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The above redirect structure you've proposed would work great.  You're ensuring only one homepage version exists, making it the canonical, and all variations (which may also have previous links going to them and SEO value) are being redirected to pass on to the canonical version.

You can use your .htaccess file to force http to https by adding the following code:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
RewriteRule ^.*$ https://%{SERVER_NAME}%{REQUEST_URI} [R,L]

The first line turns on redirection capabilities.  The second line checks to make sure the connection is not already https. The third rule will redirect users from their original location, to the same location but using HTTPS.

And also, in case you want to know how to make sure that the www. version of your site redirects to the non-www version, the code would be:

RewriteCond %{HTTPS} on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.(.)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.)$ https://%1/$1 [R=301,L]

Hope this helps

Hi Paul

They certainly can be of value.  If the blog has some good link metrics, it looks active and engaging with its audience, it matches your subject matter and if you can produce something of worth to them, then the link will be worthwhile regardless of the subdomain/domain it sits on.

I think something you should consider however is how some SEOs use .wordpress.com, .blogspot.com and other web 2.0s for different link building purposes.  Some people set up blogs on the subdomains solely for links - and then attempt to power up the subdomains themselves by sending more links/spam to them.  The reason being is that these web 2.0s may inherit some strength for the root domains and therefore pass on a good amount of SEO benefit, or even make the subdomain rankable itself.

Of course, all of that would be considered to be unnatural and therefore may fall foul of Google penalties or filters.  The reason I bring that up is, while you're not looking to use those blogs in that manner, having a lot of the majority of your links coming from those kind of blogs may have a diminishing returns effect or could end up passing much less SEO "strength" in the future - as these subdomain links might be devalued.  If you look back to the first Penguin update when Google broadly penalised directories, article sites and specifically other existing web 2.0s, such as Squidoo links, links coming from the squidoo domain were widely devalued because of people creating accounts and lenses solely just to get a "strong link" from them.  Obviously you could see the similarity there between squidoo and wordpress/blogspot, so it's worth watching out for.

However, I think if the blog has some good link metrics, it looks active and engaging with its audience, it matches your subject matter and if you can produce something of worth to them, then the link will be worthwhile.  Like all things, earn those links in moderation.  I can't ever see those links being penalised if you follow the above criteria, but just be aware that having a disproportionate amount in your link profile may eventually have some form of diminishing returns.

Hope this helps.

Hi Isaac

I actually think you would be OK redirecting the old site to the new one and, should any authority pass, it would be OK and not seen as manipulative.

This is because, to someone who isn't a music professional and not a great expert on it (like me), the two websites don't actually seem too far apart.  They would both fall under what I'd call a "music production" website.  Therefore I don't really think the redirect would be seen as manipulative, or in other words it would be solely done for SEO benefit (which is the point where Google becomes concerned).

Now depending on how "strong" your site was previously, it may vary how much benefit you'd get from passing on the authority, but I'd say go for it.  All I would say is that just be sure you're OK with not promoting your online studio by itself before redirecting, as undoing a redirect could get messy.  But if you want to consolidate your business into the single site, I'd say you'd be fine to 301.

Hope this helps.

Presuming your product pages sit under a /products/ subfolder, you could use this code in your htaccess file:

RewriteRule ^products/(.*)$ /anotherdirectory/$1 [R=301,NC,L]

Or to redirect all to the homepage:

RewriteRule ^products/(.*)$ /$1 [R=301,NC,L]

Obviously you can change the words "products" and "anotherdirectory" to whatever is applicable to you.

For more info on htaccess redirection you can read the Moz guide here.

If you're looking to redirect old URLs, sending them to the nearest equivalent page on your site makes sense and would be a good idea.

However, my question would be - Do you actually need to redirect?  If the part of your website you're looking to remove is getting little to no traffic as it is, you might be better off letting the pages 404.

404 errors are a natural part of your website - something that Google is happy to admit. If some URLs on your site 404, this fact alone does not hurt you or count against you in Google’s search results.

The reason why I suggest this is that with each redirect you add to your .htaccess file, you add extra code that needs to be 100% correct and you make your file a little bit bigger.  The bigger it is, the longer it takes to process and the longer it takes to process, the longer it will take your site to load.  Now, for 400+ URLs we're talking small amounts here and likely nothing that will affect your site speed to a degree that it will negatively affect your site - but it can be a long process to put in place and can cause problems if you're inexperienced with redirecting.

I usually follow 2 criteria when asking if I should redirect an old URL.

1. Is it getting traffic from people visiting or entering my site?  Check this with your analytics, although it looks as though the answer for you will be no.

2. Does the old URL contain any external backlinks that you would like to preserve.  If it does, a 301 redirect will help pass on the link equity.

If the answer to both of these questions is "no", I'm happy to let the URL 404.  Over time, it will stop being crawled, reducing any errors you see in Webmaster Tools.

Hope this helps - certainly no harm in redirecting if done correctly (and you can do it in one big go - personal experience with rebranding some big global sites shows this to not be a problem).  However, I would ask if you really need to - you're unlikely to harm your site either by not redirecting.

Neither make any difference for rankings, strictly from an SEO point of view.

This video way back in 2009 discusses as such and in my years of testing and looking around I've never seen a notable difference in which separator was used. Pipes (|) and Hypens (-) are the most common.  I mention that because you should consider what separator you use for user experience and click through purposes.

You might want to test which version gets better click throughs - or trump for the one that you think looks the best (this might be influenced on your competitors for your keywords.  If everyone is using pipes, you'd immediately stand out if you used hyphens).  I don't buy into the fact that clickthrough rate (CTR) affects SEO rankings (although some do), but all things considered you will want to use separators that will help increase your CTR, and as a rule of thumb either pipes or hyphens will help you with that. Commas can often look clunky and dated in SERPs (although that's more of a personal opinion).

Hope this helps.

I highly recommend reading AJ Kohn's latest blog post on the rich snippets algorithm.

Yes, getting the schema markup in place will technically enable you to have the stars appear in the SERPs, but reading that blog post will tell you where and when they will appear, which is very important.

Hi there

Quite a few tools out there will let you do this.  SEMRush is a popular one - simply add the competitor's URL into the field and it will show you the organic (and paid) keywords they rank for.  Searchmetrics does this too, and I've found it a bit better for EU keywords.

Keyword Spy and SpyFu do this as well.

Hope these help.

Hi Tom (great name)

I work in an industry where security is paramount.  From what I have seen for a region where we made the switch to all https (after doing what you have done beforehand as well), I can tell you that it has been very well received.  It's actually a bit of a selling point for us - we're able to say that every part of our site is SSL protected and customers like that, it gives an extra layer of security for them.  And, so far at least, we've not experienced any negative connotations with the move, with people being put off or confused by the switch.

I actually think we're on our way to a more secure web and more HTTPS being the norm.  SEO wise, there's even been talk of SSL sites being seen more favourably than non-SSL sites, although I'd say we're a long way off from that.

I would make the change if you think it will be beneficial to your clients - which I think for the most part it will.  Make sure you take care of the necessary SEO steps like canonicals/redirects, but it sounds like you're well ahead on that front.

Hope this helps

Tom

Hi there

I think you're inkling is correct, this would be an old penalty.

The manual action tab is relatively new, coming up to just a year old this month.  Both myself and some agency buddies have seen sites that have had penalties in there when previously the site owner (and sometimes even the agency!) did not think there was a penalty.

If you have Webmaster Tools set up, you should always receive a message whenever manual action has been taken (bar a system error).  However, in the past, for example, you may not have had WMT set up when a penalty has been applied, or you didn't have access to the account then. Therefore, the message would not be there for you to read, due to it not being sent or deleted.  However, the manual action tab will show any penalties that the site has, regardless of when it was applied, when WMT was set up, or if a message was sent or not.

Therefore, if you're seeing a penalty notice in the tab but no message was received, I believe that means it would be an old penalty - as a new one would have also sent a message as well.

Hope that all makes sense.

Good news! Both domains appear in MajesticSEO and Ahrefs. I've screen grabbed Majestic.

I imagine these will pop up in your OSE profile in the next update too.  But they're there and passing strength. Good job!

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Hi Naomi, if you'd like me to quickly check whether or not the link is showing in Majestic/Ahrefs, let me know your URL and the link URL, as I have access to both tools.  Either post here or send me a PM.

Hi there

If the page is being crawled by OSE (as shown by the link appearing in your competitors' link profile), it's probably a case of the link not being found yet by OSE for you.

OSE only updates once a month, with the next update due tomorrow in fact.  You can see the update history and future update dates here. So, judging by that if your link was placed after June 20th, and possibly a couple of days before to account for processing time, that would be the reason why it has not shown up yet.

If you placed the link well before then, it might be more of an issue with the link itself or OSE showing an error.  You can check to see if the link is showing up with a couple of other tools, such as MajesticSEO, Ahrefs (paid options) or OpenLinkProfiler (free).

Hope this helps.

Fully agree with YNWA and the above article.

When you consider that a meta description has a very small (if measurable at all) influence on your SEO performance nowadays, anything that could potentially be harmful or spammy should be removed.

Your MD is now a shop window - use it to include content that will attract people to your site, are you a local business, your phone number, free delivery, summer sale and so on.  If you have a page on your site that you're not actively trying to promote or use to bring people in, I see no problem at all at having a blank MD and letting Google generate one for you.

Hi there

You can certainly make use of some design elements to help your website appear attractive, but so it still contains useful information for both your user and the search bots.

You might have seen this already with landing pages that contain a video.  You might want to make the video the main focus of the page with little other content visible to direct attention to the video and subsequent call to action (CTA). However, what people have done in the past, with good success, is include the transcript in expandable content.  There will be a bit of text saying "Click here for the transcript" and, upon clicking that text, an element will fire, a box will expand down and the content of the video is then displayed.  The search bot can read the content at all times, which will help the page to rank (provided it is on-topic), while the text is hidden by default for user experience reasons.  There are lots of variations of this that you might have already seen.

There are two things that I would always consider: 1) Make sure you are hiding the content purely for design/UX reasons and not nefarious reasons (such as hiding text on an irrelevant page/website) and 2) Make sure that the content is justifiably there on the page.  I've seen some people "mask" their landing pages in they will show the search bots a long, informative article, but a user who visits the webpage will be redirected via javascript redirect (which bots can't follow) or will overlay the page with an iframe (which bots can't see) to show the user one thing but the bots something completely different.  In my opinion, this goes too far and is manipulative, which might see your page and/or site penalised.  With this, you are deliberately misleading the bots and/or users with what you want them to see.  I would think that a plugin that injects content would possibly be seen the same way.

I suppose there is a bit of a grey area but in my earlier example it allows the users and the bots to see, if they so choose, the exact same page and layout.  The difference is that you are styling some content so that the design and user experience is one that is tailored, but you are not restricting either the bot or the user from seeing the full landing page should they so wish.  That (again, in my opinion) is acceptable.

So with that in mind I would look at incorporating design elements that allow the content to be displayed if wanted, but can be folded away by default.  Expandable content, tabbed content, accordion menus - there are a number of ways you can do this. Try not to be deliberately misleading, but definitely design your web page around what you want your user to see.

Hope this helps.

Hi there

The most reliable way to select a company or individual for link building is to ask them for examples of their work.  This might be complicated slightly by any existing NDA agreements that they might have, but more often than not a reputable company or individual is going to cite case studies on their website anyway.

You should ask them what they have done and who they have worked with.  Whether or not they give you specific examples of links built at this stage is actually quite irrelevant.  You should instead use tools like OSE, Majestic, Ahrefs etc. to see the links for yourself.  Are they building the kind of links you would be happy to receive.  If they have shared examples with you, does the evidence match up?

The key to all of this is transparency.  You will have infinitely more confidence with a company or individual if they are transparent with their work.  Pricing, reporting, expectations - all of these can, and should, be clearly defined.  There's no excuse nowadays for a company/individual to be obscure with the work that they have done - particularly with the myriad of tools available for you to jump in and have a look for yourself.

I hope this helps.

Hi there

I'll start with question 2 first as it's a bit easier to answer.  Robots.txt blocks the crawling of a page, but not necessarily indexing.  Of course, if the page cannot be crawled it will be deindexed eventually anyway, but if you're getting that description for one of your URLs, Google has not been able to access it and will stop trying to.  So that is usually enough, although if you want to remove it as well, you can by all means.

For question 1 - GWT is a bit awkward in the sense that it treats http and https versions of your site as different webmaster properties.  Furthermore, if you want to remove a URL on your site, it will always prefix it with the http/https version of your site, no matter how you enter it.

If you added another WMT property that was https://www.yourdomain.com - you would be able to manage that domain as well and thus you would be able to remove any URLs under that prefix.

Incidentally, if you want to block all HTTPS pages from being accessed, you can do that with a special instruction in your htaccess file and robots txt.  You can instruct the Googlebot and other bots to read a specific robots.txt file if they visit an HTTPS URL.  To do that, you would first add this to your htaccess file:

RewriteCond %{HTTPS} ^on$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/robots.txt$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /robots_ssl.txt [L]

This command basically says "if the URL has https, read the robots_ssl.txt file".  You then upload a file called robots_ssl.txt to your root domain.  In the txt file you just add:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

So now, if a bot reaches an https URL, it has to read the robots_ssl.txt file and upon reading that, they are denied access.  That would prevent all of your https URLs from being indexed.

That might be useful to you, but if you go ahead and use it please take care to backup all your files in case anything goes wrong - your htaccess file is very important!

I have a slightly different approach when it comes to affiliate links.

With an affiliate link, someone is ultimately getting paid to promote the product.  It might be straight away or it might be on a CPA or shared revenue basis, but the fact is that an affiliate link is a paid link.

Google's very clear on its stance on paid links and I believe that it treats all affiliate links in this category.  Therefore, I believe you should nofollow any and all affiliate links that you have, or conversely get people who are linking to you with their affiliate link to do so with nofollow links as well.  You're already paying them/being paid to link to the product in the first place, you don't want to be seen as being paid to promote the site via SEO as well, otherwise will come down on your hard.

Don't leave it to chance - nofollow affiliate links.

Hope this helps.

Hi there

Great to see a content marketing strategy generating "extra" traffic.  In order to pass on an SEO benefit, you may want internally link from within the body of the article to your core landing pages.  That may pass on "the strength" of that page, as it were.  With internal links, you can link to your landing pages with your target keywords a bit more often that you normally would when link building from external sites, but don't overdo it. (I'd say 20-25% of links with your keyword in the anchor text would be OK for internal links - please don't do that for external links!).

Of course, the main objective I see would be to capture that traffic that comes in on those blog/resource pages and get it to convert.  Have you looked at running an email widget next to the blog?  Perhaps you can use an exit popup, popup, popunder or interstitial ad as well.  These methods are more aggressive and "in your face", but contrary to what you may think they really do convert.

Hope this helps.

Hi there

Algorithmically, the directory link you are talking about (I think I know which one you mean) could very well pass on a good amount of link equity.  This is presuming that the site hasn't its strength penalised by one of the Penguin updates - and we know in the past that Google has targeted directory sites for quality reasons.  I'm not sure this directory would fall under that category, as it is local, moderated and business related.

However, you need to ask the question: "How natural does this look?".  Going "featured" is screaming out going "paid" and we know what Google's opinion of paying for links.  So you're running a risk here that it is pretty blatant.  Depending on your strategy, it might be one you choose to take or not, but if you're trying to keep things squeaky clean I would avoid it.

The same really for visually and behance.  You're quite right in your assessment that an easy link isn't a good link, probably because the domains have had their authority diminished (no matter what the stats say) due to it being so easy to get a link there, and again it is possibly one to avoid as it may be seen as low quality by Google.  I've seen sites perform well with these links in their profile en masse, so algorithmically they could work, but again you're taking a pretty significant risk there.

Hope his helps.