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I saw a great tip by Justin Briggs on Twitter the other day. You know how Google always displays "Searches related to..." at the bottom of search results? Justin explains how you can scrape those. I'd consider those "supporting topics" and you could also use them as seeds for keyword research.
https://twitter.com/justinrbriggs/status/980149937869434881
The attachment also shows you his tip.
The canonical might be being added by your theme.
Check out this post (http://www.featheredowl.com/wordpress-duplicate-canonical-link-element/). Read the comments. The post is from 2010 but don’t let that deter you. It could very well be the solution to your problem.
Tushar,
You ask a near-impossible-to-answer question - too little information. Unfortunately, I'm going to give an equally vague answer. I'm not trying to avoid the question. There are just too many unknowns.
If you want to "quickly" earn 20,000 visits a month to your website, you're going to have to do a current state and competitive analysis to understand where there's room for improvement and then come up with a strategy and plan to arrive there. That, in itself, will take time so don't expect to arrive at your goal quickly.
Here's a post to help you get started - https://mza.bundledseo.com/blog/competitor-analysis-for-seo.
I agree with the others. Your client is going to have to convert, it's just a matter of when. The site reputation, and by association, your client's reputation, is at stake.
If you're concerned about rankings, set up a staging area and do the conversion and testing there. Baseline some key performance indicators which you can use to help determine root cause if problems arise. Hire a consultant to double check your work before you hit the migrate button. Set expectations by letting your client know that he or she may experience some short-term movement in rankings but will recover.
It's not normal.
To start, I'd check to make sure the content:
I'd also check to see if you've had any site outages that may have prevented crawlers from accessing your content.
If your site is fairly new and/or has little traffic, it's possible you're running out of crawl budget before search engines get to those pages.
Agree w. EGOL. And once that’s resolved, and just so you know, it’s perfectly normal to see ranking fluctuations. You should expect it. Rand has a whiteboard Friday (below) that describes what you’re seeing and suggests what you should (and shouldn’t) do about it.
Highly recommend you start with this book.
https://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Guide-Link-Building-Credibility/dp/1599184427
It is written by ”link Moses” Eric Ward, prescient in his understanding of how links should and would be interpreted and used to rank websites. It’s he best place to start and will give you a solid foundation to build upon.
The Moz SPAM score doesn't directly measure Google penalties. It predicts when a penalty or ban might be assigned to a website by looking for domain, on-page, and backlink warning signals that are typically present in penalized or banned websites.
The snapshot you provided shows Google with a spam score of 2. That means Google itself is exhibiting a few of those warning signals. 2 is a low score, meaning there is a low likelihood Google would penalize itself.
Moz has an excellent post explaining what the SPAM score is, how it was developed, and what it means. It lays out the different warning signals and recommends potential uses for the spam score.
Hope that's clearer. If not, let us know or search Moz for "Spam Score". There is more than one useful explanation.
Here's another resource (in addition to what Brooks and Miriam have provided) that I've found helpful.
I ran that page thru screaming frog and it came back with a "blocked by robots" status.
The second tool you suggested is not finding the noindex tag and I don't have an explanation for that, nor am I familiar with the tool.
A site command does not return any results.
Are you sure you have a problem? Is there another example you can provide?
It looks like you have the homepage canonical set as http (vs https). That's probably the problem.
Just updating the URL of the post Miriam mentioned. It's been moved and is returning a 404 error. Try https://www.imprezziomarketing.com/is-permanently-closed-killing-your-ranking-4-case-studies/ instead.
That's a question for your website or theme developer Clay. I don't think anyone here can answer with so little information and no access to your website.
Before you do that, take a look at the source code of your site now to see if you can find an h1 entry title. It might save you unnecessary rework.
As far as I know, only comparing before and after page traffic using Google Analytics.
All those pages that are canonicalized to https://www.scottscastles.com/property/unavailable/ and https://www.scottscastles.com/property/enquire/ are eventually going to get noindexed. There are 335 of them.
Your site is slow. Google's bots might not be allocating enough time to index the entire site.
Were significant changes made to the site around that time? You seem to have a mix of non-html, html, http, https, 301 and 302 (temporary) redirects.
Do Google and Bing have your most up-to-date sitemap?
Have you orphaned any pages?
Have you checked messages in Google Search Console?
Do the dropped pages have healthy link profiles?
Do you have a large amount of duplicate content that has not been accounted for in canonicals?
Pages with 5xx and 4xx errors won't get indexed.
Hosting problems (inaccessible or slow responding host) can prevent pages from being indexed.
If you're using Wordpress, there might be an H1 entry title that's causing the duplication. Some themes add an H1 entry title by default and populate it with the post name.
To get rid of it, you'd have to make a change to your theme template. VIsit the support group for your theme provider and see if they have provided a how-to or can provide that information there.
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.
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.
It's that or call your phone company and ask for options. I know in my area I can get a static IP address by upgrading my phone plan but don't want to do that.
You're not alone. I use a browser extension (https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout) because I have not found a way to block dynamic IP addresses in Google Analytics.
How long does it take before it removes most of the duplicated search result pages from the index?
Every site is different but I have seen it take 6 - 9 months for pages to drop out.
Is it still crawling those pages but has not fully decided to remove most of them?
It's possible. As Gaston has already pointed out, search engines will need to access those files again to see you want them noindexed.
How bad is this for SEO?
It temporarily dilutes the amount of SEO equity available to flow to pages you DO want indexed.
Same question but for the www version of the site. Can it route directly to HTTPS without a redirect? Do I just have to delete the existing non-www to www redirect and follow your logic above? It will take care of both www and non-www redirecting to HTTPS?
I have also asked the help desk several times for a solution, although not recently. I was told it wasn't possible.
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.
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?
geanmitch,
You have two problems:
(1) Your home page (https://www.jasperartisanjewelry.com) is canonicalized to http://jasperartisanjewelry.com/home. Change the canonical tag so the home page points to itself. In other words, your home page canonical tag should read as rel="canonical" href="https://www.jasperartisanjewelry.com"/>.
(2) http://jasperartisanjewelry.com/home redirects to https://www.jasperartisanjewelry.com/home which turns a 404 (page not found error). Create a new 301 redirect that points (A) http://jasperartisanjewelry.com/home to (D) https://www.jasperartisanjewelry.com/. Do NOT point (A) http://jasperartisanjewelry.com/home to (B) http://www.jasperartisanjewelry.com/home and then to (C) http://www.jasperartisanjewelry.com/ and then to (D) https://www.jasperartisanjewelry.com/. Go directly from (A) to (D). Get rid of any intermediary redirects.
That should take care of it.
Not sure if you're asking EGOL, me, or both of us but yes, I do share this type of content on my own site. I also look for other venues and opportunities to get more eyeballs on my content. For example, you could search Q&A sites for people asking related questions and offer specific advice and include your post so long as it's helpful.
Not surprisingly, Moz has some additional suggestions on ways you can promote your content.
https://mza.bundledseo.com/beginners-guide-to-content-marketing/content-promotion
Hi Mike,
Here's a Whiteboard Friday that talks about absolute vs relative URLs. It should answer your questions.
I'll provide a quick example. A relative URL is any URL that DOES NOT explicitly specify the protocol (e.g., "http:// " or "https:// ") and/or domain ( promierproducts.com ) and subdomain (www), which forces the visitor's web browser (or the search engine bots) to assume it refers to the same domain or site on which the URL appears. An example would be the way your logo file is referenced on your home page - /assets/images/Promier-Logo-250-Egnyte.jpg.
An absolute URL is the opposite, a URL that DOES explicitly specify the protocol, domain, and subdomain. Using the same logo file as an example, your absolute logo file would appear as www.promierproducts.com/assets/images/Promier-Logo-250-Egnyte.jpg in the code.
The Whiteboard Friday explains why, from an SEO perspective, it is good to use absolute vs relative URLs.
You said "I am trying to decide where to put my offsite SEO efforts". That starts with having high-quality content. EGOL's suggestion is an excellent one.
I'd also consider investing in some high-quality video content to complement and enrich the written. It could potentially appeal to a wider or different audience.
In deciding where to focus your efforts first, in addition to EGOL's screening suggestions above, I'd do some searching for things like "How to choose an office chair", "How to prevent light weight Dolly accidents" and look for venues with no or outdated content you could offer to help out by having them link to your own.
Check with your hosting company as well. Asking Google to deindex the pages will be a temporary fix if the files still physically reside on your website. A reputable hosting company will secure their servers so content like this is less likely to be added.
Hi liamvansteps,
Switching your domain is equivalent to moving your business from one physical location to another. If you don't tell people you've moved, they'll show up at the old address and not find you. Your SEO equity (like your mail) won't be forwarded.
You need to provide human and robotic site visitors with the equivalent of a "change of address" in the form of 301 redirects and updated sitemaps. And just like you'd probably want to tell your friends and best customers directly about the move (and not just rely on a change of address), you will want to update some accounts like social media, Moz (of course), Google My Business, and others.
What are the repercussions of not doing this? You'll lose credit for any accumulated link equity and domain reputation metrics gathered by search engines. You'll effectively be wiping the slate clean and starting over from scratch.
How do you switch domains and maintain the status quo?
Search the Moz site for phrases like "how to switch domains" and you'll find lots of helpful step-by-step information shared by others. I don't want to repeat any of that here.
You are using relative URLs for most of your images. Look to see where you have set your default domain name in 3Dcart. Does it include the www suffix? Better yet, change all your URLs so they are absolute and include your subdomain and domain.
Charlesfitz,
You've done an impressive load of research. Here are a few other items to consider:
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
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.
You have 80 temporary redirects in place for HTTP to HTTPS files. That's not likely the explanation, but should be fixed.
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.
There are 13 404 (page not found) status codes.
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.
"it does sound to me like your agency has enlarged its client stable without making the necessary hires to enlarge the staff"
The agency may have a misguided understanding of how SEO works and thinks you can add a few tags and easy-to-acquire backlinks and their clients' sites will magically skyrocket to the top of search results and convert. You might have to do some education at the same time. I'd prepare some simplified and relevant examples to try to get your points across more convincingly.
Good luck!
Let's just do the math.
Let's say you can productively work 8 hours a day, 21 days a month. That's 168 hours total.
Divide that by 55 clients and you get 3 hours a month.
I haven't added in any extra time for your "junior" as he/she is probably already using up some of your 168 hours as it is in managing, mentoring, training time.
There is no way you can achieve anything measurable on 3 hours a month, regardless of what the client has signed up for, regardless of the role and responsibilities you've been assigned. Furthermore, if you flip it around the other way, would you want to accept a client that was only willing to pay you 3 hours a month with the expectation that you could "move the needle"? I know I wouldn't.
Sometimes the http to https redirect can't be avoided. It depends on where you host your website.
Check your code and make sure every reference to /contact/ ends with a trailing slash. That should do the job.
I'd still speak with the hosting provider. It may be a firewall setting, not the CDN.
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.
Have you checked with your website hosting provider? They may be blocking bots at a server level. I know when I tried to scan your site I got a connection timeout error.
It might be a permissions problem.
You have said the sitemap is here - http://www.tagible.com/images_sitemap.xml, which it is. But the robots.txt file (http://www.tagible.com/robots.txt) does not include that sitemap. It has 10 others, but not that one.
If one goes to the subdomain (https://photos.tagible.com/) or folder (https://photos.tagible.com/images/) where the images are hosted, there is a 403 (forbidden) return code. Crawlers may not be able to navigate to the folder with the images. The images themselves are accessible with a 200 return code, but not the subdomain or folder where they are stored.
I don't know if you're aware of it, but tagible.com, www.tagible.com, and photos.tagible.com are not redirecting to their https equivalents.
I don't have any evidence to support this theory, but I suspect engagement has a lot to do with it.
Here's a good article that explains how you can use Google Analytics to assess your own website's visitor engagement. You might want to compare desktop to mobile to see if there is a noticeable difference. It's very hard to get data that allows you to compare engagement metrics across different websites unfortunately.
Hi Jeff,
If the content on website 1 and 2 is the same and you do a page-by-page mapping and canonicalization, then you'll be fine. Otherwise, I wouldn't do it.
Here are Google Guidelines for using canonicals FYI.
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.
Have you looked at this post, Sunday? I believe it will answer most, if not all, of your questions.
What is your domain Ishrat-Khan? I want to take a look at the live site.
Do I keep my canonicals at http** or make all https?**
Agree with Matt. All canonicals should be updated to https.
Will this affect ranking signals?
Shouldn't, if you've done everything right. You might even see a small boost.
Anything I should be looking out for?
I just recommend scanning your site when you're all done to make sure all internal URLs are https and there are no 404 errors.
Imageco,
No shame in trying to provide for your family! In fact, you led the way for a while there creating all those local directories. Not a good approach nowadays, but it worked for a while.
_What is the best way for me to do this? _
I'm going to point you to two resources created by Miriam Ellis, a local expert at Moz and a person who has tremendous insight and is willing to share her wisdom with anyone who asks.
Moz Local Checklist - This first one looks at the type of business you have and Google Guidelines to arrive at the best strategy for your Google My Business listing and content. It also inventories all the other steps that will need to be taken to achieve local SEO success and provides links to other helpful resources and a checklist.
Local Landing Page - Inspiration, tips, guidelines, and a template for creating truly valuable local content.
Do I need to delete everything and start completely from scratch or is there a less extreme approach to making this kind of transition?
I recommend you inventory your existing content after you've reviewed the resources above and then decide whether to keep, change, or delete them. I would expect they'll be helpful in coming up with "truly valuable local content".
And once I do make these changes what might be the time frame for turning up better locally?
As I'm sure you well know, local SEO takes time too. How long it will take is going to depend on your starting point relative to your competition. If you want to set a ballpark, I'd say a year. It's a ballpark. You should start showing up on maps sooner than that, but you may not make it into the local three-pack for some time after that. Much will depend on the strength of your competition and the health of your existing website. Local and organic are intertwined. The latest local search ranking factors study published by Moz found that the second most influential contribution to local rankings (second only to your Google My Business listing) was link signals - not on-page, not citations, and not reviews.
Good luck Imageco! Work hard. You'll get there.
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.
You're welcome.
If you have the answer to your question, you should mark one or more responses with "good answer" so this thread can be closed.
