Hey Mike,

Nope nothing to worry about. Moz Domain Authority is always jumping an and down. This is how its designed. It shouldn't be compared month to month as the previous month has no bearing on the next. Instead you should judge it on how well you are doing compared to your competitors.

Rand posted an article about it this month (https://moz.com/community/q/da-pa-fluctuations-how-to-interpret-apply-understand-these-ml-based-scores) Took me ages to find it... turns out it was pinned to the top of the forums... typical

In summary
The best website on the web has DA 100. This month they have 5000 links.
You are DA  30 and have 1000 links

If the following month the best website gains 3000 more links so its at 8000 links - the DA 100 benchmark has moved
Compared to this benchmark you are not as authoritative as you were, your DA has dropped you are now
DA 25 and still have 1000 links

Your site hasn't change and you have no extra links. But compared to the best website you are slightly worse.

As long as everyone else in your niche has done the same don't worry.
If however, you drop 5 DA and your competitor gains 2 DA. They have improved their link profile much more than you have yours and you should look to act.

DA is also affected by changes to the moz algorithm as they prioritise different factors to get a better reflection of how google perceives your website.

So the simple rule. Compare yourselves to your competitors not to last months DA alone.

Hi Oscar,

I answered a similar question to this a week or 2 ago but cant find it. Ill keep trying but here goes again

Moz Authority shouldn't be compared a month to month basis. It is not a direct reflection of how well or badly your website is doing. What it is, is an indication of how much authority you have COMPARED to other websites.

Lets say facebook is the top website and has 5000 links pointing to it. This means that DA 100 = 5000 links
During the same month your own website has 500 links. And is DA 30.

The following month facebook gains 1000 links. The benchmark for DA 100 now = 6000 links. Your own website gained 10 link but your DA dropped to 25.

Your website hasn't changed and you own backlink profile got stronger. However you lost DA. This is because the "standard" got higher. Likewise if the best website lost 1000 links and you did nothing your DA would climb.

As such you can't compare it month to month, but should compared it verses your competitors. As you saw from your attachment, all the website you are tracking dropped. So in relation to your direct competition you are still fine, there is nothing to worry about.

I would suggest that you consider the time of year. As Christmas approaches the internet goes link crazy as they begin to advertise and all sorts of reviews and recommendation are made. As such expect the best website particularly to gain massive amounts of links, this in turn increases the "standard". The result is, all website that havn't built as many links that month experience a drop in DA.

As long as you havn't experienced massive drops compared to competitors i wouldn't worry.

Hi again Ravi,

This and your previous questions have all been rather vague. It feels that you are after more of an SEO consultation than specific help with a problem.

The people on this forum are amongst the most helpful out there and always willing to offer solutions. But in return, it is expected that posters do the basic research, and read the "free information" provided. I believe you have been pointed to the "beginner" SEO articles by moz several times in your previous posts. Join this with your moz reports and all the free tools supplied by google and you have many changes  you could begin to implement to improve your SEO. If you gave them a thorough read through you should be able to identify a multitude of sins that we would be more than happy to help with.

Even if you provided us with a list of changes you have made so far, so that we could tell you where to look next it would allow us to provide you with an answer that could be built up on and demonstrate the efforts and pattern of thought you are currently on.

Your current question asks alot of us...you do not provide us with any issue or information that makes you think something isn't right. All SEO fixes are done for a reason, you need to understand the reason before implementing a fix.  Your question expects us to go to your website, access speed etc, review your source code applying our knowledge, then make a list and tell you how to change it. These are things we have spent weeks, months, years building knowledge over and we simply cannot relay it in a single message. Let alone begin explaining how to fix it all.

My advice would be to do some more research using the many resources you have been provided. Then come with a direct question such as "I have learnt speed is important to my website, what can i do to improve my websites speed". This will allow us to give you some more specific resources and direct advice that you can fix, then approach us with another question.

Sorry if this sounded blunt, I just want to convey the importance of helping us help you.

Hi Brad,

Im not an "expert" but do a fair bit if developing in my spare time. My understanding is that this shouldn't affect you from an SEO stand point. Its only the databases and administration files behind the scenes that are ran from the same place, and if set up correctly google bots dont crawl these anyway. Each site is still technically self contained and a website in its own right. You are not trying to anything naughty like linking between the sites to boost rankings etc and are treating them as separate entities. Also I believe the "store" system in magento is designed with exactly what you are doing in mind.

In terms of servers, lots of websites bar the absolutely huge ones out there are hosted on shared servers anyway, you just simply don't see it and the bots know its not an important factor (unless in extreme cases where dodgy stuff is happening i believe). The personal sites I develop are technically sub domains and I still get them ranking completely independently and treated as separate entities.

Please dont take just my opinion as the answer, wait for someone with a little more experience, I dont want to just spam the obvious but it might also be worth a post on the Magento help forums as the community there may be able to offer some magento SEO expertise that this forum cant.

Hi Edward,

You are a little confused about what this means i think so let me try to explain.

Each link can be assigned an attribute called rel="nofollow", the person who owns the link has control of this attribute so you can control if the links on your website are nofollow, but you have no control of the link people point to your website.

Generally speaking you want your link profile to contain both and it demonstrates a healthy link profile.

How does Google handle nofollowed links?

In general, we don't follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using nofollow causes us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web. However, the target pages may still appear in our index if other sites link to them without using nofollow, or if the URLs are submitted to Google in a Sitemap. Also, it's important to note that other search engines may handle nofollow in slightly different ways.

Using nofollow them on your own website

The use of nofollow links on your own website to your own pages stops google crawling and indexing certain pages on your website. For example is you had a "Login" or "Checkout" page. Many people choose to nofollow it to stop google crawling and indexing it. This stop a page with normally fairly poor content due to its nature being indexed on your site.

It is also used to prevent duplicate content, if you know a page is a duplicate of another but it is needed, rather than use canocial tags etc some people choose to nofollow them.

Im summary You can't nofollow links that point to your website from external sites (unless you contact the person sending the link and they agree to do so). Your best defence against spammy links is to monitor your link profile and when a link pops up you dont link follow the normal channels to remove it,

nofollow on your own website should only be used to stop google crawling and indexing certain links and passing link juice as and when you need it. It Google still has a bot that crawls through nofollows. But in general it will recognise your wishes.

I would do some things to look at user interaction to see if they can look past "attracting visits"

Maybe an example of a landing page attracting a lot of traffic but suffering from issues such as

• Large Bounce Rate
• Low time on page
• High exit rate

Give them stats showing a fairly new article page attracting visitors from a variety of closely related keywords, but put a couple of deliberate minor technical issues on there related to the keywords and see what they say.

Worst case: They miss everything
Mediocre: If they identify the minor technical SEO problems and small improvements
Best Case: They look past the technical SEO and realise that although you have traffic there must be an issue which could well result in a loss of ranking when google identifies users are not finding what they need.

This would give you an indication of if they can look at the bigger picture and use some initiative or if they are a more "follow this formula" type. It also opens up room for discussion.

Hi Stramark,

This is an interesting debate that I have tried to test myself to some extent and found some mixed results.

A site I took over had category pages linked off the home page in 3 locations, the main nav bar, in the content, and in the footer. The anchor text was different in all 3. I made relatively minor changes but the main one was to make the anchor text the same and remove the footer links. (Basically avoiding any threat of being tagged for spammy links with different keywords)

3 Out of the 8 or so categories saw visible improvements with the removal and standardisation of the anchor text. Very few other changes were made to these pages or the site.

This change leads me to believe that not only can more than 1 link have an impact, but different anchor text on the multiple links also can, multiple links are not simply ignored. However, The big debate i guess is whether that is a good or bad impact, since cleaning them up and removing them helped my pages.

Hi Bob,

Don't upgrade just because somebody says you need to, consider the variables and then decide if its the right choice for you. Yes its good to be up to date with the latest HTML5 and responsive designs etc but you have to way up cost vs reward.

We faced a similar debate this month after "mobilegeddon", and had to consider the change to a responsive site. After a bunch of calculations we concluded that it would take 7 years on average to earn back the costs of upgrading our website and it would simply not be worth it as our site is performing well in every other aspect.

If your site is still valid HTML, ranking well for its keywords, user friendly, looks modern and up to date then the only consideration really is the "mobile friendly" test which Lesley has detailed. In which case, its just working out if the realistic mobile gains are worth the outlay.

Disclaimer: Im sure some people will totally disagree and argue that a mobile friendly site is an absolute must. Whilst I cannot argue that this is certainly the future I believe each site must be taken individually on its own purpose & merits.

I hate these situations, its one of those 'for the long-term' cases.

Sure they rank well now, but eventually Google might/will penalise them. At the same time, you are not being employed for SEO and the client must make the final decision with all the facts. If you are being employed for SEO I would stand your ground a lot more. But as you are not you can simply offer your professional opinion and leave it to them.

Sure, if you cut out the SPAM they might loose rankings, but if you dont cut SPAM they might get penalised.

Your way, they become future proof, the risk is safe, monitored and means no penalty just rankings that can still be improved over a relatively short period.

Their way, the risk is dangerous, their rankings could be destroyed for a long time and it could happen at any time.

I would simply explain that good SEO is also 'preventative' not just 'responsive'. Get it in writing, and cover your own ass and let him make the decision.

Hi John,

I asked something similar myself something myself but im on the Magento platform. This should matter as the solution wasn't platform specific. It just involved editing htaccess file. If your up for editing your .htacccess file then it could be of some use. The topic URL is below and it contains multiple solutions for editing and removing the / and the debugging process we went through along the way. (Courtesy of Andy and Dirk) Hopefully its of some use to you

https://moz.com/community/q/cms-pages-multiple-urls

SUMMARY:
If you know how to edit your .htaccess and your ready to dive straight in this code should do it.

RewriteCond%{REQUEST_FILENAME}!-d
RewriteRule^(.*)/$ /$1 [L,R=301]

If you want the page with explanations and walk-through please see the original topic as editing your htaccess  badly can cause all sorts of errors.

Edit: I realised i was probably a tiny bit lazy and should of probably included this link which is the original link i got sent from stackoverflow with instructions on how to to edit your .htaccess file.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21417263/htaccess-add-remove-trailing-slash-from-url

Dirks answer later in the post offer guidance on applying it to certain parameters which should prove helpful if your still having loop problems with the admin page.

Richard,

I ran a test and only found 6 or 7 external links like yourself. I think you may be getting slightly confused.

Are you talking about colum AO (External Links) in a moz crawler report download? If so this doesn't refer to external links pointing off your page. It refers to external links pointing into that page.

I think theres an older post somewhere on here about it.

http://moz.com/community/q/ok-crawl-test-link-question-again

Yup found it! Staff confirm my beliefs.

Hope that helps!

Moz does a crawl weekly in which all your data gets pulled over and your keyword ranks checked etc

Expect your first full report 1 week from when you created your campaign. Some of the data will filter in over the first week. Give it 7 days and your should have a full set of info to work with.

Depending on your moz membership you should have access to tools like the moz crawl test and OSE in which you can start doing things...

https://moz.com/researchtools/crawl-test

you could run this if your wanting something to do whilst information populates. It will give you a nice report you can begin working from (just without the fancy moz interface).

Depending on your level of understanding however the report can be a little daunting - another good place to start is the moz beginner guides

https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo

plenty on here mose websites can get stuck into without seeing their first report.

Hope thats of some use

Hey guys thanks for your replies.

@Dmitri

I wouldn''t say im missing the bigger SEO picture. I'm just having to deal with the current situation in an orderly manner. When I took over the website, the previous SEO's were tracking hundreds of pointless keywords (just because they ranked for them, but we all know a keyword with 0 searches a month is hardly a model to build a business on), all categories and sub categories had no content except products. There were no canonical urls, poor navigation under optimised images etc.

My tasks thus far has been to sort a website out containing hundreds of pointless thin content pages establish new relevant categories and basically start over. But I have to do all this within the a 5 year old template with no real capital to spend. (Welcome to my hell lol)

My first job was to make the site UX & UI more friendly an I implemented drop down nav menu's, categories than make sense from SERPs and a user point of view. I removed colums to widen pages and made products and content easier to view. Cleared out 5 URLS displaying exact copies of our website. Then writing content for all the sub category pages and actually doing the basic technical SEO stuff on them all. I have now started on the products but obviously there are hundreds to work through. As such social media, backlinking, article writing has taken a back seat.

Because of this my keyword aims havn't been to rank top 10, even top 20 in some cases, but to establish a page for each keyword we would want to target, optimised it and get it achieving some form of ranking even if its 20-50th and sort out organised spreadsheets to begin tracking changes and rankings. Once I have managed to optimise the whole site, and remove the last of the very poor content. I will move onto supporting articles and back links and beginning driving ranks up.

In regards to merging the article page - i agree. the traffic isn't helping me, hence the suggestion to remove the page, but the content is good, relevant and unique, so my logic was that removing the page, accepting the loss of traffic but using what has proven exceptional content on the page would remove a competing url, remove pointless traffic targeted at similar keywords, and give a content boost to the main page giving it more chance of ranking for keywords that will convert.

@CleverPHD

The sub-categories are carefully chosen and we have made every effort to write good unique content for them all. I do think you make a good point however on products being in multiple sub-categories could cause low quality issue and maybe we should look to remove some that are showing the least promise to boost those with the most. But as we have been able to rank all these pages as high as 12th without any real back-linking or supporting articles I dont feel this is causing too many issues and can only get stronger when we have the time for backlinking. They are not loosing ranks and are remaining stable.

It is only this 1 parent category that wont rank, even badly as we appreciate its a highly competitive keyword, it shares no common products, has unique content.

You suggestions are exactly how we came up with many of our categories. But I agree that we do need more hubpages targeting wider terms to redirect to our products, at this time whilst im still working through thousands of products its not possible time wise.

I think what you gentlemen have highlighted is that I am probably focusing on obtaining some form of ranking to early, I should continue my effort across the whole site and improve it as a whole b and organising it into a manageable state before worrying about obtaining mediocre rankings that will come naturally when ive completed the mountain of work ahead of me.

Hey there,

A very important point to make is that you should have 1 and only 1 h1 tag per page. This is of vital importance on one of the most crucical SEO ranking factors. If your design has changed this I would address it immediately.

When you do a redesign like this and your rankings drop you should ask yourself 2 questions

1. Has google, bing or any other SERP changed their algorithm and could it have affected me? - if no...
2. What have I changed ?

If the SERP's havn't updated their algorithms then you have changed something for the negative. Look at your pages from before and now, what has changed? Make a list and cross them off 1 by 1 as you eliminate them. If you only had one h1 before and now you have multiple then this is your starting point.

Without seeing the site, the best advice I can give is to give your new design the SEO checklist.

https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/basics-of-search-engine-friendly-design-and-development contains all the basics. It may sound simple but go through and check them off 1 by 1 making sure your design takes these in mind or improves on what you had before.

My gut feeling is that something has changed (such as more than 1 h1 tag) that bing has noticed and dropped you for it. Google may not have dropped yet but could do should you not address it.

Edit: I forgot

If it is only your competitive keywords that have dropped rankings it could well be something simple like too many H1 tags.  Before those pages were screaming

IM ABOUT THIS

now they are saying

im about this

and this

Hi Jorge,

lets take it from the top

Moz tries to show you, and report on how google would see you site.

When you type in a url, the browser and server holding and displaying the website doesn't care if you use capitals or lowercase, for their purpose it is the same page. This is why you will have only created this page once on whatever web platform you are using. However, google sees them differently, each one as a different page.

You could access this page from any combination of capital letters even something stupid like

mysite.com/CoNtAcT-Us.html

These hundred of variations are never picked up on simply because we dont use them.

Lets presume you wanted the the page to be reachable at  "mysite.com/contact-us.html" and made it this way. The reason the second variation has been picked up on is most likely because you have used it (or someone else has) to link to that page. Somewhere somebody will have  Link Text

Because of this link the second variation is found and because google treats it as a different page, moz is reporting it as a different page.

It is a similiar case with your

mysite.com
mysite.com/index.html

Is is the same page accessible at 2 different urls.

To combat this, you need to use a solution such as

1. Canonical Tags (Recomended)

On your homepage get this code inserted between the tags

On your contact page get this code inserted between the tags

This will cause all versions of this page that are "accidentally made" to say "Hey, im just a copy of this page"

2. 301 Redirects
 The second solution is to put a 301 redirect in place, this varies depending on what web platform you are on. This simply redirects the user and any crawl bot to the intented page

i.e.  someone tries to go to   mysite.com/index.html and your website stops it loading and sends them to mysite.com

This is normally done by editing your htaaccess file. If you want to go this road tell us what platform you website is on and we can give you instructions.

Yes this fixed ours fully, we had to wait a couple of week for things to update and get pulled back through but it did the trick

Hi Mike,

Somebody might jump in and correct me here but I think bing referral / organic are one and the same. The difference being that one is when it is search logged in via https so the terms are hidden and the other when search normally and it can provide a query. Refferal is increasing as they become more google like an increase the https.

This doesn't show up for google because analytics is a google product so they classify it all as organic not referral.

Edit: I cant spell

The problem was as you anticipated, after spending a few days chasing the party who actually look after it im pleased to say i checked this morning and all is working as expected.

Thanks very much for your help Toby!

Harry, Could you provide a little more info/clarify a few things?

You stated that your direct traffic on the spike day followed the same overall pattern as a normal day etc... but you haven't clarified if the spike was all direct traffic.

Was this spike definitely direct traffic?

Also I think its beneficial for us to know (so we can look at factors that might influence direct traffic)
What Industry / Type of website is it?
Why  are Mondays normally big traffic days?

Hi Andrew,

There is no hard and fast rule for this as it all depends how closely related the keywords are, the competition etc.

The 'general' advice given is to target every page toward 1 unique keyword AND unique content. This is because ranking factors are such things as The title text, the heading text and it is very hard to put the keywords in these locations without it being spammy and forced. But these keywords should be different and not too closely related.

You should interlink from every page where appropriate to really tell the SERPS that "This is my page on Smarty Programmer" and "This is my page on Smarty Tuner". Do not be tempted to have the same page with tuner replacing programmer. Actually write different equally good content or you bring yourself a whole new set of problems.

Think of it as a model, if you have 10 keywords you want to focus, have 10 landing pages with each optimised to 1 keyword. Then have additional supporting pages in the form of blogs or information articles that are related and link to your landing pages. Your page and supporting pages will naturally attract any longtail keywords available that are less competitive.

There are ofcourse exceptions to this rule. A page can rank for several highly competative keywords, its just not that common.

That said your page ranks really well for both terms already. 1-4th for both. If Smarty Programmer and Smarty Tuner are not very competitive, you may be able to target them with 1 page by doing something such as

<title>Smarty Programmer - The Number 1 tuner for diesel trucks</title>

Smarty Programmer

Content targeted at Smarty Programmer

Why Pick the Smarty Tuner?

Content targeted at Smarty Tuner

Ensure both keywords have at least 1 image with alt and title text targeting them. This example is a bit to cut and dry but demonstrates the idea.

This should allow you to rank for both phrases on the same page. BUT there needs to be enough content supporting each phrase, and a suitable amount of competition. If the competition if too fierce you can just shoot yourself in the foot and not rank for either phrase.

If I was you I would run a couple of tests. Get Smarty Tuner inserted a couple of times within the text. Google is clever and it may associate the words enough to begin ranking you for both without sacrificing your current ranking for smarty programmer. Slowly introduce more content targeting smarty tuner such as an image with its alt text and title text, the a few smaller headings etc and some more text and I recon you can quite easily have the same page targeting both and holding no1.

Hi there,

Sounds like you are dealing with a bunch of issues here.

I suggest the first thing you address is the trailing slash issues

http:// domain. co.uk/home
http:// domain. co.uk/home/

are different urls in Googles eyes despite being the same on your website.

To fix this take a loot at a previous post by myself figuring it out

https://moz.com/community/q/cms-pages-multiple-urls

This should hopefully cut down the number of errors appearing dramatically. Make sure your only ever using one version of link either with or without a trailing slash. Make the decision and always use that format.

As for your images appearing on a page of their own. We would need to know your CMS platform. A link to your site would also be helpful as you have so many errors its kinda a stab in the dark to figure it out for you without looking

Thanks Toby, Ive emailed off, I expect a reply to be a couple of days away (what it normally take them) Thanks for the help thus far and ill message back when they do!

With it being over a week since your email was sent I don't think the two events are related, the pattern we see from our emails see an initial spike and a much smaller spike the Monday of the following week due to out of offices etc.

If your certain its direct traffic then I would be investigating further with analytics. The spike is at a time you normally experience spikes, is this coincidence or a pattern?

In our marketing department we try to paint a picture of our direct traffic users.

Which page are they landing on, what are they doing, where is the user located, are the visits resulting in more bookings/services being orders. Then consider external factors which may cause people to go looking more.

For example, one company I work with here in the UK see a jump in direct traffic correlating with the end of the financial year and tax refunds.

As SMG said, Behaviour and Acquisition tabs are your friend. Sorry its not more of an "answer" but direct traffic can be vague.

Patrick you may know more than me here but to follow up.

I understand that nofollow link wont hurt his site in anyway, and its a great link to confirm that.

However, he would be loosing the "juice" from the high authority main page and all the cateogry pages. Whilst the nofollow links wont hurt him, loosing this surly could?

Hey Noah,

Your content seems good at first glance, my major issue was that it took me forever to load your site.

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=hiddentriforce.com&tab=desktop

I ran a speed test and there seems plenty of things for you to fix, your mobile friendly which is good but at only 25/100 on mobile and 45/100 on speed, this could be a reason your finding lower class competitors out-ranking you.

My first stop would to be to fix these.

Thanks Toby, here is the entire HTACCESS file with your fix implemented. Doesn't seem to have worked if i go to

http://atp-instrumentation.co.uk with no www it still fails to load

Edited out to shorten convo

Thanks Andy, it worked a charm and testing doesn't seem to show any errors elseware.

I used the 'enfore a trailing slash' version included in the same article you provided which was

RewriteCond%{REQUEST_FILENAME}!-f
RewriteRule^(.*[^/])$ /$1/[L,R=301]

For anybody else thats interested.

Hi Mozzers,

I have a couple of questions regarding starting out into social media with an e-commerce website. Most of my experience lies in niche content where a social media following is more natural.

Having completed most of the site audit (at least the planning). Its time to begin planning the next move into writing articles on the blog and heading out into social media to facilitate link building whilst i finish off creating the last of the updated website content.

I have plenty of subjects I can think to write about and many keywords to target with articles on the website. But I could do with some advice linking this into social media.

We have youtube, google+, facebook and twitter accounts but all of them are inactive bar profile information and have almost no following.

We sell technical measurement equipment across a selection of niches.

My plan is as follows so far,

1. Write 5-10 amazing new articles across the selection of products
2. Link to them all on each social media platform to begin populating each with content
3. Populate the website homepage with links to all our social media accounts to encourage following
3b. Include adverts stating discount codes etc can be obtained by following us on social media

a little unsure where to progress from this point, I have no budget available at the moment, but may be able to obtain some if I can achieve some results without.

As always thanks for your time.

Hello Again,

I have taken over managing a website for about 2 months and have fixed a whole heap of problems. Im now turning my attention to the URL rewrites as there are ALOT of them. I have fixed the most problematic offenders that were blocking products and all sorts of mischief but I now want to clean them up.

The website is on Magento, and there are 240 custom URL rewrites.

Question 1: Am i correct that I should edit the links on my website so that they link directly to the new page instead of utilising the re-direct for best SEO results.

Question 2: If my website doesn't utilise the URL rewrite (fixed in question 1) its only purpose is to transfer link juice from any external link the page had before. If this page didnt have any external inbound links then I can delete the URL rewrite as it serves no purpose.

Question 3: If Q1 and Q2 are correct, what is the quickest way to check the inbound links to a page quickly so I can make a quick decision on if i should remove the re-write.

Many Thanks in advance!

Hi John,

We are in the process of doing a similar thing, we had 15 articles all pdf's with one in-particular attracting 5k viewers a month to the website (65-80% of our website traffic each month). Our problem was that the PDF didn't encourage them to interact with the rest of the site, and was a nightmare to update.

After discussion and seeking advice here on the moz forum we decided the best solution was to launch a blog (in process), update all the old pdf articles and release them all as a blog post, then re-direct the old pdf's to the relevant blog post then finally attach the new updated pdf as a downloadable link via a no-follow link so we don't get duplicate content and our customers can still take away the content. So far we only did it on 1 article as a test whilst we get the blog set-up correctly, and about 1/5 of 5000 viewers each month now view additional pages across our site instead of just the pdf.

If you do it correctly and get the same success with your pdf's that are attracting traffic you may find you can seek the boosts in traffic your blog is after.

SIDE NOTE: However, if your blog has 300+ articles and your not getting traffic, i would suggest moving traffic from other parts of the site to your blog in this manner isnt the answer you seek and instead you need to look at addressing the problem directly by looking at marketing strategies for your content aswel as reviewing the content in these articles to see if there may be a reason its not attracting visitors or ranking to gain traffic.

If it were my site I was building from scratch I would have the following layout.

• Home Page

• Port A

• Hotels

• Hotels 1

• Hotels 2  (site.com/porta/hotels/hotelname)

• Excursions

• Excursion 1

• Excursion 2 (site.com/porta/excursions/excursionname)

• Port B

• Port C

Obviously Port B & C would mimic port A. This way each hotel, each excursion and each port would each have a unique page crafted and target towards keywords each with a unique title and page content.

Then I would address the cruises themselves I would have a landing page for each cruise like you do now, this page would have a unique title and content (all your descriptions etc that remain constant.)

• site.com/cruise1/
• site.com/cruise2/
• site.com/cruise3/

Then a page for each for each category under each of those as below, again this would have a consistant title (Cruise 1 Itinerary) etc

• site.com/cruise1/

• site.com/cruise1/itinerary/

• site.com/cruise1/shoreexcursions/

• site.com/cruise1/hotels/

Then importantly, I would have the content on these pages dynamic and changeable rather than creating a new page. So if i had 2 dates for cruise 1  (2nd and 17th for example) instead of having

• site.com/cruise1/itinerary/2nd
• site.com/cruise1/itinerary/17th

which would create 2 pages with the title (Cruise 1 Itinerary) I would have

• site.com/cruise1/itinerary/

• dropdown menu containing all dates

• div containing timeable

• div containing list of ports

As standard these page would have the closest cruise information so there was always content. Then have a database containing all the information on a set cruise. If 2nd is selected from the drop down menu. The (div timeable) is updated to the new values and (div ports) is updated to a list of ports. These links can then go towards the static page created that remains constant.

Edit:

This should stop duplicate pages and titles and keep the very user friendly format you have now.

From my understanding it is a disadvantage Adam,

Although a 301 passes link juice it only passes a percentage of it, a little is lost along the way. Also redirects increase the amount of time needed for a page to load after the click as it has to walk down a longer path to reach its destination. Im sure I read somewhere (cant find the source sorry) that too many redirects and redirect "chains" can negatively impact your ranking but it likes redirects that genuinely offer replacement relevant content.

If it were me I would at the very least

Redirect: /this-is-it/  -> /how-nice/    removing a step in that path
Keep: /yep-yep/ -> /how-nice/

Then change all links on your website point to /this-is-it/ and /yep-yep/ to /how-nice/
If possible get any backlinks changed to the new url also.

I would be tempted to have a title and a very short description and potentially a thumbnail image or something. Enough so I can tell what roughly what the excursion is before clicking it. Not so much that I remove the need for clicking to find out more and create loads of duplicate content. That's what I would expect as a user.

So your saying in google their URL appears
site.com/cat1/subcat/subsubcat/page

but once clicked the url is
site.com/page

If this is the case, I would guess that they previously had the page at the "site.com/cat1/subcat/subsubcat/page" url and google index'd it there and have since re-directed the URL the site.com/page and google simply hasn't reindexed and updated its listing yet.

Without a URL / example to look at I cant tell if anything more is going on.

Im not a robots.txt expert by a long shot, but I found this, which is a little dated, which explained it to me in terms i could understand.

https://sanzon.wordpress.com/2008/04/29/advanced-usage-of-robotstxt-w-querystrings/

there is also a feature in Google Webmaster tools  called URL parameters that lets you block URLs with set parameters for all sorts of reason to avoid duplicate content etc. I havn't used it myself but may be work looking into

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6080550?hl=en

To my knowledge there isn't

Are there are ways with php to dynamically load in a different meta descriptions? Sure.

The problem is that this wouldn't be reflected in google. Google takes days-> weeks or even months to update a meta-description within its index. So even though you could make the HTML code change on the actual page, it wouldn't change on the search listing nullifying the whole point.

I don't believe an option exists around this, but somebody may know something i dont.

Looks like Rich Snippets / structured data are whats doing it on this particular URL. If you right click on the site and click inspect elements you will see bits of code like this

• Sports

The itemscope & item type tags all have to do with rich snippets / structured data, im no expert as i've not implemented them yet myself, but you can find out more at the following links

https://moz.com/learn/seo/schema-structured-data
https://moz.com/blog/a-visual-guide-to-rich-snippets
https://developers.google.com/structured-data/breadcrumbs In short, they tell the search engines what the data is so it can be displayed in a more appealing way in the search engine.

Sorry i should have been more clear. This php solution is not a solution, at least in any practical sense.

Basically you would have for example

Descriptions Stored in variables
Meta Description UK
Meta Description USA

The page HTML would be

but the user is already on the website... they have already passed any point the meta-description would have been displayed to them.

The problem with this is that Google displays the meta-description that it has indexed from is most recent crawl. When google crawls your page is loads your page as if it were a user from wherever the bot is located, so wouldn't be able to see the other meta-descriptions for other counties and so couldn't display them if it wanted to.

Even if it crawled your site for various places around the globe, it would just be constantly tyring to update. It can change but each time it does is takes a period of time to be reflected on google. Once its changed the old one isn't stored, its just replaced. Its kinda a 1 description per page rule.

The only solution i could think off is a different landing page for each country (which you have) but there isn't a way to have a dynamic meta description on your main .com (as far as i know) sorry

Managed it with screaming frog, I was just being a little thick and and not taking into account some other rewrites I had that were hiding these links :).

Sorry to waste your time! But thanks anyway

Andy's suggestion seems perfect to me!

This is kind of an extreme example of what 302's were meant to do. Your content will remain exactly where it needs to be for reference purposes and the eventual 301 redirects when your new website goes live. Meanwhile the bravo site with your duplicated content will no longer be duplicated and no link juice or rankings are going anywhere. (In theory)

Minimal work as if the site is an exact copy it will take only a couple of lines to redirect the whole site.

Cheers Everett.

You have definitely reset my thinking, id started to make it over complex for myself.

The content for the resolution / category pages will create a lot of duplicate issues due to the unavoidable similarities, i will take a combination of solutions provided here and try to consolidate resolution and capacity into broader categories that can be written about as you suggest with less overlap. I will look to no-index smaller categories that would be thin and cause issues but remain essential.

I will also stick to my plan and consolidate the "types of widget" onto the main widget page. This will move them a step up the hierarchy and allow me a wider scope of content on the main parent page.

All product urls are  homepage.co.uk/product.html by default so shouldnt cause issue in multiple urls. I have also implimented automatic canonical tags on all cateogry and products to combat any accidental duplications.

Hi John, sorry ive been on leave so not checked back on the  forums.

Glad it looks like its working for you. I dont think the comments do anything except signify where word press has begun writing to the .htaccess (i dont run wordpress so can't be sure). Normally comments do nothing but signify something useful to the user.

I can try to breakdown the code a little for you, but my htaccess isn't fantastic so its by no means complete.

Firstline:  RewriteCond%{REQUEST_FILENAME}!-d

RewriteCond% = This says use this condition if....
{REQUEST_FILENAME}!-d =  ... is NOT a directory

RewriteRule^(.*)/$ /$1 [L,R=301]
I believe this bit takes a snapshot of the url upto the final / then rewrites it to that snapshot.

The combination of these must mean it doesn't affect your wordpress admin directory. I know this code can break if your install is within a directory (as is discussed in the stackover flow link) but they have provided a solution for that in that topic. I would say test if on your live website to make complete sure it will work as this may be slightly different to your local install. Have a back-up ready just incase it doesn't.

Make sure you check every url including

Homepage
Pages
Posts
Category Pages
Sub Category Pages
Post Pages
Any images or files

To make sure it is working as expected on all of them.

Andy sums it up perfectly.

It is very easy to make any "SEO checker" give you top grades for a page. Likewise it is very easy to manipulate individual metrics to be higher. For instance, I could write 2000 words of useless content on wedding DJ's in perth, insert a few keywords in the right places, make sure my taggings is correct and i have the right number of tags and title text etc... Moz gives me an A for optimisation... but my content is crap.

If you have ticked all the boxes for on page optimisation (if you have more than 1 h1 tag  like a previous poster said then you need to look at this at start with the basic step) then its time to look into what andy suggests, the quality of your content, your website trust and hunt down that reason.

Hey moz,

Im currently converting my site to mobile as its an older template based on tables it will make a lot of CSS redundant. I cant delete as i go incase a page uses it im unaware of so need to clean it up when its done.

Is there a tool that crawls my entire website and highlights the unused CSS in the files? Ive found a few paying tools that claim to do so but am reluctant to just spend money on something without a recommendation.

Cheers!

Hi Prime,
On the presumption that your onsite SEO is complete and your content is indeed excellent I would do the following.

My no1 tip on getting your site index'd would simply to be to simply fetch as google and submit the main page. Set up your analytics and then focus on your local SEO. Do all your local listings, and basically everything moz recommends about local SEO. This should be plenty for you to be index'd.

Then I would stop thinking about "Link Building" in the traditional sense.

Don't fall into the trap of thinking
links = ranks = clicks = visitors

instead try to think of it as
publicity = visitors = natural links = ranks = more visitors

Take some of your excellent content and begin marketing it. Get social media happy, g twitter, facebook, google+ and every other platform you can think of active. Social media activity is a good ranking factor, use it. Get active on niche forums, other niche websites and begin spreading your brand. By this I don't mean spamming forums with links to your website I mean offering excellent advice and relevant links where appropriate. Ensure profiles are complete with links to your website so when you have helped someone and they check you out they find their way back. If you have a marketing budget get some PPC to begin driving traffic, and look at other forms of advertising. If your content really is excellent odd links will begin to sprout up.

This achieves 2 things. It spreads your brand and builds relationships and reputations within your niche.

I would do this from anywhere from 2 to 6 months. Asking for links as a new website even if your content is top notch is hard and has a very low success rate. Asking for a link from a website you have spent 2-6 months supporting and having a presence on is a lot easier. Especially if you can design a piece of content you know that site needs. Is a certain question being asked a lot on a website? Make something providing the answer then approach them with the content.

Alternatively make the first move. Found another website that cracking in your niche but not directly competitive? Review them, award them, and tell them about it. Websites like to brag when they receive a 5* award or review and will often link back to it.

Don't act to receive a link, act to advertise your brand.

I apologise if this isn't a direct answer to "how to link build". But i wanted to stress the difficulty of link building, even more so for new sites. I would rather spend 6 months of time on social media, building relationships and working myself into a position into the niche to ask for a high authority link with some success rather than spend 6 months of NO responses from link requests.

Short answer: No its never too late.

People rescue lost links in this way all the time. The old pages may not have been de-indexed yet especially if there are being linked to from another website.

Ideal solution: Locate all the links pointing to old pages and get them updated to point to the new page. Put the 301 in place anyway to save any you miss.

Nearly ideal solution: Slap a 301 redirect on it - BUT make sure that the 301 is to a direct replacement / relevant page.

There is no negative implications for doing the 301's this late... (as long as the pages are relevant). But not doing them... well as you have seen... rankings will suffer.

Ive seen links that are months to years old get rescued this way, so get them redirects on!

Hi Thomas,

Firstly, the canonical does the same job as the 301 (for all intensive purposes) without the physical redirect. So in theory only the canonical should be being indexed and all the link juice should be being passed.

The fact that both are indexed suggests that the canonical isn't behaving as intended

• I would check for common cannonical errors to begin with
• If this isn't the case, i would suggest that the 123456 version has too many links maybe internally and externally and that google is ignoring the canonical because it has too much authority.

An issue with using canonical like this is that people who use the search are not sent to the main canonical url. This gives people the opportunity to copy and link to the wrong version of the url, which isn't a practice you want.

A possible solution would be to find all backlinks and get them changed to the main canonical version internally and externally, this could be a lot of work.

The 301 redirect is better in my opinion because it achieves the following

• Customer always see a useful URL and the main canonical URL
• Because of this, links will only likely be built the the url you want
• Google will de-index the 123456 version because it becomes inaccessible

However, unless you can automate this procedure, it can take too much time to create all those 301's for every product.

Personally i use the following guidlines as i find it keeps things clean and tidy
301 any url that isn't domain.com/main-product-url.html
keep the canonical on domain.com/main-product-url.html  so that any version created from filtering or unexpected cms pages dont create duplicate content.