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So, how big of a mega menu are we talking about? Ten links?  Fifty?  A hundred? I think if you go waaaaaayyy to big it can be a problem with both usability and SEO.  But the SEO problem is not in the link dilution.

Hi Jeff, I would recommend that you gather as many screenshots and as much other evidence as possible. Then, tweet to @GoogleMyBiz and let them know you want to DM them evidence of a concerning case of widespread review spam. Wait for them to DM you back. I don't recommend doing any of this publicly. Confine your communications to DM. All you can do is report it and hope for the best. Google doesn't always act on these reports, regardless of how much evidence you send. If you aren't satisfied with the outcome of your private interaction with Google, you can then make the decision about whether to go public. If an issue is so egregious that it receives a large amount of press, Google can typically be shamed into removing review spam. However, the story has to be fairly sensational to garner that kind of attention. Good luck. Fake reviews are so prevalent and so bad for real-world communities who don't know what they are reading is fake. Hope it goes well for you.

Over the years Google has drastically devalued the SEO impact of Footer links, however, we have seen them generate a benefit in the form of referral traffic. I would be careful with having Exact Keywords in the footer links though, could seem spammy as you pointed out.

According to dev: We are at magento cloud - htaccess plays no role there since it is nginx and cloud platform.

Hi, After looking into it more, I tried to submitting the https://www.domain.com to be indexed in Google Search Console. It is saying it is because the robots.txt file is being blocked.  Now after not finding anything related to this in the Robots.txt file, I did see we are blocking SID, and when you click through this page for the first time it takes you to https://domain.com/?SID=da6c01c48dae66de9384d5b71f7af386. Could that potentially be the issue?

User-agent: * Disallow: /cgi-bin/ Disallow: /wp-admin/ Disallow: /archives/ Disallow: /? Allow: /comments/feed/ Disallow: /refer/ Disallow: /index.php Disallow: /wp-content/plugins/ Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php User-agent: Mediapartners-Google* Allow: / User-agent: Googlebot-Image Allow: /wp-content/uploads/ User-agent: Adsbot-Google Allow: / User-agent: Googlebot-Mobile Allow: / Sitemap: https://site.com/sitemap_index.xml use this it will help you and your problem will solve Regards Chotapao

Hi Jeff, This is a tough one. Very sorry to hear about your business losses. As I'm sure you know, several the recent "core algorithm" updates from Google have focused on site quality. Via their Quality Rater program, they ask human reviewers, with specific guidelines, to dig not only into the content of the site but the background of the owners/writers. They test new substantial algo changes with this group before they update results for all users, with a specific focus on "Your Money Or Your Life" (YMYL) content, or pages that deal with serious and potentially life-altering topics. A site offering health information and supplement advice, and also selling those supplements, is in the crosshairs of this kind of review. This is just my take on it, but I expect your losses are largely due to the perceived brand trustworthiness. I'd consider toning down your on-site product promo imagery and ensuring trust-building elements (badges, ratings, testimonials, any kind of accreditations you have) are clearly visible above-the-fold. I'd also recommend building a more clear/clinical layout and typographical treatment for your advice content (blog posts, articles, etc). You might also want to consider limiting the array of supplements you promote and sell, staying away from the controversial and potentially dangerous. I also, unfortunately, would not expect immediate results from this. These core algorithm updates come several times a year, but but I worked with an auto parts retailer who lost 30% of their organic traffic+revenue overnight in the "Phantom III" update (which seemed to be a general "quality" update similar to recent core algo updates) - they had some UX issues, content that seemed there just for SEO, etc. About a year after their big drop, they made a big push to improve UX/quality and add trust-building elements to their pages, and six months after this design/UX overhaul, they regained all of their traffic in the "Phantom V" update. I suspect there is nothing technically broken with your site and that duplicate content and similar are not holding you back much - but that quality raters preferred search results with other sites for the keywords you've been ranking for. First impressions of the brand, quality/trustworthiness of content, etc have big impact here - but these reviewers are also instructed to verify that the owners/publishers of the site are accredited and trustworthy as per other online sources: "Many websites are eager to tell users how great they are. Some webmasters have read these rating guidelines and write 'reviews' on various review websites. But for Page Quality rating, you must also look for outside, independent reputation information about the website. When the website says one thing about itself, but reputable external sources disagree with what the website says, trust the external sources." Not to suggest you have scam/similar accusations showing up online, but it's something additional I'd want to look into. Best of Luck, Mike

Hi Jeff, So long as you compile the list of 301 redirects and add them into your htaccess file (or plugin) before making the Shopify site live you shouldn't have a problem. Google announced some time ago that they preferred https as opposed to http and it was hinted that https was a ranking factor (or would soon become one), so you're making the right decision in that respect. Lastly, Moz actually has a pretty good site migration guide which I would suggest reading: https://moz.com/blog/website-migration-guide

Hi Tyler - Thanks for the response. I definitely know what you are saying. When we purchased this competitor, it was many different products (over 10 years ago) and gradually we added our products. This site normally does a couple million US each year, which is why redirecting it wasn't even something we thought about, and don't want to think about...and for almost 10 years everything was fine. I focused on unique descriptions, we had unique reviews and unique QA, all user generated...different for each of the two sites. But as I mentioned above, some issues happened during our migration, and with a former employee. I want to get it back to where it was, which I believe is possible. I guess I am wanting to see if anyone sees any other potential issues too.

Perfect...thank you!

Yep, I completely agree.

Screaming Frog (the free, unlicensed version, even) does a really nice job of finding both internal and external links resulting in 404, run a crawl of your site and check the response codes tab, sort by code column to find all 404s, if any. You can see the domain in this view so it's easy to sort out which are coming from inside your house, and which aren't.

So I am testing removing some of the restrictions in the robots.txt file and see if that helps as I still can't get it to be indexed.

Thank you Donna...that was it!!!

Thanks for the extra input William. Yeah, it's a new site. I was mainly concerned about the shared address. Nothing I have ever seen before. We have ran some reports on local churches, as well as churches in general to see where to get some quality links and will be implementing that soon. I will keep everyone updated on what happens!

Hi Jeff, If the content on website 1 and 2 is the same and you do a page-by-page mapping and canonicalization, then you'll be fine. Otherwise, I wouldn't do it. Here are Google Guidelines for using canonicals FYI.

Just to add on, you'll find some b2b sites have "reviews" and this can also be used for schema! Helpful for social proof but not always a guarantee to work for Google but useful to have coded.

I did test the page in Google Rich Snippet tester and it showed nothing. I see the same thing with Wikipedia's listing on https://www.google.com/search?q=tanzanite&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 Tanzanite - Wikipedia <cite class="_Rm">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/**Tanzanite**</cite> Tanzanite is the blue/violet variety of the mineral zoisite belonging to the epidote group. It was discovered by a Tanzanian Jumanne Mhero Ngoma in the ... Color‎: ‎Blue, VioletCrystal habit‎: ‎Prismatic crystals with striations; ...Crystal system‎: ‎OrthorhombicStreak‎: ‎White or colorless