I'm looking at Google Search Console data in Google Analytics, specifically Average Position as given in the Landing Page report, and the same metric broken out by mobile and desktop in the Devices report.

In the Landing Page report, I see an aggregated average position that's much higher/worse than an actual average of what is reported for mobile, desktop and tablet traffic under the Device reporting.

For example:

• Mobile: 5
• Desktop: 5
• Tablet: 5

So the average still should be roughly 5, right? Why would the Landing Page then show an aggregate Average Position of 8? I wouldn't expect to see a precisely same average given that different device types have different proportions that could render differently when the buckets are combined, but this is a huge swing. In fact, the aggregate Average Position as given in the top level Devices report is closer to 5 than to the 8 shown in the Landing Pages report. (These aren't actual numbers, but are illustrative of what I'm seeing, by the way.) Unless I'm missing some vital difference in the way that Average Position is reporting for the Landing Page report versus the Device reports, it doesn't seem like this should be possible. What am I missing?

It it's not 100% unique content that adds value to the page for the user, then it's not worth spending time or money creating it. Period. Do not copy from other websites, ever. Scaling page content is hard, it sucks, and did I mention it's hard? But there is no shortcut to this.

When I go to "myscriptedreality.com", it doesn't redirect to your new site. (No login credentials needed to see that.) Also, social traffic is generally not a ranking signal... so getting traffic from Facebook is great, but it's not going to have a direct impact on how well you rank with search engines. (But it's a great argument in favor of diversifying your traffic sources!)

Here's what I would do first:

1. Stop fiddling with boxes in the WP admin if you're not sure what they do. For instance, I can tell you for certain that NOODP and NOYDIR will have zero impact on ranking since they're rather obscure meta description directives that you probably do actually want to keep checked, and which have no impact on Google ranking. But you didn't know that, and some of those other options can affect site indexing. You don't know what you don't know, and that worries me a bit.
2. **If you don't still own the old domain, repurchase it immediately. This is absolutely imperative. **
3. Apply a 301 redirect** from each page of your old domain to the most relevant page on the new one. You'll probably need to hire someone to do this for you. It may require some time and research to reconstruct the old site enough to pull a complete list of its URLs, which is really what needs to be done. Hard to say how much work that will be without really digging into it.
4. It seems like you're getting overwhelmed by a lot of technical details without a good understanding of SEO's most basic concepts. So while your hired gun is working on the 301 issue, read the Beginner's Guide to SEO.

I wouldn't expect this to be a miracle resurrection, but it would be a solid start, and you're about to learn a lot about how this all works. Good luck, and keep us posted.

**In layman's terms, a 301 is basically a signpost that says "the page you're looking for is over here, and now I'm going to take you there." It's the technical name for what happens when you type one URL and it takes you to a different one. A 301 redirect is not just for users, but also for search engines. My guess is that when you moved your site, because the 301 redirects were never set up, it's basically like you left no forwarding address. You didn't get to take any of your backlinks or domain authority with you, and all of that is hugely important for maintaining rankings after a site move.

For me, this all depends on whether or not that content has any backlinks and/or gets good search traffic. If neither, then I'd remove it. But if people are still really actually finding the page through long-tail search, then maybe it doesn't matter too much if the trend is from 2008 since people still like it enough to search it out.

If it's linked or has social shares but currently gets no engagement, 301 it to the most relevant content that does. Logan mentions that can dilute the link juice, but you'd be directing it to a place that people actually want to go, so I think you'll be fine there. If it has no links, no social shares, and gets no traffic, it's just dead weight that dilutes your content quality. I'd rather have Google seeing high engagement with all corners of my site rather than just a small number of pages.

The point is that I think you'd do well to pay attention to what your readers are actually engaging with and let that be your guide on whether a particular piece of content stays or goes.

I think the key with this approach is to be genuinely helpful and to avoid actually trying to sell a product. That's incredibly counterintuitive, but the product probably isn't the endgame for your consumer. What are they using it for? Be an expert resource on THAT.

The Home Depot blog is a really excellent example of this principle in action. Instead of selling their products, they're showing very creative and aspirational ways that people can use them. They did an entire DIY series on concrete. Concrete!

So they do all of these posts about concrete, but they're never pitching you a hard sell on it. The path to purchase is there if you want it, but really they're just focused on being experts on all of the wonderful, aspirational things you can do with concrete. It's very shareable and pinnable and I want every one of those projects in my home. They've planted the idea of buying concrete without selling it to me. It's very obvious they are an authority on concrete, and it doesn't matter that they're a seller. In fact, I'm more likely to buy it from them now because their expertise on it is clear.

So I started with that instead of outreach because when the content is that good, you can push it out on social and get a good response. You can share what you're doing with influencers and they won't mind because it's obvious you know what you're talking about. Next thing you know, they're coming to you for comment as an expert. The quality has to be there or you're right, you just look like you're pushing product and that does get tend to get ignored.

I see a ton of churn with small, boutique merchants, and even the large ones have been grumbling lately about not wanting to support certain types of websites. I think it really depends on how effectively you're able to leverage your publishers, but as with everything you get a lot of merchants who join up with no idea how to do that.

This is how I see it work in practice when a merchant closes their ShareASale program:

our nice clean cloaked link --303--> shareasale affiliate link --302--> Destination URL (status code 200)

Assuming that the links you're seeing aren't cloaked, even if the user who clicks on an old ShareASale affiliate link does in fact land on your site, they're still getting pushed to the destination page through a 302. So there's not going to be much SEO value in these links, if there's any at all.

In our case, when a SAS program dies, the destination page is the front page of our site, not the merchant's site. This may be an account setting somewhere within our publisher account or something customizable, but it's not something the merchant gets to control.

So, digging deeper into this issue, it turns out that we can't rely on status code as a reliable indicator of page validity for affiliate network URLs. Most of them turn up with a 200. Looking at possible custom solutions from affiliate compliance monitoring services now. No one seems to be doing this thing that I need to do, but it sounds like a great business idea for someone with coding experience and more entrepreneurial spirit than I've got. Just gonna throw that out there.

Honestly, I would avoid using the same titles as a competitor. You want to stand out in the SERPs, not look like everyone else. It is possible to optimize your titles and still make them different enough to catch a searcher's eye.

Oh, nice idea, running Screaming Frog on a server.. I passed your notes along to our Dev team, we'll see what happens.

Hey all,

I'm on the hunt for a service that will crawl our affiliate links and let us know when they return an error. I need to know that the last URL in the chain is returning a 200 over thousands of pages and links on a continual basis. The hitch is that most crawlers like Screaming Frog will return all of our links as working because it's only testing the first step, and this really requires a cloud solution anyway. Anyone happen to know of something?

Edit for clarity's sake: I need something to check entire redirect chains in bulk that isn't a Wordpress plugin, isn't a website where you plug in a URL and it cuts you off after the first 100 results, and has the ability to crawl the site and provide reporting on a continual basis.

Bi75jku

We yanked a whole bunch more content than that over the last few months.. blog posts that no longer got much traffic and had never really gotten any traction, articles covering topics we'd covered better multiple times, etc. If they were still drawing some traffic, we set up a 301. If there wasn't much of anything happening, we just let it 404. We haven't seen any negative impact from this so far.

I like EGOL's idea of having someone rewrite the content on those pages. If you can't get that done quickly enough to satisfy Mr. Disgruntled, set up some 302s until the new content is ready.

I'd also say that it's probably not worth rewriting unless you're planning to do it better than it was the first time around. If you can't blow it out and make it more valuable, then 301 or 404, whatever, either is probably just fine to wash your hands of it and walk away. Stressing out over one half of one percent when it's not delivering results in the first place isn't going to be worth my time, not when I could be spending that time and effort on something more profitable. Opportunity costs apply.