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It sounds to me like you need to do a Content Audit with the goal of pruning out all pages with zero traffic and zero links from the index. See the following resources:

How To Do a Content Audit - Step by Step (Moz)

Classic Content Audit Articles (Linked-In)

Content Audit Case Studies (Linked-In)

Using URL Profiler for Content Audits ( URL Profiler)

Here's the slide deck for a presentation I gave last year about them.

Here's a recording of a webinar with the presentation above.

Common Content Audit Strategies I think the site you described would be considered Extra Large with a Penalty "Risk" so this is what the tool recommends:
"Focus: Prioritization of Pages for Content Optimization. Are you SURE there is no content-based penalty risk?
Most sites with this many pages have major content issues, meaning this would be the wrong “situation” for them. In the rare case that they don’t, prioritize the pages based on rankings, traffic potential, revenue… and propose how many to improve each month with ongoing copywriting and on-page optimization."

I recommend using Shopify for the eCommerce portion of the site, but using Wordpress for the blog. Ask Shopify support if you can install Wordpress in a subdirectory /blog/ instead of a subdomain blog.yoursite.com. To Ruth's point, don't change any of the blog URLs if you don't have to.

I wouldn't use WooCommerce if you're going to have a serious online retail brand. Wordpress is about as good at eCommerce as Shopify is at blogging.

I didn't see anything about these links showing up in GSC. If that's the case, please let us know. I have seen links show up there before that first 302 redirect to another site. In theory, these shouldn't pass pagerank, but historically Google has had some trouble figuring out 302s.

Nicholas, I agree with Matt Antonio as well. If the link the href tag goes to a ShareaSale URL it should not pass pagerank.

However, it looks like instead of just going through a 302 redirect, affiliate links like the one below just go to a 200 (OK) status page, which uses javascript (window.location.replace) to send the user on to the merchant's site. It doesn't surprise me that this could become an issue now that Google is so good at crawling javascript. But they are still pretty terrible about figuring out what it "means" in terms of what should show in the search results.

Are merchants still getting good ROI from programs on massive affiliate networks? It's been awhile since I've seen that work in a brand's favor over the long term.

How long did you let that test run for? I have seen plenty of first-hand evidence to support the assumption that Google purposefully moves rankings around like this when they see changes. It used to be easy to test things. You change something, wait a couple of days, check your rankings. The search quality team at Google has no doubt known for a long time that this is how many SEOs operate. It isn't surprising to think they may purposefully push down rankings for awhile just to confuse webmasters / SEOs who are trying to reverse engineer the algorithm or test things like this.

Thomas,

I agree with everything Kane suggested. Additionally, you might ask GoDaddy if you can add some Google Tag Manager code to the site so you can edit header and body code without messing with Godaddy's website builder. It might be a learning curve for you, but Google has good documentation and courses on how to use GTM.

Interestingly, I was able to access your home page without the redirect several times as well. Maybe they're running some kind of A:B testing? If so, that's not the way I would suggest going about it.

Hello Anirban,

I'm going to list a few resources below related to mobile site SEO and testing. However, I think your problem may have to do with the fact that your home page 302 (temporary) redirects to /NRI-Real-Estate.htm, which then has a Rel Canonical tag pointing to the / home page. Basically, this acts like an infinite redirect loop.

To see this for yourself use one of these HTTP status checkers:

https://httpstatus.io/
http://tools.seobook.com/server-header-checker/

My recommendation would be to use / as your home page. Keep the Rel Canonical tag the same, and 301 redirect the / page to /NRI-Real-Estate.htm.

Now for mobile... I noticed the HTTP header of the home page returns Vary: Accept-Encoding. This works for responsive design, but if you are truly doing "Dynamic Serving" you'll want to use Vary: User-Agent as discussed here.

For testing the design to see if it is being adjusted for mobile users I like to use my iPhone and iPad, as well as these emulators:

http://mobiletest.me/
http://www.mobilephoneemulator.com/
Or the one included in Chrome Developers Tools.

Thanks Troy!

Let us know how it goes. That does sound very promising.

Don't forget to create a new profile view so you don't sku the data in your default view.

Hello Anirban,

What is the website? Is the mobile site on a subdomain, separate TLD, within a sub-directory, responsive on the same URLs... ?

Hello Joey,

While I appreciate your quest for data, I'm not sure you can use the same technique described above unless you can convince Google/Youtube to set a cookie for you.

You'd think you could just look for YouTube's cookie whenever someone visits your site, but that isn't possible:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/30637365/how-are-youtube-and-google-accessing-each-others-cookies

Thank you for the update Kavit.

As long as those pages continue to return a 404 status code you shouldn't have any problem.

The "penalization" risk occurs when you allow those pages to be indexed with a 200 OK status code in the http header, and if you allow them to be crawled. Here are a few links to educate yourself on what the person was probably referring to:

http://searchengineland.com/googles-cutts-auto-generated-content-search-results-in-our-index-violate-our-guidelines-171553

https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/search-results-in-search-results/

Basically the strategy you outline is fine so long as those internal 404 and internal search pages aren't indexable by Google.

Hello Rebecca,

Screaming Frog is capable of a lot when set up properly. Mike King has a great post about running it on Amazon Web Services (AWS) so it could fit your cloud solution request. Have you checked out Seer's guide to doing almost anything with Screaming Frog? Do you have "Check External Links" checked? Also "Always Follow Redirects" should be checked. And you can set the "Max Redirects to Follow" to whatever you like.

If that doesn't work, have you tried Deep Crawl?

Could you give the main/featured image a custom alt attribute, and let the rest share a format like you show above? So like this:

alt="Blue Cotton Tee by Billabong"
alt="Alternate Billabong Tee Image 002"
alt="Alternate Billabong Tee Image 003"
alt="Alternate Billabong Tee Image 004"
alt="Alternate Billabong Tee Image 005"

I would not leave the rest without an alt attribute.

Hello Katherine,

I hope I understand your question correctly.

So you are using Google's Data Highlighter to mark up page elements on your site, but there is a pop-up window that you need to get rid of when using the highlighter?

If you can't get rid of the pop-up when clicking on the X, have your developers temporarily disable it. If you turn off javascript on your browser it will probably kill the pop-up, but it would also probably keep GSC Data Highlighter from working.

If you are trying to mark up the information within the pop-up, I'm not sure that's even possible with Data Highlighter. You would probably have to do that in the code on your site.

I did not mean to imply that AMP would fix your problem, as asked above. But, if you are interested in mobile optimization (including the snippets displayed in search results), you may want to check that out.

To answer your question, I don't think you are doing anything "wrong". Google likely handles desktop and mobile separately so you may have breadcrumbs on one and not the other. Having the code on the page does not guarantee that Google will display something in the search results.

Hello Micromano,

See this thread on Stack Exchange. You can mark up your organization, as well as any organization (or other "entity") that you describe / discuss on your website. Marking up an organization doesn't mean you are necessarily affiliated with them UNLESS you use the "SameAs" tag to connect that data with your own website, wiki page or social profiles...

Also, you may want to look into using JSON-LD instead. You would still base it on the Schema.org hierarchies, but the code is slightly different. The cool thing about JSON is that you don't have to show all of the data you're marking up. It can just be in the source code and not visible on the page, similar to meta descriptions as far as that aspect goes.

Here's what I would do.
1. Put Organization Schema for YOUR business (or your client's) in the HTML header of EVERY page using JSON-LD. Here's a generator I like. Also check out the JSON-LD Playground for testing your code. Don't forget the SameAs tags pointing to other sites/pages that you can verify as "official". This includes Wikipedia pages, Wiki Data pages and social profiles.

2. Also surround information about YOUR business (logo, NAP...) with traditional Schema.org Organization markup.

3. Use traditional Schema.org Organization markup for the business listings, and include a SameAs tag around a link to their official websites.

Here's a good Stack Overflow thread to check out: Mixing Together Schemas.

Hello Anirban,

Thanks for clearing that up. Again, Google does not always show markup just because you have it on the site.

If you are truly concerned with mobile optimization in the SERPs, check into Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)- https://www.ampproject.org/ .

Best of luck!

Hello Rox,

I hate the idea of you going away unsatisfied with unanswered questions. Let's try to work through this. Let me approach it from a different way, as I may have misunderstood what you were asking.

https://sub.domain.com/quote/?affiliate_id=xxx

https://aff_xxx_affname.domain.com/quote/

The first URL is the one I'd go with because it's easy to rel canonical back to the base URL and you're keeping it all on one subdomain. The second version creates a new subdomain for every affiliate, which I don't think would be a good thing.

Please let me know if I have understood your question this time.

Thanks!

Not if that something has to do with affiliate landing pages.