I'm about to do a website relaunch in a couple of months. It's a WordPress site. The relaunch will include these changes:   changes in content, both text and images a new WP theme, thus changes in the DOM as well as design changes some minor structural changes   The domain luckily stays the same.  In terms of SEO I remember reading somewhere, that it is wiser to not change everything at once, but rather do changes gradually. Especially to not make changes with the content and the design/DOM at the same time. But I cannot find that same advise anymore anywhere.  So my question is: Is it better for your Google rankings to do all the above changes at once, or do them gradually, hence changing the theme first, than waiting 4 weeks or so and then doing changes to the content?
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I'm a web designer and I'd like to make a custom wordpress theme for my upcoming blog. The template is already made in photoshop but I need a good starting point. I don't have too much experience with Wordpress but I want something that is SEO friendly which I can edit without risking getting poor search results.  I Know about Starkers and that there are other blank themes out there, but are they good for SEO?
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I have been hosting in a server from last 2 years. I am planning to change the hosting server. Before I change the hosting server I would like to know whether it affects my site's rankings or not?
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The blog post  sheds a little light on how the current process for making changes on Stack Exchange works.  Today, our research process might look something like this for a high-impact, high-cost project.     What's our current research approach? Strategy (Survey; User interview; Comparative site analysis; Historical context research; Data analysis), Design (User interviews), Build (User interviews), Ship (Survey; A/B tests; Meta feedback)  And later on it says:  Meta feedback. We monitor Meta for bug reports and small usability/copy issues after shipping changes to the site.  Now, as was mentioned in the blog post, this is a marked departure from how things worked in the past.   What was our past research approach? Strategy (Meta feedback), Design (Meta feedback), Build (Meta feedback), Ship (Experiments)  Before, every stage of the process was simply &quot;Meta feedback&quot;. Now, the Meta feedback has been relegated to... bug reports and usability issues. Please consider gathering Meta feedback earlier in the process. Meta feedback is important.  Now, as an avid Meta user, I may be biased. However, Meta represents the most engaged users - the ones who have been here for years in most cases, often current or former moderators on the network, and those who are, most importantly, the ones that the site most heavily relies on for moderation. Meta feedback represents the feedback of those most engaged users. The feedback of your most engaged users, especially on a &quot;high impact&quot; project, is important. Those users are in the best position to tell you how it well affect their use of the site as someone who uses it very regularly, and they may let you know about something that is very important to them but less so to other people. I'm thinking of cases such as the incident where the Worldbuilding.SE robot, Slartibotfast, was going to be removed due to the design changes to the site. Due to  from those most invested in the community, the robot was saved and an important part of the site identity was preserved. Journeyman Geek put it nicely in :  I'd also like to point out that, well, the designer is not going to have the same grasp of a site's &quot;uniqueness&quot; as someone who has been on it a while will have.  As I mentioned before, this is a marked departure from how SE worked in the past. You are taking a group who has, for ten years+, been deeply involved in every stage of a change, and suddenly telling them &quot;you're only giving feedback after it's done and we won't be making any big changes because of your feedback. Sorry!&quot;  That's not going to go over well. Especially in the current climate of the community having broadly lost trust in the company, removing their feedback from any changes is only going to serve to further deteriorate any remaining trust.  On the other hand, including them in the process and working with the community will massively help improve trust and relations between the engaged community and the company. We, the Meta community, are the people most invested in these sites. The way our feedback is treated should reflect that. Please consider gathering Meta feedback earlier in the process for making &quot;high-impact&quot; changes.
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I am working on trying to re-design the site for the agency I work for and a recommendation was made that we should move to a single page site with a vertical scroll which which walks through all the work that has been done. I am not a big fan of that since I am not sure how intutive that would. Is there research into what are pros and cons of a single page and when they should/should not be used as opposed to using a multipage site.
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In researching the best practice for adding sites to the Search Console, I've often seen it suggested to add separate properties for different versions of the same website. Even in  it states:     "Similarly, if your site has http:// and https:// versions, you should   add each as a separate site."   I've seen the same suggested for www/non-www. So if a site is accessible at all the variations of http/s and www/non-www we should have four properties.  But what if the site is only accessible at one variant? i.e. https and www are forced via htaccess, so only  can ever be accessed - should we still add all the variants?   In essence, the problem is that I don't know why Google wants us to do this, so I can't work out if it'll be ok just to have one instance.
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I know this question is someway similar to  where they recommend using 404, but after reading  where they suggest to use 301 when changing site URLs (in the specific case was due to redesign/re factoring) I get a bit of confused and I hope someone could clarify for this specific example:   Let's say I have an eCommerce site, let's also say the final user inserted some interesting items in the site and the eCommerce webapp created the item pages at the URLs: http://...?id=20, http://...?id=30 etc. Now let's say some of these interesting items got many external links toward them from many other sites because some people found those items very interesting and linked to them. After some years the final user deletes those items, so obviously the pages and URLs http://...?id=20, http://...?id=30, etc. now do not exist anymore, but still many pages on the web are linking toward them.   What should the eCommerce site do now, just show a 404 page for those items?  But, I'm confused, wouldn't this lose all the Google PR passed by the external links to the items pages? So isn't it better to use 301 redirect to HOME PAGE that at least passes the PR to the HOME PAGE?    EDIT:  Well, according to answers the best thing to do so far is to do a 404/410.  In order to make this question more complete, I would like to talk about a special case, just to make sure I understood. properly.  Let's say the user creates those items again (the ones he previously deleted at point 4), maybe he changes a bit their names and description, but they are basically the same items. The webapp has no way to know these new added items were the old items so it obviously create them as new items with new URLs http://...?id=100, http://...?id=101, does it makes sense at this point to redirect 301 the old urls to the new ones?    ANOTHER EDIT (It would be VERY IMPORTANT TO UNDERSTAND):  Well according to the clever answers received so far it seems for the special case, explained in my last EDIT, I could use 301, since it's something of not deceptive cause basically the new pages is a replacement for the old page in term of contents. This is basically done to keep the PR passed from external link and also for better user experience.  But beside the user experience, that is debatable (*1), in order to preserve PR from external broken links why not just always use 301, In my understanding Google dislikes duplicated contents, but are we sure that 301 redirect to HOME PAGE is seen as duplicated contents for Google?!   Google itself  so if they consider 301 as duplicated contents wouldn't that be considered duplicated contents too? Why do they suggest it?  Let me provoke you: “why not just add a 301 to HOME PAGE for every not found page?”   (*1) as a user, when I follow a broken URL from some external link to some website's page I would stick more on this website if I get redirected to HOME PAGE rather than seeing a 404 page where I would think the website does not even exist anymore and maybe I don't even try to go to HOME PAGE of the website.
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I am using the Yoast plugin to help with the SEO of my site. I just set everything up and am wondering how long it takes for google to update the information. As you can probably tell already the only knowledge I have is basic CSS.  What I am mainly concerned about is getting my homepage listed with the correct SEO title and meta description. Currently, my homepage is listed but not with the updated SEO title or meta description.  Thanks for the help.
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There are links, buttons, images and much more that directs users to new pages.   In my opinion, it should always stay in the same tab unless it's a PDF or download item. But when is it acceptable to open things in a new tab?
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I read somewhere that web designers' habit of placing a default "follow" link in the footer of their client websites is bad for SEO.  Is this true?  If so, should we use rel="nofollow" instead.  I have seen rel="designer" in some free WordPress themes.
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I received an email this morning stating that my Wordpress site had been automatically updated to the latest version. I knew about the feature but I've always wondered exactly how it works.  PHP isn't a permanently-running process: it only runs when requested. So as far as I can tell, Wordpress can only update itself when someone loads a web page. But the update process is not instantaneous, so surely a user visiting the site would have a really slow page load.  Is there a different trick they use for automatic updates? I've searched all over the place but haven't found any explanation.
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I'm using the Yoast SEO plugin on a WordPress site on a new, more memorable domain to replace an old static HTML site with no SEO. I've followed , set up 301 redirects from the old domain to the new one, and filed a change of address in the Google Search Console. However, after a few days, the old site still shows in search results, and is ranked higher than the new one if you google our company name.   And, if I try to set the preferred domain in the Google Search Console Site Settings for the new site, I see this in place of the options to prefer www/non-www/http/https:     Not all options are available because of a Change of Address request   related to this site.   I've read of some cases where this condition has lasted for .  Is there anything more I can do to fix this? Have I done something wrong, or do I just need to wait, and for how long?
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I am a big fan of minifying everything whenever possible. It is a sin for me to don't do this.  However, I recently read that one of the thousands tips to boost your website rank on search engines was to:     give you content context with good class and id name in your HTML     I always change id and class names to one or two character length...  Is not that I don't believe what that guy said, but I really need some confirmation on this. For me it doesn't make sense why would that matter.   Is that point correct? (in case it is) Why?
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Considering upgrade of CMS to latest version- the process may take anywhere from 2 to 4 weeks.  May suggest - we need to work on live server, what we have planned:   take exact replica of site and move to a test domain, but on live server Block Google, Bing, Yahoo - User-agent: Google Disallow: /, User-agent: Bing Disallow: /, User-agent: Yahoo Disallow: / in robots.txt Will upgrade CMS and add functionality - will test the entire structure, check URLusing xenu and move on to configure the site on original domain   The process upgradation and new tools may take 2 to 4 weeks....  Concern is that despite blocking Google, Bing &amp; Yahoo through      User agent disallow    can still the URLof test site can be crawled by the search engines - if yes - it may hurt the original site as will read on as entire duplicate or is there any alternate way around.
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I was wondering how much time to devote to guest-blogging.  It is pretty consuming and one person can only do a few per day max. And often you just get a link in the bottom of the post.  Is it really beneficial to SEO? And if so, are there any particular tricks or pitfalls to it?
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I am creating a new website for a client, and I think a single page website / layout will be pretty neat. There is not that much detailed content, it is a company that imports a lot of products from different companies. So it will be a bit of a showcase of the different types of products / equipment you can order. Of the whole catalog only maybe 10 products are actually shown.  Now I have the basic structure with sections and links like:      #home / #products / #equipment / #services / #contact.    Now from what I understand is that Google does not index links containing #, so there will be no problem of duplicate content, everything will be indexed as the frontpage.  Now what I want to optimize is searching. This company is agent of some product in the country, meaning only they have the permission to import and sell that product. This means  that when somebody searches for product x, this website pops up as the first hit.  Now can I make it that they will be automatically brought to the #products part of the website directly from google.  I was thinking of something like having google index the different sections as different pages. Is something like that possible?
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I have a problem with WordPress database synchronization between development and production and I am wondering how other people solving it. I am aware about  but it doesn't really cover the nastier and more realistic use case.  Say I have a live WordPress website. I took a dump of everything, replicating it on our dev environment. I started making changes. 1 week later I am ready to deploy my updates. In the meantime, database on production site has changed(new posts, new comments, etc.). How do I synchronize changes between production and development during the rollout and is it possible to automate(somewhat at least) this process?
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I'm really worried about professionalism.  My site would be something like http://mywebsite.uy instead of http://mywebsite.com.uy.  What do you think about this practice? What should I have in mind at the moment of choosing one?