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Umar,

What do you think about the all-in-one-schema.org-rich-snippets Wordpress plugin? Can you share whether you've used it and, if yes, whether you'd recommend it?

Thanks!!

My first reaction was to suggest you go ahead and optimize separate pages for each of the two terms, outdoor advertising and billboard advertising. Then I read your comment "the company only offers billboards". Now I agree with Erika that it makes sense to optimize the home page for the overarching brand offering / message (billboard advertising). It would be misleading to do otherwise and you'd be setting yourself up for high bounce rates, low time on page, and disappointed visitors.

You also said your main competitors have not optimized pages specifically for billboard advertising. That might work to your advantage.

Your HTML looks fine.

I used screaming frog to scan both pages. As Peter Nikolow says, different tools have different ways of coming up with word counts. Screaming frog says your page has 3910 words and your competitor (wickes), 3714. So they're very close. I trust screaming frog. It's a popular tool among SEOs.

I also wouldn't worry about Woorank's suggestion that you have the words "sack truck" too many times in the H1 and title tag. You're fine there too, following best practices.

Why are you asking these questions? Are you trying to figure out why wickes is outranking you? If that's the case, I suggest you try a side-by-side comparison using the keyword difficulty tool here on Moz.

I don't completely understand what you're asking, whether your site is the source or destination of links. I can say however, that it would be short-sighted to conclude there's only one reason for your site's rankings to have dropped. It could be what you've described. It could also be caused by other contributing factors. Google's ranking algorithm and the competitive market changes daily, as do most rankings.

"I'd really like to know from you if you see anything on my website that could trigger a "Panda" kind of penalization, compared to my mentioned competitor above (8nots.com)."

_Key phrase being "compared to my mentioned competitor". Cause yes, I can see things that might trigger a Panda penalization. You have a lot of overlapping / duplicate content but so do your competitors. _

The only thing that comes to mind is if there's a threshold you're exceeding that your competitors aren't by virtue of the fact that you many (and more) ways to tag/filter your content, for example, genres, specials, and ensembles.

It's a relief (that your traffic has not dropped)!

I suggest you go to the sales IQ support forum for a starter. Someone there may be able to help. I saw one other thread about analytics not being accurate and it was resolved by an employee fairly quickly.

Michael,

I read a helpful article that touched on this exact topic yesterday. It's https://www.searchenginejournal.com/mobile-first-index-actually-mean/178017/ . As you've already pointed out, a responsive solution is best, but if the website's mobile and desktop content are the same, you may not have to do anything right away.

Check it out.

Give them two options in a grid format:

(1) do nothing;

(2) redirect mobile to desktop

To the right of that, use two columns to convey pros and cons.

I guess you could do nothing and measure the impact for a few months, comparing this year to last. If things don't look good, then execute option 2. Might be hard to isolate the impact of the mobile index versus anything else though, but it's probably the best you can do.

And then there's the 3rd option... go responsive, but as you've said, you don't have time or budget for that unfortunately.

What is a realistic timeline to increase a website's domain authority by 20 points?

Years. Domain authority uses a logarithmic scale like the Richter scale used to measure earthquakes. Every notch you move up the rung takes exponentially more time, discipline, creativity, outreach, and energy.

If you're asking the question b/c you have to set expectations with someone, I'm with Gaston and would suggest you set business goals and a realistic timeline to reach them versus relying on a metric that correlates with high rankings. Think leads and downloads. If it's an e-commerce site, think sales. Things that are easier to measure and explain to the business.

What are the most important factors to increase a website's domain authority?

Someone from Moz would have to answer that. Here is the page on their site that best explains it. My understanding is the domain authority metric tries to mirror Google's interpretation of a website's importance and would expect incoming links and their sources to be given considerable weight in the calculation.

It can. It's bad enough that Google sometimes decides to insert it's own content into the title tag displayed in search results. If you add in a second blank title tag, I'd say that reduces the likelihood that your chosen title tag will display even more. Why not just get rid of the second (blank) title tag? Is there a reason you can't or a reason you want to keep it?

I agree with Kevin. Ahref has that capability assuming you don't run into size constraints. Here's a quick post that explains where to find it. (See https://ahrefs.com/blog/turning-broken-links-site-powerful-links-ahrefs-broken-link-checker/.)

"The concern is that, due to the http>https 301 redirects that will be in place, are we putting ourselves at unnecessary risk by effectively carrying out 2 migrations in the space of a year (in terms of loss of potential authority caused by redirects)?"

In February 2016, Google’s John Mueller announced that SEO equity or PageRank will no longer be lost when a 301 or 302 redirect is used in conjunction with an HTTP to HTTPS migration. While some of us doubted this statement, Gary Illyes tweeted the same thing in July 2016 and Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land confirmed it. There is no loss of authority caused by redirects when you implement HTTPS.

"Would we be better to wait, and implement https at point of platform migration instead?"

I think the approach you're taking (convert to https first) is a good one. It affords you better control and is a good use of available resources.

JFSecurity,

It's likely a couple of things are going on.

(1) Fresh content earns a temporary ranking boost. It's not surprising that you might rank higher at first and then drop after a few days.

(2) Rankings change daily, for a whole bunch of reasons. You should do as MichaelAMG suggests and keep working at it.

Charlesfitz,

You've done an impressive load of research. Here are a few other items to consider:

1. 464 pages had a connection refused (0) status code. Here are some examples:

   /collections/nude-mesh-dress/products/so-sexy-see-through-bandage-dress 0 Connection Refused
   /collections/bandage-dresses/products/navy-blue-cap-sleeve-bandage-dress 0 Connection Refused
   /collections/mermaid-midi-dress/products/mermaid-bodycon-bandage-strapless-sheath-dress 0 Connection Refused
   /collections/sexy-birthday-dress/products/celebrity-bandage-pink-v-neck-dress 0 Connection Refused
   /collections/whats-new/products/rio-rose-gold-two-piece-bandage-dress 0 Connection Refused
   /collections/whats-new/products/bandage-black-strapless-pencil-dress 0 Connection Refused
   /products/spaghetti-strap-lace-dress 0 Connection Refused
   /products/hot-celebrity-black-and-grey-bandage-dress 0 Connection Refused
   /collections/whats-new/products/two-piece-lace-bandage-dress 0 Connection Refused
   /sexy-black-dresses/products/black-bandage-spaghetti-strap-midi-dress 0 Connection Refused
   /collections/one-shoulder-dress/products/one-shoulder-gold-bandage-dress 0 Connection Refused
   /collections/white-bandage-dresses/products/white-elegant-strap-bandage-dress 0 Connection Refused

2. You have roughly 45% of your HTML pages returning a 430 status code. I have no idea what that is but it might be impeding your indexing.

3. You have 80 temporary redirects in place for HTTP to HTTPS files. That's not likely the explanation, but should be fixed.

4. You have a lot of duplicate title and H1 tags. That might result in the wrong pages getting ranked, and by wrong I mean the pages that aren't ideally optimized for your keyword phrase or targeted for SEO equity accumulation.

5. There are 13 404 (page not found) status codes.

6. You also have some perhaps unintentionally noindexed pages, for example, /blogs/news/top-10-new-york-fashion-bloggers, /collections/gold-bandage-dresses and /collections/white-swimwear. (It might also be intentional as I notice you can't manually navigate to white swimwear on the site.)

I found these by scanning the site using Screamingfrog.

Hi Jack,

I saw your question a few days ago and didn't respond thinking I'd wait and see if there was talk of an update in the SEO forums. There hasn't been any.

As you probably know, Google updates its ranking algorithm 500-600 times a year. Only the larger, more disruptive ones get talked about in the forums. You may be witnessing one of the smaller ones. I know I have seen some fluctuations this week.

As to what to do about it, if you're playing by the rules I'd sit tight and see if things normalize over the coming few weeks. It's not unusual for there to be significant changes that eventually reverse. If things don't normalize, then you're going to have to do some comparative analysis to figure out what you need to do to catch up again.

Not a specific answer - sorry, there isn't one. I could be so many different things.

I'd still speak with the hosting provider. It may be a firewall setting, not the CDN.

The quickest, most effective way to improve a website's DA and PA is to produce outstanding content and coupled with link building and outreach. It is not, by any means, quick and (as James has noted) will (by itself) only get you so far. The only realistic way in my mind you can speed it up is to (a) commit to exceeding expectations at every turn; and (b) hire more top-notch content, content promotion, and SEO people.

Hi David,

Is it necessary to redirect ALL old URLs_**? **_

No.

The old URLs will continue to show up in search results for some time. Your global redirect will make sure visitors and link juice gets appropriately routed, but you do want those URLs to eventually get dropped from the index. The best way to encourage search engines to do that is to not create a specific redirect.

Very hard to say what's going on Kingalan1 without a detailed analysis. You've done a domain and https migration at the same time. It could just be a result of the transition given Google will have indexed multiple versions of the same content. Give it some more time. After that, if things don't improve you'll need to do a detailed analysis to diagnose what the problem is.

ColesNathan,

Have you seen what Google has to say about canonicals? https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en

You might find it helpful. They list reasons why you might want to use a canonical tag including those identified above and a few others, for example, for letting Google know your priorities when it comes to crawl budget and SERP display.

Canonicals can also help undermine plagiarism. If scrapers leave your self-referencing canonical intact, it will tell Google you are the originator of that content and consolidate link signals into your URL.

Search Engine Roundtable is reporting they're seeing indications of a possible update on 9/27.

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-algorithm-update-26437.html

I'd don't think the changes you made to robots.txt are the reason for the drop.

I don't know the answer to your question but can share my personal experience. I have waited as long as 10 months for old, redirected pages to be removed from Google's index.