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Hey Hassan,
It could but before you do that. I would do the other points first as you might not need to change them to get a good outcome here.
Also, make sure you do one change at a time to see what works. As if you do everything at once you might go backwards and you would not know what could have gone wrong.
Moz guide is pretty good, its here also neil patel has one which is great here is the link https://neilpatel.com/what-is-seo/
Just side note they are updating the Moz one atm. So if you go to the blog area on Moz you can also read all of the updates too.
For me, I work it like this. if it is not hurting my rankings or user experience I would not change it. the risk is pretty high if it's not done right and I don't think you will gain enough out of it to take the risk.
Are you wanting to change it because you feel it will help with rankings?
if you didn't build the links or earned them through good content and you don't feel they are good. Always better to just disavow them. Even more so if they are .ru sites as I am sure your site is not in Russia 
I personally love https://sucuri.net to fix issues like this.
So you need to take two steps, the first one is you need to work out if someone is hacking into your site by using sucuri you can check. They will also do a clean up if they find something. To find the page they hacked into you can also look at where these links are pointing to.
The second part is you need to do a disavow of the links going to the hacked page. As this will also be hacked sites most likely or cheap links. Here is the link to do a disavow, you do this through search console.
Good luck and if you need anything else let me know.
ok, I could go into a lot but here are the major onsite changes you could look at working on to fix your rankings.
Hope this helps if you need more help let me know.
Doing 301 is always going to be a risk But if you do them right they can work fine.
I can't give you the site sadly but we had to do this for a very large client about 18 months ago. They sold shoes and they had two brands they wanted to put into one site.
What we did was a full reband and put everything under the one style and layout. This helped a lot because users were able to flow between the different products without getting lost.
From an SEO point of view we 301 each page to match the new page. there is easy sidewide ways to do 301 but as we were moving to a new flow. So we put the time and money into customising each 301. We also made sure to take the same seo onsite over too.
hope this helps and best of luck too.
If I was you I wouldn't take the risk, i have had a few clients have this as an issue in the past. As I don't know your link profile I can't say for sure but a good link profile should be made up of all different types of links.
The risk here is these links are not earned in googles eyes or in some cases other websites don't know they are giving the link back to you.
I always work off the idea that if I feel like there is a risk it's not Worth it. You might get away with it from a algorithm point of view but you just need a manual review to happen and it's going to be a lot harder.
Wish you the best of luck with it.
I would most likely use event tracking as it means you don't need to move the user to another page. You can program it into the website to send the data as it happens.
Here is a good page about setting up event tracking Click here
Just wanted to add that than you could setup goal tracking from the event itself once setup. This will allow you to track conversions better or non conversions.
Hi Jeff,
You are right Everyone plays this differently. The way we do it is group keywords for one page. No point trying to overdo it as google might see those pages as a doorway page Click here to see more. This normally hits larger sites but i have seen smaller sites get done by this too.
Its better to play itself and put a good 1000 words onto one page with a group of keywords than have 5 pages with less useful content.
Thanks, Aaron
Hi Jon,
the best way I look at it is if its not hurting you in the way of money or time than I wouldn't worry about it. I have had clients change domains or business names and it can cost a lot of time and money. Where the traffic isn't costing you anything.
If lots of people were contacting you and wasting time than yes maybe look at it but to change everything seems like a lot of work.
Just my input.
Thanks, Aaron
sorry just wanted to add that I would be doing a disavow of links if you haven't already. You have a lot of spammy looking links.
Have a look at where your links are coming from click here this can also not be helping you too.
Just looked at your website you are running both http and https. You will need to setup 301.
See the way it works is http and https are different websites and if you don't set them up right google will see them as different websites. As I'm sure you can understand google just don't understand what is going on and you can have lots of issues going forward.
You also need to make sure you have http going to the right https pages or all links going to the http will not follow on.
Here are the code to put into the site to ensure http 301 to the right https Click here
Also i was just looking at your site and I would remove your business name from titles can be seen a spammy as it has rings in the name. The overuse of keywords in titles can hurt rankings too.
If you want any help just send me a message on here.
There could be lots of different reasons. Have you checked to see if the page is getting index also how is the content on the page? Do the other pages have better content?
Just had a look at the page and I would review your title as a starting point.
So exact match for you is "copay program providers"
You then want to track each word on its own? or are you trying to work out the long trail options?
As I'm just trying to work out what bored search teams for you is.
Hi,
I'm just trying to work this out a little more. Can you give a sample of keywords you want as exact match and broad?
This post on moz is really good but it will take time and work within Google Analytics but again if you can give me an example of what you're trying to track it will help alot.
Hi,
This won't give you any issues as long as there is not two different visions of the same page e.g https and http. Some sites have different parts of their site in https and other parts in http. You just need to see if there is two different visions showing up. If there is than you need to look at cleaning this up. I won't lie it is hard doing this in bigcommerce because it's a closed system not like wordpress or another open source system.
In saying that I personally like having it one way or the other but to go back to your question. It is fine as long as there is only one vision.
I would 100% 301 one of the sites and clean this up right away. Your client could get done for a lot of different things from google seeing it as a network of sites to panda issues for sure.
I would look into the history and backend of both sites to insure there is no issues but in saying that sometimes doing the keyword focused domain name can make it harder for your when building links as anchor become harder.
First how long has it been since you moved the site off mobile?
Is the /mobile pages ranking or is it only when you search for them?
I personally would set up 301s for each page to the new page. Not 301 all of it back to the home page.
Sorry my bad. I really shouldn't reply to questions at 2am. The below page is really good to show you how PA and DA is worked out.
Hi Donald,
I normally stay away from yellowpages as google can see this as spam and even more so when you have 2500 coming from one site. I normally disavow them altogether. If they acted like a other local listing sites and didn't give so many links it's fine but yellowpages is known to do this for sure.
Local Citations can be a great part of your link building but you need to be careful and insure its done right. Here is a page Moz has put together https://moz.com/learn/local/listings about local listing/citations and why you should do them and how to get started.
Hope this helps.
Can i ask what you did to the site to break it up? It might be playing with how Moz is crawling the site.
Another cool tool for content issues is copyscape.com it might be able to give you more data.
Sadly there really isn't one. I know it doesn't help but the 301 shouldn't have been done in the first place. Changing URL's and doing 301's always impact on rankings in a big way.
You will be best to 301 the new domain back to the old one and try to stay away from doing it. Also keep in mind every time you do a 301 you will only get 70-80% of the benefit of the links going to that domain.
I don't think you need to worry about it. I think what this blog was talking about is more people who do spam content way down the page under the footer kind of thing.
I think if you build a good website which has content below the fold I wouldn't be worried at all. I have clients who rank for some very hard keywords and for conversion we have less above the fold so it's pushing them to do one of our call to actions.
Always remember google wants you to build a website which users like not a website that google likes.
always work off this. If you're putting content there because it's to help google than yes it's going to hurt you but if it's part of the website the design it's fine.
The sites i have seen be hit are ones where people have put content below the footer itself or it looks like spam.
I would be very careful when Changing 301s I have seen people have major issues when turning a 301 off. More so because a lot of people use 301 to drop spam backlinks and get a jump in rankings.
Can I ask why did you do the 301 in the first place? And are you going to 301 the new domain back to the old one.
I would look at ahrefs and check Anchors and also if its not moving it might be just a link volume issue for that keyword.
Have you checked to see if there is any errors with HTTP?
This website is really good for checking HTTP errors.
Hi Eric,
This is a hard one, if H1 and the URL are the same and there is other issues with keyword stuffing then maybe look at changing it. I would never change URL's unless I 100% know that's the issue as it could give you more harm than good. If it's not hurting your client now I wouldn't change it. No point fixing something that's not broken in the way of rankings. From a click through point of view it doesn't help having a really long URL.
These two posts are really good about URL's. I hope this helps.
https://moz.com/blog/15-seo-best-practices-for-structuring-urls
Are they ranking within the top 100 for the term at all?
Could be an Anchor issue around the term, its hard to say as can't see the team or the site.
Also I never really believe everything Moz tells me as they have the same limits as every tool out there, are you checking other tools to see if there is any other issues with the page/site.
Hey Warren,
Personally irrelevant Anchor text isn't bad at all it shows that your site is doing true link building as google wants other people to be building the links and choosing the Anchor for you.
Sometimes it can help you break up your Anchor text too which is great as Big G doesn't like overused Anchor texts.
I love using ahrefs.com Anchors Cloud to really get a good understanding of Anchors. I would be more worried if an Anchor is been over used.
I don't think you need to have it but again you need to look at your target market and see if you feel they will know this. If you're selling digital marketing your market is going to be very different than say selling craft product.
Maybe ask some clients if they know the logo takes them to the home page. Again it's very much a personal choice.
Hey,
It's best to send the customer a link to your google maps listing asking them to put the review there themselfs. As you pointed out above if you had 10 reviews all from the same google ID and IP address it will get flagged by google.
The below link is for google guidelines on reviews. One of the points they have is impersonation.
Hi Mark,
It can help but sometimes. Like if your quoted with just your name and not your business name it won't help as much but thats only if your name isn't linked to your business.
The best thing is a link even if it's a no follow link but still great work. Just remember everything when it comes to SEO helps.
Hi Dan,
A few things, when moz gives you data it's not going to be everything that google takes in to rank a website. E.g moz does not index every link that google does and there is a lot of people who block moz from even seeing their website and in turn the links they give others.
Have a look at a few other tools like the below to see if you have other issues.
I had a small look did you hire someone to do link building for you around end of May/June or did you start to do some sort of link building?
Yes this could be giving you issues. when you connected your yoast account did you remove the other code?
Even if the yoast one isn't working it would still be playing with your stats coming in.
I haven't seen or heard of any changes but I do know that if you had two different analytics codes on the site at the same time it can play with the bounce rate and normally give you a very low bounce rate.
Did you change or remove any analytics codes around this date?
Hi David,
Yes it could be impacting your SERP but without seeing what the issues are it's very hard to give full input.
If your building a new site on hubspot maybe it be a good idea to move everything onto the main domain.
It's better to control everything which is linked to your domain.
Hi David,
Can I ask why you have third party subdomain?
I always believe having everything clean is the best way to go. So try moving everything under a one domain that you control. This way you can get the best out outcomes when it comes to SERP. I know for us we always stay away from Subdomains and use Sub-folders for blogs and so on.
Here is a good link from Moz which talks about best practice.
https://moz.com/learn/seo/domain
Hope this helps.
We took on a client last year with the same thing but they were a franchise business. They had 45 locations which we made into one very large website. I think 3,000 plus pages now days. The key we worked out was to not have any duplicate pages at all from a content point of view.
Each location we run as its own SEO campaign as to get the best outcome from a local SEO point of view.
We are about to move away from having each location on its on wordpress as it's way too much work to keep updated and when we make changes it's hard.
It hasn't lost the juice as a 302 is just a temporary move to google. Once you move to a 301 you're telling google it has been moved permanently.
from an SEO point of view, no it's not going to be a major factor.
From a user point of view its key and even more so because you don't have shoe in your domain name. I have uploaded an image below. See how I have typed women shoes and the URL bolds that keyword in the URL. It's key to have something which stands out from a click through rate.
A lot of people worry about getting to page one but they forget that you need people to click on your listing. if i was you I would go:
http://shopname.com/womens-shoes/sandals
From a user's point of view not a SEO point of view. Hope this helps.
By doing the 301 your agency is right you won't lose ranking but whenever you make a change, google needs time to take those changes in. They are right you will go down and back up. I don't see how you will go higher by changing the URL.
If the next few months are big times of the year for you than your better off waiting until after xmas to make the change. You have gone three years like this with no issue so really another few months won't hurt. It's not worth the risk because things can always go wrong and even more so when it comes to 301 URLs if something goes wrong it can really hurt.
Also when doing the change ask your SEO firm how they will be doing it. I find setting a RewriteRule in htaccess to change all uppercase URLs to lowercase URLs make it easier and safer than insure 301 is setup for each URL.
Hey David,
A few things here, if I recall the ones that are showing up highlighted are sometimes ones you have seen or done a search for.
As for your map listing there is lots you can do. The most important things to do is the following:
Do local listings on yelp and other sites.
Insure you have the same address and business name on everything including your website. Little things like Street and St can be seen as different.
Put a google map on your website with the same address.
Ask your customers to do reviews. Be careful don't to do them yourself as Google does check lots of reviews from the same IP address.
These things can help get your map moving up.
Sadly the support for Google maps is pretty bad. Did you report just an issue or did you fill in a form?
If you filled on a form with them than they will call or email you Normally within a week. Sadly no known way to speed it.
I normally work out how it works in the site. E.g if your looking for heels you would do the following
Go to women shoes than heels
Yourshop.com/women-shoes/heels
From an SEO point of view it won't play a major factor in your rankings.
Also does your url have the word shoe in it. As this can play a factor from a user's point of view.