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Hi Kingalan I can understand you not wishing to fill your home page with spurious content but you need something to tell the user what the website is all about. It's OK adding a great title but that is only a maximum of 70 characters, depending on the width of the letters. So you really can't convey the full meaning of the page with so few words. (The user rarely sees the title anyway) Similarly, the description only allows 315 characters but is not used as a ranking factor, so that is not considered as home page content. (And is rarely seen by the user) The alt text on the images on the page will be read as part of the content so I would recommend one major feature image with a strong key phrase for the alt. (Wordpress calls this the 'focus keyword' but I would simply call it your 'primary keyword' or phrase). Other images can use semantically related keywords and phrases. My advice is to write around 300+ words of contextually rich content designed to be read by the website visitor whether you believe it will be read or not. This is headed by an H1 which echoes the title using semantically connected keywords. I'd consider this to be the minimum to convey the meaning of the page and be able to use keyword rich content to rank it for the satisfaction of user intent. If you need more than 300 words then separate into blocks with H2 headers. The important thing to remember is to make the writing compelling and relevant - people do read homepage content, so rather than thinking how few words you can write, think about 'what can I write that is great for the user and shows Google the theme of the page' I hope that helps, Regards Nigel

Very hard to say what's going on Kingalan1 without a detailed analysis. You've done a domain and https migration at the same time. It could just be a result of the transition given Google will have indexed multiple versions of the same content. Give it some more time. After that, if things don't improve you'll need to do a detailed analysis to diagnose what the problem is.

I did a site migration from Http to HTTPS and saw no drop but google was big on making sure such transfers didn't create and problems so people did them.  They wanted to encourage it so gave us a little boost.  I saw no drop at all.  But have heard of HTTP / HTTPS % HTTP2 having problems with traffic dropping.  But usually this was an error that had been made somewhere. OK so now I now that you are lettings that explains why so many pages.  Things should have improved but lately I am finding my pages are not getting indexed as fast as they were a month ago.  There really is a shake-up at google that is earth-moving at the moment.  Sensors and chatter has been 10/10 for almost a month now with rumours of new things happening on 17th April. I'm not one of these people who is glued to webmaster world but I'd bet it's things out of your control that have affected it or delays in indexing that will get picked up in a bit of time. Try re-requesting all your crawls.  I know what's obvious but it got mine finally indexed.

No this is ok. The old site will stay in the index for a few more weeks. Can you identify if the missing traffic is all organic?

Hey there! Tawny from Moz's Help Team here.  Unfortunately, there's no way to transfer settings between Campaigns. The only workaround is to set up a fresh Campaign with all the same settings manually — there's no way to do this automatically. Sorry about that! ​If you have any more questions, feel free to reach out to us at help@moz.com and we'll do our best to help you out.

Hi there Joel! This is not currently on the roadmap, however I have passed along your feedback to our development team so that we can consider this when we are reviewing future changes and implementations to the tools. Let us know if we can help with anything else!

Sorry for any confusion here. The Spam Score in the new Links v2 and Link Explorer reports is quite a bit different than the previous version of Spam Score. A Spam Score of 28% means that 28% of sites with similar features to yours have been penalized by Google. This does not mean that your site is spammy and if you have not had any penalties I would not be concerned about that score. It is best used to judge the quality of inbound links to your site, giving you a signal to help you determine which of those links needs some further investigation for possible removal. Happy to answer any other questions about the new tool or the score - IanW@moz.com

Hi Alan! We submit your listing data to all listing partners at the moment a purchase completes. It can take 8-12 weeks (3 months) for each one to process our submissions. Hope this helps!

This makes a lot of sense. So I will not make any assumptions about my visitors and will test so as to obtain objective feedback.

Hi Alan, I don't think the extra 3 spaces would affect your SEO / rankings tremendously. Bots would still crawl and recognise the keywords in the URL. If you're after visibility on SERPs, you can optimise your meta title and description in a way that your brand & keywords are visible and clickable. As the meta title font is heaps bigger than the URL and description, that would be the first thing searchers see. Also, I doubt your URL will get truncated in SERPs with the extra 3 characters. Hope this helps!

I definitely understand. My agency works with premium themes / child themes and find that while many are very clunky and bloated, we don't notice any issues with the code not being clean enough. When using pre-built WordPress themes, we find it's important to utilize canonical tags when necessary, always check on page speed, and to noindex unnecessary pages. We also use Yoast SEO plugin, which will cover some themes' faults. Having said that, I'm not a developer, but I'm sure there are themes out there with invalid or unfriendly code. Yoast has a good post on choosing WP themes: https://yoast.com/perfect-wordpress-theme/

In general, from what I know, the WordPress codex itself is relatively SEO friendly. When we're talking about which theme to go with – it's true a custom built theme is probably going to be less bloated and provide faster site speed. I would encourage you to audit (or have someone else audit) your competition. If you have similar content, similar link profiles, similar brand strength, etc... then site speed could be a factor that makes a difference – especially when Google issues a page speed update. However, if they have you beat on other fronts, I would put more effort into link building or content generation before worrying about which theme to go with. Does that make sense? It depends on many factors, but I would estimate building a custom theme will be at least 2X the work of utilizing a theme. And yes, the maintenance of custom themes and custom plugins is a good bit more involved than simply updating pre-built themes and plugins.

The 3rd paragraph of your answer, which refers to "lighter code", are your referring to a custom theme or can a child them have light code as well?

If your developer is asking you to select a theme, it sounds like he wants to work directly on a theme because he's going to create a child theme. By selecting the parent theme first, the structure is already there and he can do some easier CSS tweaks. If I were you, I would step back and determine whether you are paying him to create a custom theme for you, or just to create a child theme. There are pros and cons to both. The pros to a child theme are that the parent theme should continue to receive updates so your theme is not frozen in time; as accessibility, design, and SEO enhancements go into the parent theme, those will continue to apply to your site. The main advantage of a custom theme is the lightweight code base - your site should load faster as it only contains the elements you need, and not a bunch of extras that you may never use. Depending on how it's coded, a custom theme may also be better for SEO - again because there's simply less code there weighing things down. If your contract with the developer does not state whether he'll create a brand-new custom theme or just a child theme, I'd take the time to have a quick conversation and get both of your expectations on the table so you can determine what will work best in this situation. If it turns out that a child theme is the best option for you at this time (perhaps due to budget, or due to a desire to have continual updates but not have to pay someone to continually update a custom theme), then I'd have no qualms allowing the developer to work directly in WP on the child theme. It's easier to adjust things on the fly and show a client an actual prototype where they can resize the browser and see all the responsive sizes, and it will save time all around. However, if a custom theme is the way to go, I would ask if he is giving you a truly custom theme or if he's working with some predetermined framework or parent theme and only making tweaks to a child theme. That really is the only reason I can think of that a dev would insist on designing in the code itself rather than mocking things up.

Hi, Check out this link.

Fortunately, I do have full control of the server and backups. But I should have never agreed to allowing the modification of plugins. At the time I did not understand the implications. Would it help a new coder if the previous developer  provided a detailed description of the modified plugins? What if I agreed to pay the old developer to act a consultant to a new developer? My developer believes he is in the drivers seat and is charging me 3-5x what is reasonable and fair.  Result is that I can't afford to make any meaningful improvements to the site.

For suggestion 1, I should clarify that you already are using Microdata. Your Microdata is repeating what is already in the page, rather than "tagging" your existing content inline. Microdata is a good tool to use if you are able to tag pieces of content as you are communicating it to a human reader; it should follow the natural flow of what you are writing to be read by humans. This guide walks you through how Microdata can be implemented inline with your content, and it's worth reading through to see what's available and how to step forward with manual implementation of Schema.org with confidence. Will these solutions remove the duplicate H1 tag? Whatever CMS or system you are using to produce the hidden microdata markup needs to be changed to remove its attempt entirely. The markup of the content itself is good, but it needs to be combined in with existing content or implemented with JSON+LD so that it is not duplicating the HTML you are showing the user. Are these options relatively simple for an experienced developer? Is one option superior to the other? Both should be, but it depends on your strategy. Are you hand-rolling your schema.org markup? Is somebody going into your content and wrapping the appropriate content with the correct microdata? This can be a pain in the butt and time-consuming, especially if they're not tightly embedded with your content production team. I downloaded the HTML and reviewed the Microdata implementation. I don't mean to sound unkind but it looks like computer-generated HTML and it's pretty difficult to read and manipulate without matching tags properly. Is one option superior to the other? Google can read either without issue; they recommend JSON+LD (source). In your case, I'd also recommend JSON+LD because: Your investment in Microdata is not very heavy and appears easy enough to unwind The content you want to show users isn't exactly inline with the content you want read by crawlers anyway (for example, your address isn't on the page and visible to readers) It's simple enough to write by hand, and there exist myriad options to embed programmatically-generated schema.org content in JSON+LD format Please review this snippet comparing a Microdata solution and a JSON+LD solution side by side. PLEASE DO NOT COPY AND PASTE THIS INTO YOUR SITE. It is meant for educational and demonstrative purposes only. There are comments inline that should explain what's going on: https://gist.github.com/TheDahv/dc38b0c310db7f27571c73110340e4ef

The WP migration plugins I'm referring to do a rewrite of the URLs in the database. And yes, this is critical to a solid migration, instead of using redirects. There are a number of WP tools for this. My preferred tool is BackupBuddy (paid- 40% off this month) as it does an excellent job of the migration and is then a top-notch tool for managing the ongoing backing up of the site, as well as helping create a staging version of the site for future dev and maintenance purposes. I've also used the free Duplicator plugin for one-off migrations, and have used Updraft Plus on occasion as well. The majority of the work is in tuning up the site after migration, and yes, making sure all the related functionality and tools have been updated as well. My timeline would look something like this: Create addon domain in hosting cPanel for new domain and enable AutoSSL certificate - 15 mins Use migration plugin to move site to new domain - 1 to 1.5 hours depending on experience Run quality Assurance testing to insure all of site and functionality is running properly under new domain and HTTPS, including updating CDN and testing forms - 1-2 hours. Review and update 3rd party tools and off-site profiles - 2 hrs Implement final DNS changes and redirection of old domain to new, add change of address in Google Search Console - .5 hr Miscellaneous, including setting up backup protocol for new domain - 1 hr (And don't forget 3-4 hours of careful monitoring and followup for any errors over the following 4-6 weeks after migration, plus earning of new links to the new domain, and getting existing links replaced with new ones to the new domain where possible.) For a total of about 6 or 7 hours for the migration work itself. You're right, a clearly laid out and well-priortised project plan for this kind of migration is absolutely essential. You need to know exactly what's going to be done, and in what order, so you can insure all necessary steps are taken. To be blunt, many devs (even really good ones) don't take into account the extra details necessary in migrations like these that an experienced SEO pays attention to. Having all the images on Amazon CDN actually simplifies the migration somewhat as those images will not have to be moved during the changeover, just have the CDN adjusted instead. The SSL should absolutely be installed on the new domain before migration - otherwise, you are going to add a lot of wasted time and complexity rewriting the database URLs a second time after the domain name change to update them to HTTPS. Paul

Hi Kingalan I did offer to help after you emailed me. I emailed back but didn't hear anything back from you. Regards Nigel

Hi Kingalan, This tutorial might help you. It worked smoothly for me. Hope it works for you too. Good luck! Mª Verónica Ps: In case you are using the Yoast plugin, there is an option into the set up for display or not the dates. watch?v=NQ4ygSA4aP0