Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Nahid, before you use the robots.txt file's disallow for those URLs, you may want to reconsider. You may want to use the canonical tag instead. In the case where you have different sizes, colors, etc. we typically recommend using the Canonical Tag and not the disallow in robots.txt.

Anyhow, if you'd like to use the disallow you can use one of these:

Disallow: /?

or

Disallow: /?cat=

There is generally no reason that you need to redirect old images if the new site design no longer uses them. However, you might just keep them on the server in the same location.

When you have a page that's still on the site (even though it's removed from navigation), the page is still on the site and indexed--so users will still get to it. It's still probably going to rank for at least something in the search results.

What you need to do is figure out if the page still contains valid content and is useful for visitors. There's obviously a reason that the page was requested to be removed by the content manager, though.

If the page needs to be removed from navigation, and it won't have any internal links, then most likely you probably need to remove the page, as well. What I would do is set up a 301 Permanent Redirect from that URL to another on-topic page on the site. As long as you use a 301 redirect and redirect it to another internal page on the same domain, you won't lose and "SEO value".

When it refers to links, it's ALL links on the page, even navigational links. If you have too many links, then you might consider updating the navigation and splitting up those links into categories and subcategories. You may need to add additional category and subcategory pages on your site as a result.

The 404 errors and other crawl data is provided by a separate database in Google, so the timing of the links and the data you're seeing isn't exactly "in sync" so to speak. I would do a few things--look at the pages to see if there's something on your site that might be causing the errors.

Another option is to look at the link data to see if there are any links pointing to those pages. I would use another source, such as OSE or Majestic.com to see if there are links pointing to those pages that Google isn't reporting (which is often the case).

Whenever you have images on your site that tend to rank well in image search, you're going to get others who scrape your site's images and put them on their site. If they're linking to your site, as long as you don't reciprocate the link you shouldn't have any problem (don't link back).

But, if you prefer, you may want to review those links (look at the site's Domain Authority and Page Authority) and decide if it is a good link or a bad link. You can then disavow those links or disavow the whole domain with Google using their Disavow Tool.

Yes, that should work just fine. As Logan mentioned, I recommend you test it in the robots.txt testing tool in Google Search Console.

Typically, the best way to deal with this is to make sure that your subdomain cannot be crawled by the search engines. If Moz crawls it then you will still see the errors. But, if you block Google from crawling it (use the robots.txt file), then you should be fine.

Tymen, there are different types of SSL certificates, and I understand that they can, in fact, be optimized so it will load quickly. You might point your web host/developers to the Google help topic(s) here for more information: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/module/https_support#load_from_file

Also, make sure that you're using a Content Deliver Network (CDN) when you can, and use caching, as well.

Any guest posting that you're doing and  how it affects your site's search engine rankings will depend on your site's link profile. If you're only doing guest posting and that's how you're getting your links, then that may put up a red flag and it might affect rankings. However, if you have thousands of links from other sites then a few guest posts aren't going to hurt, they should help.

Keep in mind, though, that any guest posts should comply with Google's webmaster guidelines, the blogger should disclose that it's a guest post, and typically it should be a nofollow link to your website. If it doesn't comply, it doesn't matter how many posts you have, even a few could get your site penalized.

This can definitely be a problem, and it needs to be fixed.

It sounds as if there may be two websites with the same content showing up on the .com URL and the .COM.AU URL. What we typically recommend is that you verify your site in Google Search Console and tell Google which version you prefer--you'll need to verify both versions of your site.

Also, you can use the hreflang tags on your site to tell Google that the .COM.AU site is meant for Australia, and the .COM site is meant for the USA.

Duplicate title tags are generally not something that you want--but in some cases they are necessary. If the content on the page is different, then it is not going to be a disaster for the site.

I would make sure that Yoast is enabled (or use some other way of taking care of your site's meta data, etc.).

If you do have a duplicate title tag issue, though, keep in mind that there may be other issues associated with that. For example, you may need to use the canonical tag to take care of pages that are duplicates (thus the duplicate title tags) or use the robots.txt file to disallow indexing of certain sections of your site.

Most of those links are going to be nofollow links, so when it comes to building Domain Authority, it's generally not going to be recognized as a link that passes DA. Google, on the other hand, may actually count those links--as we've seen nofollow links help rankings.

As you build links, keep in mind that it's good to drive real traffic (which helps rankings) and social media shares (which helps rankings) and build your natural link profile (which helps rankings). You need nofollow links for your link profile to be natural.

Whenever you use a subdomain, it's pretty much seen as a separate site. So, while the main domain's Domain Authority will help the subdomain a bit, it's going to be more "powerful" if that content is in a folder or directory on the main domain.

Also, if the content is currently in a directory on the domain currently (rather than being on a subdomain), I would generally not move it to a subdomain.

Typically, the site: command in Google is unreliable. There are lots of reasons why, one being that there may be pages indexed that aren't "good enough", for whatever reason, to show up in the search results. When we look at the site pages indexed, we typically will use the site: command, then click a few pages deep and look at the number it shows (not the first number of pages it shows).

For SEO auditing purposes, we're looking to see if there is a significant difference between the number of pages indexed and the number of pages that we find when we we crawl the website ourselves.

Google does, in fact, know that lawyers are attorneys and attorneys are lawyers. However, you'll notice that Google's search results don't reflect this. You'll see different results for lawyer phrases versus attorney keywords. When optimizing, you'll want to make sure you've done your keyword research and mention those keywords appropriately on the site.

Any article that has release date prior to 1st-June-2012 should return a custom 410 page with "noindex" metatag, instead of the actual content of the article.

The error returned should be a "410 gone" and not just a 404. That way Google will treat it differently, and may remove it from the index faster than just returning a 404. Also, you can use the Google removal tool, as well. Don't forget the robots.txt file, as well, there may be directories with the content that you need to disallow.

But overall, using a 410 is going to be better and most likely faster.

You may want to consider a .REPAIR new gTLD domain name. One of the keywords is in the ending (in the TLD), and we've seen good results when sites have migrated to an appropriate new gTLD domain name. In your case, you may be able to get a really good, short, memorable .REPAIR domain.

If you migrate the old site to the new .REPAIR domain name  using 301 redirects and the Google Change of Address Tool, you won't see any negative effects--your rankings may in fact get better.

Yes, you can definitely use an IP redirect and redirect users to the correct 'version' of the site based on their IP address. You still may want to add a link to both versions, though, since it is possible that someone from the USA might be traveling in the UK and want to see the USA version of the site.

Keep in mind that most likely these two versions may look like duplicate content to Google, you may want to only allow Google to see one 'version'. Otherwise, use the proper hreflang tag to indicate US English and UK English.

There are tools that allow you to find out the "real" IP address of a server that's using Cloudflare. I just looked up a few using some of these tools, and they still work--so I'm assuming that Google will have the same access or ability to see these, as well.

So, your theory of using Cloudflare to not have to worry about class C blocks anymore when linking is good, but I wouldn't count on it.