Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey,

IMO when it comes to redirects/merges on a website, the first thing that you want to ask yourself, whether the content that you are merging is more related to your homepage or inner page?

What I am trying to point out is, if you have two websites: one which was selling independent products/product groups, the other the branded website, I would create a new inner page/select an existing inner page that already would host the new products on the branded website and redirect it towards that page.

If we are talking about two websites that were hosting almost the same products, then I would go for a more detailed redirect, such as independent product pages get redirected to their correct version on the selected domain. If this scenario cannot be applied, only then I would redirect whole domain to the homepage.

Like mentioned above, this is my opinion, but I hope it helps you.

Gr., Keszi

Hi Jackie,

What I'd advise you to do, is to create a Screaming Frog Crawl so you can compare the two crawl data. If both show missing meta descriptions on the same pages, then there might be something on your side.

It is always good to double-check the information you are provided. So you are sure that the issue isn't a bug.

Gr., Keszi

P.S. I made a quick crawl with Screaming Frog on the first domain: sundancevacationsblog.com and found quite a big number of Missing Meta Titles.

Hi Sam,

If the pages that you are talking have been blocked by robots.txt I do not think they would be in any way beneficial. In our case (because of a development made back in 2009 - which still wasn't corrected) we have pages that are noindex, follow. And I have seen that some anchor texts used for internal linking still bring value to the landing pages.

I hope this helped, Keszi

Hi Mark,

The guys have mentioned quite good answers above, so I am not going to elaborate on that.

I just wanted to jump in with a tool for the algorithm diagnosis: http://www.barracuda-digital.co.uk/panguin-tool/

It helped me a lot to see which update has hit one of the sites I have been working on.

I hope it will help you as much, as did with me.

Gr., Keszi

Hey,

You would probably want to go to: http://advertise.bingads.microsoft.com/en-us/home then sign in, not sign up (if you already have a bing ads account)

Gr., Keszi

Not yet, but planning it for a future website. I found this after I have made some research reading that article on the Moz blog

It seems it had some effect on us.

Hi Vic,

How about this plugin? https://wordpress.org/plugins/timeline-express/screenshots/

Gr., Keszi

Hey!

Actually Rand made a very nice Whiteboard Friday about this topic: http://moz.com/blog/subdomains-vs-subfolders-rel-canonical-vs-301-how-to-structure-links-optimally-for-seo-whiteboard-friday

I personally prefer to use subfolders, had good experience with it.

Gr., Keszi

Hi there,

Basically you are saying that you'd like to host every language on different domains. That shouldn't be an issue. If the text is translated, you could even create a sitemap for language targeting and submit it. This way Google will know that Page A is a translated version to english of Page B.

You can read more about the HREFLANG here: http://moz.com/learn/seo/hreflang-tag

There is also a tool for generating the correct sitemaps, which will make your job easy. You can check it here: http://www.themediaflow.com/tool_hreflang.php

I hope it helped, Keszi

Hi Justin,

302 status codes are temporary redirects on your website. To get to know more about status codes and best practices, you should check the following articles:

• http://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection
• http://moz.com/learn/seo/http-status-codes
• http://moz.com/academy/redirects

I hope these will clear your question.

Gr., Keszi

There was a Google Webmaster Central office-hours hangouts where John Mueller was talking about this.

The idea was, that you should let googlebot crawl the old pages also, so they can pick up the redirects.

Regarding my previous answer: Might be an idea to include the new page to the sitemap, without removing the old ones. (so they can crawl the old versions and pick up the 301 redirects).

Hey,

When we had made to merge pages, we have been waiting for a few days after the new page went live, before updating the xlm sitemaps. It is always better to give time to Google to recrawl the old versions.Gr. Keszi

Hi Michael,

I am not quite sure, but I have a gut feeling telling me it has something to do with your canonical tags. When did you implement those? (cannot run a crawl now, but I will surely check it out in the evening).

Gr., Keszi

Hi there,

With this kind of inquiry you should probably contact the help team instead of the q&a community.

You can write an email to them at help[at]moz.com or via: https://moz.com/help/contact

I am sure they will be able to help you more as the community here.

Gr., Keszi

Hi Alec,

IMO a good link is one that not only provides "link juice", but can provide referral traffic as well. Therefore when someone asks me where to start with link building, then I always try to guide them towards the concept of:

• Who is you target audience?
• What do they read?
• Do you have the linkable assets on your website, where you can provide them with unique value?

These are the prerequisites of a link building process. Only after you have answered these (and mainly to yourself), you can start thinking of how to connect your target audience with your assets.

Do not forget, that quality always wins against quantity. Do not try to create many links, with low value.

Also before you start building links, read as much as possible about Google updates.

Gr., Keszi

Hi Alec,

There are various tools that you can use, but when it comes to the real "deal" I usually go for Screaming Frog + Excel. Back, when I had a Moz Pro account, I remember their crawls provided quite a good data to start with.

This is how I usually do it (doesn't mean that there are no good tools for SEO).

The most important IMO is to collect data, as much data as possible. Understand it. Prioritize it. Then take action accordingly. (I think Moz Pro is a perfect tool that can help).

I hope it has helped.

Gr., Keszi

Hi Michele,

First of all, I would try to include it in sitemap. Than I'd do the following:

1. For all the cars that you have sold, I'd try to implement a noindex, follow (and keep the page alive for the following few days, giving time to Google to crawl these URLs again).
2. Every day a sitemap should be generated, then pinged (check Google's "best practices for sitemaps" article: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.ro/2014/10/best-practices-for-xml-sitemaps-rssatom.html and the ping protocol: http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html#submit_ping)

That's my personal approach. But might be that others come up with better ideas.

I hope it helped.

Gr., Keszi

Hi,

I'd go for redirect all the pages. Even if doesn't have 1 link (external), but until it is not an orphan page, it still got some value from internal linking.

That is my personal opinion.

Gr., Keszi

Egol, you are right! Just love how you present your idea!

I was more into how to interpret the data from Moz (or any other tools in general).

Hi Andy,

It is important to know that Moz crawl gives you an error/notification about a specific issue, to highlight that one or more elements could influence your search rankings. All tools can do, is to highlight information for you.

The way they highlight an issue (high importance, low importance, etc.) is based on the big data they are able to analyze, and how they have experienced how these data correlates with the rankings from their data.

On the other hand having your competition having the same issue, might be a signal that it is a point on your website where you could do better than your competition.

This is how I interpret their data.

I hope this was helpful.

Gr., Keszi