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Canonical tags are used to let Google know which version of two identical/very similar pages to index.

Even if you don't think you have duplicate pages, sometimes you may have duplicates because of parameters or letter case.

They are also helpful if someone scrapes your content and brings the canonical along with it—Google will know where the original is.

So it's good to do this, but just having canonicals on a page will not improve ranking by themselves.

It would be very unlikely that using "and" instead of "&" throughout your site would confer any advantage and it might confuse your customers, if that's not the way they are used to seeing your name. So stick with the & you use in your branding.

As always when these types of questions come up and you are not sure of the answer, go with whatever is the best user experience and you are likely to be rewarded. (Also, take a look and some big sites like Lord&Taylor and see what they do—they don't give up their branding just because there is "and" in their URL.)

How is the name written in other types of official correspondence—letterhead, signage, etc? The look of the name should be standardized across all sources, but that's a bigger issue than just SEO.

In terms of search, using "and" or "&" in searches will likely give you different (but very similar) results—try searching your company name with each one and see what Google already thinks of the two variants.

Using symbols like "&" can be more eye catching than just letters so that can be a benefit on a crowded search results page, depending on what else is there.

The first question you need to ask is why does your company have 15 websites selling the same things? Would having one site rank and the others just be canonical (or eliminated) be an acceptable solution? If the sites have different audiences you can try gearing the descriptions, keywords, etc. to the particular audience of the site you are working on but doing that 15 times in ways that would be unique enough to each site to allow them all to rank well on the same search isn't possible. If you ask about the business reason for the 15 sites, you may be able to work with the company on a realistic path to their desired outcome.

You don't seem to mention which site you want people to look at?

You should write your description in a way that will make people want to click on your link when they see your description in the search results.

But be aware that Google won't necessarily pick your description to show—it shows what it thinks best matches what the searcher is looking for. If your description is heavy on keywords that are not on the page and does not contain words that reflect the content of the page, it probably won't get shown.

Hi Thomas,
As you can see in the answers in this thread, DA can fluctuate with updates and the latest update was April 26. Do you track competitors' sites? That might tell you whether they saw similar changes. One inbound link from a low DA site won't do this. Unless there are other things going on that you didn't mention, this isn't worth worrying about.

I did just this type of thing a little over a year ago and organic traffic is up over 300% now. We made the change mainly to improve the structure of the website(s), with more logical organization and better internal linking. We did do the move all at once (thousands of pages) but it took a lot of behind-the scenes planning to be ready for that.

First came the decisions about what sections and categories made sense for our site. (Using the URL structure to guide users around the site makes it easier for them to find what they are looking for and interlinking between related posts as appropriate is also good—and this helps a lot with search engines.)

Then came the organization of posts into their new categories. To make things easier, we kept the individual path names the same (so www.siteA.com/old-category/old-post-string became www.siteC.com/new category/old-post-string) and uploaded them into their new categories when the time came.

We also used this time to do a limited content review (posts with the most traffic) and we updated a lot of these. We made the choice to keep most of our old posts, even though in our market they can get outdated quickly, to conserve any links we may have acquired. (The main site that we were directing to the new site was pretty old and had picked up a lot of links over time.)

We could have done a more complete content review before the changeover, but in part we wanted to see how these posts did under the new structure—we did get renewed life out of some of them, and we further updated and optimized those.

In conjunction with the export of the old sites to the new one, we made sure to 301 redirect all of the old posts to their counterparts on the new site. For the posts we chose not to bring over, we 301 redirected them to a related post in the same category.

We still occasionally come across things that need to be fixed—old posts that need redirecting/updating or 404 errors that need to be tracked down (one big issue we found was a lot of old pages had old links with hard paths to the old website root domains, causing a bunch of nasty internal not found errors—not good!) but overall we are happy with the change. (Up 308%!)

Yup, just click on the error URL in the list and you get a popup window with two tabs—Error details and Linked from.

Google Search Console tells you the URL of the linking page.

What we do is add explanatory content to the tag pages that are for key concepts for our website and link to them from a "glossary" page—people who are new to some of these terms can go there for definitions. We also link to the relevant glossary page in posts where the term comes up, helping to create good internal linking.

Other tag pages can be noindexed or just ignored—the Moz report is just for your reference.

I like to use Google Search Console (aka Webmaster Tools). If you go to Crawl > Crawl Errors and look at the Not found tab you'll see the pages that couldn't be found, either linked from within your site or from external sites.

(For now—for me at least—I need to use the old version of Search Console as the new one doesn't have this report.)

Noindex doesn't mean the page is invisible to Google, it just means it won't show up in search results. So no one "disappears."

I don't think you will lose traffic if you noindex the login page. People who are doing a search and then clicking on a login link are very likely to be specifically looking for you and if the login result is not there, they'll choose the next best page, like the homepage.

I second Gaston's comment about intent and usability. If searchers are going to be driven to a different page, you need to be sure that they can easily complete their task there.

When we changed domains, I moved several thousand posts, all at once—I don't know of any reason to throttle that. Our organic traffic is up 174% since then, so it definitely didn't hurt anything. (I am assuming that you will be setting up the appropriate redirects and Google will know that this is just a domain change.)

It's behaving exactly the way I'd expect and since it shows up in search, it's clearly indexed. When I search for "dentist, port washington" your listing is the fourth regular organic result, with your preferred title and description. So, good job!

I've not done one myself, but we use CoSchedule for our social media (and are happy with it) and this is what they recommend. The post even includes a downloadable template.

This is an old question—I found it because I was looking for the same information.

In case anyone needs this answer, this is what I found. Also, this.

In brief, yes, cross-domain canonicals are appropriate for syndication.