Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Quick question on Referral exclusions. We have a client that just rebuilt their Magento website, referral data from Paypal was never an issue, the site properly attributed to source. New web devs finished the site and all purchases through Google Analytics from PayPal Is now showing as referral traffic.  Doing research on the issue the suggestion was to create a referral exclusion in GA from PayPal. My question on that, will the ecommerce  value default to the previous referral or will it delete the e-commerce value completely from what is gathered?

So there are two types of penalties, manual ones as you have dealt with and algorithmic ones.  So clearing a manual penalty won't necessarily clear the algorithmic one if there is an issue. If I was going to find a smoking gun it would be links like www.juryverdictalert.com that have what look like a banner ad to the site but haven't put a "no-follow" to the link. It looks spammy to have hundreds of links on low word count pages all point to you from one domain.

The other things. You rank #1 for "Verdict Videos" so that doesn't look like it is algorithmic- it could just be bad targeting. I get that is your title tag, but I didn't see the keywords in anything more than an h3 and I couldn't find a single anchor text backlink that is live (I used Ahrefs). Not that you want to go crazy with that, but you would expect it somewhere.

Just echoing Dmytro I would noindex, also this can help resolve duplicate issues as often the "Tag" and Search pages can create duplicates or pages the spiders have trouble with. If you are using Wordpress Yoast has a nice feature to help automatically care for this task.

Normally I would advocate moving whatever possible to a subfolder, but I'm a bit confused by the .shop. Did you mean shop.mywebsite.com?

I would use canonical tags in this situation.

Have you tried removing them in Search Console?

We have an e-commerce client that is launching a new site. In setting up for it they decided that they want to change their navigation on the site and url structure. So everything being even, the new site will have appropriate 301 and it's built on Magento so the product pages are all structured as website.com/product-A but the category pages will now be deeper than before. So before it was website.com/product-category/product-sub-category will now be website.com/more generic category/product-category/new-subcategory/product-category. Hope that makes sense. I'm not as worried about the 301's or specific products but I'm worried the category pages dropping a folder level will hurt page authority. Any thoughts, am I being overly nervous?

Thanks for taking the time and looking at this Russ, been pulling my hair out so any help is appreciated.

I think the second is probably the issue more than the first. I would format the markup in your footer to match the format that Google Lists as well as a thought.

The other suggestion is the recent negative review might have some temporary negative weight.

So the back story on this project is we've been working as PPC and SEO managers with an ecoomerce site (Magento Enterprise based) that crashed in April. After the issue they fired their developer and switched hosting to Simple Helix at the recommendation of the new developer. Since the change we have seen a plummeting ecommerce conversion rate especially on weekends. Every time something seems really bad, the Developer gives us a "nothing on our end causing it."

So doing more research we found site speed in GA was reporting crazy numbers of 25+ seconds for page loads, when we asked Simple Helix gave us answers back that it was "Baidu spiders" crawling the site causing the slowdown. I knew that wasn't the issue. In all of this the developer keeps reporting back to the site owner that there is no way it is hosting.

So the developer finally admitted the site could be slowing down from a Dos attack or some other form of probing. So they installed Cloudflare. Since then the site has been very fast, and we haven't seen turbulence in the GA site speed data. What we have seen though is the appearance of 524 and 522 errors in Search Console.

Does anyone have experience with Cloudflare that seeing those types of errors are common in usage? Is there any other thought what might be causing that and what that means from the servers, because the developer reports back that Simple Helix has had no issues during this time.

This has been a super frustrating project and we've tried a lot different tests, but there is really abnormal conversion data as I said especially during peak times on the weekend. Any ideas of what to chase would be appreciated.

Having the rich snippet is not a guarantee Google will use the information. We see that all the time especially with author tags. Providing the information to Google is just telling them it's available, as they tweak their results it tends to move around a lot. It sound like you checked webmaster tools to see how your mark up is perceived with Google.

That shouldn't be unless the web developer set all client urls in the same profile, but that seems like an incredibly backwards way to do things. I'm not even sure if that is possible.  If that was the case you would still see all the other clients with a user account. If you get Admin rights for a particular profile it doesn't give you access to the other profiles.

Ranking factors I would look over, how fresh is your content and how fast is the site? I would also run your site through copyscape to see if there is someone scraping the site.

I would also look over your link profile if there are too many spammy exact match anchor text links. With that I like to go back and compare my GA data to major shifts in the algorithm. It helps to identify what issues need to be fixed.

My suggestion is to ask the owner to make them a non-follow. Technically for a Banner Ad that is the Google's recommendation.

My thought on seeing if you were penalized. Use webmaster tools to see if you have any manual penalties. If not I would go back to Google Analytics and filter Organic Search and look at the traffic for the last three years if you have the data. If there was an algorithmic penalty you should see a drop off in traffic. If there is I would also look to see if there were other changes made to the site during the period to rule out on page issues.

Here is my thoughts based on experience.

First the links don't disappear from Webmaster tools. You will still see them there. A reconsideration request only helps if you got hit by a manual penalty not algorithmic ones. If your traffic dropped after the disavow list was supplied it could be that you told Google to kill some valuable links and now you are missing that link juice. Though with that the  flip side from mantra of causality and correlation that Rand preaches. Google has been rolling out some changes so your traffic drop could be unrelated.

I would go back to the disvow list though and see if they put some links in it that shouldn't have been flagged as spam and resubmit the list.

One thought is to Check your GA code, sometimes we see sites (mostly Wordpress) accidentally install the old code and new code on the same page and get wacky metrics like that. If that is the case you should see an extremely low bounce rate.

Yes,

Resubmit the total file with the "good links" omitted. It takes a little time but Google will start giving you link credit again for them.

Later this month I am guest teaching a class on best SEO practices for web designers at a local College. I wanted to see what topics others would include if you were doing an overview.

I think the second is probably the issue more than the first. I would format the markup in your footer to match the format that Google Lists as well as a thought.

The other suggestion is the recent negative review might have some temporary negative weight.

Here is my only thought on that (and you may be correct),

From his data screenshot and what he said this site has already escaped numerous Panda updates. The drop doesn't coincide with a published change. It could be a small tweak sunk them, but if it was Panda wouldn't this be an end of May hit?