Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Tanveer,

When you say there is login areas, how much of the site will be publicly (and therefore Search Engine) accessible?

If the content level is low, then it will be easy to keep things compliant, and the many guides on here will help with that, heading tags, meta tags image alt tags and all the good stuff etc. 
Moz's new cheat sheet is a great starting point: https://moz.com/blog/seo-cheat-sheet 

Is your client base already established? Or are you looking for these sites to help build it?

If content such as a blog is not available to you from management then a PPC campaign might be more suitable?

Kind Regards

Jimmy

Hi there,

Do you have an example of which pages use this mobile menu?
From the testing I did, I could not get the menu that uses that code.

It would be beneficial to ask your developers if this code is still in use
(I would describe it as: the drop down menu which has an ID of "yt-mobilemen")
If this menu is no longer in use I would remove it as it is affecting your keyword density and does not look very natural, which will not be seen positively by Google, due to it being part of a dropdown, there is no association of it being part of the navigation, so to Google it just looks like a big block of keywords.

The mobile menu I witnessed came in from the left, was very nice and uses the same code as the full size one so as not to cause duplications, this is the preferred method, so if you are able to get rid of the big block of text, then go for it!

Be aware that initially it will be seen as a block of text disappearing, so would be helpful to add some more substantial text to your pages to compensate

Kind Regards

Jimmy

Hi,

I can't recommend the ScreamingFrog enough!
The free version has a limit of 500 pages, so you will need a license.

With such a large site it it recommended to check on the crawl progress to ensure there are no crawl 'loops'
If for example it turns out that a calendar on a page counts as a link for every day then the crawl will likely never finish!
Luckily you can fix such things by creating a URL Exclude rule and the re running the spider.

Kind Regards

Jimmy

Hi,

It is possible to use plugins like https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-importer/

You would backup the required content from the 2000+ site,
Upload it to the new one,
Remove all but the ones you wanted to keep (Depending on the plugins is depending on how isolated you can make the backup) 
Remove the 60+ post from your original site

Plugins like this do indeed preserve meta, images and comments etc, 
Attached is a screenshot showing how you can limit the export so you can hopefully target your content enough that you will be able to export exactly what you need and no more.

Kind Regards

Jimmy

wordpressmigrate.png

Hi Toby,

Yes, unfortunately the / will cause duplicate content and will need to be redirected, it is up to you which one to keep, I would compare the PA of both, and also which one has the most internal and external links going to it, so you can redirect the least popular version to keep 301s to a minimum.

Kind Regards

Jimmy

Hi,

The best way to see what the crawlers are seeing is to check their cache.
If you to go the cached page on Google there is a text only link, through that you will be able to see exactly what content Google has cached of the page.

Usually text that appears in the source code of the page is visible to the search engines, but without knowing the what the javascript does, it is hard to say whether it would affect this.

Hope this helps.

Kind Regards
Jimmy

Hi there,

As long as the site search and querystring is inside the website and not linking to a google search page, then yes Google will be able to see what is behind these links (but don't nofollow them or they won't!)
Such as: widgets.com/red/blue-spots?q=large

Many eCommerce sites use querystrings for product categories, if your querystring includes the name of your sub type then it will even include the keyword in the url.

Just make sure any and all canonical tags are implementation (prev and next etc.)

Kind Regards

Jimmy

Hi Glen,

If the text is getting set to transparent in CSS then it will indeed be picked up by Google, as Google ignores CSS styles.

You can always check what Google is actually seeing by going to the cache of the page and clicking the 'text only version' link.

Kind Regards

Jimmy

Hi Hans,

Unfortunately IP addresses are not great on a desktop pc, not always but sometimes our Internet Service Provider seems to play havoc with our actual location.

However on mobile it is usually a lot more reliable, so make sure your site is mobile friendly!

As long as you have all your data set up and Google+ and the likes linked then your local listings will work correctly, 
I wouldn't recommend targeting a popular IP location as it is not your true location. Keeping your town/city in your tagging will help for local searches for those who include there location in their searches.

But if your client's ISPs have their IP address located wrongly, I am afraid this is something you cannot compensate for.

Kind Regards,

Jimmy

Hi,

Whereas I can agree that having the webapps in the same domain WILL help push the root domain, I also agree care will have to be taken as to how it is done.

For instance, you mentioned you will be changing your root domain to become a landing page, this automatically affect the traffic that will go to webapp1 as you are offering people the choice. Webapp1 traffic will decrease from the 100% (albeit 301) traffic.

Also ensure the subdomains are 301 to the /webapp folder, but this too will cause a leakage (initially) as juice will need to be passed from the subdomain to the root. Root domain traffic and content will increase though which is a positive.

Ensuring any newly moved page has an equivalent 301 there should be no need to lose traffic as the traffic is simply being redirected, but without knowing what specifically happened the first time, it is hard to advise what to avoid I'm afraid.

Hi Chris

Yes as long as the links in the drop down are not hidden behind HTML comments prior to being visible to the user they will be treated the same.

To see how Google really sees your website, go to the Google cache of a page and click the 'text only version'

Kind Regards

Hi John,

Your URL override sounds like a 301 redirect, you can test this by going to what the URL actually is in your system, e.g. www.domain.co.uk/about-us/pages/competition with a
'URL Redirect Checker'
If it reports as '301' then that is good (Moz has a section on redirects in their learn section). 
If it reports as another type of redirect then that would not be as efficient as a 301.
Pages that come back as '200' are direct links (these are the best), 301 is 'Moved Permanently', they also prevent the page from being indexable via both URLs so as to remove any duplicate content possibilities.
301 redirects are 'meant' to carry all the equity across so nothing is being lost from an SEO perspective

In terms of SEO, having the easiest URLs possible is always a bonus, not only does Google prefer shorter URLs but is also encourages direct traffic and visitor referrals (you'd rather tell a friend to go to a particular if it easy enough to type).

Kind Regards
Jimmy

Hi there,

As you're aware it is best to have unique content across the different sites.
An approach could be to have Information on the products that are only displayed on the separate websites so your data could look like:

• Title
• Description
• Price
• Site 1 introduction
• Site 2 Introduction
• Site 3 Introduction

Then each site can have different content whilst maintaining one centralised dataset.

Hope this inspires!

Kind Regards

Jimmy

Hi,

I certainly wouldn't put the text into an image if you can help it, the more good on page content the better!

The H1 tag describes what the pages is about, if the slider isn't 100% relevant, then being above the H1 is fine.
If it is relevant, then you can always have the H1 above in the code, and then style it in CSS to be below the slider.

Kind Regards

Jimmy

Hi,

In a situation like this I would use something similar to:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_HOST} !^.+.example.com$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_HOST} !^.+.the-best-example.com$
RewriteRule ^(/~.+) https://greatest-example.com/$1 [R,L]

(Sorry this was written off the top of my head, so give it a test before rolling it out!)

Kind Regards

Jimmy

Hi Justin,

It is hard to tell by your screenshot, but what website are you watching in Webamasters Tools? As you are using https, the website to track would have to be the https one as a recent WMT update now classifies these differently.

Having crawled your sites with the screaming frog, I don't see any smoking guns as to why the pages would not be indexed.

Let me know about the WMT account

Kind Regards

Jimmy

Hi there,

Are the old URL's still accessible? 
If you change a URL it is always best to redirect the old URL to the new to avoid duplicate content.

Kind Regards

Jimmy

Hi,

If you do a 'Fetch as Google' in Google Webmasters Tools  (under the Crawl menu) there is a submit to index button once it successfully finds the page.

Kind Regards

Jimmy

Hi Justin,

Yes as long as WMT is specifically watching the HTTPS website then the problem is not in WMT unfortunately.

As hectormainar says, check your sitemap in screaming frog
 go to your sitemap.xml and save it to your computer
 change the frog to list mode
 open your sitemap and run

All the links in the sitemap should report 200
any 301s should be swapped with the direct versions

The 301 is good to maintain backwards compatibility and allow backlinks and old users to navigate to your new content, but shouldn't be used as major navigation.

Kind Regards

Jimmy

Hi,

To avoid any duplicate content, not having the subdomains is the safest way to do so.

Check the subdomains with something like the screaming frog, for what is returned, if there is content then you will need to redirect that content.

Kind Regards

Jimmy