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I would honestly redirect the whole site, then redirect the specific pages to the most relevant new pages.

Best of luck, feel free to send me an email (or message on here) if you need me to go any further into detail.

Your web developer is wrong. You do have multiple version of the homepage

You have the following:

http://wilkersoninsuranceagency.com/index.php

http://wilkersoninsuranceagency.com/

http://www.wilkersoninsuranceagency.com/index.php

http://www.wilkersoninsuranceagency.com/

I would first of all get your web developer to do a http:// to http://www. redirect across your whole site, so whenever any user lands on your site they atleast get put onto the same version.

As for with/without index.php you are getting these duplicates, I would ask the web developer to remove any references to index.php and just refer specifically to http://www.wilkersoninsuranceagency.com/ whilst also setting a canonical within the index.php to http://www.wilkersoninsuranceagency.com/

If your developer tries to fight this I would look for a new developer.

Just had a quick look through the site, your developer looks to be being lazy. https://gtmetrix.com/reports/wilkersoninsuranceagency.com/I6khUBrH under serve scaled images, they haven't bothered to resize it and that's making your website load slower.

http://wilkersoninsuranceagency.com/images/img0018.png is just a lazy way of naming images.

It looks like you're trying to track http://nappyvalleynet.com instead of http://www.nappyvalleynet.com/

You have a redirect from the http:// version to http://www version, so wherever you are entering nappyvalleynet.com enter http://www.nappyvalleynet.com instead.

301 Redirects, testing that canonicals are on the https url, working through the site and removing the http:// links and changing to https:// links.

Also I feel that it's important to say that could be an issue with a custom website too, due to the fact that a lot of web developers are not seo professionals, so they don't build a site to be seo friendly.

I think the biggest and most important question you need to answer is:

Does it do what you want it to do?

You need to make sure it converts a user once it's on the site, that the user can navigate through the site well. That's the top priority that people seem to neglect, they focus so much on rankings that they forget a user actually needs to land on the site and fulfill the goal of that site.

There are lots of templates that rank really well, I have customers who have used templated sites and beat all of their competition. If you create lots of unique content and modify what you've got (make sure to change alt tags from the default template) and url paths for example, then you should be fine.

It's a small ranking factor, but if you've got an established domain then I would say your established domain is more valuable.

but mydomain.com/fr with the correct code would do that?

https://moz.com/learn/seo/hreflang-tag

Why mydomain.com/france? This just makes the url much longer and the two letter country codes are recognised by most people?

"My company has a got a name in the industry as well as some amazing reviews on google + and other forums. "

This alone answers 2 and 3. You have a brand and that's more powerful than an exact match domain, it differentiates you from your competitors.

As for "If you were to use the same domain would you do fr.mydomain.com or www.mydomain.com/fr." I would choose www.mydomain.com/fr but that's just personal preference.

Got around this by adding catch alls for a-z/0-9.

RewriteRule ^a(.*) http://www.domain.com? [R=301,NE,NC,L]

This meant that the homepage wasn't being touched. However I did lose all of the category specific redirects. I'm sure there was a way around this however I don't know htaccess to do this well enough. Would be interesting if anyone would know how to do all three?

There are SEOs (like myself) who do SEO full time for a company then also do SEO as a part time role outside of working hours just to get a bit of an income boost. I have some customers who pay me as and when they want me to work and some who pay me £50 a month just to do some work for them.

I would just be wary and ask to see some of the sites they have worked on.

If you want to find these kinds of people, try sites like freelancer, seochat forums, elance. There's a load of seo forums and freelance sites that are more suited.

Annoyingly it's time to play with this beast again.

I've been given the task of doing the following.

Keeping the homepage live

Redirecting categories to the specific categories on the new site

Catch all redirects

Now i've managed to setup the specific categories and the catch all redirects, however I am unsure how to keep the homepage live (which is like this:www.domain.com/ so I can't just exclude that?)

Would appreciate any help.

It depends on the module, as a whole yes it does though.

Answered my own questions:

https://developers.google.com/webmasters/control-crawl-index/docs/robots_txt?csw=1#file-format

"A maximum file size may be enforced per crawler. Content which is after the maximum file size may be ignored. Google currently enforces a size limit of 500kb."

We're looking at potentially creating a robots.txt with 1450 lines in it. This will remove 100k+ pages from the crawl that are all old pages (I know, the ideal would be to delete/noindex but not viable unfortunately)

Now the issue i'm thinking is that a large robots.txt will either stop the robots.txt from being followed or will slow our crawl rate down.

Does anybody have any experience with a robots.txt of that size?

Hello,

I've never had to deal with an international site before, let alone a site merge.

These are two large sites, we've got a few smaller old sites that are currently redirecting to the main site (UK). We are looking at moving all the sites to the .com domain. We are also currently not using SSL (on the main pages, we are on the checkout). We also have a m.domain.com site. Are there any good guides on what needs to be done?

My current strategy would be:

1. Convert site to SSL.
2. Mobile site and desktop site must be on the same domain.
3. Start link building to the .com domain now (weaker link profile currently)

What's the best way of handling the domains and languages? We're currently using a .tv site for the UK and .com for the US.

I was thinking, and please correct me if i'm wrong, that we move the US site from domain.com to domain.com/us/ and the domain.tv to domain.com/en/

Would I then reference these by the following:

What would we then do with the canonicals? Would they just reference their "local" version?

Any advice or articles to read would really be appreciated.

According to screamingfrog the current line:

Line:40 http://www.t2tea.com/on/demandware.store/

Is the line on robots.txt is causing you an issue.