That would be great, however I AM the SEO consultant.

What tool would you recommend to identify potential bad backlinks?

Well no.  Why is only one of 9 campaigns effected (don't get me wrong, I'm relieved it's ONLY one.)

I have 1 campaign (out of 9) that has it's ranking fluctuating wildly from week to week - and in the past 3 weeks, it's tanked, and the next week come back, and this week, tanked again (what I mean by that is Keyphrases ranking #1 dropping to +51 - I had over 20 keyphrases (both local and universal) that were ranked in the top 10 (many in the top 3) that are now at 18 or higher.

I have not changed anything on the website in the last 3 weeks, but I've been working with Yoast SEO Pro to add in metadata, titles etc.  The content, managed by the marketing manager, is basically unchanged.  Help!!! This is the second time this has happened and our top competitor went from where we are now to #1 - We've been flipflopping week after week.  Not good.

I have also been getting an increased # of 803 and 804 crawl errors. Jon with Moz added me to the next beta cohort, but I can't imagine that this has anything to do with Google ranking.  I have 2 campaigns experiencing a high number of 803-804 crawl errors but only this one with the dramatic ranking and visibility swings.

mccdental.com is the domain for the campaign.

I appreciate any insight.  Newish client - NOT good.

Hey John, on one of my campaigns I have gone from 27 crawl attempt errors to 145???  All are 803 and 804 errors.  What gives?

And mine is chill986@gmail.com

I am having the same problem on one of my campaigns - The site is on WP-Engine, and the campaign has been in place since November with SSL, and with no prior issues with an 804 error until this most recent crawl.   Help!?

Samantha (of the Moz team) suggested I have my client whitelist Rogerbot - so you are saying simply whitelist Rogerbot as a useragent?  Is there any other information I need to provide?

I don't have direct control, but I believe there is a strong partnership (perhaps even a partial ownership) between my client and the target site.  I didn't develop the safewarehouseofnewyork.com site, I have only been tasked with working the SEO.  But this sounds really bad - I'm heading out the door (to the beach, it's Sunday ), and will look into this more thoroughly when I return.

I never did like the way the site designer didn't incorporate the products into the site and goes to a different site based on product line.  Not the way I would do it, but maybe the client was trying to keep the cost down.

My apologies - I should have referenced "our-services" instead of "services", no minor detail.

1. Are you using a particular WordPress hosting company?
   I host the sites on my dedicated server and provide wordpress maintenance
2. Do you have a specific plug-in that you're using to create redirects?
   I do, but I did not redirect these URLs
3. Do you create redirects by using either PHP, Apache, Nginx or Varnish?
   I use a redirect plugin - but good point, it's possible that the previous developer added 301 redirects in .htaccess.  I believe, though, that this is done by native Wordpress based upon the relationship between the primary domain, and the parent pages.
4. How familiar are you with your database?
   Familiar enough to find issues in it via phpadmin.  Again this is a Wordpress site, and it's not a frequent requirement that I modify the database directly
5. Did you do a search and replace when you moved or migrated the site?
   The structure, domain and navigational URLs of the site did not change.  I received a zip file of the database from the previous site manager, and I FTPd the files from the original location.

***ACTUAL QUESTION: I am not having a problem with the "function" of the site.   My question relates to best practices for SEO - would it be better to have the URL be simply oztruckingandrigging.com/safe-installation or is it basically equivalent to have the URL be as it is, oztruckingandrigging.com/our-services/safes/safe-installation/ ***

Again, the site works the way it is supposed to - I do see a few 404s unrelated to this question that I need to clean up, and I very much appreciate the additional resources you have provided me.  You put together a very thorough answer, but I think it wasn't clear the question I was actually asking.  I do already have the free version of Screaming Frog, but I am unfamiliar with the others.

I still am not sure of the answer for the initial question regarding duplicate page content across two different sites and whether there is a penalty.

Thank you!

I have no crawl errors / no 404s - and the nesting I refer to looks like this on the page manager dashboard in WordPress:

Services
-Safes (page parent is Services)
--Safe Installation (page parent is Safes)

So Services is a page, Safes is a page, and Safe Installation is a page.  You can get to oztruckingandrigging.com/services/safes/safe-installation by going to oztruckingandrigging.com/safes/safe-installation, as well as oztruckingandrigging.com/safe-installation. I find it odd that the Page Optimization score is 92% for the first, but 96% for the last?  Why would Moz Page Optimization see these two pages differently?  All their Services are layed out the same way (i.e. safe moving, safe removal, safe storage have "Safes" as a parent and , of course, "Services" as the Safes parent.

And the site wasn't rebuilt completely, they changed themes (appearance) only, the page management structure (see page manager description above) - the content and general navigational structure remains the same.  It just looks different, which should make no difference to Google.

I still am trying to wrap my head around the fact that Safewarehouseofnewyork.com's safe installation page is #2 for Safe Installation New York (behind homeadvisor.com 5 best safe installers in New York), whereas oztruckingandrigging.com's safe installation page (which has exactly the same content) ranks >51.

I am considering changing the safe warehouse site to have a landing page for Services with references and links to each safe service that they partner with OZ trucking on. Thoughts?  I hate losing that #2 ranking, though.

I have a client with 2 websites - one is a trucking and rigging company that specializes in installation / moving / removal of safes (site #1), the other offers a product line of safes (site #2).  I originally designed / implemented site #1 and was able to get "safe installation New York", "safe moving New York", and "safe removal New York" in the top 3 search results in.  A little over a year ago, client was approached by another marketing company to create the site #2, who also provided commercial services that I don't.  It was a business decision, and we remained in good relations.  As a result Site #1 went to the new marketing company and they built Site #2.

Fast forward to about 3 months ago - Site #1 was infected with malware, client wasn't happy with new service, and asked me to take back the Site #1 ( and remove malware), and take Site #2, and re-work the SEO.  SEO had dramatically fallen off for Site #1, so I've been working the SEO once I was able to get the malware completely removed and reviewed by Google.

Site #1 had been redesigned by the other marketing company, essentially retaining the content that I created.  Site #2 has mostly new content, but under "Services", it references the same services that Site #1provides, but the content is exactly the same, except that references to the company for Site #1 also link to Site #1.  So there is duplicate content for 5 pages on both sites.  As it happens, Site #2 that SELLS safes, is ranking #2 for "safe installation new york" for exactly the same content as Site #1 that provides the services.  Site #1 ranks >50 for the same keyphrase.

Why would this be?  Has Site #2 taken the lead on this keyphrase because of the malware situation and now Site #1 is being penalized for duplicate content?

One other major change on Site #1 is that the web technician used Wordpress's built in page nesting (page is set as child to parent page - nested 3 deep in some cases).  What are the consequences (if there are any) of having a page listed as (for example) oztruckingandrigging.com/services/safe/safe-installation vs. oztruckingandrigging.com/safe-installation?  The reason I ask this is that when I Moz page optimize for the first one for "safe installation" I get a lower grade then when I Moz page optimize for the second one.

Thanks David, will do!

I have a similar question (+ one additional one), and if I need to open a new thread, just let me know.

I have a client with 2 websites - one is a trucking and rigging company that specializes in installation / moving / removal of safes (site #1), the other offers a product line of safes (site #2).  I originally designed / implemented site #1 and was able to get "safe installation New York", "safe moving New York", and "safe removal New York" in the top 3 search results in.  A little over a year ago, client was approached by another marketing company to create the site #2, who also provided commercial services that I don't.  It was a business decision, and we remained in good relations.  As a result Site #1 went to the new marketing company and they built Site #2.

Fast forward to about 3 months ago - Site #1 was infected with malware, client wasn't happy with new service, and asked me to take back the Site #1 ( and remove malware), and take Site #2, and re-work the SEO.  SEO had dramatically fallen off for Site #1, so I've been working the SEO once I was able to get the malware completely removed and reviewed by Google.

Site #1 had been redesigned by the other marketing company, essentially retaining the content that I created.  Site #2 has mostly new content, but under "Services", it references the same services that Site #1 provides, but the content is exactly the same, except that references to the company for Site #1 also link to Site #1.  So there is duplicate content for 5 pages on both sites.  As it happens, Site #2 that SELLS safes, is ranking #2 for "safe installation new york" for exactly the same content as Site #1 that provides the services.  Site #1 ranks >50 for the same keyphrase.

Why would this be?  Has Site #2 taken the lead on this keyphrase because of the malware situation and now Site #1 is being penalized for duplicate content?

One other major change on Site #1 is that the web technician used Wordpress's built in page nesting (page is set as child to parent page - nested 3 deep in some cases).  What are the consequences (if there are any) of having a page listed as (for example) oztruckingandrigging.com/services/safe/safe-installation vs. oztruckingandrigging.com/safe-installation?  The reason I ask this is that when I Moz page optimize for the first one for "safe installation" I get a lower grade then when I Moz page optimize for the second one.

Thanks Chiaryn!  I've set it up, and will follow up with my client on the other stuff.

I'm sorry, as follow up - I'm confused - from the screenshot that I attached, I was under the impression that Google Analytics was important to show traffic data?  Am I missing something?

Dv5rx4b

Thanks Chiaryn.  I'd prefer to move this client off of Wordpress.com, but that's a discussion for him, not here :).  Good to know - I'll get the campaign started today.

Is it possible to manage a campaign for such a site on Moz?  It looks like in order to be able to add an independent Google Analytics tracking id, he has to upgrade to a business account.  Does anybody have any experience with this?

I'm getting the following error when I attempt to preview my custom report.  I have also attached a screenshot.

The moz.com page isn’t working

moz.com sent an invalid response.

ERR_RESPONSE_HEADERS_MULTIPLE_CONTENT_DISPOSITIONI need to send my client his report for a meeting tomorrow morning, and I am unable to run it.  The campaign is propacusa.comf3VhmfU

Thanks Tymen, but the question was specifically regarding www vs. non-www.  Thanks anyway!

Thanks, that's what I thought!

That's what I thought.  My contact seems to believe that the CEO is convinced that it DOES make a difference.  I would think that Google would give preference over making the UX better - typing in www doesn't seem to do that.  Just to be sure - non-www is better than www?

My client has been using "www" with his domain and before I took over, has used it in marketing etc.  I typically don't use "www" in my wordpress setup, and set non-www as the preferred domain in google analytics and google search console.  Does it make any difference?  Especially when www resolves to non-www?

I appreciate some guidance with this.

Thanks Patrick!  Hey Matt, I've been working on this site for about 6 months, and really haven't worried too much about the Domain Authority as I was seeing the selected key phrases percolating up.  But I'm not seeing things moving as quickly as I would have expected, and have been putting more time into it.  I understand this takes time - the one thing I HAVEN'T been doing is putting a lot of effort into backlinks.  I have, however, set her up with a variety of social media accounts as well as Houzz (as I indicated in my first message), and Moz shows zero links - which I don't really understand.  I believe the users are getting a good experience from the website as the number of visitors increase each week - although the conversions are sporadic, I believe she's getting phone calls from the site.

I believe I'm doing all the right stuff, but something is missing so I must not be.

Thanks for your responses!

I'm having a terrible time with one of my sites - it's a new (less than 1 year) business, and I have accounts
in a number of social media sites including Houzz, but Moz acts like there's only one link to the site.  DA is 1.
Ugh.  She has pretty good traffic for a small local business, but I'm tearing my hair out over this.  
Any suggestions?

It does.  I was sceptical when I was told that it had something to do with Moz Local.  I'll take a look at the video - thanks for the suggestion!

I went to a meetup last night that specifically talked about SEO, and although I wasn't given a good answer to this problem - and yes it continues - last week I had 30+ keywords improve by 48+ positions to #1 and this week I had 10+ drop to higher than 51,  I'm told that this is not unusual (not convinced of that either) especially with the new "localized" feature of Moz.com, and that ranking scans might be run from anywhere in the country causing the fluctuations.  This is the only site I'm seeing such dramatic swings so I'm sceptical.  I just discovered that I still have a .png as my header image (discovered last night, and have been working to improve server response speed.

I'm hoping that I can get a good streamlined configuration for a caching plugin that will work "generally" for all my sites.  I'm still open to suggestions and thanks for this one.

I can do that with my clients that are on shared service accounts for free, but not for my VPS clients - this one is shared, so good idea.  I think I probably have some images that can be resized as well.  I have the load speed on the home page down to 3 seconds, so getting there.

I have a client that has been trying a different plugin with huge success - compared directly to W3TC.  I just haven't been convinced yet will try it and see.

Thanks - I have been working to configure W3TC to improve page speed - only recently started working on it.  And yeah - I overoptimized in the beginning and have started rethinking the content based upon what I've been reading lately.  Will do - you think that page speed might be part of the problem?  W3TC is one of the most highly recommended performance plugins, but I don't think it is as good as some of the new plugins recently released.  Will search for a different one.

I appreciate the feedback - I'll see how things go next week.

The website is oztruckingandrigging.com.  I've attached a link to the keyphrases that show a big drop - but I have just as many that went up by a significant amount.  And it seems to be a weekly thing now.  Very weird.

Z2kxLv9.png

Good idea - I'll take a look. Yeah, seems like the last 3 months or so.  I don't send my client reports every week, but still - weird they are bouncing so dramatically from week to week.  If they dropped and then stayed there then I'd probably have more to go on.

Over the past couple of months I have seen a couple of my campaigns have key phrases that change from week to week from being in the top 3 to being >51.  I worked pretty hard on the sites to get them mostly #1 for their preferred key phrases, and haven't been working that hard lately, but not sure what to make of it.  It looks as though those keyphrases that dropped this week to >51 will probably be back in the top 3.  Makes it diffuclt when you are trying to prepare a report for your client.

Any suggestions are welcomed, and Happy New Year!

Thanks for the response, Patrick.

I did find that there was an error on my yoast sitemap-index.xml (404 on pagemap-index.xml) which I was able to fix last night.  Not sure why suddenly there was a problem.  I also found I had the wrong URL specified for the sitemap in my robots.txt - fixed that too.  Other than that, I resubmitted the sitemap, re-fetched my site, and everything looks copacetic in google webmasters as it certainly is being crawled, and no crawl errors.

Up until know, I've simply been massaging the content, ensuring that I hit all of the google criteria according to moz.com as well as the SEO plugin (Yoast) that I am using.  I've not done anything out of the ordinary except I added a slide-in plugin to promote a course my client is teaching (see fisherfinancialgroupllc.com).  I'm not really doing anything with links because I was having such great luck on the work I was doing with content, blogging and social media.  I can only think that maybe the slide-in plugin (had incorrect URL for the button link) might have caused some kind of recursive problem?

It's weird because my key phrases (financial advisor northbrook il, financial advisor northbrook, and financial advisor northbrook illinois) were all ranked around 5 & 6 and still moving up at the end of August, and the following week dropping to > 50.  And the drop didn't effect the "Fisher Financial" centric key phrases, just plain odd.

Not sure what other information I can provide to enable you to help me.   It's a small site and we only update it a couple of times a month other than the occasional blog post done by the client. I appreciate any information you can provide!

Not sure why my question is marked as answered.  This is the first time I've ever posted a question here, and saw that I if I liked your answer but wanted to keep the thread open to click on "Good Answer".   Sigh.  Hope you see my response, and that others can as well.

Cindy

I noticed recently that 4 of my keyphrases which ranked on page one, and were climbing 3 weeks ago, have suddenly dropped to > 50.  What could have happened?  I did find an issue with my sitemap (yoast generated), but why would that suddenly change?  And even more importantly, how do I fix it?