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I agree with Russ here and there are two important reasons for this

1. You don’t have any place from where you can contact the webmaster
2. Disavow will tell Google that you don’t need a link juice from these websites and disavowing them (as Russ said) isn’t going to hurt your rankings in anyway.

Hope this helps!

You said you remove the index.php from the robots.txt. I just wanted to when did that happened? Because after removal, it usually took some time to get back in index (crawler need to recrawl the website accordingly).

My advice is to resubmit your robots.txt and updated sitemap.xml to Webmaster console and wait for the next crawl and this should be fixed.

Hope this helps!

WHOIS is a good way to find their contact information and if this is not working find them on social media like facebook or twitter as most websites usually respond to that. If this isn’t working, I don’t think you are left with much option and you probably have to give the bad news to your client.

Another thing you can do is to see where they are fetching their data from if they are fetching data from big data aggregators you can fix the information there and it will get update accordingly.

Hope this helps!

Ideally just by changing the title tags the index should not be dropped but if this is something you have noticed, you can always update your sitemap.xml and resubmit it to Google and in the next crawl it should be indexed again.

Hope this helps!

I am not a developer so any developer with a SEO background can tell you better but in general page load speed is important both from user point of view as well as search engine rankings and as far as W3C validation is concern, there are quite a few errors that you can ignore in order to stick with your page load speed.

Hope this helps!

I am a little confused, normal ecommerce websites usually work as domain.com/category/subcategory/products and as your URL structure contains product/category I believe this is not a common scenario.

Here are my general recommendations.

1. If you are changing the URL structure and removing products from the URL, see how many external links are pointing to the internal pages as even if you set proper 301, some of the link juice will be lost and that will impact your rankings.
2. Around 50 redirections are not that much so you can do it all at once but before doing that you should have to have a plan B in-case of anything goes wrong.
3. The rankings and traffic are going to go down for a bit so you have to have a plan to get some new links so that the traffic and ranking can be restored.

Hope this helps!

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!

The straight answer to this is NO! You cannot look in to analytics data and see who are visiting these pages and where are they coming from but yes you can always look in to their back link profile and see which websites are linking to those pages and guess accordingly.

Just a thought!

Let’s go basic for a while!

If two website have the similar content, Google is going to consider both website as duplicate content. If I would be at your place, I would have created separate content for both websites so that Google consider as unique content.

If they contain two different locations, most probably you would have different physical locations as well, why not include your physical locations on the website and add business listings in Google local. Once you do that, chances are you will start ranking for the right kind of audience.

Hope this helps!

Honestly speaking, it was some other website, I would have encouraged you to set a do-follow tag but as they are social media plguins, there is no problem with that!

I personally think, anything follow or no-follow both should work fine and it should any affect your SERP positions.

Just a Thought!

Thanks Matt, videos remind me of every moment I spend at MozCon. It was great meeting you at the birds of the father table

I will use the basics here!

You have 2 website, website "A" is a total SPAM and website "B" is decent and showing some positive moments.

When you shut down your first website, make sure all of its content is out of the Google index and all the links are now linking to either 404 page or some other pages other than the content itself.

Also, make sure that the content is not used elsewhere.

If this is done, you can reuse the content slowly on your B website and run stuff accordingly and I am sure there shouldn’t be any problem with that!

Personal Opinion, my idea is to build the newer version of the content (may be by adding more facts, data and figures to it) and reuse it on the website so that it not only pleases search engine but the real audience accordingly.

Just a thought!

EGOL sir, you probably nailed it!

Whenever creating titles and descriptions you have to think about two areas

1. Your search audience
2. Search Engine Rankings

Id I would be at your place, I would list down all the important keywords in one document and then map the keywords on different pages of the website accordingly. Once done and I know what keywords I should be placing on each URL/page, I will move accordingly.

Once I have keywords mapped, next thing is to divide the pages as per the priorities. Important, Less Important and rest of the pages

Start with important pages, than move towards less important pages and then the pages that are on the website but not your priority at all.

As EGOL said, dedicate some time in your day may be half hour everyday (if you have another person to do the job in that case its different) and get the job done. This way it will be more efficient and closer to what your audience is looking for

Hope this helps!

1. I absolutely agree with you!

2. Obviously i am not an expert but I tried to explain this point to him as per my knowledge and experience but i guess he want some "expert" to explain this to him.

3. Thank you for pointing this out as the tone was pretty much rude (to be atleast).

Not sure what exactly is a satisfactory answer to him but as far as results in Google.com they are not always as per the guidelines. Type in “SEO Services” and you will find companies who are ranking on basis of blog comment spam.

But they are much better than what I use to see previous year!

I think Google is working hard to make their SERP results pure but they are 100% pure and as per the guidelines is not something I will agree with.

It’s a process and it will take time #iguess

I am in Pakistan and that is why I do check websites in rankings from time to time and I have to say that there are many niches and areas where Google still allow spammy websites especially when it comes to Google.com.pk (maybe because Google give less important in our area).

The best idea is to report this URL to Google to bring this to their attention and may be in the next Google penguin update, this got hit.

In my opinion, there is not much you cannot do other than reporting it to Google.

Hope this helps!

Ok, so here is a thing why do you want to switch from http to https version? If this is because of the fact that it helps Google rankings, I would suggest not go for it as it only give you a small benefit (if any).

If your website is small and there are only few pages then going for 301 redirection is a good idea just 301 redirect your pages so that link juice transfers to the preferred version.

If your website is big and you think that rel canonical is the only solution, my idea is to go with http version as moving https without redirection will hurt your rankings to a good extent.

Again, this is pretty much depends upon what your end goal is… so decide what you want to achieve at the end of the day and act accordingly.

Hope this helps!

I have seen website lost their rankings and traffic when they change their hosting server where the files are located where as I never heard if someone change their DNS (domain name stays the same) has lost any rankings at all.

This is my assumption but again I would suggest you to talk to the hosting company and discuss this issue with them and they might be able to give you a better insight of what they are up to!

Hope this helps!

I agree with Adam, the reason why I would recommend adding full URLs in the internal links is because if some other blog reshare (if not steal) your content and put it up on their own blog, the links (if not full URLs) will be broken.

Adding full URLs will allow new audience to reach out to you without a problem.

Hope this helps!

Here is my take on this!

In my personal opinion all TLDs are similar in the eye of Google it’s just that people tend to consider .edu, .gov and .org links more authoritative and link to it naturally as compare to .com and .net domains and which is why special TLDs tend to win the race but this is not always the case.

My advice is to see if the org domain has a good and clean link profile and if they are getting a link from quality sources, then go for it and if not the idea is to pass it like any other non-quality domain you pass.

In my opinion, saying that Google give importance to some domains as compare to others is nothing but a myth.

Hope this helps!