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.

Have you done a side-by-side comparison of your client and his top competitors? Things I'd be looking for:

• Are his top competitors specialists in the topics you want to rank for whereas your client is more of a generalist?
• What is your client's online reputation relative to the competition?  Is the sentiment positive, neutral, or negative?
• How does their anchor text compare? Are the topics you want to rank for included in the link text?
• Do competitors have keywords in their domain name? I know that's not a ranking factor, but it often translates into incoming anchor text with those topics / keywords which IS a ranking factor.
• Is the content on your client's site organized around the key topics he wants to be known for?
• Is your client listed as its author?

So, no tricks or hacks. Just a few things I look for when in this situation.

sponnu0123,

They show up for me. I searched for "dermatologist 10004" as well as "dermatology 10004". Wall Street Dermatology ranks #1 in the local pack for both phrases.

There is talk that there might have been a minor update around the 9th. Check out the following two resources:

• https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-algorithm-update-signals-on-may-9th-27549.html
• https://www.mariehaynes.com/algo-changes-and-more/

"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'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.

It is also believed (but not confirmed) that Google does not publish star ratings on home pages.

https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/87537/homepage-rich-snippet-star-ratings-not-showing-in-google-serp

https://mza.bundledseo.com/community/q/schema-markup-star-ratings

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.

Thank you.

Where can one submit a feature request for Moz, see all the other ones that have been submitted, and make our preferences known?

For those of you reading this question, I suspect there is no inventory of feature requests accessible to non-Mozzers because I have occasionally asked to have something added and been told my request would be passed along versus "go here and log it". I'm asking the question in case one does exist and I'm just not aware of it.

That said, if you think this would be valuable, please comment and let Moz know.

I think I might see the problem.

I looked at your (Jeannie's) screenshot of the page in question (https://www.hillwebcreations.com/google-maps-marketing) as well as the source code for the page. I'm seeing an extra space before the h1 close bracket (

vs

). I scanned the page using Screaming Frog and it is NOT finding an H1 on the page either.

Could that be it Jeannie?

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.

HariOmHemp, please provide your domain name so we can look into this. It's impossible to tell otherwise.

Evoe,

Your plan is a good one assuming: (1) you want searchers to see insurance website A vs insurance partner website B pages in search results; and (2) you're okay with Google Search Console consolidating all search metrics into the canonical URL in performance reports.

.

Very interesting question.

I'm also wondering if BSC + accounting (as an example) impedes your client's ability to rank because of lowered brand ranking signals. B.Sc. audiences are bound to bounce more and spend far less time on page and site. They're unlikely to link to you when they might, in fact, link to one of your B.Sc. competitors.

Nice explanation effectdigital!

Oh how I dislike Imgr and wish Moz made sharing images easier.

See if this works. If not, go to https://imgur.com/ItJ0dyS.

I'm using the Mozbar to show the redirect.

ItJ0dyS

You will rank for both, once your site has earned enough authority on the topic. Google appears to be interpreting the terms as synonymous. You're likely seeing variations cause they (Google) are perpetually testing.

If I search for "woodscrews" today, only one page 1 search result (Screwfix) uses "woodscrews" in their title tag and on-page content. The nine others do NOT and yet still manage to rank on page 1 for the term.

You may see different results, but my point is, it may be less of a conundrum than you think. If you want to try to rank for both variations, you're going to have to out-optimize all competitors, including the 1 (Screwfix) that does manage to rank for a different spelling of the term. Screwfix has not used the spaced version of the term (wood screws) even once on the page. When you take into consideration EGOL's points, that may be a problem for you.

Also of note, Screwfix does NOT rank on page 1 for "wood screws" (with the space). So they really have traded off one for the other.

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.

Your redirect is not working. It seems to be circular.

If I click on your old URL (https://www.roomsindex.co.il) I'm redirected to the new (https://www.hour.co.il). That part's good.

If I click on your new URL (https://www.hour.co.il) and use the Moz extension to look at your HTTP status, I'm told your new home page (https://www.hour.co.il) is redirecting to your old home page (https://www.roomsindex.co.il). So you need to get rid of that redirect.

Check your .htaccess file again.

Have you reviewed this?

https://mza.bundledseo.com/blog/wrong-page-ranks-for-keywords-whiteboard-friday

It's a good question and the answer depends on how much competition you're up against.

Yes Google recognizes your location using geo tags and footer content. I generally try to optimize without using too heavy a hand when it comes to city names. But if you're having trouble ranking using the more subtle tactics alone, then, by all means, employ the city name in your title tags, meta description, H1 headers, and so on. Just make sure your content doesn't start to look "stuffed" or unnatural as it may turn off visitors. It's most important to keep them interested and engaged.

Looks like you took Nigel's excellent advice and have implemented the redirects. That's great.

I did notice however, that you're redirecting vivitecsolutions to www.vivitec and then www.vivitec to vivitec (without the www subdomain). I suggest you get rid of the middle redirect and go directly from vivitecsolutions to vivitec. The redirect "chain" unnecessarily slows your site.

Related to your #7, I think citations will continue to diminish in value to the point where unrelated and unauthoritative sources will no longer "move the needle" or be worth acquiring. Local SEO companies are going to shift gears and put more emphasis on providing education and services around reputation management and link-earning. I realize some of that is happening already. I just think we're going to see more of it.

You think there might be a big change in local players this year? That's interesting. Are you thinking of any one company in particular?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Grettelp,

You can sometimes have more success getting ideas for local keyword phrases using the free Google Keyword Planner tool. It allows you to specify a geography you're interested in - city, municipality, county, township, state, province, country.

Google Keyword Planner does not give specific volumes (they give rounded figures for groups of related keywords), but you'll at least get an idea of what people are searching for and can test it.

You can also see a sampling of the phrases people are using to find your content by looking at search queries in Google Search Console, also free.

Let us know what happens please.

Often when the bounce rate is zero, it means your tracking code has been installed more than once. Check that. Also check to see if you're using both Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager on pages. If you are, make sure tag manager is tracking events and not pages which could lead to the same outcome (bounce rate = 0).

Are you using a call tracking service? Sometimes they log events in your Google Analytics account, events with no associated page views.

https://www.en.advertisercommunity.com/t5/Google-Analytics-Reports/223-Sessions-0-Bounce-0-Average-Duration/m-p/535134#

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.

No.

Just keep an eye on it. If you continue to see impressions and clicks, scan your site again just to make sure all content has been converted and there aren't any lingering files hardcoded with http. You server-side redirect will take care of it. The only possible downside is the unnecessary redirect which slows rendering a bit. Not a show stopper.

Steven,

Start by viewing your analytics to see what categories and tags are currently working for your audience. I suspect you have over-engineered your current solution and a lot of category and tag pages aren't being visited, or if they are, not for very long.

Next, make sure you don't have overlapping or redundant categories or tags, for example, "family portraits", "family reunion portraits", "maui family portraits", and "maui senior family portraits". This confuses your audience and makes it hard for you to ensure consistency and analyse results. You might want to have events as categories (weddings, reunions, births) for example, and locations and venues as tags.

Then, don't create a category or tag for everything. Set a minimum number of posts that would fit into the category or tag. You don't want a category or tag page, for example, to contain a single blog post.

Position your search button higher on the page.

Lastly, if you don't want a football field-sized list of categories and/or tags, use a drop-down.

I looked at your site Steven. Do you know that you have a mix of active and indexed pages that are http, https, and blog posts in a subdomain as well as subdirectory? You might want to clean that up.

Srinivasan.n,

I expect if those 3,000 pages are indexed and have content, they're ranking for something. Maybe not for the search terms you'd like them to and maybe not anywhere near page 1, but they're all likely still ranking.

What are you trying to do? Are you trying to figure out if you have content that can or should be removed, consolidated or updated? If yes, you might find this post helpful - https://mza.bundledseo.com/blog/content-audit#15.

Hi Tom3_15,

Should I create a new view in analytics? No. There's no need and you want to easily compare before and after.

Should I also create a new https property in Google search console and set it as the preferred domain? Yes

If so, should I keep the old sitemap for my http_ property while updating the sitemap to https only for the https property?  _Keep the old sitemap for your http property. Add the new sitemap (with https URLs) to the new (https) property.

Thirdly, should I create a new property as well as new sitemaps in Bing webmaster? Yes

Finally, after doing a crawl on our http_ domain which has a 301 to https, the crawl stopped after the redirect, is this a result of using a free crawling tool or will bots not be able to crawl my site after this redirect? _I don't know why your crawl stopped after the redirect. I use screaming frog and it continues to crawl after the 301 so it might, as you suggest, be a function or shortcoming of the particular tool you're using. BOTs should be able to continue to crawl your site after the redirect. Google certainly can.

Hi William,

I took a quick look at your GMB Listing. It doesn't display your address.

When I plug your business name and zip into the Moz Local Check Listing tool, your business comes up with an address (34th street) that is different from that listed on your website (49th street). The 34th street address is used on a significant number of the data aggregator sites as well as sites like Brownbook, Mapquest, Yahoo Local, Yelp and Yellow Pages.

That's undoubtedly at least part of the problem. You need to fix your address so it is consistent in all places.

Hi Trent,

I agree with Roman in that I would definitely do one before the other - much easier to manage and troubleshoot. If it was me, however, I'd do the https migration first. Why? Because there will be less moving parts. You only have to worry about the protocol change and can put aside renamed or dropped URLs until a later date.

I agree with Gaston. The most important thing to do is to plan and execute carefully. In my experience, failures are usually caused when insufficient time and care has gone into planning, executing, testing the migration.

You'd also be wise to benchmark existing metrics and settings before pulling the plug. It'll streamline problem-solving should an issue arise.

This post is also helpful - https://searchengineland.com/take-back-lost-links-220462. It explains how to reclaim lost links when it's not obvious why rankings have dropped. It's possible you've lost backlinks that pointed to previous versions of the site that haven't existed for years and this post provides a step-by-step technique for reclaiming them.

Yep,

You're not the only one experiencing ranking fluctuations.

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-may-update-25790.html

Someone else observed (in the comments) that the flux is really noticeable when geographic qualifiers are included in the query.

Hi Tim,

You are (fortunately) not the first to run into this problem.

https://www.liontreegroup.com/tips-and-tricks/schema-error-localbusiness-a-value-for-the-image-field-is-required/

The solution places a hidden image in the footer. Not ideal, but a potential work around. Perhaps Miriam can comment on whether she thinks it might be a risky tactic.

You may need to enable canonical headers on your CDN.

This post has more information about how to do that. It's geared toward MaxCDN and WPEngine but should give you the general idea.

Sam,

Good to know. When did the switchover occur? Was something posted so we'd know?

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.

Did you use google search console to tell google you were switching to a new domain?

Absolutely.

Ah. I misunderstood your question. I thought you were trying to get at site topical authority whereas you seem to be asking about how to find topics to cover in a specific (single) piece of content.

Jeff Baker wrote a post on the Moz Blog back in February called "The Google Ranking Factor You Can Influence in an Afternoon [Case Study]". He talks about a process for identifying which topics you should cover in a content piece. Check it out. I think he's on target.

Basically he's suggesting you look at the top search results for your query focusing on the content that is trying to satisfy the same intent as yourself. Then inventory the top ranking content's breadth and depth and try to one-up them. He suggests you can do this manually or using tools like Marketmuse and SEMRush. Read the comments as well for useful insights and suggestions.