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This should work out just fine. If you want to confirm that it is effective, you can backup the old htaccess, upload the new one, go to one of the previously 302'd pages and see if it 301s now. You can check this using the network tab in Chrome's developer tools.

Yes, the way it's usually set up, screen readers for people with disabilities can still read the hidden H1s, so you won't have that card to play against them.

Then you'll need to go off the data you have. The keyword planner is still a good tool to use, it just can't be 100% trusted. You can also play with the Google auto-suggest (waterfall) that pops up as you type things in. The suggestions are based on search volume.

There are also keyword research tools out there that can help. SEMRush, SpyFu, etc.

Also look at competitor sites that already sell the product. See what they are targeting in their title tags and H1s.

I've never tried it, but I don't think that would avoid the temporary dip.

History is showing us that canonical tags are very powerful, and do pass pagerank. Canonical tags and 301 redirects pass roughly the same authority, so even if your physical links are nofollow, those canonical tags are still being interpreted by bots as a link-like entity.

So, by cananocalizing your old domain to your new one, you effectively moved all those links to your new domain, just like they would have with a 301.

I agree with the other responses on the point that the quality content you generate should not go into a G+ post. Put your good stuff on your good site, and share through G+, it still is, technically, social media.

With that said, there is a great way to generate content and increase your ranks (of your G+ listing) with content in G+, and that's by relying on others. Get more reviews, link your G+ in places that people will see, so they follow you, be engaging with them on G+.

Don't think of G+ as another site for you to put content on. Think of it as another social media site where you can attract an audience and be engaging. By doing that, you are allowing others to produce content for you on G+ while you provide value by engaging them.

This is one of the things Panda was trying to discourage (creating pages strictly for SEO value as opposed to user value that have thin content).

Consolidating and building out a single page is the way to go. Google will still crawl the product numbers, and they will be on a much stronger page. Even if they're not in the URL and title, a more valuable page nearly always wins out.

Not only that, you're playing with fire right now. If you haven't been hit by Panda yet, your odds are much higher with the numerous little pages.

1. Consider a warning a pleasant courtesy from Google. They by no means do this on a consistent basis.

2. You can usually get back in, but the effort it takes to recover from being deindexed is demanding and probably not worth it for you naughty "dark dark grey" hat folk.

3. I agree with Irving: I've never encountered a friendly warning from Google before they destroyed all the things.

Yes, and have each one direct to the proper language on the website. If I'm a social media user, why would I want to engage with an entity that only speaks my language a third of the time?

Assuming not all of your pages hold incredible value and don't get visited a lot, I don't think you'd need to do it in phases. You can save yourself some time by throwing in some regex to grab large chunks of URLs at a time and redirect them that way.

Your more valuable pages should be one-to-one redirected as to not confuse users and to retain the most juice to the right place, but for less important pages, grab a bunch at a time.

One way to do this is:

redirectmatch 301 ^/sub/directory/(.*)$    http://site.com/newdirectory

This would grab all pages under site.com/new/directory/ANYTHING to site.com/newdirectory/.

Hope that helps.

I make sure to disavow these as well. No need to disavow each link individually, just knock out the whole domain in the disavow.

This became common practice for me once I had to clean up a manual action penalty that wouldn't go away until the scrapers were disavowed.

I do sometimes see hijacked G+ pages, or other shady G+ activities, but in my experience flagging it or calling Google resolves the issue quickly. You're always going to have people trying to game the system, just make sure to know how to defend yourself against it.

As for +TacoBellCom, first you would have to have the business named "Taco Bell" and get that verified (good luck there). Then, you'd have to hope that Google lets you add characters to the end of the URL instead of deciding it for you. Then, you would have to hope you were never reported, flagged, or otherwise looked at by a human on Google's end. So, odds are it wouldn't work for too long.

That's not even getting into the legality of trademark infringement.

Webmaster's Tools has been pretty good to me regarding telling me about 404s I may have missed after a migration, but using the tactic I described really limits missed URLs, assuming you have a good grasp on the subdirectories of your site.

Phasing is an option, but say, in the case of a redesign or domain migration, I like to do it all at once. That way Google isn't trying to index the website on two different URL structures or domains. Doing it in one shot makes it clear to Google what has happened, since everything is now moved, instead of just a fraction at a time. I'm sure this is a point of debate, and not necessarily the definitive way to do it.

EMDs still carry weight, more than they should IMO.

LondonFootball.com and FootballLondon.com are two different EMDs, just similar.

Is it worth paying two months of your SEO budget? Depends on the EMD and the SEO you were going to hire. Also make sure to do a lot of research on the EMD to see what it's history is. It is indexed? Does it have an acceptable backlink profile? Was it used for anything shady in the past?

There are very few domains I would drop thousands on, and even fewer that I would purchase strictly for SEO gain.

Ha, yeah. This job would be so easy if only clients weren't a factor. The ones that listen are always the ones that have more success.

Good luck convincing your client. Keep your cool, it can be frustrating when clients force you to let them shoot themselves in the foot. This is because once their foot is bleeding, they're going to blame you for the pain.

Webmasters doesn't yet support change of address for HTTPS. They're working on it. Yes, it's insane that this wasn't handled before the HTTPS ranking factor announcement.

Here's an article for more information: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-change-address-https-issue-18971.html

When in doubt, the answer is almost always the same as the answer to, "What is best for the user?"

Users can't make sense of all those parameters, and bots aren't likely to either. A site like Amazon.com or Canon.com can get away with it, because they have so many other factors going for them. Also, some systems create these parameters automatically, and can't easily be optimized.

So, to answer your question: It's best not to have those parameters. Users like it without them, and it makes it easier for people to link to you, since URLs are more memorable. On the other side of that, it's not the end of the world if you can't do this in an easy manner and your time might be better spent elsewhere.

Try to determine when the drop off started, and try to remember what kinds of changes the website was going through during that time. That could help point to the reason for the drop in indexing.

There are plenty of reasons why Google may choose not to index pages, so this will take some digging. Here are some places to start the search:

• Check your robots.txt to ensure those pages are still crawlable

• Check to make sure the content on those pages isn't duplicated somewhere else on the Web.

• Check to see if there was any updates to canonical changes on the site around when the drop started

• Check to make sure the sitemap currently on the site matches the one you submitted to Webmasters, and that your CMS didn't auto-generate a new one

• Make sure the quality of the pages is worth indexing. You said your traffic didn't really take a hit, so it's not de-indexing your quality stuff.

When Google sees more than one canonical reference on a page, they will more than likely ignore all canonical hints that page has. Keep that in mind when you make your decision. If the canonical tags are working on most pages, but not on that one specific page with ?m=0, you might want to keep them implemented. If the issue is larger than that and you're seeing it effect your site in a negative way, remove them and see how Google responds.

Here's a link to canonical information I refer to: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html

I've never experienced a noticable, direct effect in this regard, and have experience with ranking pages well with crazy parameters. As long as things are canonicalized properly and the system isn't creating a bunch of duplicate pages with different parameters, you should be fine.