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That is apparently what Google thinks is the most useful result to return. The searcher knows the URL of the company, but maybe wants to know the name associated with it.

It's hard to tell sometimes exactly why Google does what it does. (Which is what keeps SEOs employed.)

I just popped that into ScreamingFrog and I don't see a noindex on that page, but I do see it on some other pages. (Though that shouldn't stop other pages from being crawled.)

Maybe it was just a glitch that happened to occur at the time of the crawl. You could try doing another crawl and see if you get the same error.

Hmm. How about on the page itself? Is there a noindex?

That just says that you are blocking the Moz crawler. Take a look at your robots.txt file and see if you have any exclusions in there that might cause that page not to be crawled. (Try going to yoursite.com/robots.txt or you can learn more about this topic here.)

It looks like the error you are referring to did not come through in your question. Could you try editing it?

This sounds like you will be pointing/canonicalizing the two similar pages to the third one that is different from them? I am not quite sure why you would want to do that.

If you don't want the 1/2 content available but the pages have some authority (good links), 301 redirect those pages to 3 (if the topic is close enough and you don't have a more similar page) or if they are not strong pages, just remove them and let them 404.

If you do want the 1/2 content available on your site, but don't want it competing with page 3 in search, you could redirect 2 to 1 and rewrite 1 to make it stronger for whatever it is that makes it different from 3, so both 1 and 3 could potentially rank (for different things). Or you could redirect 2 to 1 and noindex 1.

Canonicals are intended for pages with very similar content, however people sometimes do use them as a type of redirect for not-so-similar pages. The problem with this is that a canonical is just a suggestion to Google and, as you mention, Google may ignore the canonical, especially in a situation like this.

The title and meta tags that you yourself post are only suggestions to Google—what is actually shown in the search results will depend on what query the searcher used to get your listing. Google tries to make the results as useful for the searcher as possible. (Try for example "3V Dental Associates, hours" and you will see the hours in the description.) Here is a Yoast post that talks about this (scroll down a bit).

You have to decide how important the new pages are compared to the old ones.

If you really want the new pages to beat the old pages, you should 301 the old pages to the new ones. (You could even make another new page, "old guides," that you could link to from the new page, if there is enough demand for the old guides.)

1. If you are trying to move authority away from the old pages and onto the new pages, the old pages won't be as findable in search. You have to decide whether this is important.

2. Yes, canonicals do pass page rank though (as with many things in SEO) there is debate about the details.

3. Yes, you could do that, but it is sending Google mixed messages. First you tell them to ignore the old page and look at the new page, but then the new page points to the page you said to ignore. (Take a look at Pete Meyers' Whiteboard Friday for more on this.) The other problem with this approach is that the old content would still be out there, potentially getting links or other recognition that you'd rather have for the new page. (Even though page authority can be passed in various ways, you always lose something during transfer.)

First, why can't you canonicalize the old subdomain pages to the new ones? It won't affect people who are using those old pages since the old pages will still be available. Canonicalization only affects search (unlike 301 redirects, which would make the old pages unavailable).

Links from a higher ranked page to a lower ranked page will help the lower ranked page, but if what you want is to have the new pages beat the old pages, this won't do it.

If a page has no links and has not been submitted another way, Google won't see it.

It's been a while since that has been considered as a ranking factor (and it never was a big one).

However—depending on what types of pages these are, I'd leave the bolding (unless it is excessive). It could be useful in terms of user experience—as soon as the person lands on the page, they see what they are looking for.

I use CoSchedule to manage social media (and as a content calendar). Easy to use and nice analytics.

Google has a number of ways to find pages, including links from indexed pages (whether internal to the site or external) as well as sitemaps and Fetch as Google.

Most of the time when you come across a page like that (one that has few if any internal links) it's not an organic-traffic oriented page, it is set up for some other purpose, like a landing page for a marketing effort.

Google's goal is to have the most relevant information possible, so improving and updating your content won't get you deindexed—quite the opposite.

When you say you dropped in rankings when you added new content, what do you mean? The pages you changed dropped down? Or dropped out of Google's index?

It is hard to say why that would have happened without seeing what changed but if you are sure that your changes made the pages better for what they were ranking for, it is likely that they will come back.

In the meantime, be sure you didn't change something you didn't intend to change like the index/noindex status of the page. (It seems obvious, but sometimes these things can just slip through!)

I recently did this with our site of a similar size. We had some categorized posts and a lot of date-based posts (like /issues/cwa/archives/2016/02/post-title) and we moved everything to new categories. We changed our domain name as well, which was an additional issue.

We did it all at once. The month we made the change we had about a 15% dip in organic traffic, which slowly grew the following month. By the next month (so starting about 60 days after the change) traffic was up 30% over our pre-change levels.

Now, not quite a year later, we are up 65% over our pre-change levels and still growing (even though there is still more work to be done). So for me, it was well worth it.

My biggest challenge was making sure that I had a careful and comprehensive 301 redirect table to share with the developers—it was a lot of content to categorize. I started with the pages that had the most traffic/conversions and went from there. I still had quite a few pages that were just brought along for the ride (they were outdated and had little traffic), which I just redirected into a general category. I am going through those bit by bit, updating, redirecting, removing as appropriate.

It's a big job, but it can be very rewarding!

Meta descriptions are not direct ranking factors, but they help get people to click on your result in the search results pages.

Google will not necessarily use your description—it shows what it thinks is most useful to the searcher.

If I am searching for 1-3/4 inch Bugle-Head Coarse Thread Sharp Point Polymer Coated Exterior Screws, those are the words that will likely show up in the descriptions I see, regardless of what you write in the meta description header.

So be, well, descriptive in the meta descriptions and on the page.

Do some searches on the generic product you are promoting and look at a) what their meta descriptions look like and b) what you actually see when you search. (Try different search queries, ones you think your customers might use.)

Thank you Alick, I will try that!

Has anyone received and responded to a notice of class action settlement from Google Adwords?

The sender (and the website it directs to) is adwordsclassaction.com. I see that there was such a thing, I am just not sure whether that domain is the official one to respond to?

That looks like an error in the guide to me. That little arrow symbol next to the URLs generally means it will go to the indicated page and that is what it does in this case.

If you create high-quality, unique useful pages that are well-optimized and also engage people and encourage linking then yes, they will tend to rank well (how well depends on the competition) and help your website rank well. But it is unlikely that simply optimizing on-page SEO for high-volume search terms will be enough to get the result you want. There is a lot of competition out there and many people know SEO basics. (There are many who don't as well, but I wouldn't depend on that as a strategy.)