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Hi,

Tawny is right. If you want to pass on any existing authority to a new domain/url, then you want to be using 301 redirects to do it. Either doing them en masse (e.g. all http: to https:) or individually if required, and you should get somewhere around 90% of the original SEO benefit (which is better than nothing). Plus it also avoids users trying to visit via previous links ending up on a 404 page, which is pretty bad for the user experience.

Well technically if it can't crawl your site, it won't be able to find any issues...

I think this may be an error with the Moz crawler rather than any crawlers - checking with site:dateideas.net pulls up some results, although they seem to be tag and archive pages at the moment, which I'd be looking to noindex to avoid duplicate results in the future... You can always check Google's crawling by making sure you've registered your site with Google Search Console, and I'd suggest also making sure you've submitted your sitemap.

I have had issues in the past with the Moz bot struggling to crawl on specific hosts, so it might be that... The new crawl seems to work fine for me at the moment, but is it possible your site was down at the moment Moz was crawling it? You can always request a new crawl and monitor your site uptime to see if there's an issue...

I haven't had this problem personally, but had a look around on the net out of curiousity. About the only solutions I've potentially found is removing any content groups you might have set up, and making sure any event tracking is running after page views are recorded.

It's worth running through the Google guide to setting up Event Tracking and Behaviour Flow to make sure it's done properly as a first step: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2785577?hl=en

So just to check I'm understanding this correctly:

A website with DA 34, and PA44 has linked to you. And because it's a footer link on a vb bulletin forum, you're ending up with 19,500 total links from that one website.

So...

It's not brilliant, as footer links, and masses of links from one domain, won't particularly help you. Generally you'll be advised to avoid actively going out and getting stuff like that, nofollow it, or even considering disavowing it.

However...

It really depends on your overall link profile, and what industry etc you're in. For example, if you've got a decent mix of quality domains linking to you with non-site wide links, then having one sitewide isn't the end of the world, and I wouldn't worry about it too much.

And having looked at a lot of niche industries, in many, you'll see the top results have plenty of site wide footer links (Look at local web design/marketing agencies for easy examples of this).

So I'd think about your niche and competitors, and then react accordingly. If you're worried about it, then you can always request the link is no-followed so you can still get the traffic benefit, but unless the only links you're getting are masses of site wide footer links, it should be fine as far as anyone can predict with Google these days!

I've been in a similar situation, and I'm definitely still learning when it comes to code and development. I found the best way was to separate out the technical areas, and focus on one at a time.

In addition, it's worth seeking out actual courses rather than trying to pick it all up from free online articles. Either that, or find someone that knows their stuff in each specific area, and would be kind enough to help guide you when you need it. I've definitely found that some in-depth book and course learning, and helpful mentors, has been the quickest way to level up when needed...

The robots.txt 404 could be a temporary outage, but it's a bit hard to tell without being able to see the actual site and robots.txt. Try checking the site is up, and you can access the robots.txt then requesting a new Moz crawl...

I do have one client who insists on blocking everything and then allowing specific crawlers, and allowing rogerbot seems to have worked fine to date.

Katarina shared some good advice.

Remember that the Open Site Explorer, good as it is, can't crawl the entire web, so might not discover every single link for a competitor.

And to displace an established competitor with consistent rankings doesn't mean matching their inbound links - it means exceeding them, as they'll also have the benefit of the domain history, existing traffic etc.

I've done some outreach in the past for a major window supplier in the UK, and if you use your graphics and animation skills in the right way, you should definitely be able to improve your situation. It's just about finding the right angle for the right audiences....

I've helped a couple of Web Design and SEO companies who have been in this exact position. They'd ranked plenty of local small business clients in relatively niche markets against competition which either hadn't bothered with SEO, or had often invested with a company that didn't do much. But their own site was struggling.

The main reason is that there's a lot more competition among SEO companies, and you'd hope at least some of them might know what they're doing. So it takes a bit more effort to sustain good ranking positions - aside from the usual step of making sure all your info is correct and updated for all local site listings, it's really about combining quality links and also quality reviews.

The local pack is always a bit of a mystery - sometimes it appears Google will pick random sites from the first few pages, even when some of them haven't done anything above type in their business name before closing down 6 months ago. But aside from the occasional fluctuation, you should be able to maintain a decent spot by making sure your listing is complete, you have some reviews, and you've optimised a relevant part of your site for your location as well.

As Martin said, it won't do much for you. A few years ago, having an external blog on the likes of blogspot was common practice, but it turns out that it was fairly easy for Google to figure out what was going on, seeing as they own blogspot.

You'd be better spending the time on other areas (local citations etc).

No problem. And there are ways around presenting the same content differently. It's hard to be specific without being able to know what the product is, but it's something I've had to solve for various clients, whether it's been for software or actual products.

I'd say it depends if you're going to have a significant numbers of courses, camps or lessons and a main landing page for them at examplesnowboarding.com/courses for example.

As a general rule, it's probably a good idea to have courses,camps and lessons in the urls just to give an extra indication to Google, and also to users. And saves those times when you forget to include 'course' on the end of every page title, too...

Igor has recommended some of the best tools.

However, I would keep an eye on whether the site still works for related terms if they're important. Although it's widely accepted that Google understands synonyms etc, I've seen countless examples where it fails. For instance, ranking a site differently for even an alternative spelling as widely accepted as e-commerce and ecommerce.

Rather than relying on Google to understand the related terms you want to appear for, I'd use the tools to pick up on the related words which you should actually be trying to use. For example, I'd be using commercial, business and B2B etc, rather than assuming Google (or any search engine) will pick up on one also meaning the others.

So, a 404 won't affect your overall SEO. It may affect usability if your higher traffic pages are resulting in an error. Obviously if it's images only, then that's less of a concern unless you were driving lots of traffic via image search.

Generally if you redirect everything, then the image links should be updated to (I did the same thing on one of my own sites fairly recently). But it may simply be Search Console lagging behind a bit... It's annoying if you want to have no errors on your reports (and I get bugged by the same thing sometimes, even on sites with 100s of thousands of pages), but as long as the posts are working fine, I wouldn't worry too much.

So you want to rank at the top of search results and get people to pay for your products, but you can't invest the time to write some decent content for 20 pages?

You don't get penalised for duplicate content - what happens is that all except one result will be filtered out generally. Or you'll be seen as low quality and won't rank for any... You can canonicalise all the pages to 1 main page which will have a better chance of ranking, and that will tell Google that you know it's duplicate content. But you'll only ever have that canonical example ranking - if that's better than investing in either creating unique content yourself or outsourcing it to someone that can, then that's the route to go.

It's not the best idea, as mentioned above.

What tends to work is having them as footer links for people who might be interested in the group of companies. The logical answer is to nofollow these, and they may still pass some benefits without the risk of penalty. However, when you look at large publishing groups for example (I know these well as I've worked for a few), they'll quite often list all their main publication websites in the footer, and also have them all followed.

Now it may be that Google has missed them for a penalty, or it may be as massive publishers and possibly advertisers they're getting more leeway. But it's worth saying that they certainly don't seem to have suffered - there was a case study by Viperchill ages ago covering Hearst http://www.viperchill.com/google-control/

As Matt said, you need to be redirecting all your http urls to https.

If you have WordPress or a similar CMS, you can usually do this in one go via the .htaccess file. Just enter the right code to redirect any http url to https and you'll be done.

What Martin said. Most large sharing sites will always nofollow links to avoid becoming a spam pit filled with people farming links.

But have you thought about the actual event websites? Some will always collect the presentations from speakers, but it's worth checking, as those sites are likely to result in a nice followed link from a fairly relevant place (either relevant for subject or location).

Basically, beef up the unique set of features and design specs as much as possible. And you could hopefully build up unique testimonials pretty quickly. Or just select different ones from different products, so you're not duplicating them across every product you do.

In terms of 'SEO juice', why would you not just link to the individual pages as appropriate as much as possible? That will still raise the overall homepage in the same way as you're suggesting, but without trying to adjust the 'page rank sculpting' which has become less and less effective over the years. And just try to have as few links and navigation on the homepage as far as possible which don't point to your product pages. It's fine to nofollow links like a privacy policy or Terms and Conditions, but as for anything further, you get into potentially risky behaviour for a penalty.

Hi,

So the main issue with dynamic search results is that they won't have unique content, and will quite often duplicate other pages, as you've discovered. E.g. Products under £10, Products under £20, and Products under £30 would all include content from the first, and then the first and second categories.

The usual answer is to just noindex all of them, particularly if individual product pages are your focus and ranking well. Unless you specifically want to rank for 'x products under £10' then there's no issue with removing them from search results.

You have a couple of options for doing this - either by noindexing any dynamic search content via robots.txt, or Noindex,Follow, which still allows crawling, but won't display the results. In general, I'd say that Noindexing the dynamic search results with a wildcard is easiest and most effective.

If you did have something you wanted to rank - then it's be a case of setting a specific search result with some unique content describing that category etc.

Dan

Hi Sean,

I can certainly empathise with your experience - Magento is definitely more complicated to set-up and customise initially. And for a little background, I worked on the early versions of WooCommerce with the original developers, so I understand why there has been a need for simpler, more effective eCommerce solutions.

With Magento, the key is to find developers and agencies/consultants who have experience with it. Like any platform, it's much easier when you know it well, but often we don't have time to spend learning before we're earning. I've worked on 2-3 fairly big Magento sites now, and can get stuff done reasonably quickly and cost-effectively, but it's never quite as fast as with Shopify or WooCommerce (although knowing some Magento specialists makes a big difference).

This article about a large company moving to Shopify sums it up - from the article it's clear they had appalling developers, but used that as the reason to switch platforms (http://elumynt.com/magento-to-shopify-plus-complete-guide-for-large-retailers/). I can't blame them for it when it was costing them money and business, but it's pretty clear it's a dev issue...

And Shopify isn't bad for what it is. If you're looking for something that is more plug-and-play, it'll do the job.

The problem is always that you're limited by what's available. So if what you need hasn't been created/verified/approved, you're basically stuck. From memory, a team I know have put together some SEO solutions for Shopify so will try and dig it out.

With regards to any migration - if it's done properly, you shouldn't lose rankings. I've moved tens of thousands of pages across domains and CMS platforms etc, and had minimal drops if any. Usually the new platform etc has been rolled out to improve things, so it often leads to a gain even if everything else stays the same, just because the new set-up is faster etc. The key is to plan out the switch very carefully and with plenty of time to check, double check and triple check - 301 redirects, .htaccess and robots.txt files are the essentials

It shouldn't make a difference. After all, you'll be optimising the Shop version for 'product name', and the main site version for 'installing product name', and the content will be different - so the two pages should really be complimenting (and linking to) each other for a mutual benefit.

Duplicate content doesn't stop your best page ranking by the way. It's better to think about it as a filter - if you had two identical pages, only one will ever be found, and the other might as well not exist...

I'd be interesting in why you're planning to move from Magento - you tend to find most people graduate up to Magento from Shopify or WooCommerce as their inventory and business grows.

So I'd usually suggest actually improving the Magento install unless you're looking to radically simplifying your business and product lines and won't be looking for the in-depth functionality that Magento offers...

Hi,

The answer to the first question is yes - many publications, including niche titles will have a features calendar available, or will regularly email enquiring if anyone has products, news or can help with features...

Second question? In addition to HARO and Pressloft, I'd look at the big PR lists etc. It does mean dealing with some spam requests, but can be worth it if you have the time.

Is it a small, local type business by any chance?

Despite what a lot of best practice will say regarding location pages - they still work for a lot of small, local busineses, particularly in uncompetitive niches. Generally, I'd say 500 cities/towns is massively overdoing it, and there are a lot less spammy ways of achieving something similar, but it may well have contributed to the hit...

If the clicks are the same, then actually it's fine. No one was visiting and buying via the impressions you've lost. However, I'd say it's worth looking at the location/local SEO optimisation again and redoing it in a less spammy way to ensure your client won't panic if they ever look at impressions in Google Search Console (Pretty unlikely for most clients)...

I'm going to disagree with Alick300 slightly.

You won't need to rebuild all your links in terms of the minimal loss of ranking signals. Although I'd consider it for the top 1-2% (and also any local citations etc, etc). This is based on some experience with testing whether updating links can make a marginal difference on various sites post migration, and seemingly it can help if you're just missing out on the next ranking position (for want of a better metric).

And it's also worth checking prior to migration whether the switch to https will create any redirect chains. For example, you might have an old page link that was redirected, and now redirects again to the https version etc. The Moz crawl will highlight any chains/loops you have with existing redirects...

Some quick thoughts, based on a career mixing marketing with writing for various niche publications....

Generally most publications which ran something around Back to School content will be either publishing a new version or updating it. It's also worth making a note of the author, as freelancers will often shop similar articles around a number of sites, and will be known for certain niches.

Traditional print/online publications quite often have a features calendar which they make available on request, and sometimes publish online to help suppliers/advertisers etc plan ahead.

It's also worth using online tools for journalists like HARO (Help a Reporter Out), and responding to requests for Back to School related content.

Making sure you're easily findable when journalists are looking to quickly grab some examples to finish the article they have to submit in 30 minutes

It could be an intermittent slow server or one that's dropping out occasionally. There are various services which allow you to monitor uptime (e.g. Pingdom etc).

Who owns the sites redirecting? It's pretty rare to have someone redirecting to a site they don't own or have any business relationship etc with...

If it's the same person, and the redirects are spammy/not sending useful traffic, you can just turn the redirects off.

Is it something like 'non /' to 'trailing /' to 'https' by any chance?

It's not a major issue as far as I'm aware - I've had it on a few sites where I wasn't able to implement changes to the redirects, and it didn't stop the sites from ranking as well as would be expected.

But it's also solvable - just implement the redirect rules for http non / to https, and http trailing / to https rather than in a chain.

You'd be fine with one mention of Women, otherwise you risk keyword stuff in your page title.

Plus even if it ranks, it'll look terrible in search results.

I'd wait a while before worrying - rankings can be all over the place for 24 hour periods. I've had specific terms go up and down 300+ positions over the course of a week recently, and there seems to be quite a bit of change going on.

If the desired page hasn't recovered in the space of 1 week+, and you've sorted all internal links, then I'd look at external link sources and see what's happening there that could be triggering the confusion. For instance, a newly discovered link to the individual hotel page?

Additional relevant content always helps as well

If you don't want to rank for the individual hotel at all, you could canonicalise it to leave it on the site and working for visitors, but obviously you'd lose any rankings for that particularly hotel name.

I'd second Patrick's advice - I've seen people try and do this with redirects and canonicalisation, and it normally leads to a mess that has to be sorted out in the future...

Are you looking at mobile, desktop or combined? There's been the confirmed Google Algo update for mobile: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2016/08/helping-users-easily-access-content-on.html

There was talk of a ranking update over Christmas, but I've also seen rankings often affected by a drop in interest/CTR over the Christmas period with business-to-business sectors due to the holidays.

I've seen a variety of results across clients, but a couple have declined over the last 3-4 days, so i'm investigating at the moment. At least one of them had some mobile-related issues, so I'm wondering if the two things may be related.

Just another quick point - the downside of pointing towards the Swedish site is that it's on a .se domain, and is probably hosted etc in Sweden, so while that wouldn't stop it from ranking in UK searches, it won't help.

(Funnily enough I've resumed learning Swedish recently, as I have family ties there, but haven't got on to flooring yet!)

So if you're wanting to remove the swedish-supplier.co.uk site and only use the new site, the logical thing would be to redirect the current swedish-supplier.co.uk site with 301 redirects.

That'll keep most of the authority you've accrued in the past, and transfer any current customers across.

The key task is to map out how it will work, because the homepage will be a straight swap, for example, but your old site may have content which isn't currently on the newly-acquired company domain, so you'll either need to direct those pages to the most suitable equivalent, or create new pages on the newly-acquired company domain to point the old stuff to.

Assuming no issues, you should see a pretty straight swap between authority and traffic as the redirects take effect. But if you're wondering about how to go about it, it's probably worth investing a small amount in getting an SEO professional/agency with experience in cross-domain redirects involved, even if you do the bulk of the work yourself and just get them to sanity check it.

You'll also probably want to check that the new domain is set-up correctly, and is registered with Google Search Console and the location is specified etc, plus it's also worth thinking about whether you want to continue using the same analytics account from the newly-acquired domain if it's got some installed, or from your swedish-supplier site, in which case, you need to copy across your existing code, remove it from the old site, and note the change in your GA account to be able to refer back to it...

Seems strange that the duplicate url is being created - without knowing if you've used the Twitter embed option or a plugin, it's a bit difficult to figure out the issue. You're probably better off solving it by fixing the duplication issue, rather than hiding it with a redirect, as you'll end up with a large number of redirects in place if it continues...

If you did just want to redirect everything, then the easiest would be to add a redirect via .htaccess for anything /www.twitter.com to redirect to the proper blog post title.

Honestly, I'd question having the Twitter feed on your blog? If it's just your own posts appearing, then it's not going to offer any value over having a follow button - it's only if it's aggregating multiple sources that it's worthwhile...

If the agency is working on your behalf, then it depends on the agreed contract. Ultimately, you might decide that it's worth switching to an agency which isn't as protective about the accounts.
Personally as someone who runs Adwords and Youtube accounts for various clients, I tend to group them within the account for my agency simply because it means we have a bigger overall spend, so we might get a slightly better response from Google etc, and it also means that we never have access issues when we're checking them daily (and the client generally doesn't have the time or desire to monitor as closely). But I also give them top level account access as a matter of course, even if they never use it - optimising ad accounts isn't a massive secret - it's mainly long, dull and tedious optimisation!

And if a client prefers, I'm always fine with letting them maintain the account as long as I can get the access I need - the only difference really is that it doesn't then count towards the totals for Google Partner status etc, but that's not a massive issue...

Having had agencies hand over accounts in the past, I've seen good and bad examples, and I certainly wouldn't want to work with an agency that wasn't willing to let me have a quick look at negative keyword lists etc every so often, espencially if you're spending a reasonable amount...

There's no exact rule as far as I'm aware, but generally 75-80% unique is a commonly quoted threshold.

The actually amount of duplicate content on a page won't affect how Google handle a canonical tag - either the tag is there or not, just the same as a redirect etc.

So the issue is that you have sub-pages which contain a lot of the same information about cushioning, Gore-Tex etc?

If the content is reasonably unique, then it's a case of optimising each sub page for 'trainer model name cushioning' or 'trainer model name Gore-Tex' as appropriate.

Alternatively, you could create one high level glossary page for all the terms used for all the trainers, and then canonicalise each sub page to that one - then you won't risk the duplicate content filter, and provide a useful resource for people who might be looking for Gore Tex Trainers, rather than Nike Model One With Gore-Tex Trainers...

There's pretty much no-one at Google who would know every element of the ranking system, so it seems unlikely a third party would successfully replicate it all beyond what is already available via the common SEO tools.

If they really had managed to completely replicate everything to the point it worked perfectly, why wouldn't they just set up their own websites to rank highly and make money without having to do client work?

They may well have built their own internal SEO tool, which could do something similar to the Moz On Page Grader, for example.

But considering how important external SEO factors remain to be, and the fact they'd have a much more limited data set than Moz or other tools, it seems like it would be a bit pointless unless they planned to pivot to selling their own SEO tool.

So either the client ends up being saddled with a company using a tool with very little data. Or they end up being saddled with a company aiming to ditch clients and sell an SEO tool instead in the future...

Hi,

Ideally, you want everything that's important as high up the menu structure as possible without making it too unusable for actual customers.

If it's 3 levels deep, then it's starting to get to the stage where I'd either look to move the category up if it's an important one, or possible merge it with something else that's relevant to be able to get it higher in the menu structure. Ultimately it's about managing your crawl budget and if you're burying something 3+ levels down, it's less likely to be regularly crawled unless it's incredibly popular from external links etc.

Flatter, shallower navigation and menus are always best as long as they're still usable...

Yep. There's certainly nothing to stop them from ranking, and if you're already doing well with product pages, then it's an indication your category pages should also do reasonably well.

Obviously you'll want to optimise for at the category level (e.g. Ladies Leather Jackets, rather than a specific jacket name or type), and there may be more competition. But obviously by going for broader terms, there's the opportunity to attract a lot more traffic.

In general when I work with eCommerce sites, I always tend to work from individual products up where possible, so as far as I'm concerned you're doing it in the right order...

As Jordan said, it's definitely not a big factor compared to the big signals. It does seem to have a minimal effect with everything else being relatively equal, so if it's a fairly easy thing to implement it certainly doesn't hurt though.

Don't forget to set your audience target in Search Console as well....

Hotlinking is definitely a bad idea - it can often lead to the original site changing the images to prank anyone known to be using them for example. Or if the original site goes offline, it'll take out your site as well.

It really depends on the website ownership and also the purpose. I know you were using examples, but if the second site is a specific stock image site, for example, they may consciously want to promote that site for images...

What Igor said.

The opportunities for free article posting sites is increasingly limited - the only ones I've seen getting a decent amount of traction have been using alternatives to SEO to gain traffic (e.g. paid social, email etc), and have also targeted a particular niche.

For an SEO perspective, you're basically going to be on a losing streak, as the only people likely to use a free article posting site other than something massive like Medium will be those looking to share existing/spun articles to game their SEO.

The way to think about it is as an opportunity, rather than a cost.

Instead of having two competing brands for the same customer, you now have the opportunity to target two segments of potential customers much more effectively.

Plenty of examples exist of multiple brands under the same umbrella targetting different customer groups. For example in drinks, look at how many brands Coca Cola own - and why they'd buy brands like Innocent to get to a different market group....

In finance, you might want to target one brand at younger consumers who will then grow into the other brand.

Or one for those on a lower budget, for example.

And that will naturally lead to different and unique content. I supply a huge amount of content for businesses, and my structure, language and tone has to be different for each one to appeal to the customers they want.