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Hi Mike

That is odd for sure. I could see this being tricky to diagnose over a Q&A so I'll suggest some more things and ultimately you might want to try to see if someone can help.

These are just guesses / possibilities;

1. Do you have any caching plugins etc? Try disabling those
2. Try disabling / enabling Yoast. Your settings should remain.
3. Try one by one disabling other plugins and seeing if it changes.
4. Are you using a theme that could conflicting? Check your theme settings.
5. You may want to try Yoast support directly - he typically will claim it's not his plugin causing an issue (and 99% of the time it isn't) - so might be tough to get help, but that would be the ultimate source I think of a solution.

Beyond getting hands on with it, that's what I could offer as some other guesses. It does sound like something possibly simple. I would keep exploring all options! If you do find the cause feel free to write back and let us know.

I just want to add for record, one thing that was really interesting. That is this page: http://www.lifeionizers.com/blog/health-more/benefits-alkaline-water-hair-loss

Was cached in Google but not indexed - which is odd. And to me a sign that Google is not crawling and processing the blog correctly. I've attached screenshots since they may very well index the page shortly.

Cache - http://screencast.com/t/cZcGbIHb

Site: search not indexed - http://screencast.com/t/IJQbyMhd

Christopher

Is this a WordPress site? If so, are you using an SEO plugins? Sometimes the code in the header.php file still causes WordPress to spit out more than one title tag. Let us know what setup you have.

-Dan

First off, I'm not sure I'd lose sleep over some shuffling around of just 5-10 positions. These are going to move around a LOT day to day and week to week. I'd worry if you completely dropped off pages below you were.

But pro-actively speaking, obviously you want to improve. The trick here is "Flour Sack Towels" is a really crowded and competitive SERP. It's not only competitive to rank there, but insanely competitive to get clicks.

Instead, I'd maybe use something like http://keywordtool.io/ and get some more specific searches off of "flour sack towels" - look for more specific searches where you know you offer one of the best solutions and focus on some more niche rankings.

Beyond that I'd zoom out and look at some more global site wide things you can do to improve. The thing that strikes me is that the site appears somewhat generic. I'd really work on upgrading your branding - you want users (especially new ones) to feel really comfortable giving you their credit card information to buy stuff.

• Put some real people on your about page: http://www.acshomeandwork.com/about-acs/
• Fix the lack of padding in product descriptions: http://screencast.com/t/ZOUStle7paT
• Fix the spacing issues here: http://screencast.com/t/dtqiUDv3ZW
• The whole top header area I think could be improved: http://screencast.com/t/1NPxiotb56 - I'm not a designer of course, but I can tell you my very first look at the site gave me a feeling like "this site does not look professional". I think the search bar is kind of big, the login area icons etc are funny. I bet if you upgraded you header it would cast a much better impression for users - which will trickle down to SEO because of user metrics, brand memorability etc.

Thanks Kevin!

Also, you can crawl the old site with Screaming Frog SEO Spider to check old URLs. Here's how to do that.

1. Before switching to the new site, crawl the site with Screaming Frog.
2. Save your crawl
3. After switching to the new site, crawl the old URLs in list mode in Screaming Frog.
4. If they all 301 redirect then you're good. If any of them 404 then redirects are not working or not in place and you need to fix them.

Alternatively you can also grab your old URLs from Google Analytics or Webmaster Tools if you forget to crawl the old site. But I like crawling because it picks up everything.

I would noindex tags, but leave categories indexed. You can check my post for full details on setting up Yoast: http://moz.com/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success - I'll answer the sitemap question separately.

Hi There - Donna is correct. This is for Publisher and a company G+ page, not an individual author page. Instead to enter your G+ personal page, try going to User->Your Profile and adding your G+ URL. Yoast should then add the author URL in the as he describes here: https://yoast.com/push-rel-author-head/

Hi Robert

Without seeing the site, just going by the question, this is honestly not something I'd worry about. "Duplicate content" is really only an issue if you are stealing/scraping content from other people and copying it onto your site in aggregate. Having the same text appear on one page and then another, if it's your own unique text is OK. Of course in context those pages need to be uniquely valuable for users. The homepage needs to fulfill a purpose, and the inner pages need to fulfill different purposes.

If you do not have any tags or categories, you should exclude them from Yoast's XML sitemap. To do this;

1. Go to SEO -> XML Sitemaps
2. Check off Tags and Categories to exclude them from the sitemap.

If this doesn't fix it, let us know - I can try to help further.

-Dan

Yes exactly. Set the author of each post in the post editor, and be sure that author has his/her G+ profile link in their user settings.

Hi Adrian

I think there's a mixture of things going on here. I'll just spell out the top ones I see after a quick look:

• On the old domain, URLs returning a 404 code need to also LOOK like 404 pages, right now they just look like the homepage: http://www.perfectprofiles.eu.com/kjhgjkhg

• On the current domain the alt text on the logo is "dental implants luton - logo" - just make that the company name "perfect profiles".

• In fact there's only one plain text of "perfect profiles" on the entire homepage, which is in the footer.

• And the current domain is not the company name (?) which is why it might not be ranking as well for "perfect profiles" which is kind of a vague name to begin with.

• Also, why not just redirect the old domain homepage to the new? I think that would be considered the best user experience since there's not really any useful content on the old domain - Google's cache shows no content really since the page is an image

• The old homepage has a few good links as well

• There's also three Google Plus pages and only one has a verified link to the website - it looks like there are two physical locations and one corporate? You can have three pages, but just really beef them up with as much info as possible.

• Make sure the corporate G+ page is in fact verified and then Customize your knowledge graph listing

• Consider having separate pages for each location only if you fill them with helpful unique info on each, like office pictures, staff names/pictures, hours, directions, etc.

I think it's a mix of a) Google not being 100% on the brand/company name - and then b) doing more local optimization for each location.

Hi There

In general you probably don't need to do that. Here's how I would normally deal with indexation in WordPress (assuming you're using WordPress);

• Categories - index
• Tags - noindex
• Date archives - noindex
• Author (single author blogs) - noindex
• Author (multi-author) - index
• Subpages - noindex

Basically all these settings are shown in my post here on setting up WordPress: http://moz.com/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success

Yoast is the best plugin to do all this with!

Hi Dan

Check your source code and do a Cntrl=F search for "hentry" and see if you can spot the code and any indication of if it's a plugin or where it's from. It would either be a plugin or coded into one of your theme's files (like post.php or header.php etc)

I think the data highlighter is for less code savvy folks - I have never used it, but I would give it a try as an alternative. Before you go tagging stuff, I would determine if/what on your site actually needs to be tagged too

Hi Adrian

It's always tricky! It's a longterm solution. Things will need to get sorted out by Google and the dust needs to settle.

You can really ensure this happens faster by taking all appropriate measures - like redirects, notifying webmaster tools, updating internal/external links where possible (social, local listing, etc).

The fact that rankings were lost, means you have less to lose right now - so it might be a good time to take a step back and "do it right"

I'd publish this is a page. Full explanation here! --> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RrcUKaiAc4

Look near the code and see if there is indication if it was added by a plugin - or see if you can find "

Hi Brad

ATP has the right idea indeed. I don't foresee there being any issues with this at all. You're biggest two risks with any migration (back or front end) are broken links and downtime. If you're not changing any URLs, then you don't need to do redirects. Just obviously minimize any downtime as much as possible and you should be fine!

Few rules about sitemaps;

• You should only include in them pages you also want crawled and indexed

• They should not contain URLs with 404s or blocked by robots.txt

My guess is there are too many URLs in the sitemaps, since I'd guess the website is not over 2 million actual "real" pages,

Also, I randomly clicked on a URL in one of the sitemaps and it 404'd;

http://www.eumom.ie/forums/topic/oakhill-school-leopardstown-/

This is probably causing a lot of the errors you see. It's honestly not a 5 minute fix - but if it were my site, I would be using the Yoast SEO plugin and using the sitemap feature within Yoast. It makes it very easy to include / exclude certain pages and updated automatically etc.

I think there must be a way to tell your plugin what to include / exclude from the sitemap but I don't have as much experience with it.

But generally - only include pages you want crawled and indexed. Don't include pages that 404.

Hi Joost - I'll try to tackle each of the questions one by one:

• About categories, I'm not sure of the specifics, but you'll definitely want to find a category variable that just pulls in the category name for you. What that variable is, I am not sure off the top of my head.
• The way I'd look at it - you don't want to end up with a "category" that's so deep or specific it only have a couple products in it. You may as well rank a product page instead. So long as your categories have maybe 5+ products which makes it useful for the user, you'd be fine I think.
• I wouldn't worry about duplicate content. The "duplicate content" scare from years back is only a penalty if you are scraping content from other sites and building a whole website off of other people's content. I would just judge each page individually and aim for it being as helpful to the user as possible - in terms of trying to predict their questions, fears, doubts, etc in terms of actually purchasing the product

I think it's important to understand the options and the results they will cause:

• You could "noindex" the for sale page - it will still live on your site, it's just that no one will find it in Google.
• You can rel = canonical "for sale" -> "for rent" but technically you're not supposed to because the content is different. If it worked, it would basically achieve the same thing as the noindex anyway. It's supposed to pass value like a redirect, but I doubt it would since the content is different.

I think the hidden dilemma is in the fact you're trying to capture both "for sale" and "for rent" traffic - what are the keywords driving traffic to the far sale or for rent page? Maybe it's really a matter of getting both pages to rank for their respective keywords/intents and making it cleat to the user front and center on each page they can in fact both buy or rent. So the "for rent" page would clearly state "hey, did you know you can buy this too?"

I don't know how popular the keywords are too - this would help determine the overall strategy - knowing how big the market is, how competitive, the search volume - and what a typical user expects in the industry.