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Whenever you have old pages on your site (on the same domain name), using a 301 Permanent Redirect to redirect them to the most appropriate page on your site is what you should do. As long as you're 301 redirecting one URL to another on the same domain name, you won't lose any link equity.

So, the best thing for you to do is to 301 redirect those old URLs to the best page--otherwise redirect them to the site's home page.

Like others have mentioned, if your site has both the "healthcare solutions" and "healthcare identity solutions" categories (category and subcategory), then it would make sense to keep it that way. We should be able to navigate to each of those pages in the URL.

If you just are referring to the URL, though, the keywords in the URL is such a small part of the search engine algorithms that it really won't make a huge difference--and I hardly believe you'll be penalized for it.

Generally speaking, with the personalization, it's difficult to monitor rankings. There are tools that will monitor your rankings, and generally they don't log into Google when checking rankings. They do try to set their location, though, so you can make it look like you're in Dallas and searching.

What we recommend is looking at overall organic traffic and conversions--rather than obsessing over keyword rankings. You can, though, look at Search Analytics in Google Search Console to see if there are particular keywords that you are monitoring, and see the impressions, clicks, and average position. One way to look at that data is pull the data by page and look at certain pages on your site and look at its keywords to see if there are any changes you can make to each individual page.

The new gTLD domain names are, in fact, treated exactly the same as any other TLD such as .COM, .NET, and .ORG by Google. They even wrote a blog post about it. However, we have been seeing very good results when it comes to using keyword rich new gTLD domain names.

Google has made it pretty clear in the past--translated content, even if it is directly translated as you suggest, is not duplicate content. So, if you have a page in English (even the meta data) and translate it into Spanish, those two pages are NOT duplicates.

Unless you are going to have all of the products listed on the domain.com/products/ page, then you should consider getting rid of the /products/ directory altogether. It serves no purpose if you're not using it, and only lengthens the URLs.

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.

Keep in mind that for a site:domain.com search, Google now includes pages from OTHER SITES that are using the canonical tag to point to your site. So, even though it says there are 300 pages indexed, 30 of those pages might be on other sites that use the canonical tag pointing to your site. The numbers of pages indexed that you're looking at may not be entirely accurate because of this.

The duplicate titles are being picked up because all page titles are in English for all 5 languages -

That, there, is the issue. If the page is in French, then the title tag needs to be in French. That's why the title tags are being flagged as duplicates. Because they are duplicates.

The good news, though, is that if you do take the time to update/translate all of your title tags into the proper language, then I bet that your site's search engine rankings will improve quite a bit.

I'm not sure how you're blocking Google from crawling external links in the robots.txt file--typically you only block them from crawling internal pages on your site.

If you're using a script, though, to track the clicks on external links and that script is running your site (and you're blocking that script in robot.txt), then that still should be fine. You may want to add a "nofollow" tag on those links, though, so you don't end up passing link "credit" or "link juice" to those affiliates (unless you want to do that?).

As far as external links go, though, it's typically okay (and expected) that you link out to other sites.

Generally speaking, the decision should be based on the location served--so if the company does business in the entire Dallas area then I would use Dallas. But, if it's only in Farmer's Branch, then typically you'd choose just that city.

Another decision would be whether or not this business is going to have (or currently has) more than one location in the area. So, if in the future they will have a Dallas location, a Farmer's Branch location, a Plano location, etc. then that could cause an issue in the future, as you'd need to fix it.

If the Farmer's Branch location serves the entire Dallas area, then you should probably go with Dallas.

Even though there are thousands of domain names involved, I wouldn't expect for this to have any positive effect on your site's SEO (or rankings). The problem is that these domain names aren't trusted--they aren't going to have any Domain Authority, they're hosted most likely on the same server (or class C block of IPs), and the content isn't unique to each site. For SEO and ranking purposes, unfortunately you have all of those things counting against you.

In order for a site or a domain to help, it needs unique content, higher Domain Authority, and links to it.

This shouldn't stop you from using those domains to your benefit, though. I would, however, either put up an ad that contains a link, or put a text link on the pages. I would also make sure those are "nofollow" links. Suddenly if you have 20,000 sitewide links to your site from "low quality", thin content domains, that could actually throw up a red flag and hurt your site's current rankings.

We moved a lot of client sites over to HTTPs from HTTP. We always use the proper 301 Permanent Redirects, and there is no loss of rankings as far as we can tell. When it comes to links in particular, if you 301 redirect one page to another on the same domain name, you will NOT lose any link value. The key here is that it's a redirect on the same domain name.

If you are moving from HTTP to HTTPs, make sure you verify the site in Google Search Console and update Google Analytics, as you will see a loss of data if you don't update those.

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.

Ryan, the Google Analytics tracking code is not implemented in a PDF, it's only actually implemented (the JavaScript code) by the user's browser. So, you're exactly correct:

Google Analytics is only showing how many times the PDF link was clicked on from a webpage, whereas GWT is showing all of the clicks when the PDF showed up in SERPs.

No, in order for your AMP pages to be indexed you do NOT need to implement HTTPs on your website.

When it comes to hosting images off site, keep in mind that there may be connectivity and image load speed issues associated with these images. I typically wouldn't rely on an image being pulled from someone else's site, even if it was something like Flickr or Photobucket. I don't think those particular services intend for you to use their service like that.

Rather, we typically will set up a CDN for hosting the images or PDFs, and use a subdomain of the main site in order to host the images. For example, we would set up images.domain.com and pdf.domain.com and put the images and PDFs on the CDN.

When it comes to internal linking, I would first worry about the users on your site: if it makes sense for you to link to another page on your site (so they will stay on your site longer), then you should link internally to that other page.

If you're using an internal link structure that has topics and subtopics, then the pages in each subtopic should link to each other and they should link to their main topic.

What's important, though, is to think of the user experience and if it makes sense for you to link to link the scholarship campaign on your reference page then you should do that.

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.

Yes, it's perfectly fine. It used to be that you actually needed to use hyphens to separate words in the URL (so search engines could understand) but now you don't need to do that.

So, it is OK to use hyphens in URLs.