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You are correct to noindex it, but I see no reason to nofollow.

Oops, I missed that part. Have you checked Google Search Console to see if someone set any URL parameters?

The first thing I would do is determine how many pages actually should be indexed to see if there's a large discrepancy between that and the number Google shows. A crawler like Screaming Frog can help with this. If you export the crawl to Excel, you can easily remove duplicates in the canonical URL column and filter out the noindexed pages.

If you find there's no real discrepancy, Google may have simply been cleaning house of some really old links in the index that hadn't been crawled in a while.

Beyond that, if you can pinpoint any specific URLs that have been deindexed, use the "Fetch as Google" tool to help diagnose or post it here so the community can take a look.

It's a fairly simple process to transfer ownership of a Google My Business page. See Google's instructions for how to do this.

Yes. I suppose if you have a massive site and you're seeing a problem with crawl budget, it wouldn't hurt to nofollow the print links.  Otherwise, it isn't really necessary.

Are you tracking conversion goals or events in Analytics at all? If not, you might want to set some up on the old site so you can get some before and after stats. I would also keep an eye on some of the data available through Google Webmaster Tools, such as pages indexed, crawl errors (after re-launch), search queries, and crawl stats.

Any chance you can give us the URLs? Otherwise, it's difficult to troubleshoot.  Does this only happen in Google, or do you see it in Bing as well?

Based on what you're saying, I would look first at at a few possible culprits.

• Index Issues - Have you checked to confirm that the home page is indexed by the search engine? Search site:domain.com to check. If not, you may have a technical problem that prevents the
• Internal Link Scheme - Is the other page getting more internal links than the home page, making it seem more important?
• Content - Does the other page have loads more relevant content than the home page?

Is there a particular reason that you don't want to 301-redirect the old domain to the new domain? If customers go to the old domain or even search the domain name, they'll be redirected to the new one automatically. Can you help us understand why this is not ideal?

This sort of thing is very difficult to troubleshoot without the site URL and page in question. Feel free to message me privately, and I can take a look

There are so many variables that can be affected when you migrate sites, especially if you are combining multiple sites under a single domain name.  You really need to perform a full technical audit after any kind of migration or redesign.  Here are a few things that I would check right away.

• Were 301-redirects were set up properly? If they weren't, you may be losing the value of your backlinks.
• Are there any duplicate content problems created by Joomla?
• Was the information architecture or linking structure changed significantly in the process?
• Are there any files left on the server from the old static site that are still indexed by the search engines? (I found this recently during an audit.)

Optimize the umbrella company as a brand for organic search but NOT for local SEO. Use the 3 local venues for local search optimization and it helps to use the local landing page for Google My Business and 3rd-party citations.  For the GMB pages, you really need a separate phone number for each venue even if they forward to the main line.  You can create a Google Plus page for the umbrella company but you should not create a Google My Business listing.

A common post-Penguin misconception is to avoid using important keywords in anchor text at all. You should avoid using the same keyword-stuffed anchor text in a bunch of backlinks to your site, but it's still a best practice to include important keywords in anchor text. Just don't be spammy about it. Make it natural and vary the anchor text. It shouldn't be a problem on your own website as long as it isn't done in an unnatural way that isn't helpful to the reader at all.

Take heart. There are a lot of great SEO companies out there who will strive to work within your budget.  We try to offer options so that clients with smaller budgets can afford our services, but that usually means our work is stretched over a longer period of time. In such cases, it's important to understand that it will probably take longer to see results.  This can be a good option for business owners who understand the need to invest in SEO but can't afford a large retainer.

Google will probably index it, but it won't be given the same weight as content that's immediately visible.

It really depends on your rationale for having two different pages with mostly the same content. Ideally, you could remove the old page or merge the old with the new and 301-redirect the old URL to the new one.

On the other hand, I recognize that there may be a legitimate business case for keeping both pages. In that case, you would add the new URL within the rel=canonical tag to the old page. That tells the search engines that the new page is the one that should be indexed by search engines and come up in search results.

Having the same phone number and address on two websites is not a duplicate content issue. It's very common because of business directories all over the web. If that's the only duplicate content you're worried about, then you're fine.

Yes, you are right that Google has included this caveat about deceptive and manipulative practices that relate to duplicate content, but that is not a "duplicate content penalty."  Merely having the same description for product variations will not get you penalized. That's a common issue with ecommerce websites and isn't the sort of black hat tactic that will incur the wrath of Google.

The backlinks shouldn't hurt you as long as you aren't doing anything spammy. This can happen quite naturally with a lot of websites.

The important thing to know is that 1,000 links from a single domain won't help as much as 1,000 backlinks from 1,000 different domains.  Try to balance it out with backlinks from a variety of different websites. That way you'll have a more natural backlink profile.

Have you reported the change using Google's change of address tool? Here's the intro from Google:

If you've moved your site to a new domain or subdomain, use the Change of address tool in Search Console. A change of address notification helps you manage the transition needed by Google to index your new URLs at the new address, while minimizing impact to your current ranking in Google Search results.

A change of address notifies Google about the new URLs for your existing content, so that we can update our index to reflect the new domain for your pages. This updated index status remains in effect for 180 days, by which time Googlebot will have crawled and indexed the pages at the new address.

There is no limit to the number of redirects that Google is willing to crawl within a site. However, there's a limit to the number of redirect chains that they'll crawl. A redirect chain is when one page redirects to a page that redirects to a page that redirects ... and so on.

In your case, the best thing to do is set up canonical tags to let Google know which version of the URL should be indexed. That way, it doesn't matter if Google can access the https page, and you won't have the duplicate content problem that you have now.

I can't advise you on the best way to set this up with Drupal, but you'll need to be wary of any type of automatic canonical tags. You may end up with an "http" canonical link on the http page and an "https" canonical link on the https page. That doesn't solve the problem at all.

If you are not already familiar with canonical tags, you can learn more at the links below.

• https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en
• https://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization
• https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html

By the way, I would set it up so that Google indexes the https version of your pages rather than the http version.

When you say you currently have self referencing canonicals, is the following happening?

The page http://example.com is canonicalized to http://example.com.

The page https://example.com is canonicalized to https://example.com.

If so, this is the bigger problem because Google sees these as 2 different URLs and may index both of them. Furthermore, you could be splitting backlinks between 2 URLs unnecessarily. This duplicate issue may be part of the reason you saw organic traffic drop when you launched your new site.

If the HTTPS URLs are already being indexed by Google, go ahead and canonicalize the http URLs to the https URLs. In other words, http://example.com will canonicalize to https://example.com.

By setting up the canonical this way, Google will fold the two URLs together and correctly treat them as the same page.