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Is this something that is happening between just two specific client sites? Or is it more widespread for all of your clients?

It's common for Screaming Frog and a Google search to return different numbers, but they should be much closer together than that. Which number is closer to your sense of how many URLs are actually on the site? When you look at the URLs that Screaming Frog returns, are there any that appear to be duplicate, or are otherwise not really there? Which URLs are appearing in a Screaming Frog crawl but not in the Google site: results? These will give you more information as to where Google is potentially having trouble indexing your site.

Hi Dan,

It's important to remember that Domain Authority is a Moz-specific metric, measuring the power that inbound links to a domain are passing to it. It's based on a lot of research and information about how Google measures links, but isn't necessarily a reflection of how Google is actually perceiving and rating the inbound links to your site (since no outside party knows for sure exactly how Google is measuring link signals at any given time). Since those links still point to the legacy domains, they are still coming up in the Moz tools as having high DA. It's probable that Google is interpreting those signals passing through your redirects correctly and passing that link value on to your main domain, but if those redirects go away, that may change.

URLs will often remain in the index when they have links pointing to them, because Google is indexing the presence of that link - but a URL showing up in a site: search doesn't necessarily mean that it's ever showing up for any query. Is your main domain still getting a lot/much/any traffic from your legacy domains through those redirects? How much traffic is still getting to those legacy domains (whether via organic search traffic to still-indexed pages or, more likely, from people clicking on inbound links to the old pages) will dictate whether or not you need to keep the redirects live.

One thing I would recommend doing, that I always recommend when a domain is moved, is reaching out to the sites that link to your old domain and seeing if you can get them to update the links to the new domain. You won't have anywhere close to a 100% success rate with this, but it can decrease the number of links that are passing value through redirects and increase the number that pass value directly.

If you do decide to decommission the server and not re-host the redirects elsewhere, I would recommend planning that move in conjunction with a link building and promotion campaign for the new site, to attract new links to make up for any link juice that is lost from the old domains' redirects. I hope that helps!

If you are changing the URL of your evergreen content each time you update it and then 301 redirecting the old URL to the new, that could definitely be impacting the organic traffic potential of that content. I would recommend keeping pages at the same URL even after updating them - so it may make sense, for your frequently-updated pages, to move them to a page without the date stamp in the URL so that you're not republishing and moving the page.

Hi Nick,

It's common to see a drop in traffic after a redesign, but you definitely should have recovered by now. The difference in your number of indexed pages is a red flag. When you run a Screaming Frog/DeepCrawl/Moz Crawl Test crawl of the site, what shows up? Are there any site sections that are missing? Does that 7,740 pages number sound close to the number of pages that are actually on the site, or are there still more like 30K?

Take a look at the pages that were getting organic traffic before the migration. Which of them aren't getting traffic now? Can you verify that they still exist and that redirects are working properly? Are there areas of the site that used to have a lot more internal links pointing to them then than they do now?

I doubt that your domain name and age have much to do with this, and it's common for 404s to pop up from time to time, so I don't think those are your culprits.

One thing you might try is reaching out to the domains that link to your old site and see if they would update their links to point to the same page on your new site. Start with the sites with whom you have the best relationship, and any who link to you multiple times. Make it easy by providing them a list of the pages that link to you and the updated links. You won't get a 100% response rate but it might mitigate some of the link loss.

I hope some of that helps!

It's possible that Google might give Data Highlighter information more credence when generating a rich snippet, but the success rate for that is far from 100%, as Andy and Bas have mentioned. It's just as likely that Google will be confused about which data is correct, and either not generate a rich snippet at all or generate one based on the schema markup. I haven't had much success adding markup via the data highlighter or via Google Tag Manager; hard-coding it always seems to work better. If your schema markup is incorrect, I would not recommend using Data Highlighter to try to fix it without changing the code - your best bet is just to change it, especially since Data Highlighter won't help you out on Bing/Yahoo.

Google is adding and removing URLs from its index fairly slowly right now, and it's not uncommon for changes to take several weeks to filter up into the index, especially for site: searches. This is very annoying (even more so for people who are trying to launch brand-new sites), but not a huge deal since, to Laura's point, these URLs are most likely not showing up for any searches, they just haven't filtered out of the index. I would give it another week or two and see what happens. You may also want to do a Fetch+Submit in Search Console for a few of the subdirectory URLs, to make sure that Google revisits them and registers that they are 410s now - if they've been redirecting for 2 years, Google may just not be crawling them that frequently.

The links to metro-manhattan may be losing a small amount of value as they pass through the redirects. Google has previously stated that this is not the case, but I think it's more accurate to say that it's not always the case, and I have certainly seen a measurable decrease in link value (usually around 15%) when passing through a redirect. I doubt that Google is confused about the two domains, though, since metro-manhattan has been redirecting to nyc-officespace-leader for 4 years and, unless I'm reading your question wrong, has never had content on it.

If metro-manhattan has more inbound links pointing to it than nyc-officespace-leader, AND is a better reflection of your current brand, it may indeed be worth moving the domain. I would not move the site from one domain to the other just based on the reasons you've outlined above, though. Moving your site from one domain to the other is likely to negatively impact your rankings and traffic in the short term as Google gets used to it being in the new spot. This is entirely possible to overcome through marketing the new site, but will not be a quick fix to the problems you've outlined. So if you want to move the site, and commit to marketing that site, go ahead, but don't do it just to capture link value pointing to metro-manhattan.

If you do decide to move the site, my advice is always to make a domain change separate from making other major site changes in layout, content, etc. So you would either want to:

• Move the site as-is, do some proactive link building to the new domain/reach out to people who link to the old domain to get them to update their links, get a marketing and promotion plan in place, and then once your rankings and traffic have stabilized from the move, start making improvements, or:
• Make the improvements to the site you want to make now, and revisit moving the domain after those changes have been in place for a while.

Your other option would be to reach out to sites that link to metro-manhattan and ask them to update their links to point to nyc-officespace-leader. That would allow you to get more value from those links, but I know it's not always possible to do. So like I said, unless you have additional compelling reasons to move the site beyond what you've said in your question, I would leave it where it is and focus on improving it.

If they are external links, and they are pointing to URLs that no longer exist, I wouldn't worry too much about it - it's unlikely that something that is so clearly spam is going to affect your site in any way. If you are really concerned about it, you could disavow the linking sites in Search Console.

I hope that helps. I'm still a little unclear as to what you mean by repopulating your back end in this context.

Hi! Here are a few you might like:

• https://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/1715579/building-optimization-into-your-business-culture
• http://sitetuners.com/blog/will-your-clueless-ceo-ever-support-conversion-rate-optimization/
• http://growthhackers.com/videos/unbounce-ceo-rick-perreault-talks-about-using-content-to-grow-his-business/
• http://conversionxl.com/unlocking-your-business-growth-strategy/
• https://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/2157124/combining-seo-cro-conversion-rates#

From my perspective, here are the biggest things a CEO can do to lead and foster a thriving SEO and CRO program:

• Be very clear on the goals of the project, make sure the goals are realistic and that everyone agrees they are realistic, and set a time frame to achieve them. You can tie this to business goals by understanding how each piece of the puzzle fits together. For example, you might say "we want to make an extra $X in revenue this year. We made $Y last year. If we can increase organic traffic to the website by A% and increase overall conversion rate from the website by B%, that will contribute $Z toward that goal."
• Create an environment where it's not only easy, but required that SEO and CRO teams are working together and sharing data. If teams won't work well together, build those goals into their performance reviews and make it clear it's a requirement of their jobs.
• Make sure the SEO team is included on decisions about CRO tools, and that they're involved in implementation, so that CRO isn't implemented in a way that will negatively impact SEO.
• Dedicate some developer resources specifically to SEO and CRO projects. Once a CRO test has generated results, make sure those findings are implemented quickly.

I think the biggest things that negatively impact a cross-team program are siloing (nobody knows what's going on with anybody else), lack of resources, and a disconnect around goals.

I hope that helps!

Hi Matt,

To clarify - these are internal links on your own site that have had the anchors go all weird? Or are they external links?

Yes! You asked "So if I understand correctly then Google will index just the 1st post then?" and there's no way of guaranteeing what Google will or won't do. But that is probably what will happen.

Thanks for the clarification!

From my perspective, your desire to keep both companies happy, while laudable, shouldn't have to be your problem because both companies work for you - they should be the ones figuring out how to work together - although I suppose the company that's on it's way out doesn't have a ton of incentive to play nicely.

Is the new design going to be substantially different from the old design? If so, it might make sense for them to do all of the design and dev work in their own staging environment, and then launch the site all at once when it's ready. I know 18 months is a long time, but I'd be concerned about the brand and user experience implications of having two different designs live on the same site.

I don't know of a way to have one domain hosted on two different servers. Your other best bet would probably be to do as Chris suggested and move the entire existing site over to the new server, then make changes from there.

Google will probably only count the content of the first post (or however much content displays at initial page load time) when ranking and indexing that infinite-scroll page, yes, so if you want the rest of that content in the index I'd give it its own URLs. However, Google is getting better at JavaScript and is always unpredictable, so it's not beyond the realm of possibility that it would index more content from the infinite scroll page than initially loads - don't be too surprised if you see that, but I wouldn't count on it.

You're right to be against the subdomain idea - that's not a good call for SEO at all.

What I would do is start out with a full database export of all the URLs on the current site, and figure out what URL each of those resources is ultimately going to live at. This can be daunting with a large site, but it goes faster than you think it's going to - once you figure out that all the pages in example.com/old-folder/pagename are now going to live at example.com/new-folder/pagename you can figure out the URL structure for large chunks of the site at a time. Since it sounds like there won't be any changes to the overall design and structure of the site, just some possible URL changes, that will make it easier, too. I did this for the SEOmoz.org -> Moz.com transition and it took about a month to map out 65,000 pages alongside my other SEO duties (but that was with a lot of major changes in site structure, too).

Once everyone (you, the client, both dev teams) have agreed on the new structure, it's simply a matter of:

• moving the pages in each "chunk" from their old URLs to their new URLs
• 301 redirecting the old URLs to the new URLs on a page-to-page level
• doing a database find+replace on the old site and the new one to update internal links to those pages

Be really really careful with managing expectations for this. It's very common to see pages take a temporary hit in rankings and traffic immediately after they move to a new URL; this drop is usually temporary and reversible. But you don't want the client taking that data as proof that the migration isn't going to work or isn't working, and abandoning ship. To help matters along, take a look at what their best inbound links are and the linking sites with whom you have the best relationship, and as those pages move to their new addresses, reach out to the linking sites to try to get those links updated.

Does that answer your question? Happy to discuss further if not.

Hi Christian,

What you're seeing is exactly what Google recommends for infinite scroll in the resource you link to. It breaks the page up into component resources (separate URLs) each of which could be accessed on its own. Their examples use dynamic parameters to break up into e.g. page=2, but if your infinite- or long-scrolling page isn't paginated content, there's no reason why each component couldn't have its own URL that is accessed as you scroll down.

I actually really like this method as a compromise between the "one long page with all the information on it" approach to web design and the "landing pages for people looking for specific bits of information" approach to SEO. For example, I often have SAAS clients who want all the information about what their product does to be one one long page. This is great for people who want to research the whole product at once, but makes it hard for me to optimize for keywords pertaining to individual features of the product. The solution is to have separate landing pages that talk about specific features, all linked together in one "product" page that scrolls using the methodology outlined in the Google resource you linked to. Plus, it means that people who are just looking for that one feature arrive on a page that's about that feature, instead of having to scroll to find what they're looking for.

With the infinite scroll situation, Google is only usually going to crawl and index what is available to the user before more of the page loads - so if you want Google to crawl and index all of the content on your infinite-scroll page, this is the way to do it. It's also better for users who don't have JavaScript enabled. I hope that makes sense and let me know if you have more questions!

AH! OK, gotcha. In that case, Martijn was right - you'll need to add the Review type. Required fields for the Review type are:

• reviewBody (text)
• reviewRating (of type: Rating)
• author (of type: Person or Organization)

So the markup would look something like this:

Hi Jeff,

I don't know that I agree with Martijn on this one (which is rare for us!). In my view, it's not necessary to have the Review type on-page if there's no review text on the page. Everything about this looks fine to me, and I was able to run it through the Google Structured Data Testing tool at https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool with no problem. Can you tell me a bit more about how you were trying to validate, and the error you were seeing?

There are a couple options that I see here:

• Go through the list of pages, find the most relevant equivalents on your current site, and 301 redirect them. Yes, 20,000 pages is a lot but you'll quickly fall into a groove where you find whole sections of pages that can be redirected to the same place. I did it with 65,000 or so URLs when SEOmoz moved to Moz, and it took about a month to plan out alongside my other tasks. It's tedious, but doable.
• Figure out which pages have the high-value links you want to preserve, 301 redirect those to their most-relevant equivalents, and redirect the rest to the home page. This won't work quite as well to preserve link equity or any traffic/rankings they might be getting, but it will be faster.

Either way, once you've got those redirects in place I strongly recommend taking a look at the sites that link to the old pages, and seeing which ones you might be able to reach out to to get the links updated. That way, you won't be losing link value through the 301 - plus, you might strengthen or re-establish some relationships that could result in future links. Good luck!

I agree with Miriam. The only thing I would add here - consider making changes to your lead conversion form to reinforce the "we only work in California" aspect. This could be like a check box up front that says "Are you located in California?" If they select "No," the rest of the form disappears and they get a message that says "At this time, we're only able to serve the California area. Thank you for your interest!" or something. You could keep your lead form as-is and if people select a state other than California when entering their location information, send them to a different thank you page that delivers a similar message.

Basically, I would recommend changing your lead process so that a.) it's really clear to users that you don't operate outside of California, and b.) the information about whether or not a lead is from California is easy to see up-front in your lead management system. You'll probably still get some irrelevant leads (everyone does), but you'll be able to deal with them quicker.