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Hi there,

I think this can be done a lot of ways, if you take the time to state your case well. Definitely don't pretend like you're a neutral party. Here are some examples:

• A heartfelt message from your founder: Balsam Hill vs Frontgate
• A press release: Comodo vs Norton
• A table of comparisons: Lose It!
• If you're the little guy, prove you're better: Bing It On (not that this one necessarily worked, but, it was interesting)
• Simply saying, "Why [company]?" which will capture some of those searches, without picking out a competitor Conductor

Hope these examples helped! I'll bet some other Mozzers will jump on with examples.

Best,

Kristina

To second Ryan's point: Google definitely sees http://example.com as a separate page than http://www.example.com, but I'd be surprised if you can distance yourself from bad links pointing to http://example.com by focusing on http://www.example.com. Google's pretty smart, it knows that those two pages are usually one and the same.

To your 302 redirect point: Google's seem enough improperly used 302 redirects (both accidentally and for SEO reasons, like this) to start treating 302 redirects as 301s if they stay in place over time, according to a test Geoff Kenyon worked on. A 302 redirect may work for a little while, but it's not a long term solution.

To dig into this a bit deeper:

• Does the www version of your site rank for your brand name? Is it just the non-www version that's been hit?
• When did you submit a reconsideration request, and what was Google's response? Did they say that your penalty has been lifted?
• What is the value of your current domain name? I've heard of companies that have a small enough brand awareness, it's better business sense to just restart from the ground up with a new domain. Is that where you are, or do you have a pretty solid business built up?

Hi Jon,

You should 301 redirect (you should rarely to never 302 redirect) all vanity URLs to the URL that you want to rank organically.

A 302 redirect is a temporary one, so it's telling search engines that the vanity URL is the real URL for the page, but it's under construction/temporarily broken/being revamped, so you have to send visitors to another page, just for now. A 301 redirect tells search engines that the vanity URL is just a vanity URL and that the search engine should index the URL that the vanity URL is leading to.

SEOmoz has a pretty good explanation of it all: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection.

Best,

Kristina

Hi Karl,

That's tough! Unfortunately, I've heard of a lot of weird stories like that, where Bing gets confused. Have you shared a sitemap with Bing, which only includes non "www" URLs?

Best,

Kristina

Hi Marc,

I would, broadly, break down organic ranking factors as:

• Site / page strength (DA and PA)
• Site / page / brand relevance (keywords and branding)
• Historical ranking

Site / page / brand relevance

I assume you were already thinking about page relevance when you mentioned on-page SEO. But, Google looks at site and brand relevance as well. Google would rather rank a page about "Christmas tree decorations" from a site that's all about Christmas trees rather than a site that's about skiing. Google also looks at what other sites say about the ranking site when they link to or mention them. If links include the target keyword in the anchor text or in the surrounding text, Google will see relevance.

Historical ranking

I was once told by an experience link builder, you need about twice as many links as the page in the #1 spot in SERPs to take that ranking. If you're trying to shake things up, expect more work than the DA and PA imply. (But, if you're already ranking where you want to be, you're partially protected!)

This is obviously a HUGE over simplification of SEO, but I hope it helps give you an idea of what Google's looking for. Definitely check out other posts on Moz, and Moz's beginners guide to SEO if you want to dive in deeper.

Hope this helps!

Kristina

Hey Jesse,

There's a lot of debate about the ideal way to build a mobile website, but your initial question made me think that you don't have a lot of time and/or money to spend on this. Is that correct?

If it isn't, I would spend some time researching the pros and cons of responsive vs. a separate mobile site (I won't go into it too much more than that - I'm obviously biased: http://moz.com/blog/seo-of-responsive-web-design). Setting your company up with the right sort of site the first time around is going to save you a lot of time, effort and money in the future. I really like Aleyda's mobile site audit to help guide you: http://www.stateofsearch.com/mobile-seo-audit/

But, if you don't have the time/money/support to knock it out of the park quite yet, building a decent separate mobile site is a good option. (You can't really half-ass responsive or else you'll mess up your desktop site too.)

You originally said you're good with HTML, so have you thought about just building the site yourself, with inspiration from CMS templates? Building mobile sites isn't that different from building desktop sites, although you want to stick to HTML and CSS as much as possible (no Flash)! The bigger issue is figuring out the design with such a drastically smaller screen size.

Like I said, you can probably look at a great CMS's design and mimic it somewhat with your own HTML. You can also read our guide to mobile best practices, http://www.distilled.net/training/mobile-seo-guide/ (ahem not to over promote ourselves or anything), which has a section on design. The key issues I'd keep in mind are:

• Use your web analytics to figure out the standard screen size for your mobile visitors. It's probably around 320px. Design your mobile site for that width, but make everything relative (i.e. 80% vs 80px) so that the display will change to fit the size of the mobile visitor's phone
• A button or link needs 28px x 28px around it to be easy to click. If it's inline links, there can be text around it, but no other links.
• Redesign for a single column layout. Get rid of ads or move them to the top or bottom of the body copy. Hide navigation behind a drop down. I really like how Bridgestone does that: http://m.bridgestonetire.com/
• Make your mobile site fast. Shrink images down to a smaller size, then compress them again (or, if they aren't already compressed on your desktop site, just compress them everywhere ). Go to http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/ to test how fast your site is.

Good luck!

Kristina

Hi Ash,

When Google stops indexing a page, it has to find it again and see that it's no longer "noindex"ed. Submitting it to GWT often works, but sometimes you just have to wait for the crawler to find your page again. I looked at the cache dates for other similarly deep pages on your site, and it looks like Google only crawled them a week ago. Deeper pages were crawled a week and a half ago. So, you should probably give yourself a couple of weeks to allow Google's crawler to find the page before worrying that it's a technical issue.

Good luck!

Kristina

No, Google likes unique anchor text, since it seems more organic, and supports tracking codes as well. My only hesitation is that adding those tracking codes is going to identify your links as marketing efforts rather than completely organic links. But I think you should be okay.

The problem with tagging is that mysite.com/seo-text?utm_campaign=guest-blogs could technically be indexed by Google and become a duplicate of mysite.com/seo-text. Make sure that Google knows that you only want it to index mysite.com/seo-text by:

1. Adding a cannonical tag on the page to link to the non-parameter version:
2. Tell Google to disregard the utm_campaign parameter in Google Webmaster Tools.

Best,

Kristina

Hi Jochen,

SUPER interesting find, thanks for pointing this out, Jochen.

To me, this looks like Google understands that these two pages are the same page, except for different devices, and is using information on the desktop page to make their search results more robust for mobile.

You can see the connection by looking for Google's cache of your mobile page. The best way to do this is to search in Google for "cache:[URL]". If you search for "cache:http://m.avogel.ch/de/ihre-gesundheit/erkaeltung/alles_ueber_erkaeltungen.php", Google will send you to the desktop version of the page.

Here's my theory: Google has one index for both desktop and smartphone users, so it combines data and gives the user the best result possible. Google's doing more and more to try to improve its search results even without SEO intervention, so I'm not too surprised about this, but can't seem to find this in any SEO articles out there.

In answer to your question: I recommend that you continue to keep you mobile and desktop sites similar enough that Google is pulling from both. In the past, some SEOs would build sites differently for mobile users, but I've never seen any UX studies that shows that that's a better approach. Given that Google strongly recommends that you use responsive web design, it's certainly not Google's recommended approach.

I hope this helps? I'm not sure if this was a post because you were worried about something - this seems like good news to me!

Kristina

Hi there,

Like Mike and Eric have said, I'd recommend using a canonical tag on the men's and women's pages to the version of the page that shows both genders' shoes/clothing.

That said, I just want to make sure this is the best path for your site. If it makes more sense for your site to point people to shoes and clothing by gender, shouldn't that be what you show in Google's search results? I'm a woman, and generally search for "women's shoes" since otherwise I often end up on pages that show men's options.

Let us know if these solutions work!

Kristina

Hi Taysir,

It's not a simple process, and you're going to have to modify your GA code on your subdomain pages for it to work. Google has the instructions here: https://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55524.

Let us know if you have problems with any of Google's steps,

Kristina

No need to worry about hreflang (and therefore x-default) unless you're working with international versions of your sites! If Google doesn't see anything referencing international, it will figure out the language and country from the ccTLD and the language you're using on your site. Hreflang tells Google where the international versions of a page are, it isn't necessary to designate a language and location.

Best,

Kristina

Another idea is to reach out to the websites that you would like to get links from and ask what they're interested in seeing. An open ended question like, "What should I build?" probably won't yield great results, but if you have a couple of ideas and ask a site owner if they're interested, they'll a) let you know if that's a good idea before you even build it, b) probably add some information that will make your new content richer, and c) will already be engaged and more likely to link to your content once it's built.

Hi Kathiravan,

You should be okay. Googlebot is the same crawler for mobile and desktop, so it's always going to see the content you have on the desktop.

As they said in a Q&A section and SEM post reported:

Hidden content can be discounted in ranking, but if the content is visible on the desktop version of your site, we can crawl it and use the information for ranking your mobile site as well since we can share indexing signals between the desktop and mobile versions.

Hope this sets your mind at ease!

Kristina

Hi Vincent,

My short answer is: don't let Googlebot decide. Tell Googlebot which parameters should or should not create new pages. This is something you should do if you ever have indexation problems with parameters.

Do a site: search for a handful of these URLs with parameters to double check that the drop in the number of pages being crawled is because of these pages or because of something else. If it is because of these pages, you can quickly add them back to the index by using the "Fetch as Googlebot" tool. Once you have Google fetch something, you have the option of submitting it to the index.

(If it turns out the drop in crawled pages is from something else, a good way to figure out which pages are being affected is by creating multiple XML sitemaps and organizing them by site section, so when Google reports on how many of your URLs are in its index, you quickly know which section of the site is being affected. This post is really old, but still incredibly useful here.)

Double check that these URLs with parameters are in the XML sitemap, and that you have a number of internal links on prominent pages pointing to them. Even if these can only be temporary, those links will really help the process.

Hope this helps!

Kristina

There's no magical number of internal links that you want to strive for, though in general, you want to maximize the number of internal links to your homepage and other important pages, and link to the most important pages on your site from your homepage.

I don't want to toot my own horn too much, but I did put together a guide on SEO internal linking (which is really site navigation) a couple of years ago: https://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/site-navigation-for-seo/ It still holds up, since site structure is forever.

In case you don't want to dive into that, here's what I'd recommend for internal linking for ecommerce sites:

• Put your logo in the upper right hand corner of every page on your site, and use that to link back to the homepage. It's a really common navigational tactic, and it tells Google what your homepage is (in case it's not simply www.yoursite.com)
• Use a top navigation bar that's on every page. In the top navigation bar, link to your shopping categories.
• Use a side navigation to list subcategories when a visitor is working within a category.
• Make sure to include breadcrumbs when you're on a product page.
• Limit the number of links on any given page to below 200 (bigger sites do more, but that's because they can get away with it)

Really, that should do 99% of the SEO organization you want to do within your site.

Good luck!

Kristina

Hi Issa,

You're right, duplicate content and bad usability could be triggering the slow rolling Panda 4.2, but I'd dig in a little more (apologies if you already did this research):

• You mentioned 200 pages are potentially duplicate; how many are on the site in total? If you have thousands of pages indexed, 200 duplicates probably aren't going to cause a Panda penalty.

• How similar are these postings? Just the page title? Or is the entire page extremely similar in content? (To answer this: if you made a keyword cloud for these similar job descriptions, would they show roughly the same mapping?)

• If it's just the page title that's similar, make sure to set the pages apart by including the name of the hiring company (which I assume makes the different positions unique) towards the beginning of the page title

• If the entire page is similar, then add more content to make the pages more unique, like a blurb about the hiring company, how long the job has been up, how many applicants the job has (if available), etc.

• Either way, make sure you don't have any old jobs that still have live pages! If possible, I'd redirect them to a similar job posting.

• Like John asked, did your traffic drop dramatically one day, or has it been tapering off? If it's tapering off, I'd guess it's not Panda.

• And, last, which pages lost traffic and rankings? Which keywords dropped in rankings? You may be able to tell how you were penalized by which keywords were most affected.

Hope this helps,

Kristina

An intranet is, by definition, locked down from the outside world, so Googlebot shouldn't be able to crawl it. And if Googlebot can't crawl something, it can't see the link.

If an intranet were improperly set up, and accessible to general online users, it could work. But my experience working at a university makes me doubt that there are many like that.

Hi Jcobo,

A good way to check to see if Google understands your content is to use Google Search Console and fetch the page as Googlebot. Look at Googlebot's version of the page - does it see the content in the table?

Like Logopedia said, HTML tables are extremely SEO friendly, so I'd be surprised if Google can't read your content.

On the flip side, tables are often not particularly user friendly. Why do you have a page full of your products? How is that valuable for a visitor? If Google doesn't think a page is user friendly, it won't rank it well.

Hope this helps steer you in the right direction!

Kristina

Hi there Jarred,

The first thing I would do is set up Google Search Console accounts for each of the ccTLDs you have to see if Google is sending all traffic to your .com or if this is just a Google Analytics tracking problem.

The second thing I would do is crawl the international sites with Screaming Frog. It's possible that you copied over the pages between ccTLDs and kept internal links to the .com version on other ccTLD sites.

Last, I'd check which pages are typically the referral source in GA. Then we can troubleshoot from there.

Hope this helps! I realize we've taken a bit to get back to you, so let us know if you fixed the problem on your own in the mean time. We're interested to hear how it worked out.

Thanks!

Kristina

Canonicals can pass link juice (see Dr. Pete's comment here), but it's at Google's discretion. I've seen it go both ways.

The best way is to only link the one version you've chosen as the canonical. I'm not familiar with Magento - is that something that you can change easily? I think it'd be worth the time you'd invest in making that change.

Hi Sarah,

First of all, Martijn is right, any of your solutions are definitely not cloaking. Google understands the complications of pagination.

Your solution is probably the simplest, as long as that extra content doesn't slow page load too much. You can also paginate in a way that's even between mobile and desktop, so multiple mobile pages can canonical to the same desktop page. For example, if the desktop version of review pages lists 10 reviews per page, and the mobile version lists 5, then mobile pages 1 and 2 would refer to desktop page 1; mobile pages 3 and 4 would refer to desktop page 2; etc.

Either way, you're on the right track!

Kristina

Kevin's right - Google doesn't want to do this, but they're not perfect and they'll often let a site with a stronger link profile win when there are two sites with the same piece of content. Google doesn't take complaints like this, but you can go after the site itself legally.

Due to the nature of the internet, you can never completely stop scraping like this, but I would recommend repeatedly referencing your brand in each article, and linking back to your site from within your article. Then, when they scrape your article, they'll bring over your brand name and links to your site. Then you get free links and another site going on about how much great content you have.

If you want to have some fun, you may also want to try Ian Lurie's way of handling scrapers!

Hello Edward!

I work for a site that has a lot of physical locations, so Moz asked me to step in.

Let me start with this: you don't have to call out locations if Google can establish you as an online service. When I was working for Distilled I had multiple clients with online ecommerce sites, and they ranked well in most locations in the US without specifically calling out any city or state. The key, I think, was that Google saw the "buy now" and "shipping" buttons and understood that this was accessible to anyone in America.

Your site is similar. You have "get started" or "call now" buttons that show that the whole of the transaction can be done wherever you are in the US, Australia, or NZ. You have different CCTLDs, so Google knows which countries you're relevant in.

My question for you is - why do you want to optimize for local? Do you have clients who can't find you because they're searching for local terms? Did you find a lot of local keyword volume? Because my gut response is, you probably don't need to worry about this.

Best,

Kristina

First of all - don't stress out! You won't be penalized for broken links. Google penalizes for shady behavior, not honest mistakes.

Like Andrew said, make sure that you aren't linking to any of the pages you removed from your site, and that you've removed them from your XML sitemap.

Then you should be good!

Good luck,

Kristina

You're probably already doing this, but make sure that all of your tests are using the Googlebot user agent! That could cause different results, especially with the robots.txt check.

A sense check: what is your plugin going to offer over Google Search Console's Fetch as Google and robots.txt Tester?

Hi Shawn,

If these are from crappy scraper sites (which it looks like they are), then I'd add it to your disavow list, yes. I don't think that'll get Google to remove your error in GWT, but remember: GWT is a separate algorithm from the actual algorithm because Google doesn't want us to see how sophisticated they are. If GWT sees "errors" in links, but you've properly disavowed, I'm fairly confident the actual Google algorithm won't penalize you.

For anyone else finding this thread: make sure that you check the sites that are linking to your broken pages before disavowing! If they're good links but out of date or mistyped, just update them.

Best,

Kristina

Hm, I've done a lot with Optimizely in the past, and it's never caused an SEO problem, but it's completely possible something went wrong. Since that's your first inkling, have you tried pausing that test and removing the Optimizely code from the homepage? Then you can determine whether or not it's an Optimizely problem.

Another thing you can do is use the Fetch as Googlebot feature in GSC. Does GSC say it can fetch the page properly?

If it says it can, try searching for "site:www.yourcompanysite.com". This will show if Google's got your URL in its index. If nothing comes up, it's not there; if it comes up, Google's decided not to rank it for some reason.

After those steps, get back to us so we can figure out where to go from there!

Good luck,

Kristina

Are you looking for landing pages on your own site? If so, Google Search Console is your best bet. Go to Search Analytics, click on the query you're interested in, and Google will show you all of your site's pages that have ranked for that term within the last 90 days, along with their impressions and clicks.

Moz and most ranking trackers will also show this. You can go to your campaign in your Moz Pro account and choose Analyze Keyword under rankings. Choose a keyword and scroll to the bottom to see a list of what ranks for the first 5 pages on Google.

Does this help? Do you know which keywords you think you might be ranking for multiple times, or are you trying to find those keywords?

Best,

Kristina

I would be incredibly surprised if internal links to the homepage caused the issue. Google expects you to have a bunch of internal links to the homepage.

What you're going to need to do now is do a thorough review of all of the external links pointing to your homepage. I would do this with a tool - I recommend Kerboo, although I'm sure there are others that could do the same thing. Otherwise, you can look through all of the links yourself and look for spam indications (steps outlined in this handy Moz article).

Either way, make sure that you pull your list of links from Ahrefs or Majestic. Ideally both, and merge the lists. Moz doesn't crawl nearly as many links.

Since you haven't gotten a manual penalty warning, you're going to have to take as many of the spammy links you find down as you can and disavow the others. For speed, I'd recommend that you immediately upload a list of spammy links with Google's disavow tool, then start asking for an actual removal.

Keep in mind that you're probably going to disavow links that were helping rankings, so expect that your homepage won't come back ranking as well for nonbranded search terms as it used to. You'll probably want to start out uploading a very conservative set of URLs to the disavow tool, wait a couple of days to see if that fixes the problem, upload a bigger set, check, etc.

Good luck!

What a weird plugin!

Like Gaston said, Google can deal with pagination that's on separate pages, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was a period where they crawled/indexed too many pages.

Is there an option in your plugin to keep things the way they are?

Hi Patrick,

Hm, that's tough. No, I haven't seen anything like that on my site. Could you give me some more details?

• Did your landing pages lose traffic across the board? Or did some fare worse than others? It's possible that only a few really key landing pages were hit, which is having a large effect overall.
• In Google Webmaster Tools, have you seen a dip in impressions along with clicks? If there's a dip in impressions, then search patterns are probably changing (even if you didn't expect seasonality in your niche). If impressions are still high, look for the specific keywords that have a lower click through rate.
• Have your branded searches dropped? Like Jasmine said, it's possible that there's a competitor out there that's stealing your traffic by getting people to search for their brand rather than yours, which would be hard to catch. Any changes like that in your industry?

Best,

Kristina

Hi there,

You've got a lot of things going on here. I'm worried that Google thinks your site is exceptionally spammy or has malware, since it's showing your .pdf or .doc files but not as many of you HTML pages. But I can't make any definitive statements because I'd need a lot more information. If I were you, I would:

• Dig into Google Analytics to get a better idea of what exactly has lost organic traffic, and when

• Look at the trend:

• Is it a slow decline or a sharp drop? Sharp drop typically means a penalty or that the company accidentally deindexed their pages or something equally horrifying. A slow decline could be an algorithm change (at least the ones I've seen take their time to really take effect) or a new competitor.

• When did it start? That way you can pinpoint what changes happened around then.

• Is it a steady decline or has it been jumping up and down? If it's a steady decline, it's probably one thing you're looking for; if traffic is erratic, there could be a bunch of problems.

• Find out which pages are losing traffic.

• _Are all pages on the site losing traffic? _If they are, it's probably an algorithm change or a change that was made by webmasters sitewide. If it's specific pages, it could be that there's now better competition for those key terms.

• Which pages are losing the most traffic? When did their traffic start to drop? Is it different from the rest of the site? You may need to investigate at a deeper level here. Individual pages could have new competition, you may have accidentally changed site structure and lessened internal links to it, and/or it may have lost some external links.

• Get an accurate list of every unique page on your site to clear up duplicate indexation and find out if anything _isn't _in Google's index.

• Add a canonical to all pages on your site pointing to the version of the URL you want in Google's index. It's a good way to make sure that parameters and other accidental variations don't lead to duplicate content.

• Divide that list into site sections and create separate XML sitemaps by section. That way you have a better idea of what is indexed and what isn't in Google Webmaster Tools. I got this idea from this guy (who is also my boss) and I swear by it.

• Based on traffic in Google Analytics, pick out pages that used to get a lot of traffic and now get none. Search for them in Google with site:[url] search to see if Google's got them indexed.

After that, if you're still stumped, definitely come back here with a little more info - we'll all be happy to help!

Kristina

Hi WMA,

Before I start, there are a couple of things you should keep in mind when looking at other websites for SEO tips:

1. Many websites aren't optimized for SEO (or, they're trying, but not 100% there)
2. Big companies have more leeway in SEO, because they have so many backlinks.

To answer your first question, is it self competition to include target keywords from other pages on the home page, the answer is no, it's fine to have a target keyword on multiple pages on your site. But you shouldn't target two pages for the same keyword. For example, if all you sell is books, don't target your home page for the word "books" and have a category page for books. Then, if someone searches for "books," search engines don't know which page to display, and both of your pages will rank lower.

The bigger question, how do you optimize a home page, is trickier to answer. SEO isn't an exact science, and there are tons of ways that you can effectively optimize your homepage. Generally, I would say that your homepage should be targeting your brand name as a keyword, and include text about all of your types of products, and links to category pages. But your homepage is a representation of your company, so I can't really answer that question over Q&A.

Hope this helps!

Kristina

Maybe you should noindex user profile pages until they've been active on the site long enough that a) you're sure they're not a spam bot and b) they're actually active users, with some interesting information to share on their user page?

Like Shaliendra said, this is your call. It's really about your website goals, and what those user pages do for the site. Are you getting much organic traffic from user pages? If you aren't, it's probably easiest to just noindex all user pages. But if some profiles are bringing in organic traffic, I'd recommend that you add a noindex tag immediately, but remove it once someone has commented a few times.

Does that help?

I've responded to specific comments below, but here's the information you need to redirect: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/details

The gist is, you need:

• 301 or 302 redirects from the desktop site to the mobile site, based on user agent detection
• Rel="canonical" tag on each mobile page pointing to to each desktop page
• Rel="alternate" tag on each desktop page pointing to each mobile page
• A Vary HTTP header
• A mobile sitemap

As I mentioned below, I also recommend that you have a link at the bottom of the mobile and desktop sites pointing to the other version. That way, if you get the redirects wrong, people can self correct.

Hi Tina,

Are you thinking of creating a subdomain because you want to be able to tell Google Webmaster Tools which country to target, or because you don't have the flexibility with your primary site to create pages targeted at each country?

If it's the former, you can geotarget in Google Webmaster Tools by subfolder by verifying by subfolder.

If it's the latter, I'd recommend making only one subdomain with all of the country landing pages, because you don't want to create a whole bunch of weak subdomains. New pages on your primary domain will start with more Page Authority (and therefore higher rankings) than new subdomains.

But, taking a step back, you don't really need to formally geotarget these pages through Google Webmaster Tools. Geotargeting is for when it's not apparent which country a page is targeted at, like when you're selling shoes in the UK but not in America. The page needs to be about shoes, not the UK, but still needs to tell Google that its content is only for the UK. In your situation, the page can be about the country it's targeting.

If you create a page that has the page title Liquid Text Available in Australia in May 2014 and the URL liquidtext.net/australia, Google and visitors will understand who your page is for. No need for any extra work!

Hope this helps,

Kristina

Hi Liam,

I think that the same premise applies to meta title tags and keywords in general, so, yes, a good formula for a homepage title tag is: Brand - Core Business(es), even if the core business(es) have their own category pages.

You're right, if you turn a word on a page into an internal link, it shows the search engines that the destination page is targeted for that keyword. But again, I wouldn't worry about self competition unless you're actively targeting a keyword on two pages.

Best,

Kristina

Hey Alex,

It sounds like you've already got some assurance from Patrick, but I wanted to quickly throw in my 2 cents.

The answer to your question has more to do with the people looking for your services than it has to do with a right or wrong structure. It sounds like you're making this change because you think that it makes more sense for people to search by industry than by services. If that's true, you're right, you should center your site structure around industries like you suggested. You should definitely double check with keyword volume, and by asking your customers how they searched for your site, though.

Personally, if I were looking for CRM consulting, I wouldn't look for "sharing economy CRM" (because I work for a company that's a sharing economy). I'd just look for "customer relationship management consulting," then maybe ask them if they've ever worked with a sharing economy site before.

If you check with your clients and look into keyword volume and I'm right, I'd keep the site structure the way it is, and flesh out the services pages and link to pages that are dedicated to how well you do CRM in different industries, assuming there's enough data for that. The key here is to make sure that you're writing content that your potential clients are looking for, not just filling out pages to show that you have a robust site.

I hope this helps!

Kristina

Hi Matt,

How long ago was "recently?" I've often seen Quality Scores get reset when I change the destination URL, but then time will get them back to what they were before.

Best,

Kristina

Hi Ty,

Google recommends that you keep your original profile for the main site running and create a separate profile for the combined main domain and subdomain tracking, so to get things going, you should:

1. Go under "Admin," like you had seen before
2. Click +New Property
3. Fill out the setup information (name it something that'll remind you that you're combining the main domain and subdomain here
4. Then choose select "one domain with multiple subdomains" for the tracking code.

The, yes, you're going to put that code on both the subdomain and the main domain pages.

The filter is to distinguish between the main domain and subdomains while you're in Google Analytics. GA only reports everything after the domain, so if you have two pages, www.main-site.com/page1/ and subdomain.main-site.com/page1/, they're going to be reported as /page1/, and their data will be combined.

http://www.bigdaylight.com/analytics/filtering-subdomains-in-google-analytics/ tells you how to set up a filter to distinguish between the two:

1. Select “Add new Filter for Profile”
2. Filter Name: “Show Full URLs” (or your own description)
3. Filter Type: Custom Filter
4. Select “Advanced”
5. Field A -> Extract A:
Select “Hostname” from the drop down.
Enter (.*) in the text box.
6. Field B -> Extract B:
Select “Request URL” from the drop down.
Enter (.*) in the text box.
7. Output to Constructor:
Select “Request URL” from the drop down.
Enter $A1$B1 in the text box.
8. Field A Required: Yes
Field B Required: No
Override Output Field: Yes
Case Sensitive: No

After that, you should be set.

Hi there,

Unfortunately, this isn't something that anyone can tell you without at least a few hours of research - Google has a pretty complicated algorithm!

I can tell you some more things to take into account, in addition to Bob's list:

• **Keyword relevance: **For the search queries that you want to rank for, does Sea Dwellers look the most relevant? Do you use the phrase that you want to rank for in your page title, the h1 of the page, and on the page itself? Be careful not to sound like you're writing for robots rather than humans, but using the exact same phrase as you want to rank for definitely helps with rankings.
• **Inbound link relevance: **Where did you get the links to your site? More links from relevant sites (for example, unsponsored posts about the best company to dive with) are going to help with local queries like "dive Key Largo."
• **Potential spam / paid links: **If you've paid for links or have spammy links coming to your site, Moz may have an inflated version of your PA or DA metrics, since it isn't as good at recognizing that as Google is (though they're working on it with their spam score).

Good luck! If you're feeling especially frustrated about this, I'd recommend hiring an SEO to give you some definite answers.

Best,

Kristina

Hey Adam,

There are a few tools out there:

http://smallseotools.com/code-to-text-ratio-checker/

http://tools.seochat.com/tools/code-to-text-ratio/

I've never used them, though: I think that the importance of code to text ratio is making sure your page doesn't take too long to load, or look like spam. I'd recommend you check out this other Moz Q&A to look into that:

https://mza.bundledseo.com/community/q/how-important-is-my-code-to-text-ratio-on-web-pages

Good luck!

Kristina

Nope, sorry, I wasn't very specific about when you add +New Property. When you're at the highest level, click on the account that you want to add the main domain and subdomain tracking to, and the next level down should have a button that says +New Property.

I believe that you'll have to have two codes on your site, since they're slightly different. If anyone knows a way to just have one code but track on multiple properties, chime in!

Hey Shawn,

1. If GWT is showing a 404 without a "Linked from," I wouldn't worry about it too much. Sometimes Google tries to recrawl URLs it crawled once in the past, but that doesn't mean it's causing a problem. I would double check that you don't have any internal or external links to "blog/blog," then just "mark as fixed." There's no point to disallow Google from crawling a page that isn't there in the first place.

2. Nope. The only danger of having a long robots.txt is that you may get lost while checking your rules and accidentally disallow a page you want in the index. Whenever you add a rule to robots.txt, make sure you go to Google Search Console and use the robots.txt Tester to check if you've disallowed any important pages.

Good luck!

Kristina

It's best practice to redirect, but if that's not an option, the canonical route should help the problem a lot! You'll probably lose some link equity with this route, but it should clear up duplicate content issues from Google's side.