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I understand that Yelp was down for a period of time in the past few days, and it was not just their website, their app was also down. I don't think it was related to the APIs, those sites were down entirely. They are up and running again today, though.

Brad, since the domain is not going to be yours, and you'll be unable to actually verify it in Google Search Console, then you probably won't be able to use the Google Change of Address Tool.

However, if you are using 301 permanent redirects to redirect the content to your site, that should be good enough. Typically, when you use the Change of Address Tool you get more "credit" from Google, as it looks like they will pass most of the "link juice" over to the new domain--you don't get that when you only 301 redirect from domain to domain, you will lose some "link juice".

I do recommend that you go ahead and use the 301 redirects.

Sometimes Google just picks what they think is appropriate to show depending on the search query. We've seen this in the past, sometimes due to the fact that Google, for whatever reason, doesn't like the meta description tag. Sometimes it's too long, sometimes it doesn't contain the keywords or something similar than the search query, etc..

Yes, this is definitely possible and typical on desktop results. When a page doesn't have a meta description tag or when the page's meta description doesn't match the search query, Google tends to pick text from the page that they feel is appropriate. So, yes, it's very possible, depending the search query/keyword used.

First time I've seen it happen on mobile or pointed out on mobile, but it "should" be happening, especially if the page doesn't have a meta description tag.

With social media becoming increasingly important--especially actual engagement, some tool that would help connect you with others on social sites that have similar interests and similar posts. Not only should the tool be able to identify people you should connect with and engage with, it should look at their posts and find similar posts that you're posting. This can't be done on one social network, it needs to happen across multiple networks.

Basically, it should tell you who to follow, who to engage with, and what you should share, when, to be most effective. It could even learn by your successes as well as your failures (something you posts no one reads and no one shares, etc.).

Google does crawl JavaScript, and they do index it. Googlebot is really a form of the Chrome web browser, so they will see the information that you give to them and most likely the other remaining content. Keep in mind that cloaking is against their guidelines, so may get the site penalized.

I would go ahead and give Google and all visitors the full content.

The most popular sitemap plugin for Magento appears to be this one: https://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/xml-sitemap-generator-splitter.html, the XML Sitemap Generator & Splitter.

We have run into this error time and time again. Unfortunately, OSE does not support New gTLD domain names. It's a "feature" that we've been asking for for a while (they've been out for two years now) and it's logical that OSE should support these domain names.

I understand that "they're working on it".

usDragons, the best way to deal with these links is to use Google's Disavow Links tool to disavow them.

First, you need to identify all of the links, and you an do that by downloading all your links from Open Site Explorer, Majestic.com, ahrefs.com, and Google Search Console. Combine the lists and remove the duplicates.

You'll want to manually review all of them, make a list of the ones you want Google to ignore, then upload a list of the domain names using Google's disavow links tool. Google has more info about their disavow tool here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en

Issa, there are plenty of Google algorithmic penalties that a site can have, like the Google Panda and Penguin penalties, that do not show up in Google Search Console. These can be tough to diagnose, and even when diagnosed they're can be tough to fix or can take time to fix.

What I would do is look at the Google Algorithm change history (https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change) and compare the date(s) where the site had traffic drops with the dates of algorithm updates. That should help diagnose some of the issues the site is having.

This is typically called a "microsite" and is not a black-hat strategy at all. It is more of a marketing tactic--to build a good, quality site with lots of content on a keyword rich domain name. Typically, many companies will purchase keyword rich domain names and not use them, they will just redirect them to their main site: like the way Books.com redirects to Barnes and Noble.

If the microsite only has thin content and doesn't have quality content, it could be considered a doorway page or doorway domain--but if it does have enough quality content on it then it would be considered a microsite. It still needs to have a good amount of quality links pointing to it, as well, in order to help the other site it points to. But, if the microsite is working, then the main brand site doesn't necessarily need to rank well. It gets its traffic from the microsite.

If you have changed the URLs with trailing slashes, then there are a few things you'll want to do:

• make sure all the internal links on your site are updated to point to the proper version.

• make sure that the sitemap.xml file(s) are correct, pointing to the proper version.

• set up 301 permanent redirects so that the ones with the slash are redirecting to the old URLs.

As long as you have corrected the links internally, updated the sitemap file, and set up the 301 redirects, everything should go "back to normal" within a fairly short period of time. You will need to give it time, though, as Google will need to re-crawl all of those URLs and get it all ironed out.

In the past, for these situations, we've had to get the location to set up suite numbers for each business. That way the address is correct, and then there is a suite number for each one. What we prefer to do is to get the USPS (postal service) to also set up and have those suite numbers in their system, as well. So, that way it's official.

You'll also need to post the suite numbers on the outside of the business, as well.

When you launched the new version of the site, did you set up the 301 Permanent Redirects so that all of the old pages are mapped/redirected to the most appropriate page on the new version of the site?

It sounds so me like you might not have set up the 301 redirects properly.

One thing you can do, though, is look at your Google Search Console crawl errors and pay attention to the most important ones--and fix those first.

With social media becoming increasingly important--especially actual engagement, some tool that would help connect you with others on social sites that have similar interests and similar posts. Not only should the tool be able to identify people you should connect with and engage with, it should look at their posts and find similar posts that you're posting. This can't be done on one social network, it needs to happen across multiple networks.

Basically, it should tell you who to follow, who to engage with, and what you should share, when, to be most effective. It could even learn by your successes as well as your failures (something you posts no one reads and no one shares, etc.).

When it comes to content on your site and Google Panda issues, you need to look at the site as a whole. Generally speaking, we want all of the content to be quality content. If there are book reviews that have plenty of content (as in there is a good amount of text on the page), then even if they are older books you'd want to keep those pages.

When it comes to Google Panda, which you're describing, we're more concerned about "thin content pages", not necessarily content that no one as viewed in a while. When it comes to identifying this content, though, I prefer to look at pages that haven't had any views for 6 months. Even if the page has had less than 10 views in any given month we'd still want to leave content that has had a few views in the past month.

I do believe that there is a use for older book reviews, so if the pages do have enough unique text on the page, then it would be worth it to leave those pages. You might need to look at your overall site structure, though, if you have a lot of pages then they might not be ranking well (or have a lot of page views) because of the site structure--and not necessarily because of the content.

Yes, I believe you're referring to Google's PageRank--which has, in fact, been turned off. It is no longer available. You may want to use Moz Domain Authority and Page Authority, or look at Majestic.com's Trust Flow and Citation Flow.

Based on the last several Google Penguin updates, if your site was going to be harmed or your rankings were going to go down, they probably would have gone down already. That said, that doesn't mean that you could still be penalized.

If there are sitewide badge links, they need to look natural. I wouldn't use any specific keyword anchor text, I would use your website name or brand or URL as the anchor text in the link. Don't make it look like you're trying to "game" Google by having too much exact match anchor text.

If these links are only a small percentage of the overall links that you have pointing to your site, then there won't be a problem. But if you have only 5 percent like you're saying then it should be fine.

Sherry, unfortunately, without having a 301 redirect in place, there's not much you can do to directly tell Google that the site has been moved. In order to use their Google Change of Address Tool, you have to set up the 301 permanent redirect from the old URL to the new URL (old domain to new domain). If you can get access, that's what you really need to do.

If the old site won't be taken down, there are a few things you can do, like send them a stern letter or let the lawyers get involved. Typically a letter from a lawyer will get their attention. You can, also, file a DMCA request with their web host, which they must comply with, telling the web host that the material on the old site is copyrighted (you own the copyright and rights to it) and it must be taken down.

If they won't give you the domain name, then you can file a UDRP domain dispute with ICANN to try to get ahold of the domain name. That will take some time, though. But in the long run you'll get ahold of the domain and be able to redirect it.

In the meantime, while you're dealing with all of this, you can begin to get all of your local listings (like Google My Business, etc.) and local citations moved over to point to your new site rather than the old site. In fact, you can start building links to the new domain name and Google will, hopefully, start ranking your new domain name higher in the search results.

Finally, you might actually consider moving the site to a .CARS domain extension, we've seen some really great success from dealerships that have moved from a .COM to a .CARS domain.

Whenever you move domain names, you should make sure that you use 301 Permanent Redirects (you may want to verify this by looking at the server headers, doing a server header check).

Then, you need make sure that the Google Change of Address Tool has been used to tell Google that they moved from the old domain to the new domain. You'll need to verify the old domain and the new domain in the same Google Search Console account, and then do the Change of Address.

Whenever you move to another domain like this, the old domain name will still remain indexed for at least a year or so (sometimes longer), as that's just how Google handles it. So if the old domain name still shows up for certain search queries then that's normal.

In any case, though, 301 redirects must be used and the Change of Address Tool should be used, as well.