Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

  1. Home
  2. Research & Trends
  3. Algorithm Updates
Log in to post

Category: Algorithm Updates

Discuss algorithm updates and impacts.

  • SubhaVaastu


    Dear all, Is this cache:www.subhavaastu.com is not working now with Google. Why it is not showing when the site is crawled. What were the new algorithms which Google is adopted? in my searches of all of my site internal links of www.SubhaVaastu.com, I observed only 404 instead of Google visiting time and date. After observing this 404 of each of my site links, I understand Google stopped crawling my site. Some more examples are shown below with other websites: cache:www.vastuwebsite.com ("NOT" showing when Google visited this site) cache:www.vastuconsultantusa.com ("NOT" showing when Google visited this site) cache:www.shubhavaastu.com ("NOT" showing when Google visited this site) cache:www.subhavastu.com (Showing when Google visited this site) To my surprise, I noticed that Google crawled latest links in my site, which I added a new link (https://www.subhavaastu.com/remove-negativity.html) just 10 days back, this new link was clearly crawled by Google. I typed "remove negativity subhavaastu", I saw the results with this new page in the SERP, but on the same way when I typed "cache:www.subhavaastu.com/remove-negativity.html", it is showing again 404. what is happening with Google, is Google is following any new algorithms now. Is google changed any new concept? or, is my site is penalized in any case, I think it may not be, because if my site is penalized, then Google should not visit the new links and should not show the results with my site. Coming with my site, its pure from viruses, no malicious codes. Indeed it's an article based site, which has a good reputation. This domain is taken in the year 2003. We never spam anywhere we never did any wrong methods. If my site is penalized, then is it manual penalized or bot penalized. I thoroughly checked webmaster tools and google console, I never found any notices or any note from Google. Require experts analyzation on this doubt. Thanks in Advance.

    | SubhaVaastu
    0
  • vtmoz


    Hi Moz community, We wanna give a try by removing all the links from homepage to internal pages and keep just a free trial button. Will this impact our SEO anyway? We have nearly 15 important internal pages at 2nd and 3rd hierarchy level. They may drop in rankings but we want to risk for few days to understand how it works. Your opinion please! Thanks

    | vtmoz
    0
  • Fubra


    One of our sites is littered in 404s and I have the lucky task of clearing them up. I'm using a mixture of 410s and 301s. Party central, I know. Wondered what ways people measure the success of clearing these 404s up on your site? Whether this is CTR or rankings... do you look at site benefits outside of your console errors coming down? Basically trying to understand how much this is worth doing and how to measure it's progress in real terms. Thanks!

    | Fubra
    0
  • vtmoz


    Hi all, Ours is WordPress website and we have a blog...website.com/blog/. All the important pages in the website are well linked from top and footer menu. But in our webmasters...internal links section, only homepage is at the top. Blog-posts are others followed by homepage. I wonder why blog pages are dominating our website pages. Please give your suggestions on this. Do you think Google will give more priority for the blog-posts than website pages as they are more linked technically? Thanks

    | vtmoz
    1
  • Intellect


    When We check few keywords in Google.com from India, we can see these keywords perfectly listed in the first google search result pages. But when I checked these keywords in USA chorme, Mozilla, internet explorer Brower using one of our USA client pc using remote desktop, we really shocked that these keywords not listed in the USA country. Which means I am an Indian, if I check these keywords from India using google.com, I can see but if  I check these keywords in USA country PC browser, I do not see. Please help us

    | Intellect
    0
  • vtmoz


    Hi Community, I have seen number of back-links where the content in that link is not matching with page content. Like page A linking to page B, but content is not really relevant beside brand name. Like page with "vertigo tiles" linked to page about "vertigo paints" where "vertigo" is brand name. Will these kind of back-links completely get wasted? I have also found some broken links which I'm planning to redirect to existing pages just to reclaim the back-links even though the content relevancy is not much beside brand name. Are these back-links are beneficial or not? Thanks

    | vtmoz
    0
  • vtmoz


    Hi Moz community, We can see the 404 and soft 404 errors in Google web masters. Usually these are non-existing pages which are found somewhere on internet by Google. I can see some of these reported URLs don't have any back-links (checked on ahrefs tool). Do we need to redirect each and every link reported here or ignore or marked to be fixed? Thanks

    | vtmoz
    0
  • sne7979


    There are various Heading Tags from H1 to H6. In what order and priority should they be used in order to get best reach and ranking in google. Is every Tag a must in a blog?

    | sne7979
    0
  • nweirens


    Is this a new thing or what are you all seeing?

    | nweirens
    1
  • vtmoz


    Hi community, I would like to know what is the criteria to rank a landing page in specific country Google search. For example, if we want to rank our landing page for "GDPR Australia", what are the factors which will impact beside writing the cotent related to the above mentioned keyword? Thanks

    | vtmoz
    0
  • JPRichardson


    I originally set up my domain as "overlandparkphotographer.com" and then have my "jpshots.com" pointing to it. What I recently discovered is that even though the pages of my I set Yost SEO Title to be "JPShots Senior Pictures | Wedding Photographer" When you search "overland park photographer" the snippet tile is just "overland park photographer" which sounds super sketchy. I don't know if this is something to do with yost, or if my sneaky Domain isn't worth much, and I should simply use my regular jpshots.com domain as the primary. I know it works like a charm with yahoo, but I'm not sure how much the domain name factors google these days.

    | JPRichardson
    0
  • Lauren1689


    I have started dropping on my rankings - due to lack of time after having a baby. I'm still managing to blog but I'm wondering if I update the content on my pages will that help? All my Meta tags and page descriptions were updated over a year ago - do I need to update these too? We were ranking in the top spots for a good few years, but we're slowly falling 😞 Please give me any advice to keep us from falling even further. I have claimed all my listings, and try to add new links once a month. I share my blog to all social sites and work hard to get Google reviews, we have 53 which is higher than any of our competitors. Any other ideas? Have I missed something that Google is looking for nowadays? Many thanks 🙂

    | Lauren1689
    0
  • vtmoz


    Hi, As I stated in the we have 2 meta description and title tags. Will this hurts? How Google handles this? Thanks

    | vtmoz
    0
  • judsta


    Real frustrating for me to see Google ignoring my 'Meta Descriptions' and 'mining' my site for any description it chooses. For years my meta has always been displayed and was set up with best practices according to MOZ.  My site snopro.co.nz and snopro.co.nz/wanaka-ski-hire have plenty of competition in the market but we are the only ones with a huge point of difference, we are web based only, and deliver the ski rental gear.  My quality meta was a way I could control the text and use for a good CTR due to offering something unique in the 'Meta'  (Rental Delivery).  Seems the only way I can 'control' any text is with 'Adwords'   ...funny that!  Any others out there finding the same?  Justin. BTW my meta is - 'Snopro Ski Rental Delivery Wanaka. We deliver & custom fit ski hire in the comfort of your accommodation. Hassle Free. Multi-day save 10%. Book here'

    | judsta
    0
  • PrebenKaas


    I'm trying to find a comprehensive list of CTRs by search enginge position. The most exhaustive list I've found is this one: https://www.advancedwebranking.com/cloud/ctrstudy/ - which shows CTRs by industry for the positions 1-21. I'm interested in seeing the rates for lower positions as well - does anyone in the community know any (preferably recent) resources for this? Thank you.

    | PrebenKaas
    0
  • vtmoz


    Hi Moz community, We have multiple pages from our own different sub-domains for same topics. These pages even rank in SERP for related keywords. Now we are planning to show only one of the pages in SERP. We cannot redirect unfortunately. We are planning to use rel canonical tags. But the page content is not same, only 20% is similar and 80% is different but the context is same. If we use rel canonicals, does Google accepts this? If not what should I do? Making header tags similar works? How Google responds if content is not matching? Just ignore or any negative score? Thanks

    | vtmoz
    0
  • BBT-Digital


    Is Shopify good for SEO? Such as indexing or ranking? Some factors: - URL is too big Some default URL structure cannot change - /product/ ,  /collections/,  /pages/ which makes the whole url so big Need expert's suggestions.

    | BBT-Digital
    1
  • 4RS_John


    I just did s search for Hayley Kiyoko, and Google asked me which song is my favourite from her new album. Is this a new thing? I've never asked Google a question before and had it ask me something back, other than "did you mean... (the correct spelling for what I was looking for)?" u6qYnwq.png

    | 4RS_John
    1
  • vtmoz


    Hi all, Our website is all about our software product. Generally our website pages are filled with 3 to 6 screenshots of our product features. As Google recently shifting to mobile index and pageload speed is going to be priority, we decided to compress the images on our pages and show the same images of large size in new window when someone clicks on a image. I wonder if this helps or has any disadvantages? Users may click on these clickable images while browsing the pages and may shift to new window to view the image. Will this have any negative impact on bounce rate? Please share your thoughts. Thanks

    | vtmoz
    0
  • NStarJM


    My company has been rolling out personalization at the page level across our site using behavior paths embedding content from cross pathed pages as well as customer journey mapping. The dynamically generated content doesn’t change the URLs. In the SERPs I’m seeing that our title tags and meta descriptions also seem to be dynamically generated even though we have these elements crafted. The way our elements are crafted: Title tag: descriptive Keyword rich phrase | Brand Meta description: Keyword rich, grammatically correct description tied to title tag and page content for consistency. I search a specific URL: Title tag display: Keyword rich phrase | Brand – Brand Meta description display: Random content pulled from the page I search a phrase that includes Brand + keywords in the URL: Title tag display: Title tag we crafted Meta description display: Meta description we crafted I search a phrase that includes Brand + keywords in the title tag: Title tag display: Title tag we crafted Meta description display: Random content pulled from the page Does Google crawl the page and digest the title tag and meta description we crafted? Or is Google going to ding us for having the brand twice, exceeding the length of the title tag, etc.? I have been searching the interwebs, forums and the cosmos, but the only information I’m finding is related to the fact that URLs are changing and how that would impact SEO. That’s not the case for us. Thoughts on how all this is impacting our SEO efforts?

    | NStarJM
    0
  • markjoyce


    Hi, I am currently adding new products to my website and was wondering, should I use our product description (which is keyword optimised) in the meta description for SEO purposes? Or would this be picked up by Google as duplicate content? Thanks in advance.

    | markjoyce
    1
  • vtmoz


    Hi everybody, I can see the change Google brought in the SERP. Previously website homepages will be shown for primary keywords, now it's slowly and almost switched to showing most related internal pages in a website. You can check same for keyword "SEO", Most or all the results are internal pages. I can see this change for our primary keyword from last one month. So basically Google is trying to show a page explaining about the primary keywords rather than website, that's how "what is seo" pages are ranking than homepages. If there is no such pages existed or not well written, Google is just showing the website homepage. But I noticed that websites ranking with homepages are dropped compared to the websites with dedicated page about that primary keyword. Please share your thoughts. Thanks

    | vtmoz
    0
  • vtmoz


    Hi Moz community, Our website has global audience, visitors and clients. Suddenly our website dropped in rankings for main keyword in US; which is our primary targeting country. Not sure why? This is been happening for last 2 months, we waited it to recover and now trying to fix if we can do anything about it. Is there anything wrong with back-links? What might be the factors contributing here for global website? Thanks

    | vtmoz
    0
  • BeckyKey


    Hi I wanted to get your thoughts on this keyword ranking. This page - https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/albatross-heavy-duty-office-chairs-24-stone is now ranking for heavy duty office chair 30 stone We don't mention 30 in the content anywhere, apart from the USPs at the top of the page - could this be it?! I don't know how to change this, or I guess Google is still figuring things out and maybe this will drop off? Love to get some thoughts on this! Becky

    | BeckyKey
    0
  • vtmoz


    Hi Moz community, I have this different scenario of using canonicals to solve the duplicate content issue in our site. Our subdomain and main domain have similar landing pages of same topics with content relevancy about 50% to 70%. Both pages will be in SERP and confusing users; possibly search engine too. We would like solve this by using canonicals on subdomain pointing to main domain pages. Even our intention is to only to show main domain pages in SERP. I wonder how Google handles it? Will the canonicals will be respected with this content relevancy? What happens if they don't respect? Just ignore or penalise for trying to do this? Thanks

    | vtmoz
    0
  • Eric_S


    Hi all, I'm trying to breakdown some SEO 101 tips and start from scratch. Starting with Keywords! I would like to audit our site for main keywords, grouping them in categories and subcategories. My questions are: 1. Is it possible to see where we rank on google AND search trends of visits to our site?
    2. What is a good method or structure to document (excel?) 
    3. What analysis can be made from finding the results of these keywords and how can I make use of this? As a beginner your help is much appreciated!!

    | Eric_S
    2
  • vtmoz


    Hi friends, Generally most of the articles about tags are either title rag or header tags, but not about both. I would like to know how to write perfect title and header tags. How much they must be relevant and different? Can we use the same tags for title and H1? If we are planning to rank for different keywords, can that different keywords can be used? I'm really curious to see some interesting answers for this. Thanks

    | vtmoz
    0
  • vtmoz


    Hi all, Our website ranking for mail keywords is inversely proportional in the 2 countries (US and India). I mean...if the ranking is improved in one country, it drops in other country and vice versa. The graph looks like exactly something triggered and making this happen at Google. I wonder what might be reasons for this? We have been facing this for more than a year and made number of on-site changes, so I presume if it's something to do with backlinks. Any clue or thoughts on this? Thanks

    | vtmoz
    1
  • vtmoz


    Hi all, We have double canonicals. From page A to page B to Page C. Will this be Okay for Google? Or definitely we need to make it A to C and B to C? Thanks

    | vtmoz
    0
  • WTH


    Traffic to my three sites from Bing and Yahoo has been declining over the past year. Meanwhile traffic from Google has been increasing. A year ago Bing and Yahoo brought in 34% of my traffic. Now it's only 19%. What can I do to optimise specifically for Bing/Yahoo? I have Webmaster tools. Or could it be that my customers (largely aged 60+) are moving over to Google? Thanks

    | WTH
    0
  • vtmoz


    Hi all, We are planning to de-index and redirect a sub domain A to sub domain B. Consequently we now need to d-index sub domain B also. What happens now to the link juice or page rank they gained from hundreds and thousands of backlinks? Will there be any ranking impact on main domain? Backlinks of these sub domains are not much relevant to main domain content. Thanks

    | vtmoz
    1
  • BeckyKey


    Help! I'm losing keyword rankings for certain keywords - but still ranking well on others. The trend I can see is that we're losing rankings on plurals, so this page https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/platform-trolleys-trucks Used to rank well for: platform trolleys
    platform trucks
    flat bed trolleys But now only ranks well for platform trolley flat bed trolleys platform truck I have seen a large number of keywords drop out - they're not hitting traffic massively yet, but conversions are dropping - help! I;m struggling to find the cause!

    | BeckyKey
    0
  • Andrew-SEO


    I have a website with high domain authority and high quality content and blog. I've resubmitted the sitemap half a dozen times. Search console getr half way through and then stops. Does anyone know any reason for this? I've seen the usual responses of 'google is not obligated to crawl you' but this site has been fully crawled in the past. It's very odd Does anyone have any ideas why it might stop half way - or does anyone know a testing tool that might illuminate the situation?

    | Andrew-SEO
    0
  • GoUp


    We have been on the first page of Google for a number of years for search terms including 'SEO Agency', 'SEO Agency London' etc. A few months ago we made some changes to the design of the home page (added a blog feed), and made changes to the website sitemap. Two days ago (two months after last site changes were made) we dropped subsantially in the SERPs for all home page keywords. Where we are found, a date appears before the description in the SERPs, dating February 2012 (which is when we launched the original website). The site has been through a revamp since then, yet it still shows 2012. This has been followed by a few additional strange things, including the sitelinks that Google is choosing to show (which including author bio pages showing in homepage site links), and googling our brand name no longer brings up sitelinks in the SERPs. The problem only affects the home page. All other pages are performing as standard. When Penguin 4.0 came out we saw a noted improvement in our SERP performance, and our backlinks are good and quality, largely from PR efforts. Of course, I would be interested in additional pairs of eyes on the back links to see if anyone thinks that I have missed anything! We have 3 of our senior SEOs working on trying to figure out what is going on and how to resolve it, but I would be very interested if anyone has any thoughts?

    | GoUp
    3
  • ati1


    Chrome will be blocking ads on websites that are not compliant with the Better Ads standards as of Feb 15. Could not find any clues whether a pop-up (not an ad) asking for your email is included in this? We currently have a pop-up that appears on exit intent only (which is not penalized). Any ideas?

    | ati1
    0
  • vtmoz


    Hi all, As I mentioned some days back here, our duplicate website got indexed a month back. Unfortunately there are links to our original website. I noticed that thousands of links are from our duplicate website at "Links to Your Site". Will this hurts? Now we have blocked the duplicate website getting indexed. What to do to remove these links from "Who links the most"? Thanks

    | vtmoz
    0
  • vtmoz


    Hi all, This has been a debate for years and I have noticed most of the SEOs suggest to go or switch to sub directories instead of sub domains. Still is this the same or any new updates from Google or SEO community? We have moved a sub domain to sub directory last year. The result was sub directory content started ranking good; but no change in website rankings. Because of moving sub domains to sub directories, will the linkjuice/PR of the website gets diluted as the number of pages increases which will takeaway soe authority? Thanks

    | vtmoz
    0
  • vtmoz


    Hi Moz community, We have employed different pages (topics) at same URLs for years. This has brought different backlinks to same page which has led to non relevancy of backlinks. Now we are planning to redirect some URLs which may improve or drop rankings of certain pages. If we roll back the redirects in case of ranking drop, will there be any negative impact from Google? Does Google notice anything about redirect changes beside just passing pagerank from backlinks? Thanks

    | vtmoz
    0
  • vtmoz


    Hi all, We can see very old links or anonymous links of website suddenly listing under soft 404 or 404 in GSW. As per Google, some of them are some script generated ignorable links. Other are actually the ones which were deleted but not redirected. I wonder how Google get these years old links even though there are no source links available for these. These must be fixed even though they are not linked anywhere from our internal or external pages? Thanks

    | vtmoz
    0
  • vtmoz


    Hi all, We failed to redirect the links of our old website versions to new website pages for years and we are planning to now redirect all those old links to new in the process of link reclamation. This activity may increase the back links suddenly or steadily. If there is sudden increase in backlinks, will it hurts us? What's Google's stand? Thanks

    | vtmoz
    1
  • vtmoz


    Hi all, We lost of our Wikipedia page for 2nd time and we dropped in rankings 2nd time too. I got confused first time whether Wikipedia was the actual reason as we had couple of major changes in our website. But recently it's been clear that losing Wikipedia page is the culprit as we have no website changes around these days. How many of you aware of this and experienced this? Please share your views. Hope this info will help you. Thanks

    | vtmoz
    0
  • vtmoz


    Hi all, Our website's server IP address is set to be redirected to our blog by mistake and it stayed same for months. Is there any way Google recognises it and how it responds if so? Thanks

    | vtmoz
    1
  • vtmoz


    Hi all, We have some external links on our footer menu. I'm just trying to figure out whether these take away pagerank. What if they are follow or nofollow? How fair to have DMCA badge with link at footer? Will this hurts? Thanks

    | vtmoz
    0
  • vtmoz


    Hi all, Our forum have so many discussions and topics where our users leave their websites and oter URLs which will be marked "nofollow" by default. Beside spammy websites, is that Okay to have so many "nofollow" outgoing links? Thanks

    | vtmoz
    0
  • vtmoz


    Hi all, Our duplicate website which is used for testing new optimisations got indexed and we dropped in rankings. But I am not sure whether this is exact reason as it happened earlier too where I don't find much drop in rankings. Also I got replies in the past that it'll not really impact original website but duplicate website. I think this rule applies to the third party websites. But if our own domain has exact duplicate content; will Google knows that we own the website from any other way we are associated like IP addresses and servers, etc..to find the duplicate website is hosted by us? I wonder how Google treats duplicate content from third party domains and own domains. Thanks

    | vtmoz
    0
  • harrysamson


    Hi For last month my website was ranking to 5 positions for this keyword (Magento Development Company). But recently (28-nov) it's out of 100, some time it's showing on 25 position but not showing in top 5 position. Here is my url (for analysis): https://magnetoitsolutions.com/services/magento-development/ Please explain why my keyword rankings are often not showing in the search listings. Note: There are some other keywords of different pages start getting ranking drop. please let me know is there anything i need to change. Thank

    | harrysamson
    0
  • Joseph-Green-SEO


    Hello All, I would appreciate if you could share with me your insight and advise on how to run SEO and UX experiments. How do we set up the proper benchmark and control groups, what tools to use? How can we ensure that the changes we see are not due to other factors and what difference is needed to confirm our findings? Some of the things I would like to test is if certain words in the title tag can correlate with higher CTR or with lower bounce rates. I would also like to quickly test if the common best practices only 1 h1 etc have any effect on rankings at all. Please share with me from knowledge and experience. Thanks Much!

    | Joseph-Green-SEO
    0
  • vtmoz


    Hi all, We have started link reclamation process as we failed to redirect our old website links to newly created pages. Unfortunately most of the backlinks are pointing to a page which already has lots of backlinks. Just wondering if I can redirect the old pages to the other pages than the actual related page they must be pointing to make sure only one page doesn't take away all the backlinks. And what happens if Google find that backlink is pointing to a different page than the actual page? Thanks

    | vtmoz
    0
  • vtmoz


    Hi Moz community If we Google "site:website.com"; it'll list the cached pages from the website. And we used to check them on required date range like how and which pages got indexed. But date range is not working now and the results are missing the pages which got indexed at the selected date range. Any idea why Google does this? Any alternatives to find the recently indexed pages? Thanks

    | vtmoz
    0
  • vtmoz


    Hi all, The suggestion to use meta robots tag rather than robots.txt file is to make sure the pages do not get indexed if their hyperlinks are available anywhere on the internet. I don't understand how the pages will be indexed if the entire site is blocked? Even though there are page links are available, will Google really index those pages? One of our site got blocked from robots file but internal links are available on internet for years which are not been indexed. So technically robots.txt file is quite enough right? Please clarify and guide me if I'm wrong. Thanks

    | vtmoz
    0

Got a burning SEO question?

Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


Start my free trial


Browse Questions

Explore more categories

  • Moz Tools

    Chat with the community about the Moz tools.

  • SEO Tactics

    Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers

  • Community

    Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!

  • Support

    Connect on product support and feature requests.

Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.