Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I'm looking at a site with the rel="prev" and "next" HTML attributes in place, to deal with pagination.

However, the pages in each paginated category have identical page titles - is this an issue?

Rand gives an example of how he'd vary page titles here, to prevent problems, though I'm not entirely sure whether this advice applies to sites with the rel="prev" and "next" HTML attributes in place: https://moz.com/blog/pagination-best-practices-for-seo-user-experience 

Any advice would be welcome - many thanks, Luke

Hi - I'm looking at an old website and there are lots of 301s internal to that site - what do I do with these when I move to a new site?

Should I list them and adjust them so they redirect to the new site now (instead of from one URL to another URL on the old site) - I'm thinking that if I don't the user will have to travel through one 301 then another to get to the new site, which doesn't seem like a great idea? Your thoughts would be welcome.

Very much appreciated CleverPhD!

Thanks - useful feedback - Do you need to forward existing 301s as well? 301s on the site you're moving from? Or might that create complications?

Many SEOs I know simply upload the new sitemap once the new site is launched - some keep the old site's URLs on the new sitemap (for a while) to facilitate the migration - others upload both the old and the new website together, to support the migration. Which is the best way to proceed? Thanks, Luke

Hi everyone - What is the best way to deal with 404s on an old site when you're migrating to a new website? Thanks, Luke

Yes I agree Andy - many thanks for your response - can't see any logical reason - I took a look at Tripadvisor, out of interest - and although they're not using canonical tag oddly like the site I mention above, they were using the same title tags for each page of reviews (on same hotel) - which, again, doesn't seem logical - surely better if they simply add page 1, page 2 and so on to Title Tag?

Hi - I've been looking at review websites like tripadvisor - I looked at Tripadvisor's hotel reviews and the reviews may extend for several pages, yet they don't change title tags and so on, on each of the multiple pages? Surely it would be a good idea, from an SEO perspective, to change title tags (and perhaps other tags) for each of the multiple pages - even if the change was slight - e.g. "The White Swan Hotel - Reviews p 1" - "The White Swan Hotel - Reviews p 2" and so on? Am I missing something?

Have just been looking at a review site and they're using the canonical tag very strangely, to me.

For example, they may have several pages of reviews of the same item - they use the canonical tag on page 2/3/4 to point back at page 1 - and yet there is no duplication between the pages.

Any idea why they might be doing this?

Hi - I'm assuming image URL best practice follows same principles as non image URLs (not too many files and so on) - I notice alot of web devs putting photos in subdomains, so wonder if I'm missing something (I usually avoid subdomains like the plague)!

Hi guys, I'm working for an electricity company and they want businesses to embed "live energy saving tables" where they choose to, on their website - each table links back to the electricity company.

Now I'm only comfortable with editorially given links these days, rather than "you choose to embed this table and it will link back to us - that's the arrangement" set ups - even when they're not using anchor text.

What are your thoughts?

Thanks, Luke

I noticed "Don’t block your HTTPS site from crawling using robots.txt" here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/https-as-ranking-signal.html

Does this mean you can't use robots.txt anywhere on the site - even parts of a site you want to noindex, for example?

Thanks for your input Andy - some good commonsense there Luke

Thanks for that superb contribution, Don - helpful beyond words for me, because I've never worked with such a site before - hugely appreciated - Luke

Hi - I'm working with a utility company that's produced a calculator for individual households.

When you go to their website and type in your address, various household info is pulled across (from various databases) and a calculation is generated on electricity costs/savings per month - the only unique content on each page = numbers. Beyond that, the content on each page is a template.

There is actually a unique URL for each household (when you click on your property name a unique results page is generated).

I'm worried about thin content penalties - is the best option to nofollow noindex these individual household pages (99% of the site!)???

Many thanks EGOL - some excellent points.

An energy company I'm working with has decided to target 20,000 odd companies on their own b2b website, by producing a new dedicated page per target company on their website - each page including unique copy and a sales proposition (20,000 odd new pages to optimize! Yikes!).

I've never come across such an approach before... what might be the SEO pitfalls (other than that's a helluva number of pages to optimize!). Any thoughts would be very welcome.

Just working with a company that has chosen a home URL with /home latched on - very strange indeed - has anybody else comes across this kind of homepage URL "decision" in the past? I can't see why on earth anybody would do this! Perhaps simply a logic-defying decision?

Thanks Tom - that's incredibly helpful - much appreciated Luke

Hi guys - I'm looking at a website which uses hashtags to reveal the relevant content

So there's page intro text which stays the same... then you can click a button and the text below that changes

So this is www.blablabla.com/packages is the main page - and www.blablabla.com/packages#firstpackage reveals first package text on this page - www.blablabla.com/packages#secondpackage reveals second package text on this same page - and so on.

What's the best way to deal with this? My understanding is the URLs after # will not be indexed very easily/atall by Google - what is best practice in this situation?