Welcome to the Q&A Forum

No this is not normal. Something is wrong.

Go into search console. Is your sitemap still running the old sitemap or has it been updated? Is the new domain fully crawled? If your site map is incorrect and 404ing this needs fixing.

Have you done comprehensive 301 redirects to the new domain? How many 404s do you have in search console? Have you used domain forwarding and resolved the urls at the new domain?

Also do you still have the search console with the old domain in it? Look at search analytics (in search traffic), what is your average position? compare to new domain - what is the average position for that. Have you had a big rankings drop? You must have, but this will show you the scale of the problem.

You can expect a domain authority drop with a new domain name. This will climb back up.

The loss of backlinks and traffic however would suggest your 301s are not complete which will impede your DA recovery.

How many 404s do you have in search console?

It should on every page. At least every page that has the potential to activate a featured snippet/knowledge card/knowledge panel etc.

Re: 2nd question - It's difficult to say without seeing your site. Personally I would some research to see what featured snippets are available to you. Target the snippets. (if that is your goal) What are your competitors featuring in etc.

If you PM me a URL I'll give you a list of search terms that trigger potential snippets.

Here's some more info

https://moz.com/community/q/open-internal-links-in-a-new-tab-increase-bonus-rate

No I don't think this will.

A bounce means there has not been a second interaction on the page, and you are encouraging second interactions. A link is being clicked on the page.

I realize this is creating a new tab. But as long as it's the same session (session cookie carried over) then this will not be a bounce.

You can stay on a page for 15 mins and leave, and this will be counted as a bounce. It's all about the second interaction.

The bounce rate on the new tab is a different matter. If this tab is just closed after use then every visit to these tabs will be a bounce. That will not affect the rankings of the original page.

What about the page authorities of the individual pages that are competing.

Does the weaker ranking site have decent internal linking to spread the pagerank around? e.g. breadcrumbs/page level links?

Ok. Is there space in your H1? Also the first sentence of the first paragraph?

Have you analysed the backlink profile?

Do a quick Domain Authority check.

Have a page for the pillar topic and one for the sub topic if you have the word count to justify it.

Otherwise sub topics can be H2s

if you have two separate pages I would avoid keyword cannibalization were possible. Keep your keywords on the page that target them.

However it may be necessary to talk in the context of pillar content. If you do mention the Pillar keyword, make it a text link to the pillar page. That way google will attribute the use of that word to the pillar page when ranking - and it will in fact strengthen the pillar page.

Does that make sense?

Can you install a responsive menu on your website? So your link count is not doubled?

Thanks Miriam, This is very helpful and makes a lot of sense. What do you think of towns and villages, or boroughs of a large city. Do you think the close proximity is dangerous territory re: keyword permutations?

I take your point about unique content tailored to the people of the city - it makes a lot of sense. But what about locations that are closer to each other?

I know it's a tricky question but any insight would be most welcome.

Fair enough. Sounds like you know your stuff.

Honestly i'm not sure how quality score is calculated from the broad match. I get it's the potential for the match to be a quality one. As you say the more potential matches may create a lower average. So the less strict you are, the lower the average as the is more of a potential for lesser relevant phrases to match.

All i know is a £1.24 click may look close to a £1.48 click but it's 16.2% on top of your cost. So if you don't have a 16.2% increase in ROI you need really think about what is being wasted. A rule that has served me well is: If most of your clicks are from quality scores of 5-7 you are pouring money down the drain, especially if these leads are rarely converting.

All the best.

Hi

Thanks for your response I'm interested in this too. I've been targeting cities with their own pages but I head recently that google are going to be clamping down on multiple keyword permutations. Do you think cities will be counted in this?

You need to indicate paginated content.

Use rel="next" and rel="prev" links to indicate the relationship between component URLs.

Check this guide - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663744?hl=en

Moz did create DA as a substitute for page rank when google stopped releasing the data.

In my experience it does correlate with high rankings and subsequently increased traffic.

How did this go? I'm doing this myself.

The main concern would be loss of backlinks. But otherwise this is a good practice

If the sub domain targets keywords not targeted in the rest of the website then rankings will slip.

I would 301 all webpages to relevant pages on your main site. Any important keywords should be monitored. You should crelated pages with content from the sub domain to maintain these keywords.

If traffic is non existent just 301 them.

Sounds like youve got a good plan. You might consider meta noindex on these pages until you have your new content.

Quality score is to do with how closely you have matched the search term with your keyword, your ad text, and your landing page. It is much easier to get high quality scores with exact match as you are tailoring your ads far more sharply.

A broad match should only be used in a tiered ad campaign.

If you use broad matches as a general option you will waste money. You will easily double your costs or worse. A high quality score ad has a fraction of the click cost. Don't run anything below 9.

You need to make the content as unique as possible. Look up keyword capitalisation.  You need to only use certain words on each page. 1 and 1.4 share the keyword 'metal'. You will need higher word counts to differentiate the content. Include sub titles has specific to each page

No. The referring URL is a page on your site that has a broken link on it. These are damaging your rankings so so fix ASAP.  Go to all the referring pages and fix or remove the links with the URL in.

Yes I'm currently doing this for a number of sites

An audit would be testing the current implementation

Identifying new itemprops to add as you say.

And identifying the snippets and serp features that the site has the potential to compete for.

I would translate them.

Otherwise I would noindex them as they would either be duplicate or have no user value.

Sorry I just reread your question. Deleting the http site in search console would not cause 404 errors in moz. They are an independent issue.

How is moz crawl getting 404s if the http site is offline. You must have hardcoded http links in your https sites.

To answer your question it will all smooth itself out if you put it back online

Howdy Rand

This all looks great. There's two things in particular that jumped out. The more regular DA update sounds ace. As long as it's moving in the right direction of course. Hehe. But that's for me to sort out.

The second is the lost links report. That's the one thing that I always wanted from the that section. That will be so so useful.

The URL structure should match the menu structure. This is beneficial to bots crawling your site.

You're two specific questions are open to discussion. I've heard pros and cons of both.

Traditionally it's include www with trailing slash only on directories

Yes this does not seem right. Did you check out the url the link is coming from. Is it in text with an anchor text. Or is it in a profile page?

These product pages will have trouble ranking when people search for those products online. If the category pages do well in rankings then they will get traffic flowing down to the product pages. But if they don't then I hope the homepage does well otherwise you have a problem.

Do they have an active blog or social media?

P.s welcome back!

You're homepage dissapearing is of concern.

What version domain name is connected to your IP with your domain name provider?

Have you set up search console with your preferred domain?

I'm inclined to stick with branding so all one word.

However, what would affect this decision is search data. Go into search console or connect search console to analytics.

Look in the search terms panel. Are people typing it as one word or separate words. Often it's best to display what people expect to see. That improves CTR

Don't stress everything is OK.

When google indexes your site it makes its own URL list. 404s in search console are just google saying 'hey I checked for this page from my list and it's gone'

Well that's fine. You deleted it so you already know it's gone. Google will keep checling for this page a few more times then it will deindex it. It just doesn't want to deindex without fair warning.

If these pages are still getting traffic however I would 301 them to a relevant page to maintain user experience.

Finally, if these pages targeted keywords you want to rank for. You will loose these rankings if you don't target them elsewhere.

The number of internal links you make to a page shows the level of importance you place on that page within your domain. Fact check first sentence - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/138752?hl=en

That's the lesser point here though. There's a bigger issue I need to resolve. My most important pages are the ones google perceives to have far fewer internal links and these pages are not being shown in the serps, instead the lower pages are showing.

I will progress with checking the js and robots to see if I can get this crawl sorted.

You mentioned the keywords took the client to the homepage.

Was the homepage targeting these keywords? Where they in the title for example.

If not then you've had a good run but it's time to start targeting these important keywords with bespoke pages.

Do you have a decent 404 page? Does this facilitate further browsing.

Internal links that 404 will leak page rank. So you need to fix any internal 404s. Google says 404s in search console are not damaging but many people including myself see traffic bumps from resolving these with a 301.

Have you seen any drop in traffic or rankings.

Im going to be checking the javascript and robots to see if there's any reason the links aren't being counted. But if anyone else has any insight it would be most welcome

Thanks for the response but that's not really what I'm asking.

Search console is not registering the internal links to the middle level of menu items.

It is saying that the lower pages have many more internal links which is not true. Google rates the importance of pages by the number of internal links they have.

I would do a bit of everything. Make your product pages as comprehensive and media rich as possible. Include subsections with relevant key terms.

Make your category pages comprehensive and make sure they reference and describe what the category is about. Including sub heading and relevant information.

Do good internal linking to products and link away to relevant blog articles about new developments in that type of product range.

After that just let Google do what it does. Your time would be better spend moving on to the next category than to micro-refine what is probably already a good job.

Sorry if this isn't the best answer - that's just my opinion.

Good Luck!

Hello

I have a web site with a menu structure with three levels

Top Level (Single Item) > First Level (Single Item) > Second Level (Multiple Items)

The first level pages do not rank well. The top level and second level pages rank well.

Search Console acknowledges 600 internal links to the top level.

600 to the second level.

But only 100 to the first level.

This is true across 6 top level items. It is not to do with page level links. It just isn't acknowledging all the links to the first level.

Does anyone know why this might be?

Thanks for any assistance you can give me.

If you only did one thing its Redirects Redirects Redirects. Make sure all your current content has a new home to go to, to maintain traffic. Keep a similar website structure were you can to limit the amount of redirects you have to do.

Then monitor search console closely. Any redirects you've missed will 404. Redirect these. Redirect to relevant pages, never redirect a content page to the home page.

Maintaining traffic is the priority and this process will do that.

Transfer you meta information over to the new site, titles and descriptions etc. Don't overhall your SEO during a site move or it will be hard to identify why traffic is missing if you get any missing traffic. Do the move, wait for things to settle. Then consider your revamping your meta information if you currently plan to. If you're adding new content it gets slightly more complicated but try and compare like for like.

Using your old content on other sites and generating backlinks from it is certainly a good strategy.

If your not using it on your main site and can use it on relevant industry sites and generate backlinks, then that sounds like a winner to me.

As far as I am aware google searches through it's index using the cached versions of the pages. Once the page is found it will display the most recent version.

This is were having a website structure that promotes more regular crawling is important. Try not to waste your crawl budget on useless pages. Make your website lean and don't have internal redirect chains. Use nofollow to stop bots entering pages that have no value in the serps. Regularly update your sitemap.xml.

You can also use the 'fetch' facility in search console to notify google if an important page has been updated.

I would try and incorporate the old content in the new content to get an even higher word count. Does the new content have a rewritten form of the old content? Do you definitely have no use for it on your own site?

Hello

This sounds strange. Do you know why it has happened?

Is it possible someone has reported you on google maps for having an incorrect address? Did you authorize your address with your Google postcard? (the one they send out)

I would stick to "about" or "about us". Making these pages easy to find is important. I think Google use these pages to detect where your company is located. If the site has an address this increases trust. If the same address is in the Google Business Page this improves local search.

Here's a handy guide

https://moz.com/blog/9-simple-tips-for-making-an-about-us-page-that-works-for-your-brand

It a really low portion of the sitemap though. It's of concern. I work with around 20 sites and the rest are indexed fully.

This one used to be indexed

Yes listen to Moz but also listen to search console.

Moz will report on the keywords you are targeting which is amazing

But search console will report with a much broader brush. Including long tail variations etc

The date you posted your content will signal to google you are the original.

If the content has been copied contact the webmaster and ask for a reference in the form of a canonical tag.

Otherwise you can report copyright infringement to google

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dmca-notice (Digital Millennium Copyright Act)

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?