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Hi there,

Others have already mentioned great starting points. The steps I would take here in order would look something like:

1. Confirm that I'm looking at the right data, and identify where the drop is coming from. Is it mostly the blog? A certain section? Top performing pages? Homepage? Or is it more of an all around drop to most pages?
2. Once you answer the first question, it will allow you to prioritize where to look. If you identify most of the drop happened on your blog for example, you can focus your attention there to answer questions like, "Have we changed anything on the blog recently from a technical perspective?", "Are we confident there is nothing that is stopping us from ranking technically?", etc.
3. The more difficult situation is when there is a general decrease in traffic to most pages on the site (doesn't seem to be a rhyme or a reason). In these cases I would look back at what updates have affected the site before to see a trend. When did the drop happen? Does that drop line up with a recent update? If so, what was that update about? Then some form of a technical audit, content audit, etc would be reasonable next steps to essentially identify the biggest issues in each.

Some other points in no particular order

• Remember that more content/pages does not necessarily mean more traffic. Because your formula was working a year ago doesn't mean it will work now (or work as well).
• Looking at your site briefly, you have a good amount of content (~17,000 pages) but it's difficult to navigate and find articles. If I had to guess, I'd say the site could benefit from a re-design and content overhaul/audit to ensure there are not too many overlapping pages and that they are easily discoverable by users (and crawlers).

I know that's a bit of a brain dump but hope that (along with other response) helps point you to a starting point!

Hi there,

A few things:

• If there are thousands of pages on your site that only contain a video per page, that would be considered thin content from an SEO perspective. If you are trying to fix that I would recommend adding a noindex tag to all of the video pages, resubmitting those URLs to search console (or wait until Google crawls them), and then once the pages are removed from in the index I would add a disallow rule in the robots.txt file to prevent Google from crawling them.
• Another question: does the subdomain have any other content? Are the videos used elsewhere? It sounds like the videos themselves could be valuable from a business perspective and SEO is only one part of a site's success - I'd be thinking about how else I could utilize them in search (or other channels).
• Happy to look further if you want to post the subdomain - hopefully I understand correctly.

Hope that helps!

Hi there,

In terms of your questions:

• Deleting images or pages spammy links point to won't help since the links will still point to your domain regardless of if the place they are pointing to results in a 200 status. Also, I wouldn't recommend deleting any images or pages if they are important to the site!
• If you did remove assets or pages, it would have no impact on your domain authority.

If I were in your shoes, I would disavow the extremely spammy links and then carry on with other projects (building the brand/audience). If you're still concerned with spammy links coming in, I'd recommend setting up a framework to update your disavow file every ~6 months or so. Google has gotten good about ignoring a lot of clearly spammy links, but I still like to disavow the really bad ones just in case.

Also, don't forget that domain authority is just a metric that tries to represent the overall strength of a domain based on links. Google doesn't actually use DA (although it's likely they use something similar) so I wouldn't stress too hard about increasing DA (although that might be the lever you need to pull).

In short, I would:

• Disavow the really bad links.
• Do that once every 6-12 months if you're concerned.
• Move forward with other forward-thinking tasks like building out content hubs, building the brand up, working on social presence, etc.

Hope that helps!

That's interesting—please do! Interested to hear what the cause is...

Hi there,

I haven't seen this warning from Google but reading their guidelines suggests that perhaps your site has been hacked or maybe you're running some ads that have content embedded that would trigger this warning?

Having a link to a site that doesn't use HTTPs shouldn't cause this warning to appear... maybe others have a different experience? Interesting to hear what others say.

Hi there,

I can't point you in a specific direction on how to go about doing this, but as Martijn mentioned it's important that you make sure:

• 301 redirects are setup from old URLs to new URLs (/cat-name 301s to /prod-name)
• ALL internal links are updated to /prod-name (for example, in the main navigation, footer, sidebars, etc.)
• I believe what Martijn meant with the URL depth comment was that websites (particularly ecommerce sites) should be structured logically (mainly for topical authority). So for example, if you are a site that sells electronics, it's important from both a user and bot perspective that there is a domain.com/laptops/ page (which would be the category page). Under that, it makes sense to have a product page that would live on domain.com/laptops/macbook for example. It sounds like you are considering to remove the top-level category pages, which might result in a worse user experience and possibly a less-than-ideal setup for link equity being passed down to product pages.

Martijn, is that what you were hinting at?

Thanks for the question. It isn't uncommon for there to be strange 404 errors in Search Console with little information/bad information. They are working hard to improve this, but I wouldn't take everything you see there as set-in-stone.

This doesn't sound like a negative SEO tactic. I would just mark them all as fixed, and see if they appear again in about a week. If they do, I'd make sure they are actually served as 4xx status and not worry too much about it. If you want to do more digging...

Some ideas of where you could look further

• Logs logs logs. This will be the ultimate truth - you will be able to see whether or not GoogleBot is actually hitting those URLs.
• It could be something weird happening with a plugin of yours that generates those URLs (particularly on Wordpress).
• Perhaps you have a filtering system setup that generates these URLs?
• If you have a search function on the site, sometimes weird URLs can be generated through that.
• Do the URLs come-up when you crawl the site at all?

Just a few ideas!

Exactly - I would do the same and make sure to mark them as fixed. Also worth noting that if you have a lot of errors showing up, it could be easier to mark everything as fixed first and then check back in a week or two to get the actual bad URLs to appear versus having to go through a bunch that may or not be accurate anymore.

Hi there,

I haven't used the areaServed markup, but here are my thoughts:

• If your business _actually _serves all the different areas you are marking up, the markup is legitimate and therefore should be safe. However, if you are trying to manipulate/be spammy with your markup Google could penalize the site.
• In terms of how Google will read the markup, that's a tough question to answer. If there aren't any errors with it in Google's schema testing tool then it's safe to assume that if Google chooses to read/consider the schema markup it would understand that "x business provides services to the following areas".
• Where your business appears on the local pack is determined by many different inputs (such as reviews, quality/quantity of local listings, schema, etc.) I would imagine if Google chooses to consider this particular markup it could help your business appear in more local mack packs if the competition isn't much stronger when it comes to reviews, an actual brick and mortar location, etc.

Hope that's somewhat helpful—happy for anyone to disagree/jump in with more information.

Hi Becky,

As Joseph mentioned, Wistia and YouTube are two very different platforms with different goals. There are times when using both is a great strategy! So it depends on the goals you've set.

YouTube is an entire platform you can build on to increase brand awareness, revenue, and get your name out there. Some businesses/marketers entire strategy is within the YouTube world.

Wistia is geared towards making sure any on-site videos is as ideal as can be.

So, if you are just focused on creating videos to enhance your product pages, Wistia is a great option. However, if you wanted to create videos showing off your products in a unique way and build an audience/following outside of just your site, YouTube would be your best bet.

Hope that helps!

Hi Ajay,

Great question. First off, I think that both a video sitemap and the correct schema optimizations are extremely important in getting your videos to rank. Personally, I would start off with creating a video sitemap and then branch off into utilizing schema. This is just a matter of preference for me because I like to get the foundational elements done first.

In terms of what tools you can use - I know of a few. If your site is in WordPress the Yoast Video SEO plugin has worked well for me in the past. If not, here are some great posts on Video Sitemaps and the best process for creating them.

https://www.distilled.net/blog/video/creating-video-sitemaps-for-each-video-hosting-platform/

https://mza.bundledseo.com/blog/video-sitemap-guide-for-vimeo-and-youtube

Hope that helps!

Serge

Hi Brian,

Here are my thoughts around your questions:

1. You mention that the videos aren't tagged or optimized well. If this is a main reason for creating a new channel I would suggest you create a plan for going back and optimizing/tagging all of your current videos instead.

2. Instead of creating an entirely new channel, could you rebrand yours? Change the name, logo, links, etc. but keep the videos, views, shares, etc.

3. In terms of SEO - YouTube takes user signals (views, shares, interactions) into account for ranking videos. I would say if there's anyway you could retain your current YouTube channel, do that. However, if you have to create a new YouTube you can get newer videos ranking fairly well by optimizing them correctly as well as adding them to a video sitemap and utilizing schema.

Hope that helps!

References:

http://searchengineland.com/youtube-ranking-factors-getting-ranked-second-largest-search-engine-225533

Hi Zack,

Great question. First of all, I haven't gotten to play with the official AMP plugin for Wordpress yet, but I've been researching and reading about the implementation of AMP pages within Wordpress for a while now.

First of all — it's recommended that you utilize AMP pages if you are a publisher or push out content often. In other words, AMP is not ideal (yet) for ecommerce, casual bloggers, etc. You can definitely try it out, but AMP was specifically designed for publishers that churn out a lot of content.

To answer your question regarding duplicate content — From my understanding, the proper way of implementing AMP pages and avoiding duplicate content is to put a canonical tag on your main page that points to the AMP page (this way Google sees that you have an AMP version of this page), as well as adding a canonical tag on the AMP page that points to the regular page.

In other words, you would have something like this.

Main Page

AMP Page

Here's Google's take on this.

i'm assuming that the plugin will automatically add the correct code to the pages, but I have not tested it so I wouldn't know for sure. Please do let us know if you end up testing this out!

Also, you might want to check out Yoast's "Glue" plugin for editing and adjusting AMP pages. It seems like it could be helpful.

Cheers

Hi there,

Great question.

The short answer:

• You can't control whether or not Google shows sitelinks for your site.
• If Google decides to show sitelinks for your site, you can't control which ones they show.
• The best you can do is optimize your site hierarchy, internal links, and on-page elements as best as possible to make it clear (and simple) for Google to crawl and understand seperate sections of your site.

Google used to have a "sitelink demotion" tool that let you submit links you wanted removed from sitelinks that were showing up for your domain. Google got rid of that function earlier this year. Either way, it was the opposite of what you are trying to achieve (get sitelinks showing for your domain).

Google's recommendation is to "...make sure you use anchor text and alt text that's informative, compact, and avoids repetition."

In other words, make sure your site has a clear hierarchy, that internal links are pointing to important sections of the site, that anchor text is descriptive, that pages are optimized clearly, and of course that your site being crawled accurately.

Hope that helps!

Hi,

There could be a variety of things that could have caused this, but I would start by asking a few questions:

1. Did the drop happen quickly? Did it go from positions 1-3 to 20 below in a day or two?
2. Is the SERP volatile? Has there been lots of movement for the SERP historically?
3. Have other sites in your space seen negative drops? I know there has been a lot of movement in the last few weeks.

Some general things I would jump into to start looking:

• Core technical elements.

• Was the page de-indexed somehow?

• Was the page canonicalized elsewhere?

• Did the core on-page elements get re-targeted to another term or removed?

• General health of homepage/site

• Is your backlink profile healthy? Did you ever purchase links/did someone purchase negative links to your domain?

• Is your content scraped or duplicated across other sites?

• Is your website mobile friendly?

• Does your site load quicker than 5 seconds?

• As Nikki mentioned, it's also important to look at who is ranking now.

• What is the DA of their site compared to yours? Is it much higher?

• Is their quality of content better?

If the drop happened quickly it's likely that something technical went wrong or you've been hit with an obvious penalty.

If it's happened over months, it's probably less obvious and could be multiple things.

I know that's not a straight answer, but those are some starting points I could think of with the information provided. Hope that is helpful!

Hi there,

First off, I think you made a good call on changing the URL structure and title tags. It sounds like you are seeing positive results from an organic ranking perspective as well as a user experience perspective (this is particularly beneficial because UX plays such a vital role in organic rankings now).

To answer/bring up your specific concerns...

1. How important is the product code to each individual product? If your company is B2B and these product codes are extremely helpful for other businesses I would say it's definitely worth considering. However, if your company sells standard items directly to customers, I think this concern would vary from product-to-product. In other words, if you think there is a substantial amount of users who are searching for the product code, this is something I would consider.

2. In terms of including the brand in the title tag, I would say yes. I don't have much backstory on who your customers are and what you are selling to them, but just based off of this information I would say it would be more beneficial to include the brand name in the title tag. Something like you suggested would work great. "BRAND1 - Product Name - Your company name" would be another way to think about it.

Hope that helps!

Great question.

As recommended by Andrew, I would definitely check your site's robots.txt file to ensure those pages or sections of the site aren't being blocked.

Secondly, I would check your sitemap and make sure there aren't any errors within it. Often times if your sitemap is inaccurate Google might decide to not index certain pages.

Doing a site:search for your website will help you understand what pages are showing up as well. Beyond this, you can do a site:search and enter a keyword for one of the landing pages that isn't being indexed by Google. If that page shows up, you know it's indexed.

Often times GSC doesn't give us 100% accurate data and therefore it's good to do these checks yourself. It's important to note that Google doesn't have to index certain pages if it doesn't find them useful for one reason or another. This is something we don't have much control of, however I doubt that is the case here.

Do the steps I mentioned above and let me know if you find anything interesting. Respond with your findings and we can try and get to the bottom of your specific issue. Hope that helps!

Hi! To answer your question—that's totally fine, as long as the canonical tags are pointing to non-trailing on product URLs and trailing on blog URLs, this shouldn't be a big deal.

There are other things to consider like internal linking (and making sure that's consistent across the site) and possibly choosing one version (like trailing slash) and force redirecting the rest (to ensure things are clean when it comes to URLs).

But as far as the direct question goes, as long as your canonicals are set accurately for those sections it shouldn't be a problem.

Hope that helps!

Hi there,

In terms of your questions:

• Deleting images or pages spammy links point to won't help since the links will still point to your domain regardless of if the place they are pointing to results in a 200 status. Also, I wouldn't recommend deleting any images or pages if they are important to the site!
• If you did remove assets or pages, it would have no impact on your domain authority.

If I were in your shoes, I would disavow the extremely spammy links and then carry on with other projects (building the brand/audience). If you're still concerned with spammy links coming in, I'd recommend setting up a framework to update your disavow file every ~6 months or so. Google has gotten good about ignoring a lot of clearly spammy links, but I still like to disavow the really bad ones just in case.

Also, don't forget that domain authority is just a metric that tries to represent the overall strength of a domain based on links. Google doesn't actually use DA (although it's likely they use something similar) so I wouldn't stress too hard about increasing DA (although that might be the lever you need to pull).

In short, I would:

• Disavow the really bad links.
• Do that once every 6-12 months if you're concerned.
• Move forward with other forward-thinking tasks like building out content hubs, building the brand up, working on social presence, etc.

Hope that helps!

A few unordered thoughts:

• I don't think that the URL alone is what's causing the blog to outrank the homepage. Some causes are probably that the content is better suited towards "plastic cups", the on-page optimization is more specific towards "plastic cups", or that the blog post has more internal/external links pointing to it. Also could be a combination of any/all of these.
• If your main topic for the site is around plastic cups, then the homepage should probably rank for it. In which case you could 301 the blog post to the homepage, and ensure that the homepage is targeting "plastic cups" as best as possible and that the content suits that keyword well.
• If the main topic for the website isn't plastic cups, then I would argue that it's OK that the blog post ranks—take that and use the homepage to target something else entirely and just make sure the CTA on the blog post is appropriate.

The way to let Google know your homepage is most relevant for the term:

1. Redirect blog post to homepage.
2. Ensure homepage has well written and helpful content around the topic.
3. Ensure homepage targeting (title tag, h1, etc) is focused on the topic.
4. Re-submit sitemap to Google for re-crawling and wait for a few days/possibly a week.

Hope that's helpful!