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Hi I personally would host them in a subfolder - especially the PDFs as they are likely to gain links and these links will help strengthen your domain.

However if you have them in a sub-domain they won't have the same benefit from the links as Google essentially treats sub-domains as a separate domain. This will also limit the ranking ability of PDFs as they won't benefit from your domains authority on a sub-domain.

Have a look at this article for a bit more insight into subfolder vs sub-domain

- http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites

I hope this helped..

I would have said that breadcrumbs are a positive as they show the user the exact location of the product they are looking at and give them an easy trail to find similar/alternative products. The other areas of navigation in close proximity only show one level (presuming your client means nav menu etc?). Then I would also say that some of the most successful websites such as Amazon still use breadcrumbs in order to help customers from a usability point of view. From a search engine point of view; Google actually displays the breadcrumbs in the search results giving you more links in each search listing, which is a positive thing. Breadcrumbs in search results is likely to help increase click-through as the person searching might not be after the exact result listed but they can see you have a category for those products, so they can click straight through and see if you have exactly what they are looking for.

It must also be remembered that product pages can be accessed a number of different ways - search on site, search off site, links from other sites, through the navigation menu and so on. Therefore a clear trail for the user will help them locate other similar products and make it easier to navigate and engage with the website, meaning higher average pageviews and a lower bounce rate...

I think you will find this post by DR Pete helpful, as I know I did in the past -

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/why-wont-google-use-my-meta-description

Hi Richard - one quick question - are your sites going to be on separate domains and are these domains going to be linking to each other? I am just wondering whether you are trying to keep both sites completely separate or whether you are making it clear that they different parts of the same business? If so have you thought about having both sites on one domain with your homepage making it clear there are two separate areas you service - B2B and B2C? By doing this you will benefit in the long run from a more powerful link profile and therefore greater domain authority and ranking ability - one link will benefit both sides rather than just one domain if you have them separate. It is better to try and build one rich information resource for customers than split it in to several in my opinion. However this all depends on whether having both sides of the business sat under their own folder on one domain is appropriate to your whole customer base? Doing this would also resolve any potential concerns you may have about hosting mulitple websites under separate domains on one server. You often see sites that are trying to sell to customers and to potential resellers having both types of content for the same product on one site rather than separate.

If you have them separate and both rank well you are likely to get customers looking at each site anyway when carrying our research in the SERPs.

However if this is an issue then let put your mind at ease - there shouldn't be a problem with having two separate sites on separate domains as you are making sure that the content is unique. Obviously just make sure you don't have a mass of links between the two. A link to acknowledge their relation is fine though. The only time there would be an issue is if you are trying to hide the relationship from Google and you aren't as you are trying to serve to different customer bases with unique content. Shared hosting on the same IP is very common these days and the only time it has been an issue in the past is when one site on that IP has been penalised. This impacted on other sites - however this even seems to be less common now with more sites appearing and more shared hosting..

I am just trying to find out why you have chosen the structure you have from an SEO viewpoint and making it easier to build authority for your companies web presence.

Have you considered allowing only a certain proportion of each page to show to any visitors including search engines. This way your pages will have some specific content that can be indexed and help you rank in the SERPs.

I have seen it done where publications behind a pay wall only allow the first paragraph or two to show - just enough to get them ranked appropriately but not enough to stop user wanting to register to access the full articles when they find them either through the SERPs, other sites or directly.

However for this to work it all depends on what the regualtions you mention require - would a proportion of the content being shown to all be ok??

I would definitely stay away from serving up different content to different users if I were you as this is likely to end up causing you trouble in the search engines..

Have you considered putting a 301 redirect in place so that the none trailing slash URLs that have links pointing to them redirect to the trailing slash version as that is now your preferred format? It will help reduce duplicate content and cut the potential of wasting link juice if some links point to one version and some to the other. You also need to make sure that your navigation structure is updated to point to the trailing slash version rather than being redirected to it.

Firstly I would ask what the purpose of your link directories were in the first place? How do people submit to your directories and what value do they add to your site apart from possibly having too many links on some of your sites pages? Do you have a lot of spammy sites submitted? I personally would look at cutting this facility as Penguin has hit a lot of link directories and as you say there are a lot of irrelevant sites in your directory! Are your directory pages indexed on a "site:" search in Google?

Have a look in /wp-content/plugins/wp-super-cache/wp-cache-phase1.php you will find it there

Hi Iris

Sorry about the slow reply been very busy - 3600 is seconds which is the equivalent to an hour so it should be fine with this new value.

I agree with Travis if you are going down the keyword rich domain I would go for the one without hyphens.

Hi

I have used the URL removal tool in the past to remove URLs with success - as we know it helps speed things up. What you have done is right and if you are patient Google will start removing each page as it crawls it again. You might find this confirmation from Google reassuring in your situation - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93710?hl=en

Reading the article you posted of when not to use the tool I can't see that your pages fall into any of these categories - but either way I personally can't see using it causing an issue to be honest but its your call.

Hi Hashtag - Ricky is correct - it doesn't really matter either way as the 301 redirect will force the load of the new location page and its content whatever, so you won't be able to access your old page contents as its url is redirected - unless you have logins for your server of course...

Hi Kumar

Oh ok - that makes sense well there are lots of people that can help you on here - however I would consider having a go at some of it yourself as your site isn't huge and you could improve some of the basics before getting help. The resources above should really help and off course you have the community to turn to - just a suggestion to help you get the most for your money. As ever I guess this boils down to your time available and budget - good luck

Best Regards,

Matt

Brand or domain anchor text links are far more natural than keyword anchor text. Gaining links that are brand or raw domain from an authority site will benefit your sites authority. I always look at it like this - if you didn't know anything about SEO and you liked a site that you wanted to link to and this site sold blue widgets for example would you link via the domain/brand name or by entering "blue widgets"? You would go with the more obvious, easier option domain or brand - hence this is far more natural in the eyes of Google and far more likely to have been earned naturally. Increasing authority is all about earning links not (dare I say it..) link building. Focus on creating great content and making people aware of it then the links will start to come naturally. SEO isn't a quick fix, so approach this with a strategy looking to build a quality online presence and establish a relevant audience for your site through social and other channels.

Hi

I can see that Tom and Ryan have done a great job of handling the most obvious issue that may have caused your site to drop in terms of changing to HTTPS. You have also mentioned the fact that you have changed some significant on-page factors which could definitely be the culprit.

However I thought I would just add this - I saw someone move to HTTPS and they did implement the correct redirects and then register both versions of the site in webmaster tools and so on. However they still saw a noticeable drop in their organic traffic which turned out to be caused by a significant drop in site speed after moving to HTTPS.

You may have already checked and your site may seem fast but I would double check the speed of your site with Google Page Speed Insights and GTMetrix (another speed tool I like). If your site seems slow look at what you can do to improve it with the recommendations on these tools (as this will help your site whatever) - also speak to your host and explain you are seeing a decrease in speed can they help.

This tactic worked in this case and I just thought I would mention it as another angle to approach this.

Hope this helps!

This is the correct code and will validate if you copy and paste it into the structured data testing tool -

ASG Seamless Gutters Inc

• About us
• Testimonials
• Email Us

70 Leete St., Springfield, MA 01108 (413) 455-0800 info@asggutter.com <time itemprop="openingHours" datetime="Mon,Tu,Wed,Thu,Fri, Sat 7:00-19:00">Monday - Saturday 7:00a-7:00pm</time>

The postaladdress schema wasn't declared properly so wasn't being read and you needed to close this set of postaladdress schema with a prior to opening hours which are part of the HomeAndConstructionBusiness schema.

Hope this helps

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Hi Laura,

I believe http://www.seopowersuite.com/rank-tracker/ will provide the data you are looking for - you can track keyword rankings on different search engines in different countries and see what page is ranking. This should be easy to monitor your different ccTLDs.

Hope this helps

Matt

I would definitely say that your site is over-optimised and that you are having issues as you have built a lot of landing pages for locations which are very similar just with postcodes and location names being the main difference.I know you have tried to write unique content and specific location information but it still feels very similar and over-optimised purely written as an aggressive way to rank in all these London locations. I would say your site could be classed as being full of doorway pages for all the locations and this is definitely something Google doesn't like and falls fowl of their guidelines thus hurting your ranking ability. You also don't appear to have physical locations in these places so they are more of a service area. As you aren't ranking at the moment I would personally cut everything back focus on ranking for your actual physical location then you may want to choose service areas and build some pages around these, but you don't want to overdo this and you definitely don't want a cookie cutter approach. Look to build pages that really are unique. You also need to look at building the main service areas you cover into your main navigation not at the bottom of your page.

Here is an article on Search Engine Land which addresses this very well and gives you lots of points to consider in order to help you get your site sorted and hopefully ranking - http://searchengineland.com/local-seo-landing-pages-2-0-222583

Have you also looked at how others have ranked for the main terms you mention above? Competition that is successful is always a good place to look

Hope this helps!

Matt

hi - you will want to make sure all your canonicals are updated to https as these are now the master copy of the page. Check out this migration article from http to https guide from search engine land - https://www.google.co.uk/amp/searchengineland.com/http-https-seos-guide-securing-website-246940/amp

Hope this helps

Hi - In my experience doing a rebuild/redesign improving the content and then redirecting sees fluctuations with some rankings dropping initially but overall there being a pretty quick positive response to an improved site with rankings peaking for redirected pages between 3 and 6 months. With quite a few terms that ended up page 1 average position 1-3 i have seen the most fluctuation in rankings during the first 3 months - assuming Google is deciding where you should sit testing a higher position and seeing if you belong there. Hope this information helps a little