Welcome to the Q&A Forum

1. Use Google Search Console and see what queries you get traffic from for the home page.
2. Replace the old with the new text in one sweep.
3. Monitor and see what you've gain and what you've lost as far as organic traffic for the home page and see if you are missing anything. You can roll back if the "damage" is extensive. There is no real damage you can end up with that you can't reverse. You can always roll back if needed - but if you say the content is on the same subject but more professional then all should be good and for the best.

Hope it helps.

Most likely a reporting issue. But a good reason to dive into those links (in bulk, a link profile audit) and see if you can spot and see when they got added, if you can improve some etc.

Does Google treat bit.ly links differently?

** Yes, but the difference is small.

So bit.ly links are good as they use 301 redirects and although the official version is that they don't lose any page rank they do a little. From the 3o01 or else - it doesn't matter from where, but they do loose some. If you get any - that's fine - don't worry about it. If you build a link building strategy on those - that's another story and a good but very grey area

Those things still work - in some extent. Google however will drop some/most of the links but some do stick. if you can diversify the target it will help even more.

If there is no relevancy though  (between the links, old domain and the new domain/pages) - you won't feel anything.

There is no penalty for duplicate content (if you take that content from another site you posted on yours). Google went on record several time on this subject. But you won't rank with this content anyway.

Now if your site is 10-100 pages and you get 15k in - then you will change the topicality of the site by a lot with thin content that doesn't rank and dilute everything you have and that is not good. If your site is 200k pages indexed already and you add 15k - I would't really worry about it.

To play it "safe" you could indeed noindex them. Those will still be crawled if they are linked though. If you want to cut them out and also save some crawl budget (if the site is new and with not that many pages) I would push all of those 15k pages in a separate folder in the structure and add that folder in robots.txt as disallow.

Take into account that linking to those pages and having those pages indexed is also a signal for the pages that are linking to them (good or bad). If those are on the same topic it will help the pages that are linking to them.

If you can find the time and energy to improve this content even if it's the same like on any other sites, find a way to add some value (in the way you show it, with resources, stats, addon con tent etc) those can turn into a good set of landing pages.

my 2c. Hope it helps.

Can you share the query ?

You go be fine without one. You only need one if you want to manage that subdmain: add specific xml sitemaps links in robots.txt, cut access to specific folders for that subdomain.

if you don't need any of that - just move forward without one.

Hi Chase,

Removing dev via web master tools should do the trick for now. Then since google won't get to dev anymore you should be safe.

Adding both noindex and password protection is not needed. Since it's password protected Google won't get to see the noindex on the pages. So you should only do one of the two. No need to change now. The password protection is safe.

As expected 'dev.chiplab.com' was removed from the SERP.  Now, I'm a bit worried that the link equity was transferred for good to the subdomain from 'www.chiplab.com'.  That's not possible, right?

*** Yes, that's not possible so you are good.

Only 301 redirections are "mandatory" for Google to pass equity - so all good.

noindex would be the easiest way.

Seen some people having the same issue fixing it by adding rel canonical to dev pointing to the new site and so the main site got back step by step with no interruptions...

Cheers.

Hello,

I can see the thought process there but correlation doesn't mean causation. A dot com targeted (WMT) on UK will have the same benefits as a co.uk domain.

However a co.uk might have a higher CTR - and that could be reason enough to switch.

Take into account that if you do move / migrate and if you do everything by the book you will still "lose" something with the 301 redirects. (using 301 redirects is the main option for a migration). Also with any migration there are a lot of "possible points of failure" so you should take that into account.

Hope it helps.

Thanks for the answer.

It dose indeed but it's removing the post if it is scheduled for a future date. And if that date is 6 months from now we lose it until it will get reposted.

We are looking fora solution that a post can be scheduled some time in the future but it will stay online until that date comes.

Just to be more clear on it: we want to edit, improve older articles with fresh new content and updates not just change the date but we also do want to keep the old URLs as we have a lot of social exposure on those and direct links. (and yes, we did take into account the 301 as a solution but we will lose the social shares).

So dose anyone knows a solution or a plugin that can do that ? (as if we take a post from 2007 and set it up for dec 2015 we are losing the old one until it will get published in dec 2015.

Thanks !

We are wanting to refresh old posts on our blog and schedule them to get “republished” to the home page of our blog on a future date. However, when we edit the “Published” settings date and set it to a future date, the post gets removed from the blog and put back into a “Scheduled” status. Many of these posts are “evergreen” and bringing in traffic so we don’t want to have them get removed from our site.

So to recap, we need the ability to be able to reschedule already published posts to get “re-published” back on our home page without having them get removed from the site.

Does anyone know of a plugin or solution to this problem? Any help would be appreciated.

Hello,

You are looking in the wrong direction. There is no Penguin filter on viplane.com.au.

I don't know what you've "clean" from your link profile but you might have shoot yourself in the foot with that session - no headshot though ...

There are so many other issues with the site but yes, links are important but it's not the only thing you should focus on.

Cheers.

What's the URL of the site ?

Do you say Google will think its spamy and won't propagate any link juice or just like a few.

** No, not spamy - but so many people are doing that and those links should not count and send out PR anyway - since those are not "natural" links. You won't get into issues for those - is just that google won't count them.

There was an incident a few years back with a WordPress theme provider that had a similar link in the footer and the theme got very popular and so they got a lot of links. At that stage they got into issues as those links where "seen" as spamy - but after google "fixed" that case now they also have a algorithmic rule to treat them as they should but without hiting the target site - as again - a lot of people are doing that, it make sense and they are not SEOs to add "nofollow" so Google is taking care of that on their own.

in that case wouldent it be better to dofollow only the home link?

** In my opinion that will look spamy - since it's clear you need to cut down from the site wide links but still have those links on your SEO "campaign"

Personally I would leave them as they are - it make sense to have them as you said those are bringing in referral traffic and some might even "count" and send some PR your way.

No, the Geo targeting in Web Master Tools is not for boosting the Geo keyword (in your case "India") so it's not going to boost : "SEO services India" for your site because you have the GEO setting to India.

The GEO setting in WMT is just to clearly state what is your target audience - and in this case is India -> so your site should do better for all searches from India.

It might actually decrease your chances to rank in US based on that - so you have to chose GEO location settings only if you are really targeting mainly a specific location...

Hope it make sense.

Hi,

Unless the sites are very big - I don't see a reason for those type of sites to even have xml sitemaps. Now for sure those won't hurt - but they won't provide a positive ROI anyway.

I would first look in Web Master Tools to see what is the crawling rate - and if it's very low, then yes, it might help pushing some xml sitemaps to try and speed the process.

Also remember that lastmod and changefreq are just hints - Google might use them as some addon info but changes are small - for a site that doesn’t get updated that often - for google to take those into account.

Now let's assume you will add the xml sitemaps and you will add changefreq at one month - google might have a crawling cycle for this site - once a day for the main pages (home page and that's it or some additional 1-2 pages in the site that are "more important" and for the rest maybe google bot will visit them once a week, once a month or even once every few months - depending on how old is the site and the history of the site ...).  Let's assume Google will take into account your changefreq settings - and it will visit more often as he might think you are up to something .. as in adding more content ... when the bot will see there is nothing there he will resume his old crawling cycle anyway.

Again, you can put changefreq once a day - it won't back fire in any way - is just that google bot will ignore that...

Hope it helps.

Those links are for sure marked by Google as NP (No Propagate) so it's like they have the no follow attribute - chances are high that those links won't count anyway from an SEO point of view.

Unless you will end up with a 6 or 7 digit as far as amount of this type of links I wouldn’t be worry and I would keep them as do follow as some might count - even if only a small % out of the entire bunch.

Google is smart enough to dal with those type of links - they do have a separate approach for "design by" or "develop by" type of links.

Cheers.

That article you mention is very up to date.  but if you got "hit" by Google bot several times a day for those pages that now you return a 404 response code you will see a decrease in pages crawled per day since once Google sees a 404 response code it will not visit / hit that page that often aftre that...