Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thank you Thomas, I am glad it was understandable, I have a habit of waffling on a bit when trying to explain things

What is your username so I can DM you the two domains privately.

Cheers in advance Tim.

Hello fellow Mozzers,

We have two websites for two similar brands at my place of employment, the two brands currently serve slighly different products but could be held quite happily under one branded site. As part of a potential group merger into one sole brand, we will have to create one joined up website which will then feature all our products. The newly merged site will also have more scope to allow us to expand our product range where as currently one brand is kind of specific to a particular market due to its name.

So as part of the Merge, I have to consider the potential implications for our search traffic, as this is an integral part of our business.

Brand A - older, more authorative, great content, good organic positions - top 10 for pretty much all terms we favour.

Brand B - younger, but has more marketing scope due to name, still good site and lots of content.

Unfortunately Brand B has more in terms of potential lifespan, but is currently the less authorative of the two sites we run. it has lower DA and PR according to my Moz Analytics, a lower number of quality links and less content. In order to give the Brand B website the boost that is needed and in effect replace Brand A in the serps which has great organic positions, I need to make sure all bases are ticked for an action plan.

So far this is what I have.

1. Transfer all exisiting Brand A web pages to Brand B website.
2. Rel canonical all Brand A pages to now point to Brand B websites new pages.
3. 301 redirect all pages on Brand A to Brand B during the transfer.
4. Once 301 redirects are in place then request external sites to actually repoint to Brand B website for any links.
5. Update xml Sitemaps
6. Update any content that mentions Brand B to now be Brand A.
7. resubmit sitemaps to Webmaster tools
8. Update all social profiles
9. Update all local search profiles and listings
10. Update all review sites with new brand name / merge any with both brands

On a supplementary note for customer information, looking to also keep the older Brand A Home page up for a short time to help people understand the transition rather than a complete redirect which to our demographic could confuse and alienate people. Will also look to send a mass email to roughly 400K people informing them of the move abd how it affects them.

I have no doubt there will be some glaringly obvious additions, any further advice would be much appreciated.

Hope you are all well.

Tim

However, just because an image is visible in Google Image search, does not mean you have the rights to simply use the image as you see fit. Other parties may have intellectual ownership over each image.

I would avoid using images that you do not own or have not purchased.

As per the previous comments their is a chance you could be in breach of copyright laws, this could open you up to a whole heap of trouble. If you really need to use images of celebrities I would possibly look into buying images from media outlets who can sell you these for a license fee and tell you how they can be used.

You could possibly find what you are looking for on sites such as Getty Images or Shutterstock. Alternatively, if you have access to a camera or photographer, you could then get some yourself.

Hope this helps.

We experienced a similar thing when we implemented a live chat solution. Our TTTFB increased siginificantly, not only did this impact the serps but also reduced the customers experience due to having to wait longer.

See if your live chat solution can provide you with a gzip compressed version that you can also load in asyncronously. This may help give your site a speed boost whilst at the same time maintaining an excellent UX element.

I read an article the other day about hidden content etc. I would recommend not doing so as Google will not necessarily count it. I would recommend having the links visible and accesible for both Google and the user.

Here is the article I read.

I would think the best way to resolve this issue would be to apply schema data to the relevant products or recipes. This will then allow google to determine the correct placement for the respective items.

For recipe schema click here and
For product schema click here

At the base of each section it demonstrates how to implement the schema correctly.

I hope these help

Edit - as per Amelia, recipies placed next to products and vice versa could lead to a better user experience due to the relevent content being easily accesible.

Another one I have used in the past is http://www.plagspotter.com/ - when I last used it seemed to find a few pages.

As per Moosa's response, I would agree that leaving the products in place is the best option. Would you rather have these pages none existent to search? or would you rather have them available where serps and users can still find them.

If a user can still find them you can then try to upsell from a discontinued item or cross sell to another variant. This way you have a second bite at the cherry and have the chance to still convert a sale. If nothing is available you may miss out on these additional opportunities.

Simply make sure that you demonstrate effectively that the item is not longer available, but these other products may help.

As per Ruben, the site you are managing is lacking any credibile relevant links to the site, without these preferably naturally occuring quality links, your site is not being seen as an authority in its field. As such this is something you can certainly look into rectifying, but it is no easy fix and will take a lot of hard work and the creation of quality content.

Link profile can be looked into here

Secondly and this is my own personal opinion but the site to me lacks some more natural copy that is targeted to the end consumer, it feels very much like it has simply been created with a tone just for Google and may possibly be being targeted for an over optimisation penalty, especially for the term Air conditioning which appears so many times.

You could also think about adding more relevant copy around the products you install, benefits, features etc. A blog might be useful for this. Finally I would also think about establishing some social channels for the site and local presences in Bing and Google.

Also check out the webmaster elements that Ruben mentioned - sitemaps, 404 errors etc

Absolutely!!!!!

If you think about it logically, what does a CMS do. It uses templates and stores content  which is then output to the page - this webpage is HTML and is the basis of pretty much all webpages. Just because a site is HARD coded in HTML without the use of a CMS that compiles  it for you does not mean it cannot be optimised.

If you ever look into the source code of a page output via CMS to the browser, you can see all the components usually utilised to give your a strong well optimised site, however if HARD coded you can probably go even further depending on your skillset to provide even more optimisation on a more bespoke level.

Don;t delay get stuck in

I was aware that the mobile icon was being tested and was resently confirmed to be rolling out. As such and as per Leonie, you may have not seen it in your browser as only the odd test saw it. Going forward this will likely be visible to all.

A bit more can be seen in these posts.

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-anti-mobile-friendly-icons-19282.html
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-smartphone-icon-19233.html
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-smartphone-icon-15532.html

also a bit on mobile friendly ranking factors here

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-mobile-ranking-algorithm-19463.html

Hey SWD,

First of all it appears to be a relatively competitive keyword phrase with quite a few companies targeting it, As such just because you may be doing some things right, it doesn't mean you will instantly climb the serps unfortunately, How long has the site been live?

Here are some things to check - make sure you...

1. Submit your sitemap in Google and Bings Webmaster tools.
2. Also do a crawl of the site and submit and render before sbmitting to the index.

Even after submission it will take a little time for it to appear.

Secondly, and this is only my opinion, but I check the source of your pages and spotted this 
alt="DPF Cleaning Service | Economy Remapping | JL Engineering" title="DPF Cleaning Service and Economy Remapping" on all of your navigation buttons, make them relevant to where they are pointing,

A few more relevant links to your site may help too. Cheers

Tim

I know you are pinning this on the structure of the site, however, when did your structural change take place? Could you have also taken a small hit from the recent penguin / panda refresh that has seemed to have rolled out recently??

We certainly saw a little movement here.

This is a link to an article from Barry Schwartz on the rumblings. 
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-shift-panda-penguin-19437.html

I suppose it would depend on how long the sites remain in the index and also in the cache.

I would probably suggest still adding them to the disavow file if you really want rid of these detrimental links.

I am sure I read somewhere, although quite some time ago that having your domain name in the title is a good thing and at the end of the title tag is best. Based on your above comments I do feel that you are following the correct format and structure. Just remember to try and get your pages main search terms in the title that are relevant to the page.

You mention that on a lot of the other pages you are planning to use "Buy and sell paintings | Maleribasen.dk", Although a good title I would only use this once, possibly on your home page. Using the same title tag on muiltiple pages is a negative factor in my book. I would advise you to make each and every title tag unique and relevant to that individual page.

If you Articles page is made up on paginated pages also add rel="next" / "previous" to help with structure.

Hope that helps. I am sure others can also add more?

Tim

Couldn't of said it better myself Leonie.

In my personal scenario I am currently gathering information on 4 campaigns/websites (5 in the pipeline), to help me continue them to develop and improve.

Campaign 1 is my main brand website,
Campaign 2 a sister brand.
Campaigns 3 and 4 are sub brands that are a little less important.

By running each of the campaigns I can gather greater insight into how they are performing.

You may find you only want to use one campaign.

Has the site recently moved to HTTPS:// and have you also reincluded the https:// version in webmaster tools. This may throw up a few errors.

I have also noticed that if you type in http://www you can still get to the site, might be worth a redirect in your htaccess file.

Maybe also add the following to your wordpress header -

Also check any settings in wordpress are not causing a no index issue.

Hope this helps

Tim

I also agree with Alex, definately reach out to see if it can be rectified, in most cases webmasters/commenters/bloggers are more than happy to perform a quick edit.

At the end of the day you have a brand to maintain and having it mispelt can potentially dilute your credibility and how people search for you.

There is no reason why you cannot request a link but be careful, despite being a recommendation from an external site/person, you want to make sure that google does not class it as a press release. PR page content links now tend to require a no-follow as can be deemed as external advertising. Although I would imagine the language used is much more natural, personal and this will hopefully not be the case.

Hello Meaghan.

I am not wholly sure how flipbook is crawled and if this would be of benefit or not (any further comments may determine more) But I do know that PDFs can be crawled for content etc, as such maybe upload the PDF as an accessible document, providing the copy has remained as text and is not now image based.

Secondly, have you considered adding each of the magazine articles to a blog of some kind on the site, that way your will most likely benefit from the addition of new quality writtern content for its users. You do not necessarily need to add it all of the offline magazine this would possibly be detrimental to the effectiveness of the publication, but you could certainly hand pick some of the best to feature. Alternativily you could opt for an online subscription base and put all the articles online as well as in print, but have only a few teaser articles accessible to the public.

Having your content online will then be make it bit more approachable and also sharable to the masses via social platforms etc, this could potentially help your subscriber and visitor base grow leading to new opportunities.

Hope that helps.