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It's not a huge problem, but it is poor practice. You may want to look at the plugins you have installed, figure out which one of them is causing the redirects, and then disable it. Wordpress will throw a 404 automatically for pages that don't exist, there's no need to redirect them using 302s.
I would guess because it is on the .ca TLD. Google's international search engines favor sites that are on country specific TLDs. Also, the domain is a partial exact match, which still gives sites a small boost when it comes to ranking.
The interactive Flash site may also have positive user metrics (time on site, # of pages visited) which could also help boost its rankings.
Having the errors in Webmaster Tools is not going to negatively impact your SEO in any way. It's more of a heads up to you, the webmaster, that they have found a page that is missing.
As long as there are no internal or external links to those pages, they should disappear automatically, although it could take months. If you don't want the errors cluttering up your report, then manually marking them as fixed is the way to go.
If you have tons of links in your navigation it may be helpful to use tools such as CrazyEgg or ClickTale to determine which of your links are actually being used. If you present the user with too many options, they can often be overwhelmed and take no action at all. If a link is in the sitewide navigation but isn't actually getting any clicks, remove it.
Yes, try to reduce the number of links you have on all your pages while maintaining a good user experience. Contextual navigation is a great way to achieve this. For example, if someone is exploring the "Energy" section of your site, then they probably don't need 50 links about "Funeral Planning".
Try to keep the links in the nav relevant to the section of the site they are on, while providing access to the top level categories if the user wants to visit a different section. This will reduce the number of links on the page, and also improve the keyword relevance of each of the individual categories.
In general, Google does not like search results in its search results. Dynamically generating content can get you some traffic in the short term, but puts you at a big risk for Panda and other thin-quality content penalties in the longterm.
Is this a local business where location matters? Are Bromley and Sevenoaks close to each other?
If location matters and the two locations are close enough, creating 2 landing pages is a great way to get traffic from both locations. You can even create pages for other cities that are close by to get traffic from those locations as well.
I'm personally not a fan of mega menus (this article explains why), but I think it can be OK on the homepage. It becomes more problematic on the inner pages, however. If someone is in the "Energy" section of your site, they don't need to be able to get to every page of the "Funeral Planning" section. So if you can make the menus more contextual based on what section of the site the user is on, that will provide the best experience for users, preserve link equity, and improve topic relevance.
Just be sure to put in 301 redirects from site B to site A, so that Google doesn't think the blog content is duplicate content, and you should be fine.
Do you think that the extra keyword is negatively impacting your SEO or user experience? If so, it may be worth it to change the URL structure. Just be sure to triple check your 301 redirects before you go live, and be ready to revert back to a previous version of your site in case anything goes wrong. Expect to see a slight dip in traffic for a week or two as Google sorts everything out.
The exact threshold that Google uses to determine duplicate content is a tricky one.
The more important question is, are you noticing a problem? Are both pages being indexed (2013 & 2014)? When you search for the 2014 model in Google, is it showing up in the search results or is it being filtered out as duplicate content? If your content isn't being indexed or isn't ranking, then you have a problem.
Panda also can be an issue, but only if a large portion of your site is duplicated. Is this model upgrade process something you apply to 1 or 2 products, or are you talking hundreds? What proportion of your site is nearly duplicate content compared to original content. If the percentage is too large, you could be at risk of Panda.
If this is only for a couple of pages, you can always just take a little time to re-write the description from last year to improve its uniqueness, and also bolster the page with unique content like user reviews and new photos & videos of your product. Once a product model is discontinued, you can also 301 redirect it to the newer models.
Hard to say without looking at the actual page, but it looks like http://www.domainname.com/category/thiscategory/page/2/ is probably a paginated category page (when you're in a category, and looking through older posts). There is probably a relative link somewhere on the page ( vs ), that is causing the link to be malformed. So take a look at the category template, and replace any relative paths on those pages.
Agreed. You should describe what is depicted in the image using the alt tag-- this helps Google understand what the images is about and also helps people who are vision impaired or are using text-based browsers. The alt tag is also displayed in regular browser if an image fails to load for whatever reason, or if the user decides to turn images off while browsing.
When did you implement the 301 redirect? It can take a while for Google to catch on to the redirects, especially if you have a large site.
If you want to see the transition sooner, use the Change of Address tool in Google Webmaster Tools:
The way that Google finds robots.txt files is by taking your URL, and adding /robots.txt to it. So a good way to see if the robots.txt file is affecting your subdomain is to go to subdomain.domain.com/robots.txt. If the file exists, then it is affecting your subdomain. If it doesn't, then it's only active on your main domain.
Getting indexed is function of having unique content and pagerank, so make sure your subdomain has unique content and links if you're having trouble getting it indexed. Submitting a sitemap is no guarantee that Google will index your site.
Maybe it's just the case that Google thinks that the search results page provides a more relevant result for searchers?
Think about it: if someone searches for "fishing boat videos" on Google, are they really searching for any one particular video on your site, or do they want to browse through a selection of videos? In that case, a search results page is probably the best page from your site to display.
Rather than fighting against this trend, you should run with it and create category pages based around your most popular categories of search results. Add a unique text descriptions to each of the category pages, to make them even more relevant for search.
As for the product pages themselves, they need more unique titles. Rather than titling each video "Fishing Boat Video" you should give each one a unique title that describes what the video is about, such as "Small Wooden Fishing Boat in Caribbean Video". That way, people who are searching specifically for that type of boat will land on your product page. Also, try to add more unique text content to the product pages, because right now they don't contain much unique content.
Hey Daniel,
I doubt that sending radio traffic to the old URL would have any impact on which page is ranking in Google.
Another thing you should do is add canonical tags to all of your pages. That will also help Google tell which version of the page is the correct version to show, and also helps prevent a lot of common duplicate content issues.
Good point. If you don't want the filter pages crawled at all, it would be better to just block them via robots.txt. My preferred approach is to use query parameters for filters, and canonicaling the filtered pages back to the original, unfiltered page.
Another approach is to use AJAX to dynamically filter the page. This takes more programming overhead, but won't result in tons of extra pages being crawled and potentially indexed.
I would go back and edit the old post and add a prominent link at the top linking to the new article. This will help the new article to rank better and give users an easy to get to the new article if they happen to land on the old one.
If you are going to have the exact same content on all domains, stick with the .com and 301 redirect the rest of the domains to the main domain.
If you are willing to invest in different content for each domain, then you should have no problem. Just be sure to put the hreflang tags in the header of all the sites, so Google knows that they are related: