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1. It's great that you haven't been manually penalized! Unfortunately, yes I have seen pages drop off the map entirely before for specific keywords. Most keyword tracking tools only search the first 100 results, so if you don't make it inside that bubble it will display a null value like (--). It basically means you need to up your game. Most often you can make it well inside those first 100 results by applying on-site SEO tactics. Update your meta data, make sure relevant pages are linking internally to the page you're trying to rank, and improve the amount of unique quality content on page. Put some focus on the user experience.

2. You can disavow them, but I would strongly recommend you first check which ones are marked nofollow. You don't want to disavow those because they're already compliant with webmaster guidelines. For the rest, communicate with the bloggers you've paid and see if they can switch it to nofollow. Give them a couple of weeks. I don't think you need to jump straight to the disavow file if you can get a significant percentage of those links marked nofollow. I generally avoid using disavow files as much as possible because it's like the nuclear option. Last resort.

Moz has a pretty sweet tool with their spam score. I love how easy it makes it for the novice-intermediate SEOs to do a good job keeping their site quality up without needing a ton of oversight from a director or SEO manager. Check out Moz's article on spam score to get an idea how it works: https://moz.com/blog/spam-score-mozs-new-metric-to-measure-penalization-risk

I think if you have 4 or less that's pretty rock solid. It's an approximate value, so don't hyperventilate if you can't get it down to 0. Even this blog has a spam score of 1/17.

Thanks Miriam, you've been super helpful. For the time being I'll close this ticket but if I can get some solid data then I'll happily share the data with the Moz community in one format or another. Cheers!

Thanks Miriam, I don't think there's a ton of value to be had for this one particular client (not enough to make me conduct an extensive study on the matter), but even that is shooting from the hip.

Do you know of a heatmap study that shows how people interact with knowledge panels? If I can prove that X% of users interact with the competitor space on those panels then I may have a case to perform further research. Which if I did, I would share here, because I am a sharing kind of person

One of things I noticed when I clicked through some of the profiles was that it was pulling information from Google My Business, which makes me think that the information in there may be tied to it. I have a hard time believing that it truly is as simple as "people also search for (x) website" because I've seen Google posting businesses that are marked as permanently closed in this space, and I can't imagine people are repeatedly searching for a closed business in their area.

Hey Debashish, I'll try to answer your questions in order so they make the most sense, because they're good ones and they mirror perfectly the same questions we all see in this industry.

1. We really need to define penalization here first. Unless you're getting a message in Google Search Console telling you that your site has been manually penalized, then you haven't been penalized. Next we're going to make an assumption, which is that you gained some ranking benefit from illicitly garnered backlinks. And finally, we're going to assume that Penguin caught on and devalued those links. This means you haven't been penalized per se, but you're no longer deriving optimization benefits from those links. So 'recovery' in this sense is going to mean something different.

Recovery from a manual penalization does not mean you will return to your previous rankings and organic traffic. It means that you are no longer being blacklisted by Google and your site is being indexed by Google again. But in both cases, what a client wants to know is "when will my previous rankings return" and the answer is that they will not. If you were ranking highly before due to inadvisable link schemes and those beneficial links were devalued or disavowed or removed, then you aren't going to see a return those strong rankings. You're going to have to fix things so you're obeying webmaster guidelines, then begin competing in another way that's within guidelines to bring yourself back to the top.

John Mueller gives this response every time he's asked this question in his Hangout series, and he gets asked it A LOT. You can see those videos here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKoqnv2vTMUMqH8IyzOMBc_Z8i-S6-tVJ. This channel is a really fantastic resource for learning some intermediate to advanced SEO tactics via Q&A with John Mueller himself.

2. You can submit a disavow file via Google Search Console. Again, this is going to tell Google that you don't want any of those links to be associated with your site for the purpose of ranking. What some SEOs are guilty of doing when clients were hit with Penguin penalties was to disavow ALL backlinks instead of just the naughty ones, and this got them back in the index but completely nullified a lot of valuable and credible links.

Consider that it takes 4-12 months to implement and begin to reap the benefits of well thought out white-hat optimization strategies, and use that as your timeline for 'recovery', because again you're not going to see an immediate return to your previous rankings and will need to implement new tactics.

Define "useful". What business outcome are you hoping to achieve with it? If your intent is to get your business onto a host of local directories, then it's useful. If you want to ensure you have a good position in the map pack and local organic SERP, then it's useful.

If you're already ranking highly in spot #1 and #2 and don't care to be on directories, then maybe it's not the tool for you. It's a relatively small expense, and I think having accurate NAP+W information around the web can only be of benefit to your business, so I would recommend it. However it really depends on your budget and what outcome you hope to achieve. I don't expect it to generate a ton of leads for you.

Hello fellow Mozzers,

In Google's knowledge panel there is a section at the bottom that says "people also search for" and a list of competitors is displayed. I'm hoping to get some information I can use to get my client listed there on top of the local organic results. The more SERP presence, the better. Attached image should provide clarity to those who are confused. I suspect I know the answer to this question, but since I can't find a source to verify my beliefs, I'm crowdsourcing. Thanks in advance!

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Yes, Google can penalize you for hiring bloggers. They view this is a link scheme (source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356) and it's something that SEOs have been doing for a long time. Google has gotten better and better at catching these types of schemes, so it would not surprise me in the least if you were caught up by Penguin, which now operates in real time and simply devalues links instead of putting your entire domain into a sandbox.

To keep your strategy in line with Google's webmaster guidelines, you should request that those links be marked "nofollow". There is still a lot of value to this kind of outreach even with a "nofollow" added, so I wouldn't recommend you necessarily stop doing what you're doing as the bloggers have been honestly informing their audience that an editorial review was requested.

Some of the ways nofollow links can still help you:
1. quality referral traffic
2. backlinks generating backlinks over time

Best of luck, let me know if you have additional questions. Thanks!

If by orphaned you mean that the pages are inaccessible from other parts of the website and Google is unable to see them, then technically no, it's not impacting your rankings. Or it could be technically yes, depending on how you look at it.

If Google can't see the pages, hasn't indexed the pages, then it doesn't factor those pages into its algorithm. If those pages contain valuable content that users would like to see, then they should be accessible, and making them accessible to users and to Google can improve your rankings.

I would ask why they're orphaned first before making changes though. If they're landing pages meant only to track SEM campaigns, or test pages to try new code, etc. it makes sense to keep those pages orphaned. Context is key. Don't open pandora's box by accident! But keeping them orphaned isn't actually impacting your rankings, because it's as though it doesn't exist to Google. So proceed cautiously, and may the odds be ever in your favor.

It makes sense semantically and search engines (particularly Google) are able to understand language better than most people think. Go ahead and add "in", and furthermore if Royal Oak is a city, use proper grammar and add the comma before the state. It's not going to be a problem to add it, but it may be a problem for you to have poor grammar on your site as proper spelling and grammar is actually a ranking factor.

Well it could be a few things. Either it's always been there and you never noticed it before, your company/client added it but did so in a way that populated it out over 1000 times as an error, or the site was hacked and the js was inserted by a malicious entity. It looks like they're using a link shortener in the src part of that js, which makes me nervous.

Wow, this is a loaded question. The way I see it we can break this up into two parts.

First, subdomains vs. domains vs. subpages. There has been a lot of discussion surrounding which structure should be used for SEO friendliness and to keep it really simple, if you're concerned about SEO then using a subpage structure is going to be the most beneficial. If you create a separate domain, that will be duplicate content and it does impact rankings. Subdomains are a little more complex, and I don't recommend them for SEO. In some cases, Google views subdomains as spam (think of all the PBNs created with blogspot.com) and in other cases it's viewed as a separate website. By structuring something as a subdomain you're indicating that the content is different enough from the main content of the root domain that you don't feel it should be included together. An example of this being used in the wild appropriately might be different language versions of a website, which especially makes sense in countries where the TLD doesn't represent multiple languages (like Switzerland - they have four national languages).

Next, the concept of duplicate content is different depending on whether it's duplicate internally, or duplicate externally. It's common for websites to have a certain amount of duplicate or common content within their own website. The number that has been repeated for years as a "safe" threshold is 30%, which is a stat that Matt Cutts threw out there before he retired. I use siteliner.com to discover how much common content has been replicated internally. Externally, if you have the same content as another website, this can pretty dramatically impact your rankings. Google does a decent job of assigning content to the correct website (who had it first, etc.) but they have a long way to go.

If you could assimilate the new content and have the pages redirected on a 1:1 basis to the new location then it's probably safe enough to do, and hopefully you will have it structured in a way that makes it useful to users. If you can't perform the redirect, I think you're more likely to struggle with achieving SEO goals for those new pages. In that case, take the time to set realistic expectations and track something like user engagement between new and old content so you have a realistic understanding of your success and challenges.

Have you considered using tag manager to quickly tag events such as button clicks? The other option I see in common use is to just set a goal to activate on a page view of the thank-you or confirmation page (destination URL). If you don't know what that is, you can't find it in your CMS, and no one can tell you, I would take the time to find out by following the funnel to completion. That's going to be the easiest path for you.

Once you've got the basic stuff down, you'll probably be asked to do all sorts of other tracking. My favorite one for ecommerce is whale hunting. You segment your data so that you only look at the people that spend above a certain amount on your site and compare their activity to the people who aren't spending a lot and to the people who aren't spending at all. Your client will love you for that one.

Just to verify - this is js that your company/client did not insert themselves?

As long as the links are marked nofollow you don't have to worry about being penalized for unnatural link building. To stay in line with Google's webmaster guidelines you should make that a part of your strategy. If you're getting hundreds of dofollow links in a matter of days, Google is going to know those are unnatural whether they have a high DA or not.

Google has stated in the past that they may pass value through a nofollow link, so don't consider it a dead end for SEO efforts. I would consider any link from a legitimate website to be of value, regardless of what their moz score is. Remember that any score from moz or any other third party is an approximate measurement of Google's algorithm and does not guarantee anything. There may be something valuable to your website on other sites with a low DA.

Hi Rick,

Since I haven't seen a response yet, I'm assuming I wasn't clear enough in my explanation so I went into an unfiltered view for one of my clients and found some ghost spam, then skitched it so you could see how to get there and examine it yourself on your website. Hope this helps!

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Not just yet. Click on the secondary dimension drop down bar and type in hostname, or find it under the behavior bar. You can also look at just google traffic by clicking on Google first then setting the hostname as the secondary dimension. It should become apparent at that point if you have a lot of bots spoofing your traffic with a fake source.

The first thing I think of is that you're measuring pageviews instead of sessions. If you put a lot of effort into streamlining the user experience, wouldn't you expect a decrease in pageviews as users are finding what they need faster?

I would check a few different things to gain a more complete picture. First, check your sessions instead of pageviews. If sessions are trending the way you expect them to compared to the previous year, then maybe the redesign impacted user behavior so they're hitting less pages on the site.

Next I'd see if there was any differentiation between mobile, tablet, and desktop pageviews that are skewing the data. Since the site is now responsive I wouldn't be surprised to see a difference in user behavior on mobile devices, and that may be impacting your pageviews.

Lastly, why not segment and compare by traffic source? If you can identify a sharp drop from a particular source you might be able to gain some insight there. An easy method of viewing this is to create a collection of pie charts or bar graphs so anyone can quickly see where the change was.

There are other ways you can slice and dice and segment your data to tell your story, but I would start there.

Yes, because this filter is based on the hostname. If a bot is spoofing the source but does not have a valid hostname (and most will not) then it will be filtered out by the include filter. Go into your GA data, go down to the source/medium report under acquisitions and set the secondary dimension to hostname.

If you're seeing something like (not set) next to Google/Organic traffic in the source then that's spam. I've got some in my unfiltered views as well. From the article I sent you:

"On the other hand, valid traffic will always use a real hostname. In most of the cases, this will be the domain. But it also can also result from paid services, translation services, or any other place where you've inserted GA tracking code."

So just make sure you compile a list of all the valid hostnames for your website and you should be fine.

Hi Rick,

Try checking your traffic against the secondary dimension "hostname". If a large number appear to be invalid hostnames then you've got yourself an answer. Referral traffic, also known as ghost spam, can be removed with an include filter. Moz wrote a great guide on how to do this here: https://moz.com/blog/stop-ghost-spam-in-google-analytics-with-one-filter

If you're at all concerned that the traffic could be ghost spam and you don't have this filter in place, then an easy means of checking is to implement the filter on a test view and see how it impacts your data. Just make sure you create a new view to test it on first, because I had a client accidentally exclude all of his valid hostnames and lost every last bit of actionable data.

Hope this helps!

I think Robert covers it pretty well. I would just add that it will probably be easier for you to rank for the long tail terms like "frosted jelly donut" as well if you're already ranking for "donut" if you've developed a logical hierarchy in your site architecture. When ranking for donuts, creating your sub categories or internal pages linked from your page that's ranking will pass along more authority to those pages targeting long tail terms.

That said I agree with Robert's assessment that assigning your time half and half is a good strategy if you have the resources to do so without becoming stretched too thin.

I'm glad it's on your radar at least! I don't imagine that migrating all your content into a mobile friendly format is going to be simple, but definitely worthwhile.

I mean, come on.

Ack, are you trying to get access to a client's profile?

An easier method is to get the owner to give you manager access so you can access it from your own account. You can follow Hurf's article if you're not worried about security and that should do the trick too. I've had some bad experiences with lack of security and wouldn't wish it on anyone, so I don't recommend it if you can avoid it.

I'm going to try to turn you around, because you're going down the wrong road. It's a bit of a read, but stick with me.

Stop thinking about sculpting your internal links, and start thinking about how to create a user friendly navigation. Your SEO and conversions will flow from there. Let's pretend you're in the home services category and you install and replace floors. The services you provide are repair, installation, and replacement of tile, wood, and vinyl floors. You'll want to have a homepage that allows users to navigate to pages that describes the services you provide and the products you offer. So your top navigation could have a menu that looks something like this:

Tile Floors
-Tile Floor Repair
-Tile Floor Installation
-Tile Floor Replacement

Wood Floors
-Wood Floor Repair
-Wood Floor Installation
-Wood Floor Replacement

Vinyl Floors
-Vinyl Floor Repair
-Vinyl Floor Installation
-Vinyl Floor Replacement

Now you've got at least ten pages that you can start to write content for, and each of them is easily accessible. If you have pages that you consider important to your users and your business objectives, best practice is to make them easily accessible from the homepage in your main navigation, and to make them accessible from related pages as well. In keeping with the home services theme, something you may consider a "non important page" could be your legal disclaimers. It's important alright, but not necessarily for the majority of your users. It's acceptable to link to content like that in the footer.

The reason I'm trying to direct you to think about the way users interact with your site is because that's the way Google has designed their algorithm to work. Since users interact with the footer much less than body content, Google has tagged links in the footer, and those links pass less PageRank. If you spend your time trying to game the system, you'll ultimately lose, whereas if you focus on your users, you'll ultimately win. To go back to our main navigation example for our flooring company, if I followed your strategy I might place content in confusing places, moving my "tile floor repair" page to the footer or a sidebar where users can't find it and Google devalues.

So focus on the users and the PageRank will follow. Good Luck!

No problem! One more thing that caught my eye. You need a native speaker to reword your English page. Some of the sentences don't translate very well, and apart from killing your conversion rates it's also a bad look for your SEO.

Best of luck, looks like you're offering a cool service!

This isn't the answer you want to hear, but I don't believe there is a way to do this. There is a way to see search traffic coming from different Google properties by removing Google as a search engine in Google Analytics. All traffic from different Google properties then shows up as referral traffic (so for example, I'd get to see traffic coming from images.google.com and traffic from google.fr, instead of everything showing up as Google/Organic).

But SERP features exist on google.com, meaning this is something that won't show up under sources because whether traffic clicks through on the SERP feature or your link, it's still coming from Google/Organic, and altering your settings so it shows up as referral it would still show up as traffic from google.com. Thinking about the way analytics collects data I don't think there's a way for us to determine a click through from a SERP feature unless Google provides that specificity.

If you find any information to the contrary, please share it here, because I'd love to dive into this myself if it's available!

Let's start with some easy things to fix shall we?

First, thin content. I crawled your site with Screaming Frog and found you have 482 internal pages on your site. That's a good size! But 80 of those pages have less than 300 words, and a some of them have as few as 18. My french is a little rusty, but most of those pages that have a low word count look like contact pages. So while not entirely necessary for the user experience, it can't hurt to add some text that's easily readable by users and bots in HTML. At the very least, provide a call to action that represents your brand so people are more likely to fill out your form. This should help reduce or remove your "thin content" warning.

The "No Contact Info" warning is easily fixed. Add social links to your footer and an email address where users can contact you on your contact page.

Ignore the "Low number of pages found" warning for the time being. You should check this against Google Search Console to see if Google is finding all the pages you've listed in your sitemap. If Google says they've found everything and indexed it, you're probably pretty safe. When I crawled it with Screaming Frog, I found that all the pages returned either 200 or 301 status codes, so this may just be something wonky with the Moz Crawler. You can also check how Googlebot sees your website with a tool such as httpstatus.io by setting the user agent to Googlebot.

A couple other notes:
1. You did a great job specifying the language for your english pages, but you can add hreflang tags to your French pages. 
2. You have both https and http pages being generated. Make sure you're only creating pages in https. This is complex and beyond anything I can easily describe in a response here, so you'll have to work on this with your web developer. Once you have everything in https, go ahead and enable HTTP/2 for your website. It will improve security and speed.
3. Finally, check you link profile with a tool like OSE. If you're being linked to from shady websites with suspicious anchor text you'll want to disavow those links. Anything from Russia check to make sure they're not scraping your site. I've been getting a lot of that junk with my clients.

That was a what I got from a quick browse. I think you will reduce your spam score sufficiently by following the steps listed above as well as improve your site's security, speed, and user experience. Good luck!

The best course of action is going to vary. Generally I'd say promote your content everywhere you can until you find what works. Maybe the content you're producing is best on Instagram, or maybe it gains more traction on Pinterest. Maybe your tweets have more engagement than your Facebook posts. Should videos go on Snapchat or YouTube?

It's really difficult to say what you should be doing without any knowledge of your products, services, content, brand voice, etc. If you're considering paid promotions then Facebook is probably your best platform for its ability to target very specific segments. And it just has massive reach. But otherwise, try to match up your content with the right platform through discovery.

Once you've got that nailed down, definitely give the content a home on your website. This gives people something to link back to.

You can get pretty creative with how you target people for link building campaigns, so you don't need to take this strategy as link gospel, but it's one option for you that I think is a bit more ethical and probably more effective in the long run than paying bloggers individually to link to you.

Bingo. Thank you gentlemen, I have a date with a new view in analytics.

Anyone attacked by a scraper can agree that Google isn't foolproof. We have one website that has turned invisible even though it was ranking strongly for years. The scraper copied everything exactly with one exception - they changed all the links on the site so nothing would point back to ours. It was a pretty nasty hit. Still waiting on the DMCA takedown.

Got a local search question for you here. Google will automatically redirect most users to their country's google product of choice - google.ca if you're in Canada. However, I'm seeing a ton of organic traffic to our website that is ranking poorly in Google.ca, but ranking well on Google.com. This is a local HVAC business in Alberta.

Is there a way to see the amount of traffic coming from Google.com as opposed to Google.ca in analytics?

98% bounce rate is more indicative of ghost spam in your analytics than actual users. Moz writes a great article about what ghost spam is and how to stop it here: https://moz.com/blog/stop-ghost-spam-in-google-analytics-with-one-filter

A high bounce rate isn't helping the site, so at best it's a null effect, at worst your superior is correct and it's impacting your rankings. Again, Moz has a great article on the topic: https://moz.com/blog/traffic-engagement-metrics-their-correlation-to-google-rankings
From the article: "**Bounce rate: **At first glance, with a correlation of -0.08, the correlation between bounce rate and rankings may seem out-of-whack, but this is not the case. Keep in mind that lower bounce rate is often a good indication of user engagement. Therefore, we find as bounce rates rise (something we often try to avoid), rankings tend to drop, and vice-versa."

Keep in mind that's measuring correlation, not causation. As no one has been able to prove that Google uses engagement metrics as ranking signals we cannot definitely say whether or not bounce rate has a direct impact, but for obvious reasons we want to keep bounce rate low.

I hope this answers your question more fully.

We always go with the more specific geo and it has worked for us. Blue was just giving an example not knowing your precise location. The only caveat is that whatever geo modifier you add should be easily recognized by both Google and users. For example, I have some clients that attempt to use abbreviations and slang on their website "because it proves I'm a local". But if Google doesn't recognize it, it has no SEO value.

Easy way to check - search the location on Google and see if they have it defined in their maps.

And I know Google knows where Manhattan is

To quote John Mueller, "The goal should not be to have a natural looking link profile, the goal should be to have a natural link profile".

Purchasing links would be inadvisable and against webmaster guidelines. Some of the best link building strategies I've seen have revolved around creating really great content and sharing and promoting it through social networks. Passive link building through content marketing is honestly the best way to create positive link equity without running afoul of Penguin.

Your client is a small business owner whose concern is in bringing in quality leads that are going to turn into customers. The strategy your superior wants you to follow is in line with your client's business objectives of bringing in leads with a local SEO strategy. At the end of the day, whether or not you bring in leads from organic sources is what your client is going to judge your performance on.

Whether your superior is technically right or not doesn't truly matter here. What matters is your client, and he's counting on you and your team to grow his business with a competitive local SEO strategy. Be a team player, and focus on the strategies that will bring him quality leads.

I've seen it advised that you should not use letters - so 1-800-eat-cows would be less optimal than 1-800-328-2697. I don't know if it's true from an SEO standpoint, but it's certainly true from a usability perspective. Customers do not enjoy having to translate letters into numbers, especially anyone who is even slightly visually impaired. Takes forever.

I like the blog kissmetrics did on this awhile back: https://blog.kissmetrics.com/get-started-using-schema/

From the article:
"Schema markup helps your website rank better for all kinds of content types. There is data markup for…

• Articles
• Local businesses
• Restaurants
• TV episodes and ratings
• Book Reviews
• Movies
• Software Applications
• Events
• Products"

What I really enjoy about schema is that it's virtually untapped. Every time I do a SERP analysis it amazes me how few of my client's competitors have optimized with schema. If you're willing to read through the resources on schema.org you'll see there are tons of ways you can markup your data. We've implemented roughly 9 types of schema for one client, including local business, product, offer, and reviews (not sure where the full list is). The neat thing is that you can also mark up specific elements on the page, such as videos or open hours.

Another plus to taking the time to slog through it - it's a common language across all search engines.

Best of luck!

Hello Raymond, I'll answer you second question first because the explanation is a bit lengthier.

There has been a lot of debate over the years about how accurate the information in Search Console is, particularly some of the information in Search Analytics. Personally, I found the information to be inaccurate at worst and misleading at best. As an example, I searched through the number of impressions one of my client's small local sites had received over a period of thirty days and discovered my client was ranking for some long tail keywords that were misspelled and had somehow received hundreds of impressions from those keywords. I then checked the volume of those keywords in Adwords and saw immediately that there was a discrepancy between what Adwords reported (an extremely low yearly volume) and Search Console (extremely high monthly impressions).

So either A) impressions means what we traditionally know it to mean - someone typed in a keyword and landed in the SERP and saw the listing. Which would mean the information is inaccurate (possibly tracking bot traffic?). Or B) impressions means something else entirely in Search Console, which means it's misleading.

This was a roundabout way of saying don't take Search Console data as gospel. There isn't a clear cut guide on how the information is gathered and disseminated, meaning you cannot quality check it for accuracy the way you can with Google Analytics.

To answer your first question: adding a secondary keyword that's relevant is unlikely to negatively impact you. I would find it highly suspect that Google would rank you lower for adding MORE content to your website, and the additional keyword could improve CTR, which has been associated with higher rankings for awhile now, as a sort of positive signal with a short half-life. Just make sure it makes sense for your users and the topics are related. "Tree removal and tree trimming" is acceptable, whereas "Tree removal and ice cream" would be confusing and I would be unsurprised to see a negative impact from that.

There is no hard and fast answer to this. I've seen a DMCA request with Google take over a year to respond to, and I've seen it take a couple of months. Treat it as a marathon instead of a sprint. If you're lucky you'll be one of the ones whose case is examined and quickly rectified but expect this to take awhile.

I think Emily is on the right track here. You'll want to 301 redirect to pages that are similar in content. Your top level page on flowers from the old site should redirect to the top level page for flowers on the new site for example. It's more time consuming to implement one to one redirects this way rather than forwarding the entire domain to the homepage, but it will keep your referral traffic intact and Google is more likely to pass on the equity you've built over the years.

Hi Emily,

I wonder if there's a difference between the Windows and Apple version. I have not noticed it on my mac, but haven't paid close attention on my PC. What are you operating on?

I have a final update for everyone! We discovered the cause of the mysterious increase in crawling. One of our partners tested out a second version of the content on the website (yes, we have two complete sets of content for every page) by swapping out the first set with the second set. The second set caused Google to reevaluate the entire website, crawl it repeatedly thousands of times for two weeks, then stop.

The result of this refresh was a jump in the rankings. We were ranking on page one for about 15% of our targeted keywords and after the new content was inputted it jumped to 71%. Only time will tell if those new rankings will stick, but for now it looks pretty good.

Google does not use social signals as a ranking signal. It would be far too easy to manipulate rankings, and there's no guarantee of quality.

However, studies have shown a correlation between content that is shared many times and links garnered. You've likely gained quality backlinks thanks to all the repinning on Pinterest, and that has impacted your SEO efforts in a positive manner. And of course, quality referral traffic is always appreciated

Sorry Sean, I misunderstood your question. No, you cannot redirect any website you don't have access to. My recommendation would be to contact the host and work with them to obtain access. It's usually not a complex process.