Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Generally, optimizing a page means that you are targeting a specific key term you want to rank for. While you might not see measurable "negative" SEO effects of having pages with no content, I believe that you could use those pages to target key terms. Images rank as well as pages. You can use image alt attributes and add some content to those pages which may help drive some traffic. I like to play safe rather than sorry. It takes a little bit of work, and you might not have keywords for those pages yet, but you could use the images as ranking tools.

Option one is better because of the punctuation. Hyphens are better than periods.

I understand the theory but I disagree. When you use your H tags properly it doesn't necessarily make a difference where they are located. H1 tags are usually the title, so it is better to have them higher on the page, however it doesn't negatively effect you if they are closer to the bottom of the page. My h2 and h3 tags are actually above my h1 tags and I have not seen any negative effects from this. The important part of these tags is the keyword use and whether or not they are used in order of importance, h1 most relevant to page, h2 is like a subtitle and so on.

The concept of optimizing the internal page for Blue Widgets should be the same as your home page. It should contain relevant links and on page optimization focusing on your keyterm. In this case, blue widgets. You would want to make sure that you use this term in your meta title, description, in the URL and include relevant content as well. The links are only half of the equation. Having a ton of links and no relevant content will be what gets you in trouble with the engines. As long as you have a balance of links and on page content you should be ok.

They have different purposes, but all relating to preventing the same page from showing duplicate content because of the different ways a URL can be written. There is nothing on this page to show that using a canonical tag can take two different pages and remove the similar content. The purpose of the canonical tag is to set the preferred URL for one page.

I would remove the domain name when you use the query.

moz keyword research in the united states best practice gets a much different SERP than keyword research in the united states best practice.

If you are trying to get a pure SERP result than you shouldn't use your domain name. That will tell you if there are any other search results in the web. If you want to find duplicate content on your site use copyscape.com or go to GWT and look for internal duplicate content.

Again, not only copy creates a duplicate content message. It is having an off html to text ratio, repetitive links in the HTML with not enough copy to balance it out. If Moz is reading a duplicate content error, and the number is increasing week to week I wouldn't discredit the finding simply because you don't understand why the error is occurring. The canonical tag won't prevent two different URLs from showing duplicate content. If you want to do that, no follow one of the URLs. That isn't best practice though, best practice is to fix the copy.

Canonical tags just point non www URL address to www addresses. It tells the engines that whether or not the WWW is used, the two URLs are the same page. It will only solve the duplicate content errors if that is in fact what is causing the error. If the actual cause is duplicate content the only way to solve it is to write unique copy.

I completely agree with Ruben and Tim. You need original, unique informative content. It is such bad practice to not touch your site simply because it is ranking well. You have to keep content fresh and update the site. Stagnation is never good. Even having a blog will help you keep content fresh.

What kind of social presence do you have? Are you posting enough to have valid social signals? I would beef up social engagement, add a blog and get some relevant backlinks.

Depending on when you made the changes, it could just be that they weren't fixed in time for the next crawl. Fixing these duplicate titles are really important for your SEO.

Open the medium priority issues and set it to duplicate page titles only. When you do that you will see which titles are duplicate. Sometimes there are more than one duplicate title so make sure you completely expand each line. I would make sure I go back into all of them and see if what is showing as duplicate on the crawl report is still the same information on your title tags. If it matches, then those pages need to be changed. If the titles are different, then wait another week and just see if the timing was off somehow.

If you have pages with duplicate content there could be a few things triggering it. There could be a too much of the same HTML and not enough text to make the pages look different. The content on the pages could be very thin, and very similar. The best way to offset duplicate page errors on your site is to get original, informative, unique content on those pages. You can set your crawl report to high priority errors, then select duplicate page content. You can then look at all of the duplicate pages side by side to determine if you can get unique content on those pages. If you are getting duplicate page errors for the same web page, one with a WWW and one without, then check to make sure your REL Canonical tags are in place and functioning properly. If the pages are different then you need to get great content up.

I don't think that you should wait to change from HTTP to HTTPS. You are developing an entirely new website and domain name. To the engine this won't look like changes made on one site. They are going to see this as a brand new website. So basically, it isn't a matter of making changes too close together, it is creating the website you want, how you want it, right away.

How do we drive traffic: In light of removing these old pages, and seeing a tremendous influx of 404 errors, I am assuming the pages that were removed were not 301 redirected. If that is the case I would strongly encourage you to redirect those old URLs to your new pages. This will help get traffic to the new pages which will eventually help them rank on their own. It sounds like your pages just dropped off the face of the planet and because the other pages are so new, you are losing all of your organic rankings and subsequently, organic traffic.

How long should you wait to be indexed: Did you submit a new sitemap to Google? I would make sure you have done that. After that, it shouldn't take very long, 2 weeks is the longest I have waited for an index after a sitemap submission.

As far as a penalty goes, check WMT. If you see nothing in there from Google I think you are safe on the penalty side. However, the sudden changes, the large amount of changes and the influx in 404 pages might have moved your site back in rankings while Google takes a look to make sure there isn't any nefarious activity. I wouldn't worry about a penalty unless you actually receive one.

If you are worried about duplicate content, try researching Rel canonical tags to see if they will be helpful to you. It sounds like you made a lot of changes quickly, and that Google needs time to investigate. Unfortunately, you have to kind of wait a little bit. Try the things I listed here, I hope that it helps!

The blocked URLs are probably no follow links throughout the site. Do you have a lot of links pointing outward from pages?

Google is indexing 3511 pages, of which 3331 are blocked by Robots. I would check some of the internal/external links on those disallowed pages. I don't see how it could come up to 3331 blocked pages, but it couldn't hurt to start there.

Definitely get a sitemap submitted asap. It will help for sure.

Definitely get some quality links to that page, and make sure that your content is helpful, unique and engaging. Try not to make so many changes so fast. Give your page time to even out after make changes. If you do too much to fast it will be hard to pinpoint what is working and what isn't. Start with the content, then the meta data, then the links. Sharing the page through social will help too.

I would definitely look into the Panda 4.1 update that happened 9/25. Double check the content on the pages and make sure that it is all relevant.

Google will eventually get rid of them. If you have similar pages to the ones that are 404 errors, then you should redirect them. If you don't then best practice is to let them fall off.

However, if you had key terms ranking on page 1 or 2 on those pages I would definitely redirect them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xp5Nf8ANfOw This is a video by Matt Cutts where he kind of tells you how to handle these errors effectively

This is something that I am very familiar with. We are in almost the exact same situation. Matt Cutts at Google is pretty responsive on this subject. Here is a video where he describes in detail how Google views duplicate content : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQZY7EmjbMA

My professional opinion is that you should try to get as much unique content on the page as possible. I have been successful at getting my customer reviews to appear on site and in the source code of the page. I believe this has directly helped the rankings of my product pages. If everyone has the same content there is really nothing to separate its relevancy in the eyes of the engine and most times the searcher as well. If you are all on the same level where is your competition? What sets you apart from their pages.

Customer reviews, in my opinion, are the holy grail of on page content. If you have no product reviews (tsk tsk) then you can implement in house reviews, like a manager's review or have someone in the company write, in their own words, some informative article between 500-600 words to help give you content that is unique.

Content is king, even duplicate relevant content can be harmful in my opinion. Just because it won't cause a Panda penalty doesn't necessarily mean that the content isn't negatively effecting your SEO.

I don't know if I specifically understand what you are asking. Google hasn't changed the way it uses meta titles. If you have not specifically designated the meta title for your pages, your platform might pull information from the page to populate the title tag. Without seeing the actual page I can't be more specific than that.

I personally would not. From what I have gathered about the latest Penguin update, it really targeted link neighborhoods. That is what you are describing when you are talking about the link profile of this other site.

Ask yourself this, does it look natural? Is there a relevancy from this site to mine? True it is just one link, but is it worth risking your link profiles integrity? My answer is always no.

In my experience XML is really the best practice. You can have more than one site map technically, but you should always have an XML version.