Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I don’t think there is a way to move the dates but if the problem is still there it should be appearing in the issues section. If not that most probably means the problem has been resolved.

Hope this helps!

Once the website is out of the penalty it usually takes time to come back to its original rakings and in my experience, it’s a slow process. Changing a brand name and start with the new website and content is again a time taking job and it’s not really simple decide one and go with it!

In my opinion, you have to consider several things in mind before taking any decision.

-          How will your audience react to the website if they are going to find the same venders with the different names?

-          What is the guarantee that your new website will not come under the Google Penguin/Panda radar?

If I will be at your place, I would consider the real problem and I think the real problem I see with your website is that you have one channel to get new customers and that was search engine. If this is the case than you should stick with the same website and try to diversify online channels to attract new customers, you can use content marketing as a channel, QnA forums as a channel, Youtube as a channel and more.

Instead of going with the new website instantly, try to find out the root problem and solve it accordingly.

Hope this helps!

I seriously do not understand your question. Can you please try to be a little more specific about your question so that I can answer accordingly!

Please consider!

I believe when you are talking about 1 to 5 million URLs it is going to take time no matter what tool you use but if you ask me screaming frog is a better tool and if you have a paid version of it you still can crawl websites with few million URLs in it.

Xenu is not a bad choice either but it’s kind of confusing and there is a possibility that it can broke.

Hope this helps!

So you exactly have an idea that you can work around with the MLS pages to make them more unique which in my opinion is the ideal choice so let’s move to the real question.

I don’t think no-follow is a bad option but if I would be at your places I would have used rel canonical instead of no follow.

Rel canonical simply tells search engine out of the two identical (or almost identical) page which one is the preferred version of the URL.

Hope this helps!

Thanks Tomas,

I was trying to come up with a detailed answer but nothing was making sense to me at that time. Kudoos to you as you covered all the possible questions

I think I have to agree with Patrick. Whenever you have soft 404s on your website the best way to deal with them is to think about users and then about search engines.

Again as Patrick said, if the products are gone forever, redirect the pages to most relevant product and pass the link juice to other pages as well so that right kind of product started to get ranked. If the product are temporarily unavailable my advice is to show the product details, images with a tag about out of stock  and a popup may be that guide to other parts of the website.

Whatever you use, think about your users and if they are comfortable, just go with it and I am sure search engine will follow you accordingly as at the end of the day what search engine want is the happy user.

Will soft 404 hurt? In my opinion few soft 404s on the website should not hurt but again as you said it might grow in thousands, in that case this is can be a problem and can affect your SERP rankings.

Hope this helps!

There is no rule book for crafting titles except one and that is to create the titles that encourage users to click on the website plus after reading they get a clue of what they are going find in the website. The idea is to test different titles and see is working for you and your business.

I have experienced website that receives are better click ratio when the brand name was added and for few other websites the CTR goes higher as we remove the brand name from the title.

My advice for you is to test and see what works best for you!!

OK, there may be other factors as well but yes exact match domain do have an impact not huge but they do have the power to outreach if all other things are working along.

I think this is what you should do:

-          Audit the website and see how many total links they have and how many are coming from quality sources. Compare it with your link profile and see if this is the problem

-          Another Research why they out rank you can be the quality of content on their website as compare to on your website. You can improve the quality by rewriting content plus adding some additional informative content.

-          Check social and compare it with yours.

Ideally, perform the complete website audit for both websites and if data says you are better it’s just the matter of time that you will again rank and the competitor will either go down or will completely go out from the search results.

Hope this helps!

I am not sure If I get your question correctly but as per the best of my understanding if you are making a switch from http to https it’s not important to upload the disavow file of https as well and this is because 301 redirection will also take search engine bot to https versions and take the same actions accordingly.

But, to be on the safe side if you include https versions in the disavow file, it will only help! J

Let me know if it makes sense to you!

The example of few URLs would help but let me tell you something pretty straight! If the URL is giving a 200 header status that means the URL is there and Moz tool will cover it and show it in the report.

If you think these are “sense-less” pages why not 404 them or redirect them to pages that make some sense! #justanidea

Hope this helps!

This sound like a completely fine idea from the search engine optimization stands point. I mean Google can’t ban you for selling the same product on two different websites J

Good Luck with that!

I will agree with EGOL! In my opinion Google does not discriminate EMDs but according to the latest Moz’s ranking survey it is believed that Google still favor EMD’s to an extent. If you are losing rankings with EMD there can be other issues which can be over optimization, under optimization, low quality links pointing back to the website and more.

Hope this helps!

Last time I used URL removal in GWT was a long time ago and at that time the URL will not get out of the index for ever but for 90 days only and after that it will come again.

The better idea in any case is to use no index, no follow tag on the pages that you want out from the Google’s index!

Hope this helps!

You have site A and other location centric websites B, C, D and more.. (100+). From my understanding, adding a link in the footer (followed) to all the location based website will give Google a red flag. This is because Footer links are generally side-wide.. and adding 100+ side-wide links to a main website does seems like a problem to me!

If I were you, I would have added the link on one page (instead of site-wide) to location based websites. The links should contain either diversified anchor text or may be branded one.

Just a thought but I would love to hear others opinion on this one!

EGOL nailed it!

Probably the best use you are thinking of the domain would be to start another website and get it rank for similar kind of keywords which means you will have two domains giving you traffic and conversions. In my opinion, it is better to work hard on one domain and make it an above avg. domain instead of continuing two avg. domains.

The other use you might have thought is to redirect keyword friendly domain to relevant pages. If the domains are new and they don’t have a decent link profile, they probably will not help anyways. What if you build a decent link profile for my new domain? Good idea but the better idea is to spend that same time on your current website and build some quality links for that website and make it an above avg. one.

Just a thought!

Casey is right Panda and Penguin are different penalties and they should be resolved differently! Penguin has to do with links so if there is a penguin penalty then you must have some toxic link within your link profile.

My idea here is to collect all the links (GWT, Moz, Ahrefs, and Majestic SEO) and then either manually check each link or use Link Detox or Link Risk to kill all the links that are unhealthy. If the penalty is penguin you will receive a Google message to either remove more links (with some examples of the link) or it will give you a positive message that will say “The penalty has now been revoked”

Note: It is better to remove as many bad links as you can before disavow them.

In case of Panda, the problem is within your site and content so may be the content you think is high quality isn’t really high quality in the eye of Google and in this case you should considerer redoing your content.

All in all I believe the decision of going for a new domain is too early at this stage, my advice is to look in to the penalty details and deal with it.

Hope this helps!

I am not sure what exactly the guy was thinking but I highly doubt that this is a right kind of disavow file you should go for.

In order to take down the disavow file. Sign in to Google Webmaster Console > go to this URL > download > Upon clicking disavow links it will show you a popup screen that will show you the last file you have uploaded… just delete that file and you are safe.

New step is to relook into your disavow file and see what links you are putting as negative links and why and once sure upload the updated file again.

Hope this helps!

I believe you really need someone who can do the site audit and tells you what areas of the website need more improvement. I run a screaming frog on your website and I can say that the migration was pretty much done right.

Obviously when you migrate and 301 pages from only to new domain, not all the juice pass to the new domain so loss of link juice can be one of the reason why you lost rankings for any of the key phrases.

You said you were ranking on 9 and 10 and recently moved to 8 and while I was checking your ranking on SEMRush.com it says “7” so seems like you are on your way back to your old position.

Here are the few things I would suggestion you should do.

1. Hire a consultant to do the detailed audit and answer the important questions raised by Matt and few more important questions.
2. As 301ing the pages result in a loss of a link juice to new pages so I will recommend building few good links pointing back to the different pages of the website.
3. Also, update blog more often and see if you can engage target audience on your blog via social media and other relevant sources.
4. Also make sure your site speed, page load time, server connectivity and uptime is up to the mart as this can be a reason.

Hope this helps.

When I search your site in Google it shows me 82 results against my query “site:domain.com” so it seems like Google is slowly crawling your site but you are right the rate of crawling pages is quite slow and to increase this here are few things that you should follow

• Strong Internal Linking

It is important to have a strong internal linking between the pages if you want Google and other search engine to crawl your page. Please check if you have a strong and powerful internal linking between the pages

• Xml Sitemap

The other thing that is missing on your site is xml sitemap. The idea is to add an xml sitemap and add it in Google webmaster tool and this will indicate Google to crawl different areas of your website with no hassle

Hope this will help!