Welcome to the Q&A Forum

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?

Super affiliate here. While Everett and Thomas are right to point you in the direction of the FTC texts, keep in mind that the FTC guidelines are just that: guidelines. They're not law, not widely enforced, and Google largely ignores affiliate links so long as they're nofollowed. They don't seem to be quite up to the level of the sponsored links and content that bloggers must disclose to avoid a Google penalty (but again, that's Google's enforcement of their own guidelines, not law.)

Some merchants with affiliate programs will insist on clear and conspicuous disclosure if you want to remain in their program, but really their panic over the guidelines died down pretty fast after they were released in 2012. The one major exception that comes to mind are credit cards providers, which are exceptionally picky about compliance on this issue since they're subject to tighter regulation on the banking side of things.

All that is not to say that disclosure isn't the right thing to do - only that it's not likely to land you in hot water with anyone anytime soon.

As others have said, maybe, maybe not.

In my vertical, if "Macy's coupons" is the keyword, then everyone in the field puts that first in the title tag because the conventional wisdom is that it's the optimal placement.

The problem with that strategy is that everyone's title tags are nearly indistinguishable from one another. Literally nothing in the column stands out from anything else. Blah.

When we added a dynamic count to our titles, eg. "7 Macy's Coupons", and wrote them so they remained keyword rich while also reading more naturally, we observed two important things:

1. Our rankings did not change at all.
2. CTR went up.

The working hypothesis is that the number helps us stand out and the natural structure is easier to read and digest. It's optimized for human eyeballs just as much as it's optimized for ranking.

That's just one example, of course, and I'm sure others can line up with examples where the slightest change to a title tag knocked them back to page 30. I'd recommend testing it out.

When I search for "personal injury attorney" there are plenty of results that pop up that are clearly optimized for "lawyer." I'd say yes, Google clearly has connected the dots on that one.

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.

I'd move the older articles into a /archive/ subfolder (keeping a site search function available) and then exclude the archive from indexing. The pages stay up and can be found on site by interested parties while newer material gets all the glory.

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.

Just because Google is choosing not to display your titles and descriptions doesn't mean it hasn't indexed them. It's content and in the source code. It's indexed. It's being taken under consideration for ranking purposes. Google ultimately controls what is displayed, however. Titles and meta descriptions are merely a polite suggestion.

There is no way to opt out of those rewrites 100% of the time. NOODP is only good for opting out of Dmoz descriptions, if you even have one there at all. (Most newer sites probably won't since inclusion hasn't been relevant for at least 5 years, probably longer.) It's not the only alternative snippet source. It's much more likely that Google will just find relevant text from the page itself to populate a description snippet, and NOODP will not block that. If Google is choosing its own snippet over mine, I don't always worry about it unless it's choosing something that's just flat out bizarre.

I also like to look at Google's rewrites as instructive. The algorithm is serving up something that it thinks is more relevant to your query, and these days, with RankBrain and the entire menagerie in play, it's getting pretty smart. So if Google is rewriting my description, which means that Google has decided that particular text is relevant, then I'm going to take notes on what text it's grabbing and seriously consider adjusting my own description to be a closer match to whatever Google is inclined to serve up. If Google is literally pointing out the most relevant text for that query, maybe we should listen, right?

My first thought is that this topic is already well-covered in a competitive vertical, and it's going to take a lot more than on-page factors to get it ranking well. Has the content earned any links? I see it's got 14 social shares, but the top articles for "moving tips" have more than 500, and a few have thousands. What are you bringing to the table with this advice that others aren't already offering? Can you organize the info in a way that's more shareable? Develop a functional checklist that someone who's moving can actually print and use? Can you pitch a news story around it to local media? Interest for "moving tips" seems to really spike in June and July, so you're well-positioned to coordinate with peak seasonal interest right now.

It could be either. I've seen bit.ly pop up in Ahrefs, which is how we found that ugly link scheme, but most of the time they list the site at the beginning of the chain.

Google is absolutely smart enough to understand the difference between uppercase and lowercase and ferret out user intent. I'd wager that a lot of people don't bother with capitalization when typing a query, so it would be incredibly important to get that right. I've never seen a difference.

Hypothetically speaking, it could be a factor if/when capitalization changes the meaning. Off the top of my head:

• spring vs Spring
• fall vs Fall
• split vs Split

But I would imagine that in cases like these, the way you're using it in the query is also providing important contextual clues.

"How can we duplicate that?"

It really depends on how those shortened links are being used, and I'd say that mostly you don't want to go there. I've seen spammers use shortened links as a way to mask their paid links and link networks... they build a bunch of burner pages on freebie sites like Weebly, then stuff them full of links to the bit.ly URLs, which then 301 (and pass equity) to the main site. So if you took that bit.ly link and ran that through a backlink checker like Ahrefs, it would have a ton of links pointing at it. When the freebie services catch on and shut them down, they just build new ones, repeat the whole process. It was a big problem with Patch for awhile. It's the SEO equivalent of money laundering. The Payday update seemed to kill most of it, though.

To Eric's point though, a lot of social networks use link shorteners, so pop one of them into your backlink tool and see where they're leading back to.

Applying Broken Windows Theory to SEO is such an underrated tactic. It's totally worth the time. Will you be able to directly attribute revenue to the cleanup? Probably not. Will it improve the overall quality and user experience of the site? Absolutely, 100%, and that's where it becomes an SEO play - because that better quality and better UX exactly what Google is aiming to reward in the long run. And because your site no longer looks like an easy mark for spammers, it should attract less spam in the long run.

Also, adding to MattAntonino's comment, Paul Haahr said a few weeks ago that the quality rater guidelines are basically Google's ideal algorithm, so you can count on Google working to incorporate as much of that as they can into the algorthm over time as they figure out how to automate it instead of relying on human maintenance. So even if it's not there now, count on it being there in the future. Future-proofing is always a good idea.

Two things immediately come to mind for me.

1. Wow, 50 mentions at 2% kw density is sounds like a LOT of content for one page, and

2. When you read it out loud, does it sound like natural speech or does it sound like you're just banging away at one keyword over and over? Because I believe that's what Google and the tool are probably getting at - making sure you're getting the keywords in there while still keeping the language as natural as possible.

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.

First, when you say you have a Penguin penalty, are you talking about a manual penalty where you got a message from Google in your GSC account? If not, it's not really a penalty so much as it's just how the algorithm currently affects you. I'm not just being pedantic here about how as SEOs we often label things as penalties when they're not. How you approach a penalty is very different from how you approach an algorithmically bad ranking.

Second, we can speculate that the upcoming Penguin update might be better at catching crappy links like the ones you described, but no one can say for sure. Sometimes updates live up to the hype, and sometimes they don't. I think we all have our fingers crossed, though.

I honestly think that Google is aiming to be smart enough to understand that a red widget, green widget and blue widget are really all the same thing in different colors, and that at some point in the near future that kind of nuance will kill the need for 89 mostly duplicate pages. That feels really, really thin to me.

As for getting the words on the page in a way that isn't utter spam, what about serving a photo caption along with a color selection? Making sure your images are appropriately named like "red-widget.png", working the colors in in such a way that they're providing useful context to the image being displayed?

The few that I tested including your brand name turned up page 1 results in an incognito search. They're definitely indexed, and performing well enough on branded searches that I saw.

Are you running any kind of rank checker? Looking at query reports in Webmaster Console or GA?

After reading through this entire thread, my big question is if the content for each city is still roughly the same thing or if all of them are substantially different after the move to subfolders. Because I agree that moving content off subdomains into subfolders SHOULD generally be a positive move... unless all of those subdomains were essentially identical, in which case you've just handed your root domain a big duplicate content issue.

Just because everyone else is doing it doesn't mean it's the best way to go. Here are my thoughts.

• Doing the same thing as everyone else won't help you stand out.
• One page with multiple color options inherently has more opportunity to be robust content-wise.
• One page with multiple options means all links to that product are pointing at a single page instead of being diffused across too many pages.
• One page with multiple options may actually be a better user experience since the user then doesn't need to leave the page to explore them.
• No more worries about duplicate content!
• Focus on ranking one completely killer page instead of scattering your efforts across lots of so-so pages.
• If you have one amazing page that ranks well for all colors, do the individual pages need to rank at all? Scary to think about not worrying about whether or not a page ranks, but honestly, sometimes that holds people back. If focusing on all means ranking none, is that actually worthwhile?

I honestly think this is worth exploring.

First question, how long ago was the 301 set up?

Probably not much impact at all if it's just one instance, might vaguely improve internal linking if it's more extensively used, but really I question the logic from the UX side... as a user, my expectation is that two links labeled the same will go to the same place.

Yay! Awesome!

It's been awhile since I've used Redirection (the Wordpress plugin I mentioned) but you would just copy/paste it into a field there. There's no validation check for whether or not the page currently exists that I recall. Someone else lurking around this topic may be able to confirm that.

You should still be able to do a 301. You just need to know what the URL was_, _even if it's not there anymore. In fact, you can 301 a URL that's never existed at all. It's basically just a note that says "we think the thing you're looking for is over there".

I would recreate the portofolio URLs on the new theme with the new URL structure, then 301 the old URLs to the new ones. You can do the 301s pretty easily on Wordpress with the Redirection plugin.

If you don't want to recreate the portfolios, just 301 the old URLs to the most relevant page on the redesigned site.

Hope that helps!

If you're using Google Analytics and have connected it to your Webmaster Console account, the quick and dirty high-level way to do this is to hit up the Queries report (Acquisition > Search Engine Optimization > Queries) and compare two time ranges. If your average position is unchanged (or up!) but your impressions are down, that would imply a change in marketplace demand. It's not perfect, but it's good for an at-a-glance gut check.

Digging deeper, I like to keep a rank checker running just for this kind of research. The rules here are basically the same as playing the stock market: Don't fuss over it every day. Set it up and leave it alone to quietly track and gather data for the day when you finally need it. I like rank trackers that check daily so I'm not fretting for a week or more over an aberrant result. The more granular data is more meaningful.

If it's not a change in rankings, it may be a change in demand. Use GA or whatever analytics suite you're using to view last year's traffic at this time next to this year's traffic. Are the spikes and dips happening at the same time every year? That's probably a natural seasonal fluctuation. You'll also be able to see roughly when you can expect traffic to rebound.

Another thing to look for in your analytics is which specific pages saw the biggest drops, and if any saw traffic increase instead. Demand doesn't always simply drop off - sometimes it shifts from one product offering to another. If it has, is there anything you can do to give it a boost?

If you don't have enough data in analytics to suss out your seasonal patterns, plug your top keywords into Google Trends and take a long view. Does search volume appear to fluctuate seasonally around the periods you're seeing it happen on your own site?

Hope that's helpful. Good luck!

There is a link spam technique out there that is used to hide actual links from the site owners. So, if you are logged into your WordPress site, for example, the links and pages won't appear to be there. But, if you are logged out then the pages will be there, visible to the search engines and the public.

Often those injected spam URLs are hidden using javascript. There's a Chrome plugin called Quick Javascript Switcher that will let you toggle JS on and off. Once it's off, if there are injected URLs on your site, you should be able to see them.

Do the products you're shuttering have decent backlinks behind them? If not, then you probably won't see a noticeable lift. Even if you do have some good backlinks there, my guess is that any lift would be small at best. I don't say that to discourage you, mind you. Good SEO is a collection of a bunch of little things that all add up to a lot, so don't skip it just because it's small.

Also, Jordan's comments about setting up 301s to the most relevant alternative and doing what's best for the user are spot on.

I see this as three distinct steps:

1. Remove the old 301 redirects that go from A1 --> B
2. Add new 301 redirects that go from B --> A2
3. Add new 301 redirects that go from A1 --> A2

However, if there aren't any valuable links still pointing at A1, you can probably get away with skipping the last step since the only value would be for indexation guidance that would have been accomplished long ago when you first set up the 301s from A1 --> B. It won't hurt anything to do it anyway, but it might save you some time.

Indeed. I certainly didn't mean to exclude all of the languages of the world there.

The way I understand RankBrain, it's kind of like Google is learning a second language. It speaks pretty good English now, but doesn't always understand the nuance of a query. The more it practices, the better it gets at understanding what you're looking for.

That said, I think the best approach is to keep writing well-researched, authoritative content that clearly answers the question your users intended to ask. Despite all of the hyperventilation about it, I don't think it actually changes much of anything strategy-wise. If anything, it reemphasizes the call for rich, high quality content.

If you're canonicalizing duplicate pages to a single source, assuming it's the one you want to promote, then no, it shouldn't hurt your SEO. The site you're pointing at should see some benefit, and the ones doing the pointing will take a backseat, possibly drop a bit. I'm guessing that's the whole idea?

But why do you have multiple sites that have the same products and descriptions if you're not trying to drive organic traffic to all of them? Is it more for paid landing page purposes? If not, why not 301 them to the main site instead? Or, as EGOL suggested, build out content that makes each site uniquely helpful and authoritative so that those canonicals aren't necessary?

I can definitely say that keywords in a URL can make a difference in a competitive vertical. We have an article on site with a slug of "best-place-to-buy-a-mac-online" and you get one guess what keywords it ranks for.

That said, if you're talking about changing URLs sitewide, I would be very cautious. Maybe make changes to one or two pages to start and watch them for a few weeks.

This looks to me like someone who knows SEO is important but has no idea what they're doing. Russ is right, superfluous meta tags haven't worked for nearly 10 years, if they ever did at all.

I agree with this approach, but I also would be trying to dig into _why _they think they want a second site instead of just coming back with a recommendation. What do they think that will accomplish for them? Sometimes clients will ask you to do something that they think will solve a problem when really they should be asking you how to solve the problem, and the situation as he's described it totally feels like one of those times to me.

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.

Data is the cinnamon of content marketing. It enhances your dish with a nice cinnamon flavor, but you probably don't want a big heaping spoonful of uncut cinnamon or the next thing you know you've launched a viral video meme. Or something like that.

A story without data maybe is a nice story, but it's also toothless. The internet is littered with baseless opinions and we don't really need more of that. You can make an opinion insightful, however, when you back it up with facts, sources, numbers. Prove a product works laying out a success by the numbers. I want to see stories that know when to lean into the data, the kind of story that chews your face off and then drops the mic.

Make an assertion, express an opinion, back it up with facts, but never forget that the numbers are there to support the story, and not the other way around.

Cinnamon... face chewing... it must getting close to lunch time.

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

It wouldn't be considered keyword stuffing, but the benefit of adding the keyword may be lost by the fact that you've made your URL longer and buried the pages another level down in the subdirectory structure. It's a nice bit of readability, but my guess is it's not going to have much impact on ranking.

For me, the relative neutrality of it and the low risk means that I'd consider user experience the deciding factor. Google will display the URL in any SERPs you rank in, and having the keyword visible there is probably a good thing for the searcher.

Check out Rand's post about structuring URLs (particularly #3).

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

I don't believe it's the length or the number of words so much as how much more information those extra words bring to the table. More words isn't better, but more information is.

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.

I wouldn't consider it keyword stuffing, reads pretty naturally, but it also looks like the same thing everyone else does... how would that stand out in these SERPs? What would make someone click yours over someone else's on this ultra dull list? Literally no one stands out.

VrCVt58.png

Good call on the reCaptcha stuff, I hadn't even thought about that. Google is teaching its algo image recognition by asking real humans "so, what exactly is this?" in a sort of backhanded way. And what would that do with that?

I do see a case to make for unique images being more highly valued. If duplicate content is devalued, and images are content, well... ¯_(ツ)_/¯