of your site on the search results page for that query.  With change also shows the change compared to the previous period. Green indicates that your site's average top position is improving.

  To calculate average position, we take into account the top ranking URL from your site for a particular query. For example, if Jane’s query returns your site as the #1 and #2 result, and David’s query returns your site in positions #2 and #7, your average top position would be 1.5.

I know this does not answer the question you asked, but I hope it gives you the question you need to understand to put all this in perspective.  Get a reputable Keyword tool that gives you the data output that you need for reporting.  Stick with it and you will do fine.

Cheers!

One other thing I forgot.  This video by Matt Cutts

It explains why Google might show a link even though the page was blocked by robots.txt

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBdEwpRQRD0

Google really tries not to forget URLs and this video reminds us that Google uses links not just for ranking, but discovery so  you really have to pay attention to how you link internally.  This is especially important for large sites.

Yes, the crawler will avoid the category pages if they are in robots.txt.  It sounded like from the question that this person was going to remove or change the category organization and so you would have to do something with the old URLs (301 or noindex) and that is why I would not use robots.txt in this case so that those directives can be seen.

If these category pages had always been blocked using robots.txt, then this whole conversation is moo as the pages never got in the index. It is when unwanted pages get in the index that you potentially want to get rid of that things get a little tricky, but workable.

I have seen issues where there are pages on sites that got into the index and ranking but they were the wrong pages and so the person just blocked with robots.txt.  Those URLs continued to rank and cause problems with the canonical pages that should be ranking.  We had to unblock, let Google see the 301, rank the new pages then put the old URLs back into robots to prevent the old URLs from getting back into the index.

Cheers!

One wrinkle.  If the category pages are in Google and potentially ranking well - you may want to 301 them to consolidate them into a more appropriate page (if this makes sense) or if you want to get them out of the index, use a meta noindex robots tag on the page(s) to have them removed from the index, then block them in robots.txt.

Likewise, you have to remove the links on the site that are pointing to the category pages to prevent Google from recrawling and reindexing etc.

The https ranking signal is a tiebreaker assuming that all other ranking factors are the same

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-https-dealbreaker-20632.html

You have to decide if you have other reasons to go https site wide.  Are people logging in?  Are you having them provide sensitive data?  That is the reason you move.

If you do want to move everything to https:  use the 301 redirect.  It will probably be a wash in the end.  You lose a little bit of link equity in a 301, but in a tie, you would "win" thanks to the https and assuming that the other page is http.  The key to the 301 is to have the 301 be page to page and not global in nature.  If you use a 301 and you redirect a page to another that is not on the same topic, you will lose link equity.  Google does this so that if you have a page that has a lot of link equity for the topic "red widgets" and then 301 redirect that page to one on "purple fruit" the link equity is lost.  You have to redirect the "red widget" page to the new page on "red widgets" to have that pass through.  Otherwise, you are just using the 301 to help move people along to the new page, which is not a bad idea, but something you need to think about none the less.

I would not use the canonical as the http to https is not really what it was meant to be used for.

In the end, just be consistent and it will all work out as there are a ton of other factors that are more important to help you rank.

Cheers!

Key point by Rebecca, use data to make this decision.  I just 410'ed almost 800 old pages/articles from a website I help run.  They were all republished press releases that were at least 2 years old, they got less than 9 organic pageviews over the past 6 month period and no link equity.  You have to do some work with merging this data from GA and OSE, but it is worth it.  I could say that when I deleted these 800 pages I was not losing significant traffic or links and I was improving my crawl efficiency with Google and potentially a quality factor with Google as they were not having to look at crappy old content.  Another way to say this is that if users were not visiting the pages nor were they linking to them, how could they be useful and if anything would make my site look less reputable to them.

Cheers!

FYI - the spider Screaming Frog (one of my fav tools) just integrated with the GA API, so you can crawl and get GA data combined. (You can also just play with GA filters as well).  If Screaming Frog can get the tool to access the Moz API - BOOM! That would make this work so much easier.  (Hint hint mozzers this would be an amazing tool for the Moz crawler as well!)

Agreed.  Used 301s to redirect the old m. pages to their www. counterparts.  This way, not only do users get redirected automatically to the proper page with the correct content, but if there is any link equity, it gets passed along as well.

Key point, do not redirect all of your m. pages to the www home page, that would be bad.  Also, bonus free advice.  If you are setting up global 301 redirects, go ahead and do some additional 301 cleanup in several areas.

1. If your site is indexed in Google with the www subdomain included (i.e. http://www.website.com), make sure that the non www urls for all pages (i.e. http://website.com) 301 redirect to the www version. This needs to be a page to page redirect, not everything to the home page.  Reverse this if your website by default uses the non www subdomain.

2. Likewise if you ever used https or moved from http to https, 301 page to page everything.

3. If you have anything where you have

http://www.website.com is the same as http://www.website.com/index.html or http://www.website.com/folder/index.html  etc 301 all those "index.htm" type urls to the folder ending in the slash.

The idea here is to remove duplicates and have the 301s to do that.

When you get all this done, run a spider (I like Screaming Frog or Botify) to see if you have any navigation, sitemap or other internal links on your site that are 301ing.  Try and think about anywhere else that you control that you might accidentally be pointing to old URLs (rss feed possibly? Your homepage in your Facebook account? etc) You may be pointing (accidentally or on purpose) to old URLs and want to update those.  That is another signal to Google that you are not using the old URLs and pay attention to the 301.  I have found issues with Google still reporting a 301 in Search Console and it was because I was still pointing to it in my navigation.

Cheers!