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Hi,

I definitely agree with you that you should never sink to that level and should rather always build great content instead. However nowadays it's harder to say if these backlinks really put them in front of your competitors as they could already be disavowed by them. I think in this case you could argue that these links are not disavowed. You could report the links to Google so they can have a look at it.

Hi Steven,

Good question, I work for a publisher and on a in-regular basis we post content that is already been published on another blog. What we look for is greatly unique content, but what we always do is is point the canonical back to the original URL so we won't get into trouble by publishing any duplicate content. We also attribute the author with a link (although most times nofollow). I wouldn't post your content to too many sites (max 2).

I agree with what is said above, in addition you could also add the ignore parameter in GSC. As it 's basically adjusting the page content based on that. It's a bit unclear how much information that is really sending to the crawlers but it probably can't hurt.

Hi,

I would go with C, as that option seems to cover all the old pages as best as possible from your old site on to the new one.

Martijn.

You would usually just have the page 404 as it's some information that doesn't exist anymore. If the page is still receiving significant traffic you could redirect it to a similar page, but over time the traffic will then decrease anyway.

Reach out to people you see writing about link building on a more advanced level. If they're talking about creating strategies which don't involve any outdated strategies then you're on the right path. I also think it's noteworthy that it should be somebody within the same country as they know the audience much better. I would be weird if I started as a Dutch person link building for the German market (they have a very different culture, especially on the web).

As far as I could know based on your description I'd like to know if there also is a main site. If there is why not do all your campaigns and content performance over there so you would fully benefit from doing everything over there.

I think Daniel already did a great job answering the question what you should be focused on around the migration itself. By to answer your question specifically. I would focus on making sure that the actual directory links + pages will be in place. Sitemaps is usually something that you build for making sure that there is support for them so you can have more insights. It's not something that can help you lead your SEO strategy, it provides insights but in itself doesn't create a ton of value compared to the other stuff that you can work on.

Like Drones already mentioned, I would try to figure out what search engines could potentially still know about the history of your site. So make sure to check through all the available tools: Google Search Console (if you already own the domain), Majestic SEO, Open Site Explorer and Ahrefs what kind of domains are linking to your site and what type of links they are. Relevant or non relevant. If the majority of them is it probably will harm you in this case as you have too many non relevant links pointing to your site. If you barely can't find anything about it, I wouldn't worry too much about it.

Hi Tof,

Quora's got indeed a great community. If you could sent me your email address via a Direct Message then i'll make sure you'll receive an invite for Quora.

Hi Rob,

I would always recommend to also add the HTTPS version to Google Webmaster Tools. I even go as far nowadays to both register the www and non www version of the domain name in Google Webmaster Tools. Mostly I want to be absolutely sure that I see all the data on our own project or for clients.

I would immediately start looking into any solutions that offer an API to make sure you can pull keywords at a fast pace for the 20k products that you offer. By doing this you can cross examine them to make sure you have all the right data sets to make good decisions.

As far as I know how Yoast can create the sitemaps it's just a dump of all the articles that you have in WordPress. So your use case wouldn't be solved with just installing the plugin. You would probably have to work with either what you have or put some effort into rewriting how there sitemaps are being generated.

Hey!

Usually tag pages are pretty useless and they could be removed if they don't provide any additional information. In your case I would make sure to see if there is any overlap between tags and categories and accordingly to that remove the tags. You could use the canonical tags, but that's mostly putting band aid on something that is fundamentally broken I'd say.

Martijn.

At least a very detailed technical audit of where you site is causing issues and what you can improve. Also a very decent keyword research to figure out what you're already ranking on and could easily improve. Then a plan + execution on how the agency is going to drive certain groups of keywords/intents to the top of the rankings with creating great content and how they're aiming to do research around what makes sense.

Hi Thomas,

I absolutely agree with you, I've seen some successful and some note quite successful rebrandings been done in the last couple of years and for sure I would like to know how Moz covers this. Luckily Rand already agreed with us on this as stated in his post: "We'll be sure to do an interesting case study on the impact this domain migration has on our search traffic. :-)".

So hopefully we'll see it popping up in a few months.

Well the best way to explain more about this would to guide you here: https://moz.com/blog/google-link-command-busting-the-myths it's already from 2009! but I'd say still relevant. These link commands are pretty useless these days. I'd set up the Google Webmaster Tools the right way to make sure that the data on your external links is up to date.

Hi James,

The right syntax is:

Sitemap: https://www.pkeducation.co.uk/post-sitemap.xml
Sitemap: https://www.pkeducation.co.uk/sitemap_index.xml

When you retry it should show up as working.

Martijn.

Hi,

Ini this case you're talking about the version parameters in the URL for a JS file I would really focus on other things. This is expected and encouraged behavior for URLs like this and Google doesn't find this an issue at all.

Martijn

Hi Catherine,

Depends on what position you'll end up. Which likely will be position nr1 as the quality score for your own brand name will likely be very high. Then you would drive up the CPC probably, but I must say that brand bids are usually very low. So only if you have thousands of clicks on them every month it probably won't affect your competitors spend that much ;-).