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Hi there Remove the canonical - consider having both pages ranking a good thing. I don't know why you would canonicalize your homepage to an internal page, don't do that! Let your homepage be brandname.com and keep your internal page the brandname.com/cotton-tees - that's just a best practice and logical. Your homepage should NOT be an internal page - it should be the face of your web presence and a way to showcase all of the great internal content on the website. I would also look into opportunities to link to that internal page off the homepage. Hope this helps - good luck!

Hi Eileen I just noticed you didn't respond to my questions here - are you all good? Would love to help in any way that I can! Also, can you provide a URL so I can review? Thank you!

Hi Marcy, If the sites are using your brand name and/or other brand terms, and your brand is copyrighted, you may be able to file a Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown request with Google: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dmca-notice?pli=1\. As they note in the description on the tool, be very clear about whether the other site's actions actually constitute a violation of your copyright before filing the request. I think it's unlikely that these new sites are impacting your site's performance in search - I was a little unclear about the JavaScript redirect, though (I'm at work and don't want to click on the links you posted on my work computer). Is it redirecting from their site to your site, or from their site to another site that is the porn/junk site? If it's the latter, that shouldn't be affecting your site at all. If it's the former, you may want to file disavow requests at the domain level for those sites just in case. If your drop in rankings was caused by these new sites, I would expect to see a drop in performance across the board, rather than for specific queries, so I recommend that you keep digging on other reasons for the drop. I would take a look at the sites that are ranking now for the terms you've lost rankings for. How are they different from your site? What sites are ranking now that weren't ranking when you were on top? It may be that Google has decided that your site doesn't fulfill the search intent for those keywords, so taking a look at the sites that rank now will give you some insight into the kinds of pages that Google wants to rank for these terms. Since these were highly-converting terms for you, consider investing in PPC ads for these terms while you work to regain your organic presence. Good luck!

I find that many visitors do not use sidebar site navigation that much to reach the content they want. You may want to consider that web visitors searched for something first on Google and then probably start reading the page where the term appeared. If links for more information appear directly in the page content they are reading, they seem to like those links rather than prefer navigating the site’s content via the main menu bar or sidebar navigation. Viewers really are driven by the topic that interested them in the first place. Use tracking analytics to determine just what your pattern may be.

Tables render slightly slower than divs, but it's not the end of the world. In general, you should avoid tables unless you're working with actual tabular data, but if tables make your life easier they're not going to have much impact on SEO, if any.

Generally domain.com/blog is the best option. Using that structure will help you build the value of domain.com.

OMG, looks like there are results all over the web with those links. See: https://www.google.com/search?q=allinurl%3A%26tag%3Dvebidoo_com-21 I'd suggest you make sure yourdomain.com/randomurl.html contains a canonical to itself. That way, if somebody links to yourdomain.com/randomurl.html&tag=vebidoo_com-21, Google will ignore it. You can also add it as a ignore parameter in your Google and Bing Webmaster Console. I hope this helps.

Nope, unfortunately, there's no way to export the pages that are linking to 404s. If those links are valuable, you should set a 301 permanent redirect to the new page (where the original content used to be). By doing that the juice passes to the new page.

Unfortunately, robots.txt won't prevent your site from being crawled and indexed if there is a link from an external site pointing to yours. What you need to do is use on all your development pages. I don't know how big your site is, so this may or may not be a lot of work. Do this, then after the next Google crawl, your pages will be dropped from the SERPs.