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You're right, link building is important and it's still an important part of Googles' search engine algorithm. What I would do first is go to Moz's Chapter 7: What is Link Building? to make sure you're familiar with the overall strategies and see some examples.

What we generally recommend is starting with looking at your particular niche and the keywords you'd like to rank for. Make a list of your top competitors and start looking at what links they have (you can use Open Site Explorer to find your competitor's links). See what types of links they have and see if you can get similar links (or get linked on the same sites). Focus on getting quality links to your site, not just "easy links".

Artisancrafted, as long as you are using the canonical tag properly on the sites, it shouldn't be hurting your site's SEO at all. However, if you are able to move towards having unique product descriptions on each site then that will benefit your SEO in the long run.

Akira, there really is no direct connection between AdWords and organic rankings. However, there have been studies that show that if you show up in AdWords and in organic search for a search query it will benefit your organic--the visitors will tend to click on your organic listings and on the PPC ads.

Organic is not affected by PPC.

You may be able to pause the low-converting ads while still keeping the higher-converting ones. Furthermore, there may be other keywords that you can bid on that you aren't showing up for. I would look at Google Search Console's Search Analytics report and look at the impressions for organic and see which keywords are getting impressions but not clicks. That may reveal some keywords that you may want to bid on.

All in all, though, if you want to totally pause your AdWords ads it won't affect your rankings.

Jarred,

Whenever you move to a new domain name Google will keep the old domain name indexed for up to a year (or longer!). It's just the way that Google does it, I suspect that it's because you may change your mind and go back to the old domain.

Having the old domain indexed in Google isn't a problem, as users should be redirected to the content on the new domain.

It will take up to a year for Google to stop indexing the old domain.

By the way, make sure you use the Google Change of Address Tool in Google Search Console, it will really help.

Chris, great question. You really have two issues here. The first being the SSL certificate issue, and the second being the duplicate content issue.

Regarding the SSL certificate, as long as the domain is listed in the certificate it should be fine--cloudflare.com does it this way and offers free SSL certificates for every site, and it's not an SEO issue. As long as the certificates are valid I don't see an SEO issue. I prefer to have one certificate per domain, but that's not an SEO issue.

The other issue, however, is a duplicate content issue. The user is presented the non-secure version. So when do they get to the HTTPs version? Do they ever? Also, what happens to the search engines when they crawl? Do they get the HTTP or HTTPs version?

Seems to me that the best solution here, if you cannot 301 redirect all HTTP requests to the HTTPs version would be to use the canonical tag to specify the HTTPs version.

Regarding the GCLIDs, you'll want to update  your Google AdWords campaigns and anywhere else you can updated the URLs to the new HTTPs version of your site.

Whenever you use a 301 Permanent Redirect  you typically lose the referrer data, so that's why you're going to see issues with the referrers.

I would definitely use the 301 permanent redirects and NOT use the canonical tag for this. Also, don't forget to verify the HTTPs version of your site in Google Search Console, as well. We recommend getting a few new links to the HTTPs version of the site, as that will help with indexing and crawling.

When you moved your site to HTTPs, there are a few things that you need to do:

-- make sure you fix all the internal links on your site so that they point to the HTTPs version and not the HTTP version.

-- make sure you set up 301 Permanent Redirects from the old URLs to the new URLs.

-- verify the new HTTPs version of your site in Google Search Console. You should be seeing less pages indexed in the HTTP version and more pages in the HTTPs version of your site.

As long as you set up the proper redirects, you should not generally see any problems or changes in rankings. It will take some time for those new HTTPs URLs to get indexed, but the 301 redirects should take care of that.

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=

It really shouldn't be an issue, as most sites will use a 301 to redirect pages without a / to a URL with a slash and vice versa. It depends on your particular CMS, though, on how it deals with it. I know that on certain sites that I am familiar with do redirect the pages without a / to pages with a slash, so linking internally to a page without a slash does a 301 redirect to a URL with the slash.

When it comes to Google, however, I believe Google treats both at the same, so http://www.domain.com is the same as http://www.domain.com/

The only concern I would have is whether or not the URL without the slash redirects properly to the URL with the slash.

If these were previously closed locations or removed in Google My Business then most likely Google picked them up from the aggregators. It sounds as if that's the case, as those locations were probably listed on other websites, the local search data providers.

Moz has more information about these here: https://moz.com/learn/local/local-search-data-providers

What you'll need to do is figure out where your other listings are--and get those removed, as well. Otherwise, even if you get them removed from Google again they will show up again once Google pulls the data from the data providers again.

One way to deal with this is to have the main site not mention any particular locations. Then, in one section of the website you could create a directory or listings of dealers who offer your products. Each dealer who sells your products could get their own page, and be listed in the category or city page as well.

Generally speaking, what you're describing is the fact that the sites just don't have enough Domain Authority and links in order to rank well for the keywords you're targeting. If the sites are new, it might take some more time, as they may be "sandboxed". They need to become trusted more.

There are a few options. I do recommend "picking one" domain and 301 redirecting that one to the preferred domain. Then make sure you use the Google Change of Address tool to tell Google that you've moved.

Another option is to keep both sites live and then use the Canonical Tag to tell Google which domain is the preferred one. You'll have to do that at the page level, on each individual page.

I prefer, though, to use the 301 redirect option and the Change of Address tool.

Christa, if you're not able (or don't to) use a canonical tag, then you're left to do a few things:

• optimize the site so that there are more internal links to the preferred page
• keep that page "fresh" by updating it's content on a regular basis
• get more links to that page from other sites
• get social media mentions and work on 'engagement' on social media that mentions the preferred page.

Don't think of it as 'demoting' one particular page, I would work heavily on promoting the preferred page so that it's stronger overall via social media and links.

If you are going to literally shut down your m. subdomain, then the best way to do it is to use 301 Permanent Redirects to redirect the traffic to the appropriate page on the main domain. I would NOT use canonical tags in this case.

Your best bet is to make sure you comply with Google's guidelines, the Bing guidelines are typically similar.

It also depends on how the business relationship is set up. If they're independent contractors of the company then it would be different than if they were employees of the company.

Generally speaking, we typically recommend setting up "suite numbers" for the business location, and those need to be clearly marked at the location. I have heard of cases where Google has looked to make sure that this is the case.

Those keywords are extremely competitive. What we generally recommend is that you go after geo-based keywords such as "city name + mobile development".

The other issue I'm seeing is that there are some low quality backlinks pointing to the site. You'll need to work on the link profile and get the overall Domain Authority and overall trust much higher than it is currently.

I know it's frustrating, we have come across lots of listings like this in the past. About the only thing you can do is flag the listing and explain that it's a duplicate listing. You might have several people using different Google accounts flag the listing, as well.

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.