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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.

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.

that by doing as much, they will increase their opportunities to rank for related KW terms

This is, in fact, a misconception and a false assumption. Simply redirecting domain names will not increase rankings. In fact, if you redirect too many domain names it could hurt rankings and give the main site a penalty (we've seen it happen before).

What I do recommend, however, is that you do your due diligence on all of the domain names that you're redirecting, as you could be redirecting a domain that has a penalty or low quality backlinks.

They certainly will make note of those phone numbers, but since the phone number is not a web page there's no way to pass on "link juice" to it. So, there's really no reason to mark it as a nofollow link.

HDPHNS, it's quite possible that Google is doing that on purpose--that they see the product is out of stock so they don't rank it as high. Google wants to provide a good user experience, and it would be frustrating if someone went to Google, did a search, went to your site, and found that the product is out of stock.

Hi Inevo,

You don't mention which CMS your client is using, but if you mention "plugin" I'm assuming that the client is using WordPress. If that's the case, then they should use the Yoast SEO plugin, which will automatically generate the sitemaps(s) that the client needs.

If the site has good search engine rankings, then I wouldn't necessarily worry too much about Domain Authority dropping. It could be that the other sites linking to your client site has dropped, so that would then drop your client's DA.

Whenever you migrate a domain name to another domain name (I think this is what you're saying you did), Google will keep the URLs of the old domain name in their index for at least a year. That's if you migrate to a new domain name.

If the pages have 301 redirects to other pages on the site or new pages on the site, then those old URLs could still remain in the index for a period of time--you'll be able to see them if you search for the URL.

Typically even if those URLs are still indexed, it shouldn't be hurting rankings at all.

I would check to see if you've uploaded the file to the right folder on the server. Some servers have a public_html folder and that's where you'd want to upload it to. If you are able to access other pages on the site but not this page in particular, then it might be a caching issue. Oftentimes ISPs will cache pages and you won't be able to see the latest version. You might try accessing it from another browser, or use something like Rex Swain's HTTP viewer (http://www.rexswain.com/httpview.html) to see if it loads there.

You really should be using Google's parameter tool if you do NOT want those pages crawled.

If they are crawled, and you use the canonical tag in order to tell Google to pass any "juice" to the page you're setting the canonical tag to, then you won't lose any traffic. Both of those URLs (the one with the parameters and one without) essentially will be crawled, but won't be indexed.

Personally, if you cannot use siroccowebdesign.com, then sirocco-web-design.com would be preferred since it separates all of the words. I would, however, buy both and redirect one to the other.