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I would definitely at least clean up the article HTML and structure before launching the pages, since you don't want people who might land on them before they're updated to have a weird experience. As far as optimizing them for SEO, I think you could go ahead and make the pages live and roll out edits as you make them. Prioritizing the pages based on highest-traffic/best-converting first is the way to go. If switching your platform is going to make your site easier to crawl, you definitely want to do that sooner rather than later - plus, having the new pages live will allow them to start accumulating some links even before you make keyword-related changes.

In general with a major change like this I recommend changing as few other things as possible simultaneously. It's OK to make more gradual changes, and it gives Google fewer things to get used to at one time.

It's fairly common for Google to "test" ranking a brand-new page pretty high for a relevant query, and then after a little while, for that page to settle into where it will be ranking long-term. The good news is that Google is finding your new pages and understanding their targeted queries; the bad news is that they're not sending enough of the signals Google needs for them to rank that well long-term. Some things that will help:

• Work to boost your organic click-through rate through better calls to action in your title and description tags.
• Look at what happens when people click through to the page from organic search, during those first few days when the page ranks well. Are they spending a decent amount of time on the page? Are they moving deeper into the site? Or are they bouncing right away? It's likely that google is using user data such as click-through rate, pogo-sticking and dwell time to determine whether or not the page is a good result for that query.
• Make sure the pages you're creating are robust and provide a complete answer to the query, and, if possible, point users to a next step in their research or decision process.
• Brooks is correct that building up your domain authority over time will also help you rank better, so that should definitely be part of your long-term plans.

Did you receive the answer you were looking for?  I'm going to go ahead and mark this question as "Answered," but if you need more info or help please let me know.  Thanks!

Hi Marcy,

If the sites are using your brand name and/or other brand terms, and your brand is copyrighted, you may be able to file a Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown request with Google: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dmca-notice?pli=1\. As they note in the description on the tool, be very clear about whether the other site's actions actually constitute a violation of your copyright before filing the request.

I think it's unlikely that these new sites are impacting your site's performance in search - I was a little unclear about the JavaScript redirect, though (I'm at work and don't want to click on the links you posted on my work computer). Is it redirecting from their site to your site, or from their site to another site that is the porn/junk site? If it's the latter, that shouldn't be affecting your site at all. If it's the former, you may want to file disavow requests at the domain level for those sites just in case.

If your drop in rankings was caused by these new sites, I would expect to see a drop in performance across the board, rather than for specific queries, so I recommend that you keep digging on other reasons for the drop. I would take a look at the sites that are ranking now for the terms you've lost rankings for. How are they different from your site? What sites are ranking now that weren't ranking when you were on top? It may be that Google has decided that your site doesn't fulfill the search intent for those keywords, so taking a look at the sites that rank now will give you some insight into the kinds of pages that Google wants to rank for these terms. Since these were highly-converting terms for you, consider investing in PPC ads for these terms while you work to regain your organic presence. Good luck!

Having one Organization tag and then marking up each location with LocalBusiness is how I would do it. It's hard to say what might be going on without knowing a bit more about your implementation. Is all this markup on one page (e.g. an "Our Locations" page), or is each tag firing on a separate location page? You mentioned that some of the markup is showing up in GSC and some isn't - do the entities/markup that are showing up in GSC have anything in common? Are you using static JSON-LD markup in Google Tag Manager, or using variables to generate it dynamically?

CleverPhD is right on the money.  On-page factors are important, and they're great to fix since they're entirely under our control, but Google looks at over 200 different factors when deciding where to rank pages, and many of those factors are off-page (links, social shares, etc).

The on-page report card isn't intended to be the be-all and end-all of your SEO activities - nor is it a checklist of things you can do to automatically rank well.  Because Google keeps its algorithm a secret, there's no way for any outside party to definitively say "yes, your page will rank for sure."  As CleverPhD pointed out, the next step after a well-optimized page is to build high-quality links.  Pages don't exist in a vacuum - your site needs to not only be well-optimized but also have enough authority to place it highly against other pages competing for the keyword.  This is very difficult to do for a phrase with any kind of competition, based on on-page factors alone.

It looks like right now the page that you provided as an example has a Page Authority score of just 16 - you've got 1 link from 1 root domain.  I would focus on increasing your PA and DA scores by building some high-authority links.  The resources CleverPhD pointed out will be a great start.  I would also recommend Mike King's terrific post on link building, found here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-noob-guide-to-link-building

Good luck!

It looks like you are correct - this link is difficult to detect on this page, because it sits in the widget. A quick look at the page source for this page reveals that the link www.sitegeek.com/webhostingpad is not visible in the page source, either - just the link to the javascript widget. So the reason these tools can't detect the link is that, to a tool's view, it is not present on the page at all: it lives somewhere else and is only displayed here via the widget.

As to how to fix this, it really depends on what kind of development resources you have available. Google is notorious for having difficulty crawling JavaScript and Ajax, and while they have gotten better at it, they're still not great at it. Ideally, you would change the way your page templates are created so that when the page is generated, it calls for the information, dynamically generates the table, but then publishes it directly on the page rather than calling it via a widget. This would probably be a fair amount of work and would require re-coding the pages that these tables appear on, so it may not be worth it to you to do, depending on how important you decide those external links are.

Hi John,

As long as you've implemented rel=prev and rel=next markup on your paginated content, having duplicate title tags on these pages shouldn't be a problem at all. If you're really concerned about it, you could update the title tags on subsequent pages to say e.g. "Page 2" at the end, but if you've already marked it up as paginated content it should be fine. Hope that helps!

Hi Ray,

Many sites don't have As on every page - not every SEO has the budget or the authority to easily make changes and fix on-page errors. You're the owner and president of your company, but most SEOs aren't - and many SEOs are dealing with hundreds or thousands of pages - getting an A on all of those pages can be a large amount of work.  Sometimes site structure issues like (for example) old CMS mean that on-page errors are difficult, if not impossible, to completely fix without a full site redesign - an expensive and time-consuming prospect for many businesses, even large ones with lots of budget.

I'm sorry that the tool hasn't met your expectations, but again, the on-page report card is not intended to give you a full SEO evaluation or to be a one-stop indicator of your SEO success. I disagree with your assessment that working to get an A in the on-page report card isn't helping you rank - combined with a solid off-page link building and sharing plan, having your on-page factors optimized can be a very powerful tool.  But they simply aren't enough to help you rank on their own.

You're correct, the third test is similar to your situation. So it may be that Google is crawling the link just fine and is passing that link juice, and just that the tools you're using aren't sophisticated enough to detect it. The dynamically inserted text is present on Google's cached version of the page, so it may very well be fine and you might not need to do anything. I usually try not to rely on Google to figure things like this out, since they are inconsistent at best at correctly understanding JavaScript code, but like I said, if changing how this information is displayed on these pages is going to require a lot of time/expense/work on your part, it may not be worth doing.

I would say that "also important" is a more accurate characterization of my comments above regarding link building and PA than "more important." Did you know that you can customize report emails to send the information you want? You can configure them in the Reports section.

The reason we send the weekly crawl report emails is so that users can easily see if their site is kicking up a new or unexpected error. If you have suggestions for how we can improve the report, I know our Product team would be interested in hearing them - you can request a feature at https://seomoz.zendesk.com/forums/293194-seomoz-PRO-feature-requests.

Cleaning up the backlinks is by far the best option, and regardless of what else you do I recommend setting that in motion - but it sounds like a 100% success rate is pretty unlikely (and it usually is).

If you don't need any pages in the problem directories to be indexed, I'd definitely consider noindexing the /event/ directory and any other directories that are causing problems. You may also want to disavow the old backlinks on a domain level, which will take less time than doing it on a link-by-link basis. If you are going to do this, be warned that it has the potential to hurt your rankings - these links may be causing a penalty risk now, but they may also be passing value to your domain that, once removed, will cause the domain to slip. If you do decide to go that route, I recommend coupling it with a concerted link building effort - have a plan for several months of link-worthy content and a solid promotion plan to get new, more-relevant links to the domain.

Yes, the on-page optimization tool is up to date with Google's recent updates.  You'll notice that the tool will call out when you have over-optimized or keyword stuffed content.  Because the on-page tool doesn't look at inbound links, however, getting an A+ in the tool won't mean that you are safe from Penguin penalties - make sure to be checking your inbound link profile as well.

Andy's suggestion would work just fine - but you might also consider building some kind of landing page for the new site to preview the change (if it won't wreck your brand launch strategy to do so). When we did the switch from seomoz.org to moz.com, we had a page up teasing the new brand and even collected email addresses for our community to be notified when the new site launched. Not only would this solve your current issue, it would also allow Google to start crawling your new site sooner. You could even do some PR to build some links to the new domain in advance of the switch!

Tags aren't going to give you a ton of SEO value on specific posts, so I would use them in whatever way makes the most sense for you to organize your content. It shouldn't be necessary to add your location to tags, though, unless you have multiple locations and are posting about the different communities you're in. Even then, I would only add location tags to posts that have some kind of location-related content. If your site overall is doing a good job of saying "San Francisco" (you've got your address prominently featured on your home page and Contact Us pages; you've used schema.org markup to mark it up; you add your city as a suffix to your title tags; you've claimed your local business listings in places like Google My Business, Bing Local, Localeze, etc.) you shouldn't need tags for Google to understand where you are and rank you for location-specific queries accordingly.

Hi Mike,

You're correct that the Product markup is really intended for individual items, not a category of items. Under "Multiple Entities on the Same Page" here https://developers.google.com/structured-data/policies Google suggests that you mark up each item on the page individually. Other than that, yeah, not much else to mark up. Hope that helps!

I have definitely seen this before - it's been happening more frequently in the last ~3 years. Here's a piece from Search Engine Land a few years back on it: http://searchengineland.com/google-title-wrong-157819.

When was your last crawl date in Google Webmaster Tools/Search Console? It may be that your site was crawled with some kind of problem with the robots.txt and hasn't been re-crawled since.

It's important to remember that Google in general takes canonical tags as more of a suggestion than a rule; they may decide that another page deserves to rank instead. Take a look at the version of the page that ranks: does it have more external or internal links pointing to it? You may be able to build up your canonical page by directing some additional link juice that way.

If it's all the same to you which version ranks, it might be easier to just take the hint and make the ranking page the canonical page; otherwise, it may take some time to build up those off-page signals to get that version to rank.

A noindexed page can still accumulate and pass link equity, although results vary on whether or not some of that link juice "evaporates" along the way. I'm inclined to agree with Chris, though, that there's probably no need to noindex a page that redirects to a page that you do want indexed.