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hey camarin, so far I see 271 URLS indexed for the search "site:https://www.northshoreymca.org". There are of course a couple of changes I would do like try to have a friendlier look to the tag URLs instead of having the tag parameter, but anyway it seems that it's working. Also PA for this page https://www.northshoreymca.org/locations/haverhill/ is 33. I think as you said it was just a matter of time. I hope your problem got fixed.

Sure! I'm glad you found that useful, it's always good to ask since in seo there's no clear path to the success, share the experience and doubbt is always helpful

Agree, it totally depends on what's up with the website. It may be more or less work, but unless they caused a google penalization for changing their website (ex. unwanted cloaking) it should be a matter of fixing the broken stuff.

Most likely google lost the track of their backlinks and without proper 301 redirection (which may have been sent all to the homepage is not helpgin them recover).

I would recommend try get access to their GWT first so you can assess how doable is the work for you. You can make a preventive analysis at no cost which will  help you understand the timeline and weight every single action you'll need to take, and how much are your clients able to support you.

I would not focus too much on GSC if the site has been recently built, the place where you want your pages to be is google index

The place I would check is GA to see how many of your pages are getting at least 1 visits and which ones don't. You can then look for the pages which are not getting traffic and understand if they are not being indexed or not ranking high.

This page for example https://www.northshoreymca.org/programs/creative-arts I've noticed that you're using the rel="<a class="attribute-value">shortlink</a>", which I don't think it's adding too much value, probably is making things messier, as you two different version of your page, in fact if you check for /node/ folder you're finding pages you don't want (ex.https://www.northshoreymca.org/node/145 instead of this <a class="attribute-value">https://www.northshoreymca.org/content/ymca-north-shore-annual-gala</a>) I would set up a 301 at least so you ensure that google is not deciding which is the best page to index and serve to users, I know you hav a canonical but it could be something you could test, and help google not making too many decisions, especially because canonical is just a recommendation done to bots, and which google normally doesn't follow boldly for new sites.

hoep this helps, let me know how it goes!

this is one of the few things where google has a pretty clear statement:

"If you think a content is relevant to your users you should always make it clearly visible"

If you think about that it makes complete sense, if someone searches for a content and clicks on a result they expect to see that text, if that is hidden somewhere they won't consider that result relevant for their search, and that's what google do not want to happen.

I have to agree that the 500 words content still works for the long tail, so I would say, keep your important content at the top of the page and reference other supplementary content at the bottom or at the side but always try to make it visible.

You can see Google standing on Barry Schwartz latest article on google discounting tabbed content

As an addiitonal thing it's totally safe to hide some content on your mobile version if you've a responsive website for improving user experience, as far as that content is clearly shown in your desktop version.

hoep this helps

Hey Becky,

quick note here, I may not be understanding correctly but I see one thing omitted. While I agree that in the long run you'll need the 301 ony from pages which receives links from outside in order to keep the SEO juice flowing into your website, I think you should also apply 301 to pages which doesn't, just because need to understand that when one page returns a 404 which is the one you want to be indexed instead of it, (if you have one). This will make the transition process easier for google to digest.

e

You have to be natural. That is the key. If the page you're linking is about "red leather boots" then the anchor should reflect that. What you have avoid is forcing things.

Example of a good breadcrumb
Home > Shoes > Red Leather Boots

Now an over optimized one
Home > Boots > Red > Red Leather Boots

You are repeating words that do not add any value, same things happens with URLs many people repeat their product in the folder then in the URI of the page.

My recommendation would be to keep it optimized but without forcing anything. If you are in doubt if Google will like it or not, think about your users. Will they like this link showing that text or will it be too redundant? there you got the answer

There are places where variation is not only allowed but also recommended, ex. external backlinks, internal links from other pages, etc. You may want to use call to actions or LSI keywords. You can use this tool to find interesting LSI terms: https://lsigraph.com/

about the breadcrumb I would keep it always the same. Breadcrumbs purpose is not for optimizing anchors but to give users a navigational support so if I were you I would always keep them descriptive but never over optimized.

That could be completely normal. Google sends a warning because you're giving conflicting directions as you are preventing them to crawl pages (via robots) you asked them to index (via sitemap).

They do not know how important those pages may be for you so you are the one that needs to assess what to do net.

Are those pages important for you? Do you want them to be in the index? if that's the case change your robots.txt rule, if not then remove them from the sitemap.

About the previous answer robots text is not used to block hackers but quite the opposite. Hackers can easily find via the robots txt which are the pages you'd like to block and visit them as they may be key pages (ex. wp-admin), but let's not focus on that as hackers have so many ways to find core pages that it's not the topic. Robots txt is normally used to avoid duplication issues and to prevent google from crawling low value pages and waste crawl budget.

Hi QuickLearner,

You are actually raising a very interesting point. So, as for disavow you have to disavow links pointing to the current site and the ones pointing to any other property you own which is 301ing to it to be extra safe.

Remember that the disavow file should include all URLs/Domains that are pointing to your site that you are not able to remove by yourself or after trying to ping the webmaster. Based on this:

• you should disavow in your http site all the links that are pointing to the HTTP site only that you marked as spammy
• since you're going to make many changes on the disavow file, it may be a good moment to further reanalyze links you want to include vs you want to remove. Just ensure you're doing it right.
• the HTTPS site disavow file should contain all the links of the HTTP site + the ones pointing to it. Again only the links you want to remove obviously
• Even if sites that have expired can be safely removed as they're not linking to your site anymore, in the past I always kept them. Two reasons:

1. sometimes google index is not very much up to date especially with tiny, low quality sites, which these ones may be. The site may have disappeared but if google doesn't drop it, it still counts as a link to your site
2. you never know what's the real reason behind that site 4XX,5XX. So in case they may reappear I would just keep it there. It's like an IP blacklist. I don't know if that IP is still used but just in case I keep it there.

I hope this helps you!

e

I imagine there is no way to show the new design and layout on the old domain.

If that's the case I find option #2 to be the best. You are showing the new website while keeping the areas you're developing closed, and without any redirects. It's critical that you place redirect from old to new website after everything is ready so you can make a page by page or section by sections redirect and not send everything to the homepage.

I understand that clients sometimes wants to move forward but it's better to make things right. You're still providing hiim/her and option to start marketing it, although I still think it's not a good idea as people will see a work in progress website. Ensure to explain all the drawbacks on moving on early as you may be wasting a good marketing opportunity.