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Ah yes when it's pointed out like that, it's a conflicting signal isn't It. Makes sense in theory, but if you're setting it to noindex and then passing that on via a canonical it's probably not the best is it.
They're was link out in that thread to a discussion of people who still do that with success, but after reading that I would just use noindex only as you said. (Still prefer the no index on the robots block though)
I don't think it should be blocked by robots.txt at all. It's stopping Google from crawling the site fully. And they may even treat it negatively as they've been really clamping down on blocking folders with robots.txt lately. I've seen sites with warning in search console for: Disallow: /wp-admin
You may want to consider just using a noindex tag on those pages instead. And then also use a canonical tag that points back to the main job category page. That way Google can crawl the pages and perhaps pass all the juice back to the main job category page via the canonical. Then just make sure those junk job pages aren't in the sitemap either.
The truth is no one knows... That's why the algo is such an evolving mystery 
It's also different for every niche. For example in an easy niche, you can fix a page's SEO and a couple of days later it will move up the rankings 5 spots, say from position 12 to position 7. Then in a competitive niche you can spend 100 hours doing onpage SEO and the page position might improve by 1 spot over the course of 3 weeks etc.
The best way to test different on-page factors is with single variable tests in isolation using fake keywords like the guys at SIA (Search Engine Intelligence Agency) do it. Then you pin down the most effective tweaks and bust a lot of myths as well.
The joy of the new site eh. Sometimes no matter what you do this can't be helped and is just temporary. You've completely changed your site framework and URL structures so it may take a little time for Google to trust the site again.
But firstly, some blatantly obvious things like.
As far as content length goes, I wouldn't worry about that as long as it is good content - but that also depends what niche your site is in and whether or not content length is a factor.
But you say, you have added an extra folder to your URLs. This is usually worse. Was your old URL:
example.com/clean-short.html - and now you have
example.com/useless-folder/another-one/now-long-full-keyword-here.html - This URL structure would hurt your rankings no matter what you do.
If you have changed all of the following it will be a bumpy ride:
Share your URL if you want some further advice as someone may see something very obvious that you've overlooked, but without seeing the live site it makes it harder to help.
If that was the final product page, then yes, you should be using a standard htacess rewrite command to ensure that the final product urls are always www.domain.com/productx But in saying that, the way you had it is totally fine if all the other url possibilities have a canonical tag that points back to optimised version (original product url - www.domain.com/productx)
The htacess rewrite it's not something you should be handling manually. Magento has that option inbuilt into it. It would be a fair amount of work if you had to do that manually. and I would just run with the canonical option if that were the case. Any good eCommerce platform should have the inbuilt ability to automatically remove the category folders and other search queries from the final product url.
Sometimes it's ok to leave the category folders in the url, it just depends on the products being sold. Below would be an example where I would leave the category folders in the url if I was selling different colored soccer balls.
www.sports.com/soccer-balls/black-white/
www.sports.com/soccer-balls/blue-white/
www.sports.com/soccer-balls/red-yellow/
Yes it does take some patience to find a nice domain that's relevant and has stats. I wouldn't 301 the other domain to the new domain as a new domain won't be able to handle that many new inbound links which is what your effectively doing by sending a 301 with links behind it to your new domain.
If the urls follow any particular pattern then you can use a htaccess redirect and return the header code 410 / 403 / 404 to Google. (I suggest 410) They will soon drop out of the index.
I don't know the exact .htaccess syntax off the top of my head but it will be something like this:
If they all come from the same folder then it would look something like this:
RedirectMatch 410 ^/folder/.*$
If they have a common character string after the forward slash (such as xyz) then it would look something like this:
RedirectMatch 410 ^/xyz.*$
If they have any common character string footprints at all (such as xyz) then it would look something like this (now I'm guessing):
RedirectMatch 410 ^/()xyz.$
This would be a pretty easy fix if all of those spammy urls have any common characters after the forward slash or they all originate from a certain folder.
Re-purposing domains is no where near as safe or effective as it used to be. Your asking for trouble if your going to completely change the topic of the website and expect easy ranking benefits from the old off-topic inbound links. (this is one of the footprints they used to recently de-index low quality PBN's because the sites topic had completely changed after the domain was re-birthed)
In saying that, I wouldn't start with a fresh domain either.
I would do my homework on domcop or register-compass and find an expiring/expired/deleted domain with great on-topic link metrics and start the new site that way. If your niche isn't that big then you may be able to find an on-topic domain with metrics like DA40 - PA45 - TF35 - CF40 for under $500. That would give your new site a huge kick start. Hunt for decent Trust Flow with good topical relevance. If you build a great site under a domain like that your rankings will come much easier than using a fresh domain.
Those paths all seem fine as they are all legitimate ways of getting to that bunch of products. I'm also assuming that the final page on each of the below urls is a page that contains a selection of products and you can still click on an individual product from the list and go to its url.
1)www.domain.com/productx
2)www.domain.com/category/productx
3)www.domain.com/category/subcategory/productx
4)www.domain.com/bestsellers/productx
It's even debatable whether you need canonical tags on any of those above urls, it all depends on how different those pages are from each other with regards to the content on the page before the products. If all of those above urls had different H1 tags and different content before the product feed then they are all stand alone legitimate pages that don't need canonical tags. But if they're all virtually the same and not much customization has been done to the auto generated pages then yes, they should all have a canonical tag back to www.domain.com/productx perhaps, or the most suitable page.
A bigger issue I think you may have is the url of the final single product page. It shouldn't be like this:
www.domain.com/category/subcategory/productx/final-product/
or like this either:
www.domain.com/bestsellers/productx/final-product/
Optimally, it should read like this no matter how the visitor got there:
www.domain.com/final-product/
In most cases, for optimal Seo, an extension, plugin, or htaccess command should rewrite the final product url to strip out all of the category url paths or best seller url paths from the urls so your final product page url is short and clean like this: www.domain.com//final-product/ even though the path is really ths: www.domain.com/category/subcategory/productx/final-product/
It's pretty hard to tell what the optimal solution for your site is without having a look at it and understanding your product range and categorization a bit better, but I hope that helps a bit.
I highly doubt it would effect rankings due to low quality issues but it will show that you have site map error warnings in your GWT console. That issue is technically classified as 'Warnings' and not 'Errors'. The right thing to do in that scenario is take the robots.txt block off and just use a 'noindex' tag on the pages. That way they can stay in the site map but they won't show up in the index. Otherwise you should remove them from the sitemap if you don't want the warnings in GWT.
What are your clients rankings like? If they're no good, then all of the above answers are great.
But if your clients rankings are good, I wouldn't touch it. I have a client in a similar situation who has hundreds of bad inbound links from the same site. But .. he continues to rank in position 2 for the most sought after and highly lucrative keyword in his industry. I could fix it with one line in a disavow file using a site wide domain disavow command, but I dare not touch it as long as he ranks. He's been ranking there now for close to two years! In situations like this Seo theory goes out the window. In short, if he's ranking then I wouldn't touch those links as the algo's still nowhere near perfect.
If it's a new domain then I definitely wouldn't go with anything like WhatAreTheBestRestaurantsIn.com. I would rather go with besteat.com or bestin.com and I could rank those domains much easier too. Don't start with a long spammy domain, build a brand instead. New domains with keywords help very little these days.
Most of the words in your domain examples are 'stop words' and shouldn't even be in domain names. (Words like 'are-best-in'). Even if you had categories for states they still don't belong in the final url either. Example, whatarethebestrestaurantsin.com/wa/seattle should still resolve to whatarethebestrestaurantsin.com/seattle Although you could still visit whatarethebestrestaurantsin.com/wa/ when you click on seatttle the url should rewrite to whatarethebestrestaurantsin.com/seattle
For longevity, quality, branding, trust, and non spammy purposes, I would build the site using clean short urls like the below made up examples. EMD's are all but dead, especially long ones like whatarethebestrestaurantsin.com
tastyeat.com/seattle/
bestin.com/seattle/
tastytown.com/seattle/
dinein.com/seattle/
If there is a 301 already in place then you have nothing to worry about. Google won't see it as two different pages. As for the PA variation, this is a very minor variation and nothing to worry about either. I would only be concerned if your non www site had a much higher PA than your www site, then you may be redirecting the wrong site. For instance, you wouldn't redirect your PA55 version of your domain to the PA12 version. Hope that helps.
Yes definitely don't forget canonical tags where possible. But I think those pages are being auto generated via searches on your website or some other means. Most good Seo plugins or extensions prevent these pages from being indexed. Second to that, find the parent page and use use a wildcard block command in your robots.txt file. It should look something like this:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /your-inner-page/*
That command will block every url variation after www.yoursite.com/your-inner-page/ from being indexed or crawled but still allow your real page url of www.yoursite.com/your-inner-page/ to be crawled and indexed.
Hi Edward,
Duplicate content is generally only harmful when it's on your own site. I say generally because you wouldn't want to post the exact same or poorly spun article on multiple websites to get links coming in but that's not what's happening here.
I have duplicated entire sites onto new domains and changed only the suburb keyword. I just did an entire swap and replace of one location keyword and the new duplicated site ranked beautifully. It's not a tough niche of course, but in duplicate content on different domains isn't a problem.
In your case I wouldn't worry about it too much at all, as it won't hurt your rankings. If you want to get rid of it though, just sign up for a free DMCA account and they'll get it taken down for you, assuming you own that content or originally paid for it to be created.
Yes and anything to do with WordPress link cloaking and redirects the must have plug-in is 'Pretty Link Pro'. It provides super easy link management and handy analytics on every outbound link you create. I've been using it for years and it's great.
Definitely don't go redirecting them to your money site Mickey. Any 301's pointing to your site are always risky. If you are trying to maintain some high-level branding recognition with the domains then that may justify redirecting them to your money site, but I know that's not the case.
The only other reason you would want to 301 a domain to your site is because it had powerful on-topic inbound links pointing to it. That kind of redirect could help your site in a big way, but it's also very risky too. In general, you want to have the least amount of 301's pointing to your domains as possible. And if possible you want to have absolutely no 301's pointing to your site, especially if there's no authority or inbound links juice attached to them.
Interesting question. Yes, just adding the no follow attribute would be a much better solution, but it's not always optimal to have your full affiliate links exposed to everyone.
I would still run with the redirect linking process that you're using, provided that the mechanics of it are sound, and they work. But I would just make sure that all of the links are actually nofollow links. Linking out to sites in a bad neighbourhood is what will hurt your site's rankings. Provided that your affiliate sites aren't super spammy, and all of your outbound links are nofollow, you shouldn't have a problem.
As much as you probably don't want to hear this, I think those domains are pretty much useless. I'm also assuming (possibly incorrectly) that you have just bought these domains for around $10 because they were available.
If the domains don't have any on-topic inbound links or authority behind them, then you can't really do much with them except start from scratch. If they do have some established authority and topically relevant trust flow, then that's a completely different story.
Keyword rich domain names are more of a hindrance these days than a help. One of the main reasons is that every time you acquire a naked URL backlink to your site such as www.citystatephotos.com, it already has the main keyword in it. This makes it very difficult to control your link anchor text ratios in the long run.
Google is all about brands now and not keyword rich anchor text domain names. Yes, those domains are perfect candidates for a churn and burn spam campaign but they're not the type of domain names that you'd want to build a long-term stable Internet presence with.
They're also no good to build a PBN's on either because they have no juice going to them. The effort required to send them quality link juice would be far better off spent just improving the quality of your original site.
If you keep the name address and phone number off the radar then you're also retarding the new websites ability to rank in that new area. When it comes to rankings for geo-targeted services the NAP details are a huge piece of the ranking puzzle. Even a very weak website with a legitimate localised address that has been verified has a much better chance of ranking for those 'area service keywords' than a strong website with no locality credentials.
With regards to keeping the business name the same, I'm quite positive that won't work either. If anything, that will cause inconsistency with your main website's NAP listings, and could potentially hurt the rankings of your real website. Starting a new website also puts at least another 60 days of waiting before you're able to achieve strong solid rankings for that area. Within the next 60 days you could build some brilliant links and perform a ton of on-site optimisation to your current site.
Getting those other service area pages to rank from your real website also has the added bonus of increasing the overall authority of your real website. Yes it's tough to rank those new suburb pages, but it'll be even harder to do it from a new website that isn't even real.