Welcome to the Q&A Forum
Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.
Write as much copy as you need to convey the information that is needed for your visitor on that page. If you can create a good user experience on one page with 100 words (by answering the pain that they would be going to that page to solve) and then you need 1,000 words for your next page, then do that to. Don't make arbitrary copy limits or goals based on SEO, make your pages user friendly and your copy useful and your pages will rank well for the appropriate content.
While you should not fear change, your comment "However, the current setup is sending a worthwhile traffic volume to the site." says all you need to know, if the service + city landing page model is working, don't change it to change it or because you read something that says you should. If you do however believe that targeting the broad keywords instead will net you better local results, set up a few landing pages for the broad keywords and A/B test them against the local landing pages.
This is done for pages that may have additional information added to the url in a query string. While I prefer to have all pages canonical to themselves, I highly recommend doing it to any home page or landing page that can have multiple external links pointing to it.
Yes, it needs to be a 301 redirect. If your permanent homepage will be /en then you should 100% permanently redirect your old homepage, a 302 is just a temporary redirect you should only use it for temporary redirecting.
Its not hard to do a 301, here is some information for your devs.
If you have separate pages for mobile and desktop that contain different information then yes, you should make sure that your meta and title reflect the information that is displayed on the page per device.
The idea of redirecting a user to a car that might not match their search does not seem like a very user friendly option, if they wanted a mustang and clicked a search listing for it but none are available and were then redirected to a camaro page the user would not be happy, and that flow is built only for the site and not the customer, IMO.
My thoughts are instead of worrying about what is best for Google, think of what will give a user the best experience and go with that. While it is nice to have a lot of pages index, if by the time they get to Google they are gone, what good does that do a visitor who was searching for a specific term that your site no longer offers? They are much more likely to leave which will effect your whole site negativity as bounces from search go up.
You may want to be careful keeping pages live that are basically useless to visitors, if the ads are expired and it makes people leave your site (bounce) it will hurt your entire site, not just those pages.
Like most social media buttons, any link involved is tagged nofollow. There are really no SEO effects to adding a button like that onto a site.
It will not remove a page just because the link is gone. Your best bet would be to set up your back end to automaticly add a noindex meta tag into the of ads once they expire.
Example of tag
No, GA never retroactively adjusts data, a filter is considered a day forward change affecting only new incoming data.
If they are doing a lot of campaigns where they would have many urls with various query strings pointing to the pages then it would make sense to just have each page generated with the tag on it.
You put all the work into those articles, why would you throw away all the search relevance that they have earned? I would never ever move content and not redirect it, no matter how many 301s I would have to add.
It looks like a lot of those blocked pieces are not on your site but are located on other sites and you are pulling them onto yours. Now it also looks like, besides the gallery, the rest of these pieces really are not important (social media buttons, placeholder images) so you should not be worried about them. The only one you should look into more is the Gallery box script, your best bet would be to go to either the developer of that plugin or a wordpress technical forum to see if anyone else has had a similar problem and come up with a solution.
While you will always loose some ranking with large site wide restructures, you can minimize it by having your redirects in place as soon as you make the shift. When I do restructures or site re-launches I create a large CSV that has all of my current URLs and the corresponding URL that it will update to. Double check the list and use it as a checklist to make sure all of your old content properly redirects to the new. On a side note, when doing something like this it is a good time to update your site to secure as you are already redirecting the majority of your pages, so redirected them to the https: version is not much extra work.
As for if you should do this, that will depend on your site goals and if adding the date in the url would benefit your visitors or corresponds with another digital part of your digital strategy.
You are correct in your assumption, if you are not allowing Google to index those pages then Google image search will likewise not index images from those pages. While you could then create gallery pages for your images that did not have noindex meta tags, without having other information on those pages the images will not rank well (and at that point you would be better spending your time just creating unique content for your similar product pages). Unfortunately, if you want your images to searchable you will need to make your pages as well
I would select custom filter and hostname.
If you are using Google Analytics this is an easy fix but you will want to make a new view to test it on first.
All you need to do is create a filter to remove the stg.mydomain.com. Test to make sure you aren't removing legitimate data, but this is a pretty quick fix.
Dave,
Your best bet to keep these pages indexed but not have duplicate content issues is to add code that will place a canonical tag on search pages based on the original search query so that even when additional information was caused to load into the URL, such as your example, it would point back to the base page. If you do not want these pages indexed at all you can do what Keszi said or block all search pages using your robots.txt.
I would not block your product pages or search pages but I agree with blocking your shopping cart funnel.
Google official explanation of canonical and some common mistakes Google sees when they are implemented.
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html
They are different things for used for different reasons. By using the robots to block any page behind a log in you will not have to worry about them trying to access that information at all. You should also have canonical tags pointing to themselves on all pages especially product pages and landing pages.