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Hi Alick, thanks for your reply. That might be why we are seeing an improvement then as new visitors get attributed correctly, and only returning ones don't. I am just a bit concerned that this effectively means we have to wait 6 months to know for sure whether this fix is actually working 100%. But hopefully we'll see a gradual increase in the percentage of transactions getting attributed correctly, to give us an indication of whether or not it is working. Thanks!

Hi all,

We have been having a problem for a while now where most transactions are attributed to referrals from our payment gateway Sagepay. The issue started a couple of months ago, when we finally upgraded our website to https:// for logged in users and transactions. Before, when we were using http://, transactions were attributed to the correct channel. Even weirder, we upgraded 4 websites and only 2 of them have the issue now, the other two continue to attribute transactions correctly.

I added Sagepay to the referral exclusion list which made no difference. Over the weekend, we upgraded to the global site tag and it seems to have improved somewhat, but yesterday 50% of transactions were still attributed to referral/sagepay.

I am also seeing an odd issue, where for half of the transactions, the revenue and transaction are attributed to one channel, but the products (quantity) are attributed to another. One of the channels is always referral/sagepay and the other is the channel that the transaction should be attributed to.

Has anyone seen this issue before? I'd appreciate any tips that might help us fix this issue.

Thanks in advance!

For pages like T&C etc. I wouldn't use canonicals. It is perfectly normal that all websites have pages like T&C, privacy policy and so on, and even when the websites aren't owned by the same company, they are usually quite similar. I would simply leave them as they are. You will not be penalised for duplicate content, but Google may choose to show only one of the results in organic search results.

If someone was to google "website 1 terms and conditions", Google should still choose to show the T&C of website 1 as an organic result. If you used canonicals, where website 5 is used as the canonical, you would probably have website 5 shown no matter which T&C a person is trying to find.

For product pages, you should be using different content (product descriptions) to avoid this issue. However, we have the same situation, where we have some products sold across more than one website, but we actually only want one of them to rank, so we have used cross-domain canonicals for those products. It has worked really well for us.

I should add that not all of these websites are ours, but many are competitors'.

Hi. I track 32 websites and many of them saw a drop of 1-2 in DA this month. 7 dropped by 2, 7 dropped by 1, 15 stayed the same, one dropped by 3, one by 7 and one by 8. I didn't have a single one improve.

Assuming you are keeping your domain, what you should do is 301 redirect your old pages and your competitor's old pages to your new pages.

You can't rename their domain to yours but you need to redirect it to yours. You will also have to continue to keep ownership of the domain (renew it when necessary) to be able to benefit from the domain authority and "link juice".

I would suggest using apostrophes where/if grammatically correct. It depends on the individual sentence whether you would use an apostrophe.

Lawyers = plural of lawyer
Lawyer's = singular of lawyer, to show possession
Lawyers' = plural of lawyer, to show possession

Have you noticed any increases in other channels? I would suspect that traffic coming from https:// to your http:// website was previously counted as direct and is now being attributed to the correct channel (organic or referral).

I use both and I don't think either is a replacement for the other. If your website is under 500 pages, you can use the free version. If not, one license is not expensive at all and valid for a whole year.

The Google Search Console is probably the best and most reliable source for organic keyword data. It can be found in Search Traffic --> Search Analytics.

Unfortunately, Google Analytics does not provide keyword data anymore for most queries. You can use the Search Analytics data from the Search Console to learn about the search terms user use to find your website, but you can't link it to Google Analytics data in the sense that it will show conversions for specific keywords from the Search Console.

Thanks Joe. I will do that. Very helpful, I appreciate it!

It must have been, although I could also not see anything in Search Console before we cleaned up the hack.

I haven't seen it affect organic performance at all although it's hard to say as we are a B2B business and don't see as much traffic on weekends. Plus it's our corporate website which doesn't get much traffic to begin with.

Hi Joe,

The report just says: "Currently, we haven't detected any security issues with your site's content." That's the problem, I had the email, but in Search Console there is no evidence of any hack (although we were definitely hacked, and it is now cleaned up).

Thanks!

We have had some issues with one of our websites getting hacked. The first time it happened, we noticed it the next morning and cleaned it up before Google even realised. However, the same thing happened again over the weekend, and I came into the office to an email from Google:

Google has detected that your site has been hacked by a third party who created malicious content on some of your pages. This critical issue utilizes your site’s reputation to show potential visitors unexpected or harmful content on your site or in search results. It also lowers the quality of results for Google Search users. Therefore, we have applied a manual action to your site that will warn users of hacked content when your site appears in search results. To remove this warning, clean up the hacked content, and file a reconsideration request. After we determine that your site no longer has hacked content, we will remove this manual action.

_Following are one or more example URLs where we found pages that have been compromised. Review them to gain a better sense of where this hacked content appears. The list is not exhaustive. _

We have again cleaned up the website, however, my problem is that even though we have received this email, I cannot find any evidence of the manual action having actually been applied. I.e. it doesn't show in the Search Console and I am also not getting a warning in the search results when searching for our own website or clicking on the result for our website. That means I cannot submit a reconsideration request - however I am not sure at all there was actually a manual action applied at all based on my test searches.

Has anyone here experienced the same issue? What do you suggest doing in this case?

Thank you very much in advance for any ideas.

You can still see it on the link you originally posted - the box with the text about the current index mentions it.

If there is, I'd like to know too. I've done this before for about 3.5k pages. Took me a while.

Hi, sorry for the late reply. I don't think migrating to another platform is an option, to be honest, but I appreciate the advice. Thanks.

Yeah, if you go into the report, there will be a tick box next to each line. Tick the one at the top to tick all of the ones on that page and then click on Ignore. You can only tick 100 at a time, though, so might have to go through a few pages worth of results.

Hi Christina. It is generally recommended for all pages to have a canonical. In most cases, these will be self-referential canonicals. I.e. for a product at http://www.website.com/product the canonical should be http://www.website.com/product.

Have a look at this recent article: http://www.thesempost.com/google-recommends-self-referencing-canonicals/

Yes, they do. If you want to keep 301 redirects in place, you need to stay the owner of the domain and ensure it continues to 301 redirect to your new domain.

Thanks for the links, Roman.

I know Feefo support it but was wondering whether Google are happy for this type of review as I understood Feefo, Trustpilot etc. to be third party reviews which I thought Google doesn't allow markup for anymore. But I suppose they must be ok.

I'll forward these links to our developer. Thanks!

Have you already verified the website with http? When verifying https websites you need to add and verify the website with just http first: http://www.nookie.com.au/

I am a little confused about whether or not it is ok to use Schema markup with reviews collected through Feefo.

We use Feefo to collect reviews from our customers and these get displayed on our website. We get service ratings as well as product ratings through Feefo. My question is: Is it ok to use Schema markup for these?

I would have thought they would fall under 3rd party reviews, but this article from the Feefo website seems to suggest that it would be ok to use markup in the way they recommend.

Can anyone confirm how Google handles review markup like this?

Thanks in advance!

I recently updated a Wordpress website from noindex to wanting it indexed and I still had a warning in Search Console for a day or two and the homepage was initially indexed with the meta description saying "A description for this website ...", even though the actual Fetch and Render and also Robots.txt test was just fine. If you are absolutely sure there isn't anything wrong, I would maybe give it a couple of days. In our case, I resubmitted the homepage to Google to speed up the process and that fixed it.

We have seen huge drops like that in the past. In our case, the new number seemed more accurate (what I would expect) - and I put it down to having implemented canonicals, pagination etc. which would have brought down the number of duplicate pages indexed.

If you haven't seen a drop in traffic I wouldn't be too worried.

We had this issue with products which we sell on two different websites, that Google would rank one or the other, randomly swapping them out for each other in the rankings. We used cross-domain canonicals to solve this and it has fixed the issue for us, i.e. the website we want to rank now ranks for these products, the other one doesn't.

If you use canonicals, it will most likely mean that only the main page will rank (the canonical URL).

It clears the item from the list permanently (until you choose to un-ignore it). I only use it for things that Moz finds but that we are not planning or unable to fix (or that are supposed to be this way). So if you have fixed the issues, don't ignore them, they will just be removed from the list when the next crawl is done.

Hi, no don't add the crawler exclusion as this will not prevent Google from indexing them, but it will prevent Google from seeing the no-index and canonicals tags (seeing as it won't crawl the pages anymore).

What type of TLD is it, i.e. co.uk or .com etc? There are some that aren't supported by Moz and for those you'll see a DA of 1.

Thanks, that's a great tip! I've bookmarked that page, very handy to have that link. I'll bring it up with the team. I agree, it might be easiest for the sales team to share the link.

Thanks! I did respond to it (slightly different wording though), so we will see what happens.

I agree we should get some more reviews to improve our average but will have to see how we can encourage customers to rate us on Google as well as the other platform we use.

Hi all, We recently received a 1 star rating on GMB. It's just the rating, no review/comment with it. We don't recognise the name so we think it must have been made in error or is spam.

We discussed this internally, and it was decided that we should try to have it removed, although I personally didn't think our chances of getting it removed would be very good (because we wouldn't be able to prove it was spam). I flagged it as spam but didn't get a reply (would you even expect to get one?). I also sent GMB a DM on Twitter a couple of days ago, and again no reply.

Edit: Google have now replied as I tweeted them again and as expected they won't remove the rating as it doesn't violate their policies.

Normally, I wouldn't be so concerned about one individual poor rating (especially as it is just a rating), but we haven't had any reviews on Google before, so now our average is one star which just looks bad when someone googles our company. We use an external review provider for getting reviews from customers, so we don't actively encourage our customers to rate us on Google.

I was thinking we should reply to the rating, with a message saying something along the lines of "We can't find your name in our accounts, but if you get in touch with our customer service, we are confident they will be able to help you."

It would also help to get more ratings or reviews to even out the one bad one and improve our average.

Is there anything else we could do? How would you handle this? Thanks!

I don't think that's the correct use of these tags. See here. Possible negative side effects are only the blog post considered as "page 1" would be indexed.

Pagination is for paginated content where one blog post or article is split up into several pages. In this case you'd want to send readers to page 1 usually. I would remove the tags. You can have links to the previous and next article for the user though.

You can see here which spam flags your domain is getting: https://mza.bundledseo.com/researchtools/ose/spam-analysis/flags?subdomain=www.way2flowers.com

• Thin Content: A subset of pages within this subdomain have little content.
• Large Number of External Links: A subset of pages within this subdomain has a large number of external links.
• Small Proportion of Branded Links: Links to this subdomain have low amounts of branded anchor text.
• External Links in Navigation: There's a large number of external links within sidebars and footers.

I haven't, this only happens to me when there has been an issue with the website at the time it was crawled and that usually resolves itself the following week.

Sometimes it can also be related to the number of pages Moz has crawled. I.e. when it crawls more pages, it also finds more issues.

Xenu's Link Sleuth is free so you may want to check that out (not sure just now whether there are any limits with regard to website size) but I also recommend Screaming Frog - it's money well-spent, such a feature rich tool!

Are you also 301 redirecting from http://www. to https://?

If you click on the spam score it will tell you which spam flags the domain has. There are quite a few which are unrelated to links.

DA is not related to Google updates as it is a score given by Moz and as I already said, it only updates when a new Mozscape index is available. The drop you noticed in February must have happened with the 26/1 update.

If you did see a change in it today, it was likely because they were trying to roll out the new index (and failed).

Your DA only updates when there is a new Mozscape index available. There should have been an update on 28/2 but they have been having issues with deploying this index so the index from 26/1 is still the most current one. I.e. there shouldn't have been a change in your DA since then (unless the new index was briefly available, but I haven't seen any changes in DA on our websites yet).

There was also no change in the Mozscape index on 7/2 so your DA wouldn't have had any changes then. The most recent one would be the 26/1 one.

You can check for updates to the Mozscape index here: https://mza.bundledseo.com/products/api/updates

I was getting the same yesterday. Clicked the link and reauthorised, then refreshed the page and the notification was back up. I figured it must be a bug given that I had just reauthorised (several times).

In that case, how come the KWE is now missing data for keywords which it previously (last summer) had? There are some keywords that I previously got data for from the KWE but now it says "no data". For the UK, the number of keywords with "no data" has definitely increased.

Yeah, I am having the same issues within our vertical, e.g. for one list of keywords, I only get search volume data for 47 out of 168 keywords, for another list I get search volume data for 88 out of 192 keywords. Unfortunately I haven't found Keyword Explorer all that useful since they lost access to keyword planner (Google) data.

I have started relying more on keyword planner again but that said, keyword planner has also become a lot less useful over the past 6 months since they started combining search volume for singulars, plurals, acronyms etc.

The redirect does help with passing on the link juice. Domain authority is not a Google metric but a Moz metric. Therefore while your DA may have gone down to 1, your hard work isn't lost. All the domain authority does is predict how well your website will rank, it isn't consulted by Google, though.

It doesn't take into consideration any redirects from another domain. But Google does take these types of links into consideration that have been 301 redirected.

Here is an article that may help: https://mza.bundledseo.com/learn/seo/domain-authority

Where possible I would also suggest contacting websites to update the link, but you may find that your traffic and rankings won't be as affected as you might fear.

Hmm, I look after 7 websites. Haven't done any link building on any of them, but one maintained its DA, one dropped from 10 to 1 and the others all dropped a bit but not as dramatically. Most competitors have also seen some drops.

DA is helpful as a guideline, but I wouldn't use it as a KPI because it is a relative metric.

One of the things you could do is manually check those links that showed up in OSE before and check whether they're still there. Other than that, if you are sure that something is wrong, go through everything you've done in the past couple of months and any changes that have been made to the website to see if any of them caused any issues.

However, I still think that if your rankings haven't gone down and your traffic haven't suffered, I wouldn't assume there is an issue purely because the DA has gone down.

We have seen huge increases in organic traffic and conversions over the past 6 months but our DA has gone down.

This sounds exactly like the problem many have seen after the recent API update. I would suggest reading this topic: https://mza.bundledseo.com/community/q/is-everybody-seeing-da-pa-drops-after-last-moz-api-update You'll find a few more in the Q&A section but this one has a really helpful reply from Rand Fishkin.

We also saw one domain drop from 10 to 1 and I have seen someone else here mention a drop from 12 to 1. I for one am not going to worry about it for now, fairly certain it will get fixed with the next update which is expected in a little over two weeks.