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You can control parameter handling in Google Search Console and direct Google explicitly how to treat parameters.

If Google deems a parameter page worthy of being indexed it will index. But if you edit the parameter handling in GSC as mentioned above, they will usually/always follow that.

If you get links to a parameter URL and it canonicalizes to the non-parameter, that link equity should flow just find to the non-param page. Triple check meta robots, robots.txt, canonicalization setting to be sure.

Yes, I think this will make it easier for them for sure and should theoretically help your links pick up.

If you want to be 100% safe you don't violate any guidelines, just make sure you're not explicitly telling them they have to link back in exchange for product, but you can encourage and if they do on their own free will it should be fine.

Never heard of a penalization around over-optimizing images, I think that's a very small concern.

Like EGOL said, optimizing the file name with keywords and dashes is actually one of the best ways to go. Google's image search engine is very rudimentary so it uses the filename as a large % of the image ranking algorithm. Would take the approach of describing the image succinctly in the alt text while including and image.

As far as helping the page rank in the normal SERP results, images have a very small contribution. So it's a best practice but don't waste too much time on it unless it's a massive site where you can apply scalable changes all at once.

A lot of SEO's recommend Distilled's training course as the default. It goes through a lot of topics and is just $40 a month, so a good way to get the basics covered, although they also go into more advanced topics.

Meta keywords are not still a thing, at least in Google search!

So looking at Strasbaugh, and answering some comments you made:

• You're right, it's not mobile responsive - this can be a detriment, but it's not going to knock them off the first page in most cases just because of that. It's a small percentage of the overall factors
• Site design - I feel that I have pretty high standards, but I wouldn't call this "old and frankly, terrible" - I'd say it's decent for this industry. Keep in mind they're not trying to be a creative design agency website
• Domain age can be a helpful factor if it truly is old
• Unfortunately, the Moz bar isn't the best source to find a high volume of links (yet) - using Ahrefs I see 70 linking root domains, which is pretty decent for a local firm
• Video, H1, H2, blog/content updates - those can be signals but are not deal breakers if other factors exist
• Titles are important, but they're not totally bungling them. They at least have their core phrase "financial advisors" in there, although yes all the pages should have rewritten titles
• One thing that's likely helping is that its links have generally good anchor text. Mostly "Strasbaugh Financial Advisory" in the link anchor. This is something that I thought Google would have discounted more by now, but that's not the case, it's still a strong signal
• Lucky for you, if they're a competitor, is that in looking at their traffic on Ahrefs, they actually don't get a ton of it, it's only about 53 visits a month. The important thing to note is that your example keyword exactly as you phrase it "Financial Advisor in Colorado Springs" - gets 0 searches a month. The keyword "financial advisors colorado springs" gets 20 searches a month and they are ranked #4
• Looking a page like http://www.strasbaughfinancial.com/who-we-serve - they have decent helpful informaiton on there. It's not 10x or even 2x content by any means, but it's better than what I see on a lot of these local financial firm websites

Hopefully that helps! The good news is that if you think what they're doing is minimal, then you should be able to replicate and improve and then rank!

I think it's a great idea to stoke demand by creating blog posts before the product pages are up.

If you think about it you're suggesting two options: do nothing or do something. If your product pages won't be up for awhile, might as well put that content to use, which will help you uncover a few things:

• How difficult is it to rank for product related keyword?
• How much natural demand is out there for my products already?
• Are people willing to sign up for a waiting/mailing list for my products?
• What types of content do readers find most compelling on my site or in my niche?

I wouldn't wait because you never know what delays there will be in the future, so might as well start now.

Switching platforms, such as to Shopify, is always a pain, but if you're going to be migrating pages anyways, a few blog posts won't be a huge technical challenge.

Possible SEO consequences/recommendations between blog posts and product descriptions:

• They are two different things. When reading blog posts, people are looking for information, stories, ideas, etc. When people read product pages they want to know details and FAQs about that product specifically. There will be some overlap, but keep the goal of the user in mind.
• That said, you can use some of the product descriptions within blog posts, but I wouldn't just copy/paste. There's no such thing as a duplicate content penalty, but it's usually not a good idea to replicate pages across your site word for word.
• When you write blog posts about your products, link to the product pages from within the post. You always want to prioritize product pages for your money keywords, and blog posts for more informational/long-tail/high volume, but low difficulty keywords - two different strategies.

Hope that helps! Let me know if you have follow-up questions!

Thanks for the update Erin - totally understand if it's outside the company's bandwidth, although Moz's perks will be missed on my end!

Just jumping in here even though it's an old question.

The thing is, Moz is crawling the pages and showing duplicate titles, but if you have page B using rel=caonical pointing to page A, then Google will reference page A.

It's ok if page A and page B have the same title if using rel=canonical, because Google will follow that directive most of the time.

So if Moz is surfacing duplicate title tags but they are canonicalizing, it's safe to ignore Moz's flagged issue. Don't always take it at face value.

It would most likely be a waste of time to go change all the page titles for the duplicate pages if you're using rel=canonical.

It's awesome that you have such an aged domain, but I would agree that it sounds like a mouthful and it's hard to get strong branding around it. If you're planning to be around for awhile, I'd recommend making the change from a brand standpoint.

In order to tell if you'd lose rankings on the "web design" types of keywords, I'd recommend doing an analysis of how much your keyword in your domain might be helping over not having it. You might do this by pulling the page authority of your pages ranking for competitive keywords and compare those to your competitors' page authority scores for the same page type competing for the keywords and check if it seems that you have the advantage boosted by the domain.

You could also analyze the anchor text profile used to help rank your pages and see if it's strongly positively influenced by your company name to help rank.

Even if you do find additional boosts from your domain name, I'd recommend making the change!

You're right on target, it's not a good idea to index search results. Google doesn't want to crawl or index other search results in its own search results. There are some exceptions for gigantico sites like Yelp or TripAdvisor when showing their search results pages are actually the best option, but if you're not at that level and especially if you're an ecommerce site, it's not recommended.

You wouldn't be harming anything by excluding search from your robots.txt file. In fact, many top sites exclude search results to preserve crawl capacity and for indexation reasons.

You'll also want to look at parameter handling in Search Console, this article from Google will get you started.

Yup - for this first time, I think ever, one of my clients DA jumped up about 10 points to a number that's more in line of where I thought it should be, based on industry standards. At the same time, the two closest competitors dropped by 5-10 points each, which was very relieving. It was relieving because I had been monitoring their own content and links for the past few years, and much of their links have been spam or purchased links. I had been waiting for their drop for awhile, and now there's vindication!

So for the first time in awhile, I'm very impressed with this update, and from my narrow perspective, the new index seems to be right on the money.

In response to the part about "you need people to miss you", a good example would be the owner of a small quaint Italian restaurant in your neighborhood that everyone loves. The owner moved to your 2nd rate smallish big city from Italy 10 years ago and just loves what he produces and his customers. He's constantly making the rounds every night complimenting, talking to, and cracking jokes with customers. When he's not around people miss him. He has a distinct opinion and perspective, and that's why people keep coming back.

Scaling this up and broadening it out to all businesses, I think it means focusing on a specific segment of your market and putting your stake in the ground, forming an opinion, and keeping the conversation open with that segment of your customers. I mean if you read some company blogs, they're just checking the box to say they have a blog. They're not going deep and passionate and getting opinionated.

Off the top of my head, https://baremetrics.com/blog has an awesome 10x brand blog. It's opinionated, helpful and goes above and beyond. I trust http://www.thekitchn.com/advice more than I trust allrecipes.com or something generic. I love how Ian is a honey badger in his posts - https://www.portent.com/author/ian - he writes like he talks and that's way more engaging than perfectly formatting a long post.

I would view the Moz blog as going deep and connecting with the audience. Contrast that to HubSpot, while although they are volume animals, they kinda just pump out mehh content and let you find the golden nuggets.

Just a few examples so far! It's an open discussion so I don't have a proper conclusion.

I would say it depends on the size of the site, if it's a large site, you can be wasting Google's crawl capacity by having it spend time following 301 redirects from nonexistent pages.

Google does a pretty good job explaining the soft 404 conundrum:

Returning a code other than 404 or 410 for a non-existent page (or redirecting users to another page, such as the homepage, instead of returning a 404) can be problematic. Firstly, it tells search engines that there’s a real page at that URL. As a result, that URL may be crawled and its content indexed. Because of the time Googlebot spends on non-existent pages, your unique URLs may not be discovered as quickly or visited as frequently and your site’s crawl coverage may be impacted (also, you probably don’t want your site to rank well for the search query [File not found]).

We recommend that you always return a 404 (Not found) or a 410 (Gone) response code in response to a request for a non-existing page. You can improve the user experience by configuring your site to display a custom 404 page when returning a 404 response code. For example, you could create a page containing a list of your most popular pages, or a link to your home page, or a feedback link. But it’s important to remember that it’s not enough to just create a page that displays a 404 message. You also need to return the correct 404 or 410 HTTP response code.

Here's the thing, if you keep it as a 301 redirect from the old listing page to the property overview page, that old listing page will stay in the search index longer since you're not showing a true 404 response code. So if people are in the search results and click on that listing there's two ways of looking at it: if they click on the non-existent listing, well at least you'll still be driving a little bit of traffic to your site and hope they look at other properties. On the flip side it's a poor user experience since they were expecting to see that property page when they clicked from the search results, but instead are just being led to another page.

I think the decision lies in the size of the site. If it's a huge site, let them hard 404 and follow the best practices. If it's a small site and you're hoping people stick around serendipitously, you can probably keep doing what you're doing.

Thanks for the transparency as usual. A question I've always been wondering:

Moz seems to have much more stature, clout, and maybe funding compared to many other SEO software companies based around the world. And of course you offer more of a suite of products rather than just focusing on Open Site Explorer. But to me one of the most important SEO tools is the backlink explorer tools that companies offer, and it seems like OSE, although one of the first, lags compared to a few others. I've read that OSE isn't looking to just grab all the links, but only the most important ones. It seems though that there's been lots of technical challenges, and I can't help but think that there are other companies that have already solved their indexing challenges or are a few steps ahead of OSE.

Would Moz ever go out an buy a pretty good backlink explorer company like Ahrefs or Majestic or some other upstart that's solved that piece of the puzzle? Combining that new technology that's solved the indexing part with your DA algorithm seems like a match made in heaven. I'm sure you guys have considered this years ago internally, but it's a question I've always pondered...

Really hard to know for sure without knowing the industry/vertical, but it sounds like you've started somewhat of a system for scaling this up.

I would estimate a half-hour per article with time to upload to the CMS included in that, so around 15 pieces I would estimate is fair. Again a lot depends on the research and ultimate quality of the content, but it sounds like it's fairly straightforward.

One thing you could do to help is identify what features are being identified over and over, and see if you can help with some Excel spreadsheet magic.

I managed a project like this in the past for golf course descriptions, and since there were about 1,500 of these, using Excel came in clutch.

Yes you want quality content, but if you're listing features over and over, then you should use tools to help speed up the work!

A few thoughts - pretty good explainer video, I would imagine that would take a ton of time to write!

First impressions on user profiles:

• From looking at a few of the profiles, it seems like you'd be missing out on a lot of good user data if you simply retired these profiles permanently. From a search engine perspective, it sounds like they're not bringing in much on their own. But there's also qualitative and quantitative data that you can glean from all of those profiles to inform and create content, charts, data, reports, etc for your site. You can map out all the user profiles to create personas for your site. You wouldn't want to trash these and lose the data.

• I do see the point on the content being somewhat thin, but thin content pages don't always harm your site if they're serving a purpose on your site. If you look at Moz's profile pages, some of them aren't very meaty if the users haven't contributed many posts or comments. So it should be evaluated on a case by case budget.

• What you can do - and I believe Moz does - is if the user hasn't been active in the last year, you deactivate/archive their page until the user signs in again. That way you only have active user pages. Conversely, you can leave the profiles up but just automatically noindex those pages that aren't being used so that the crawl budget isn't being wasted. Another idea is to automatically noindex some of the pages under a certain word count threshold.

• Yes the user profiles may be eating up your crawl budget when Google crawls the site, so you wouldn't necessarily want the profiles being crawled above other important pages if the crawler is hitting it's limit. Check out Search Console to see the crawl activity and stats (under Crawl Stats)

• It looks like you have 8,000+ profiles currently indexed - which is both good and bad. Good because it's proof that Google is able to crawl all of those profiles and deems them worth indexing. Bad if you don't want all of them indexed or to waste your crawl budget.

• You are write that all of the title tags are the same. I would automatically rewrite those and run a 90-day experiment to see if you can actually get some long-tail organic traffic to those profiles. Perhaps in aggregate they can actually bring in some traffic. Or maybe you'll learn after 90 days that they just don't rank for anything and so aren't worth spending time on.

• One thing I noticed is that you don't have an XML sitemap designated in your robots.txt - https://www.hairlosstalk.com/robots.txt I would add multiple XML sitemaps to your robots.txt by creating a sitemap index. The WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast does this well for your WordPress pages, but you should make sure your shop and profile pages get their own XML sitemaps as well.

• You should submit all sitemaps in Search Console and track the page indexation % for each XML sitemap.

• You should also run a cohort report in Google Analytics to see if those with profile pages on your site have higher engagement rates than non-users and let that inform your decision as well. Do they purchase more than others? Visit more often? You don't want to chop off a community that contributes to the health of your site and revenue.

• From a UX perspective, it's a funk thing to have your headers and design different among the WordPress, Magento, and Blogs sections. I'm sure you're aware of that, but it's definitely something that stands out.

• Action items:

• Rewrite all title tags on user profiles (auto generated is ok) and test for 90 days to see if the traffic changes

• Also optimize the profile pages with on-page best practices as well

• Generate XML sitemaps for each section of your site, and submit them in Search Console

• Create some type of programmatic way to deindex old or extra thin profile pages

• Run cohort reports on profile page owners vs anonymous visitors

There's your free mini-site audit! Let me know if you have other questions!

Yes you can redirect the 3 URLs to the new product page and everything would be alright.

The question to consider though, would be if you had tens of thousands of product pages and so then would need tens of thousands of redirects. If the old pages did not get much or any traffic, or just the popup URL was hardly ever visited, it might not make sense to implement the redirects. Those redirects could slow down portions of your server or site while processing those redirects.

Essentially if you had a bunch of old pages that were just never useful, let them 404. If they were useful and linked to or in the index, then 301 redirect to the new page.

Hope that helps?

Highland brings up some great points that I agree with. I definitely am learning as well that for some clients that are larger and has an in-house team that you support as an SEO, they might just want you to focus on SEO. But if it's a smaller company you're working with that maybe doesn't have their own Director of Marketing, then you kind of want to take on that role and provide a variety of services. It's kind of a business-dependent approach, meaning every company has different needs - no two are the same. Although productizing the services for clarity, ease of pitching is a good idea too.

In response to your question, I would agree with you that it is a difficult situation - writing content for a law firm that you don't have the technical chops for. Assuming that you're dealing with lawyers - I would imagine they are super busy and their billable hourly rate is so high that they're incentivized to work on their own client work rather than help you write content.

Perhaps rather than a blog, you can organize and repackage lawyer-approved information and helpful guides to post on their site. Think about who their clients are and what the clients need help with and serve them the best info possible on the site. Showcase the trust and authority of the firm with evergreen content.

If you do decide to continue blogging, perhaps take the Movado approach - where in their real estate niche instead of talking about real estate jargon and industry issues, they broaden out to talk about cities, neighborhoods, and local topics in cities across the world.

This is definitely still a sound strategy, especially since you're essentially cleaning up parts of the web! You're reclaiming links already pointing to the clients site, so it's a fairly straightforward strategy. The title led me to believe you might have been snapping up deleted domains and redirecting to the client site, a general gray-hat strategy.

A few issues to watch out for:

• In order to recover the most value, try to recreate the original content on your site that the external sites were linking to. For example, if you had 30 external links to a resource page that's now dead, it would be best to recreate that page if it still applies to your business rather than 301 all the links to the home page
• Be wary of redirect chains, Google will stop following a few redirects chained together (4 or 5 hops)

Here's a good article from PageOnePower on the subject as well.

@Trevor - I've noticed an anecdotal trend since around 2011/2012 as the average thumbs up on any Moz post has decreased. Seems that after the switch from SEOmoz to Moz there was a dip, and then a second dip after this most recent redesign. Am I totally off here, or is this something you guys are seeing.

Would be a cool blog post to compare the trends of page views and thumbs up over time and any big meta trends that go along with that, could be very informative. I'm sure there's some UX and brand engagement metrics to go along with that.

Have also noticed less comments from well known SEO/other leaders since around that time. Could very well be a correlation between those who were leaders in 2012 that have since just received so much business that they can't keep up with commenting and/or they've shifted attention to their own websites and content. I'm thinking of people like Wil Reynolds, Ross Hudgens, Dan Shure, even Cyrus Shepard and Dr. Pete, among others!

Again, would make an excellent blog post!