Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Do you have any notices in GWT Katie?

Great suggestions by Oleg.

Yoast wrote an article last fall that talks about some of the reasons a site might be slow getting indexed and how to get it indexed faster. They have some worthwhile suggestions.

Did you submit the new (https) version of your website to both google search console and google analytics? Is that what you're looking at? Was the https version of the site fully indexed before you noticed the noindex tags?

Have you confirmed every page on the site was converted to https and there aren't any remaining pages (images or pdfs, for example) that are still http and therefore not showing up in your reports?

Just to add to Dirk's response,

Adam Melson at Seer Interactive wrote an excellent post called "Link Building Guide: When You Have No Links". Check it out.

The other thing I'd like to note is, you should plan on spending the same amount of time promoting your posts as you do writing them. And yes, depending on the level of competition you're up against, it can take months or years to gain meaningful traction.

Cyrixr, Can you tell us the site and page you're referring to?

Character width is now a consideration when deciding what to put in your title tags. Keep that in mind too. I think the pipe most likely consumes the least real estate.

This post from Search Engine Journal (https://www.searchenginejournal.com/definitive-list-reasons-google-isnt-indexing-site/118245/) is helpful for troubleshooting.

This Moz post (https://mza.bundledseo.com/blog/8-reasons-why-your-site-might-not-get-indexed) has some additional considerations. The 6th point the post author raises is one you should pay attention to given you're asking about a large e-commerce site. Point 6 says you might not have enough Pagerank, that "the number of pages Google crawls is roughly proportional to your pagerank".

As you probably know, Google has said they're not maintaining Pagerank anymore, but the essence of the issue raised is a solid one. Google does set a crawl budget for every website and large e-commerce sites often run into situations where they run out before the entire site is indexed. You should look at your site structure, robots tagging, and as Jason McMahon says, internal linking to make sure you are directing Google to the most important pages on your site first, and that all redundant content is canonicalized or noindexed.

I'd start with that.

John,

Not long ago, you should have fully expected to lose up to 15% of a page's SEO equity with a 301 redirect. That changed in February of this year when Google's John Mueller announced that no page rank is lost with 301 or 302 redirects.

Moz's own Cyrus Shepard wrote a What You Need To Know Post after that announcement. I think if you read it, you'll be well equipped to weigh your options and decide on the best path forward for this particular situation.

I sometimes see that happen too and wonder if the competitors have one golden link, one super authoritative followed link incoming to their site that just blows your client out of the water. I know your question says "no links", but take a look. It's all I can think of.

Don't understand what you mean by a "dead link with # symbol".

Regardless, I misspoke. What you have with your current structure is NOT overkill. (I was looking at the line below, what you were considering as an alternative, when commenting.)

You only have "st-louis" once in your current structure. I say leave it as is and don't incorporate the city name again in subfolders and file names.

You should include St. Louis in the page copy and meta data and, from your example above, I can see you're doing that. You're on the right path.

Look at your landing page report comparing the before and after time period for organic traffic. Is it specific landing pages that have lost traffic or is the 35% drop roughly consistent across the board?

You have a bunch of pages (787) ending in html that are timing out with a 504 Gateway error.

Here are a few examples.

https://www.scottscastles.com/book/enquire/baronial-castle-54.html
https://www.scottscastles.com/book/enquire/beautiful-historic-mansion-31.html
https://www.scottscastles.com/book/enquire/beautiful-holiday-house-23.html

I sampled a few with a site: command. Many are still indexed so that could be the problem. A few are tagged as no-index, but they're the exception rather than the rule. Many are canonicalized to https://www.scottscastles.com/property/enquire/ or https://www.scottscastles.com/property/unavailable/ but none are redirected.

I'd start there.

I agree with Skye AP. There's no lasting value to paid links, just increased risk. I know it's cliche, but your best investment is in creating and publishing truly original, sought-after, high-quality content and then promoting the heck out of it on sites where your best prospects, customers, peers, and influencers like to hang out.

boyakp,

We're still waiting for you to share your client's website....

You're right. If you removed the redirects, there's no need disavow. I assumed that was what you had done to remove the links given you said you sold Site A.

In my personal experience, it can take Google months, up to 8 months, to drop links. Hopefully in your case it won't take that long.

Agree with the others, Yoast is a robust tool that offers you the most flexibility and configuration options.

Why are you asking? Are you having a specific problem or are you just surveying the group before deciding to move forward with a specific tool?

Hard to tell without knowing the name of the business and the website, but I'd make sure you have a Google My Business listing and local schema on the page. It's a place to start.

Hi Followuk,

Good question. Things have certainly changed making link building much harder than it was not too long ago, but that doesn't mean you should stop altogether. You DO need to follow best practices though.

Where to find best practices?

I have suggestions on where to start:

• The Moz Beginners Guide - Chapter 7 - Growing Popularity and Links;
• the Link Building Category of YouMoz has lots of good and detailed information;
• I also like Point Blank SEO's Link Building Strategies; and
• Digital Current 2014 Link Building Best Practices.

You might also want to think about being alerted to new publications on the topic. Rand did a whiteboard Friday recently that explains how to setup alerts and identifies free and paid tools you can use. I found it tremendously helpful from a variety of perspectives.

Hope that helps.

D

I'd start by taking a look at your link profile. I did a quick check with Moz and Majestic SEO and noticed a couple of things:

1. You have very few incoming links (0 recorded on Moz, 84 on Majestic).
2. None of the Majestic inventoried links have any citation or trust flow, meaning they're considered very low quality.
3. The majority of the Majestic inventoried links are tagged as having been deleted.

Another quick note (but this wouldn't prevent you from being indexed) is your tag pages are indexed. I'd change those to noindex to minimize duplicate content.

You have a very confusing and convoluted site structure. It may be preventing Google from indexing all the pages on your site.

For example, when I navigate to Shop > Chakra Essential Oil Roll Ons > Hemp Hoppin Chakra Balancing Essential Roll On Oil, I land on URL 1 https://**www.**hariomhemp.com/collections/essential-oil-roll-ons/products/hemp-hoppin-balancing-essential-roll-on-oil-100mg-cbd.

URL 1 redirects to URL 2 - https://hariomhemp.com/collections/essential-oil-roll-ons/products/hemp-hoppin-balancing-essential-roll-on-oil-100mg-cbd (without the www).

That page (URL 2) canonicalizes to URL 3 - https://hariomhemp.com/products/hemp-hoppin-balancing-essential-roll-on-oil-100mg-cbd, a different one again.

URL 3 - https://hariomhemp.com/products/hemp-hoppin-balancing-essential-roll-on-oil-100mg-cbd is indexable.

There is a 4th URL that shows up in a site scan - https://hariomhemp.com/collections/frontpage/products/hemp-hoppin-balancing-essential-roll-on-oil-100mg-cbd. It is also canonicalized to URL 3.  It is linked to from the Home page as well as the /collections/ and /collections/frontpage. The later two URLs do not appear in your site navigation.

So you need to look at your site navigation again and clean up some of this confusion. That may not be the source of your problem but it's where I'd start.

How is your own site doing wrt inbound links from external sources Jesus? Do you have many? Are they coming from quality domains? Related domains?

I share your frustration and see this type of thing all the time. It seems you have to go above and beyond in order to neutralize the advantage keyword incorporating domains have.

I would do as Dan has suggested and go after some very high authority links within your industry. That's the fastest way to level the playing field in my opinion.

It might make sense to ask for an objective 2nd pair of eyes on your Wordpress configuration. It's sounding like it might be a setup problem. Do you have someone you can ask to do that?

You should not rel canonical to the first page in a paginated series as subsequent pages are not duplicates of the first.

Here are Google's recommended best practices where it talks about this very thing - https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html.

The RS SEO Joomls extension looks very promising. I've only just begun to poke around with it, but would recommend starting there unless others have different suggestions.

You maybe haven't gotten any responses yet because the page you reference - http://manvanlondon.co.uk/category/clients/removals/man-and-van-wandsworth - comes up as a blank page with the words "write error" in the upper left-hand corner. It's hard to diagnose without being able to see.

I get the same error if I try to view http://manvanlondon.co.uk/category/. Are those legitimate pages? I can't navigate to it via your site structure. I can get to http://manvanlondon.co.uk/category/removals/ but not http://manvanlondon.co.uk/category/clients/removals/.

I'd start with the canonicals. They're not set correctly.

Your home page (https://www.pacificsmoke[dot]com) has a canonical of www.pacificsmoke[dot]com/home.  It's missing the "https://" in front and "/home" should be dropped from the end.

The English version of your home page (https://www.pacificsmoke[dot]com/en/) is canonicalized to www.pacificsmoke[dot]com/home. It too is missing the "https://" in front and should be canonicalized to itself.

I'm assuming because of the /en/ page at the end of the page above and your location (in Canada) that you plan on creating a French version of the page. If that is the case, you will also need to introduce hreflang tags. If that's not the case, the /en/ page is a duplicate and should be removed.

If you need help with hreflang tags, Gaston Riera previously answered in a question in Q&A about hreflang tags and listed a bunch of helpful resources. You can find them here - https://mza.bundledseo.com/community/q/hreflang-tags-and-canonical-tags-might-be-causing-indexing-and-duplicate-content-issues.

Other pages may have similar problems.

Agree with Trevor and would add that they have NAP info on the page and "lawyer" in their domain name.

I, like Cocoonfxmedia, would like to think that given Google has to be aware that not everyone will be able to remedy their situation quickly, they'll go easy at first and ramp up penalties over time.

That said, I don't think anyone outside of Google knows the answer to your question. You're smart to push. I recommend you baseline traffic, conversions and rankings now, before the change, so you can use that push even harder should a negative impact be felt and you need evidence to support your request for approval.

"Are the following hreflang tags correct? "

Yes

"Or now that we do not have french version yet, should I delete the first line? Because, for instance,  we do not have such a URL yet: https://www.pacificsmoke.com/fr/wholesale."

You don't need to add any hreflang tags until you add translated pages. I only mentioned them because you have an /en/ page and you're in Canada. If you don't plan on adding translated pages, then you don't need the /en/ page and you don't need hreflang tags.

I guess the other thing to consider is if those same links are replicated elsewhere on the page, they will only pass equity once.

Hi Stroke,

First check to make sure Google's has indexed the page. If it has, and you continue to see different results, it's because the search engines has decided to grab something else from the page and display it as the meta description. They do that sometimes.

The best thing you can do to minimize this type of occurance is populate your meta description with a clear and accurate description of your page content.

Danarchism raises a good point. Is there a place where crawl impacts are noted? Given the respect that your metric has earned and the number of questions it raises when there are unexpected fluctuations, it would be really helpful if Moz shared their observations.

Also wondering (like Danarchism) if that's already available and I too have missed it. If that's the case, please share.

Lastly, was this a one-time anomoly that's now fixed?

What exactly is the opposition? It would be easier to respond if we knew exactly what their objection is. Seems like you have some data already (heatmap) to support your case.

I must be thick because I certainly don't understand the statement "they are arguing that these images should NOT have alt text as it doesn't add anything to the disability screen reader as the image text would be repetitive with the text on the page. "

No, I haven't run into this problem before. Perhaps they're referring to situations where alt tags just get stuffed with keywords. Image alt tags shouldn't just repeat the text on the page or act as a repository for keywords, although that's often what you see. Image alt tags should accurately describe the image first, use keywords second and where it makes sense.

So, for example, this page has an alt tag coded for the little blue button above that depicts Roger, the company mascot (<img <span class="html-tag">alt</img <span>="Roger_blue_square"). The text "Roger blue square" doesn't appear anywhere else on the page. (Well I guess it does now!) It's a bit succinct - first time visitors might have a heard time understanding what the image represents - but it is accurate and isn't just stuffed with "Moz Q&A Community" keywords.

I'm waiting for the day when Google decides to start penalizing folks for doing what you've described above.

A meta refresh can be used as a back-handed way to redirect one page to another. It works but causes a delay in the page rendering which is considered a poor user experience and therefore typically tagged as a warning.

What causes a meta refresh? You probably have a meta refresh tag in the header section of your code. It would look something like this - . "30" means wait 30 seconds before doing anything. The URL listed after that is the page you want the website visitor redirected to.

How to fix? Get rid of the meta refresh tag and replace it with a 301 redirect. Here's Moz's help page on 301 redirects. https://mza.bundledseo.com/learn/seo/redirection

Does that answer your question?

So, we all "nofollow" most of the external links or all external links to hold back the page rank.

Nofollowing links does not mean you retain link juice or page rank. That page rank gets dropped rather than being transferred to another location.

Is it all same about external links and nofollow now?

I don't understand your question but if you mean should all external links be nofollow, the answer is no. As Google has suggested, you should still tag trustworthy destination links with the follow attribute.

Headlines are you first opportunity to catch someone's eye. There are some great headline testing tools out there, but they're not a whole lot of help unless you manage to attract enough audience to get a meaningful sample size. Might not work for you.

I'd use tools like Buzzsumo to find the most popular headlines for my subject area and then try to adopt similar techniques. I'd look for syndication and guest posting opportunities on publications that you know your audience visits. Great headlines and syndicated / guest posts will get you exposure. Quality content will earn you the links.

Oh, and Grammarly is another good tool to help improve your writing. I like that it's a browser extension that integrates seamlessly with common writing tools like Wordpress and MS Office.

It really depends on the nature, link and traffic patterns of your site Andy. If the vast majority of those 2,000+ 404's are coming from pages that should never have been indexed in the first place, you can probably get away with Luis's 2nd suggestion. If they're differentiated, valuable, and show evidence of incoming links and traffic, you've got some work ahead of you.

You might be able to streamline the process by inventorying and grouping like pages, then doing group redirects. But I suggest you do some analysis first to determine whether the effort is warranted.

Nice explanation effectdigital!

Hi Edward,

It sounds like you're looking for content promotion ideas of which blogger outreach is one option. Try doing a Google search for "content promotion" to find ways to increase your content's visibility and exposure.

Don't know. It probably depends on which images you fetched and rendered. I did some image searches and wasn't able to find many images on your site, only the ones whose actual file names were visible in the HTML.

If you haven't read this yet, please do (best practices for URLs).

So, it's a combination of things. As Devi Allen said, less is more. You want to use (and not over-use) descriptive words, separated by hyphens, "keeping URLs as simple, relevant, compelling, and accurate as possible". "To correctly render in all browsers, URLs must be shorter than 2,083 characters."

Which is better, your URL or your competitors? They sound pretty close based on your description but what matters is the actual words used in the URL, the site structure represented by that construct, whether the words truly represent what a visitor will find on the page, and whether the page content will provide visitors with the information they came looking for.  URL length is but one of many factors that go into determining whether you or your competitor will rank higher.

John,

there is no right answer to your question, no rule of thumb. As I said earlier, it really depends on your originating pages and how much traffic, bookmarks and inbound links they currently have.

Matt Cutts says "there is no limit to the number of [direct] redirects we'll follow".

If it was me and I was worried about slowing down the site, I'd create all the redirects and watch site speed. If the site slowed down, I'd deal with that then. It's easier to drop redirects than it is to try to recover lost links because the redirects weren't there in the first place.

Do we lose backlinks and domain authority when we change domain name?

Assuming your site structure, file and folder names, and content remain the same and you do 301 redirects then no, you would not lose backlinks and domain authority. You should also:

• benchmark key metrics (for example, site speed and rankings);
• update internal links (don't forget about your non-html pages as well);
• check for and fix and redirect chains;
• tell Google (via Search Console) that your domain name has changed;
• set up new properties in GSC (www, non-www, http, https), set your preferred profile and geography, and eventually merge profiles into a set;
• transfer your disavow file in GSC;
• track 404 errors (that could indicate you've missed some files) and customize your 404 page to help visitors that encounter them as a result of your domain name change;
• update any external URLs with UTM codes that point to your site (UTM codes get stripped with redirects);
• update your domain name in Google Analytics;
• update your sitemap and add to GSC as well as your robots.txt file;
• I usually update major sites that point to me as well, things like Google Maps, local data aggregators, and social media sites; and
• check your traffic, rankings, and GSC daily for a while so you can react quickly if something's amiss.

Unfortunately, it is rarely the case that only your domain name changes in which case you'll need to a page-by-page mapping. Don't forget about images and PDF files that may be indexed separately from HTML pages.

Check out this slide presentation (https://www.slideshare.net/bastiangrimm/migration-best-practices-smx-london-2018) from SMX London 2018. It was recommended by John Mu at Google and is really useful.

7 months is not an excessively long wait time. It can take longer. You may also never hear back.

Stick to your plan. Wait to hear what the previous SEO company did.

Tanveerayakhan,

You have your answer.

• http://goo.gl/Twp28T is NOT ranking on page 1 on google.com. (I searched for "web hosting Pakistan" incognito while in the US and it came up on page 2, #12.)
• Google's algorithms are imperfect. http://goo.gl/Twp28T is ranking as well as it does due to known black hat tactics which haven't caught up with it yet.
• If you want to out-do it, be patient, persist and "try and defeat the site on merits. Build up your domain authority."
• You should watch your tone and maybe show some appreciation for those that are volunteering to help you. (Otherwise you'll stop getting suggestions.)
• If you're not getting the answer you want, feel free to hire an expert. Moz does provide a list of recommended companies that provide consulting services.

Hi Luke,

It's a complex topic. I think you'll find this Matt McGee article from SmallBusinessSEM and this one from Marcus Miller at Search Engine Land extremely helpful. Both talk about how to optimize multi-location businesses and very specifically about data consistency and does Google pay attention to slight variations like the one you described in your question where the addresses are never wrong, just "mixed up a little".

"... for the most part, the algo handles those minor discrepancies well. That being said, you don’t want to tempt fate."

No. That's not the sole cause b/c I can still see blog content indexed on Google. It looks like you currently don't have Google Analytics tracking codes setup on the blog content, so any visits you are getting aren't getting captured in reports.

Also on the old site, you had two separate sets of Google Analytics tracking codes set up on the blog content (UA-743349-4 and UA-30229507-1). It's possible the code was firing twice causing double counting.

You're right. It wouldn't. Just the analytics.

Updating the title tags isn't the issue cause it looks like they didn't have unique title tags before the transition. But it should help boost organic traffic.

You may be right (it's a lot of small things). Have you looked at your traffic sources before and after to see if anything stands out? Is the drop evenly spread across direct, organic, PPC and referred traffic? Is it primarily in one area?

I'd be happy to take a look if you want to give me temporary access to your analytics and WMT. Sometimes it just takes a fresh pair of eyes.

Excellent summary Thomas. Is that custom or are you using a paid tool to generate that?

Thanks for clarifying the point about duplicate hits.