No problem at all. As you said, the fact that you can do a site: search and see that your pages are actually indexed means that most importantly, your site is in Google's index.

As for it not showing up in Search Console, it's very hard to troubleshoot these ones without access to the account - after 3 or 4 weeks you really should be seeing at least some data in there. To my knowledge, the only part that really lags a whole lot is the number of indexed pages.

You should be able to see Content Keywords for example. If all data is completely blank, there may be a larger problem here. Can you see Analytics data for this domain? If so, was Search Console verified via Analytics?

I can think of two potential causes here. One is simply that the number of indexed pages that shows in Search Console often lags behind by several weeks these days so it may simply be that.

The other is that you may have the wrong version in Search Console. Apologies if you've already checked this but just in case you're not already aware, Google treats www.domain.com and domain.com as completely separate entities so if your site lives on the www version, you must use that same version in Search Console, otherwise you'll see blank metrics like you are right now

Hi Falguni,

If you're looking for white hat SEO (which is what you'll find at Moz) then there's really no generic forum(s) that will send you traffic that matters. Link building via forums has to be done in a particular way anyhow to avoid being spammy and these forums should be specific to your niche.

Essentially what this means is if you're working for a finance company, the forums that could be used correctly for them would be different to an accommodation website or a plumber.

Locating the best forums takes a bit of research - what you're looking for is an active forum specific to your topic that you can genuinely contribute to, much like I'm contributing here right now, though I do this for community engagement and a mutual sharing of knowledge rather than traffic or leads.

We've experienced almost exactly the same process in the past when a dev accidentally left staging.domain.com open for indexation... the really bad news is that despite noticing this, blocking via Robots and going through the same process to remove the wrong ones via Search Console etc, getting the correct domain ranking in the top 50 positions took almost 6 infuriating months!

Just like you, we saw the non-www version and the staging.domain version of the pages indexed for a couple of months after we fixed everything up then all of a sudden one day the two wrong versions of the site disappeared from the index and the correct one started grabbing some traction.

All this to say that to my knowledge, there are no active tasks you can really perform beyond what you've already done to speed this process up. Maybe building a good volume of strong links will push a positive signal that the correct one should be recrawled. We did spend a considerable amount of time looking into it and the answer kept coming back the same - "it just takes time for Google to recrawl the three versions of the site and figure it out".

This is essentially educated speculation but I believe the reason this happens is because for whatever reason the wrong versions were crawled first at different points to be the original version so the correct one was seen as 100% duplicate and ignored. This would explain why you're seeing what you are and also why in a magical 24hr window that could come at any point, everything sorted itself out - it seems that the "original" versions of the domain no longer exist so the truly correct one is now unique.

If my understanding of all this is correct, it would also mean that moving your site to yet another domain wouldn't help either since according to Google's cache/index, the wrong versions of your current domain are still live and the "original" so putting that same site/content on a different domain would just be yet another version of the same site.

Apologies for not being able to offer actionable tasks or good news but I'm all ears for future reference if anyone else has a solution!

It isn't possible to do this when behind a login but I would definitely still spend the time doing what you can manually before pushing it live.

The other option you have is to push it "live" but block the whole site from crawlers with Robots.txt. Screaming Frog does give you the option to ignore the instructions in Robots so you could still crawl it. If this site is replacing an existing one that makes it a little more tricky. If that's the case, you could still do this but make sure that you get to work on your audit the second you push it live and get it done as quickly as possible.

If the site is up and blocked via Robots for 20 minutes it's unlikely to cause an issue. If you leave it that way for a week however... not such a good idea

Issa is correct and to be honest, he's pointed out what I see as a pretty major problem - not being able to see these metrics (particularly ahrefs) really isn't ideal for analysis and/or troubleshooting.

Also, it may very well be that the competitor that keeps targeting the same terms as you is doing so via other means. There are countless tools available to all of us that allow for analysis of strong and relevant terms so your site may have little to do with their decisions.

Beyond this, one glance at your page titles will often be enough to figure out what you're targeting

Hi Rachel, no problem at all, happy to help out!

We have a couple of clients in similar industries where it seems most of their successful competitors are using black hat tactics to get ahead and it seems to be working for them for now.

These clients are still too new to us to report anything valuable just yet - they're certainly moving ahead and I don't see an issue outranking their dodgy competitors, it's just frustrating that black hat SEO is typically much faster but their rankings could drop literally any day.

That aside, a disavow may help you somewhat but I always recommend spending the time removing as many as you can (without paying the removal fees that many will request!). Building new, high quality and relevant links will also help swing that ratio away from being almost exclusively spam. Everybody has at least some dodgy links to don't stress too much about getting it perfect, just improve the ratio.

It's great that you've got unique content coming and regional differences in law and restrictions is a great starting point for offering that unique value as well. Location pages like this are just fine, so long as they each serve a unique purpose. Just make sure the site structure and content caters to the user's intent, not just adding content to keyword-specific pages.

I would expect that removing as many of those bad links as you can, building quality new ones and improving the site's content will go a long way to lowering your spam score and more importantly, moving one step closer to driving qualified and converting traffic.

Hi Rachel,

I've just spent a minute or two having a look over the site and link profile and there are quite few reasons why the spam score would be so high.

Looking at the link profile to start with, most of the links are made up of SEO directories and blog comment spam and this alone would be reason enough to consider the site spammy.

Looking at the onsite work, at first glance things don't seem too bad until I let Screaming Frog crawl it. There are some internal links pointing to 301s which isn't great efficiency for crawl budget but far more problematic is the ~50 pages that exist purely to chase a particular keyword. They don't offer any value to the user at all and are very direct in the keyword they target with only ~50 words of the same content on each with the location changed.

For example:
https://cyntox.com/oklahoma/
https://cyntox.com/north-dakota/
https://cyntox.com/ohio/

Here are a couple of resources to better understand the Spam Score. Matt provided them in another thread and they proved very handy, just don't fall into the trap of only fixing elements that Moz looks at to lower the score; produce a stronger and more genuine website instead!

Blog Post
Whiteboard Friday

As is so often the case with Moz's spam score, if you want to lower the spam score you just need to lower the spam I hope that helps!

hey, sorry just catching up on these after a busy week!

I figured i would start with having someone write unique content for me for the top 100. and for the rest find someone really inexpensive to go out and copy information

This plan is perfectly fine until the words "copy information"

If you're copy/pasting content from other sites then you're really going to hurt your potential to rank. Rather than doing this, my suggestion would be to either put that budget you were going to spend on copy/pasting into having that person write more pages, OR have the second person use the first writer's first 100 as a reference point for how the other pages should read then write them for you.

Since duplicate content will essentially be ignored, you're better off with no content than a site full of duplicates - at least the no content option is free!

maybe use an online tool that modify's some of the words

This is what we refer to as "content spinning" and is an old tactic that no longer works. Even if the content is spun enough to be seen as unique, it will be so unreadable that you'll suffer for low quality content instead.

if they grab the descriptions from a 3-5 sites, then maybe google wont consider it duplicate content.

This won't actually help you either. Search engines aren't looking for completely duplicated websites, they're looking for duplicate content. Even if your content came from a mix of 1000 different websites, it would still be seen as duplication.

Overtime if i have success with the top 100, i will add another 100 or so every month.

Nothing wrong with that at all.

When it comes to SEO you basically have 2 choices. Either cheat the system and likely see great gains for a short period of time (black hat) or you can focus on offering excellent, unique value and an experience that users want to return for (white hat). Content spinning & copy/pasting from multiple websites definitely falls under the "cheat the system" category.

Hi Alex,

Sounds like you've already got the nav changes under control which is great!

Technically DA is based on your link profile so that won't change, though if you mean just the overall strength of the site, it will drop away from the SERPs once the 301 to the subfolder is in place.

In case you haven't already thought of it too, once that redirect is in place, consider reaching out to any valuable referring domains pointing to .ae and ask if they can update the link to .com/ae since the site has moved. This is some easy low-hanging fruit and a great way to drive links directly to subpages as I'd mentioned doing earlier.

You will retain most of the strength from these links using the 301 anyway but why sacrifice that 10-20% loss in strength if the referring sites are happy to update a single href?

This is a tough but common problem. In the perfect world, you'd hire a team of high quality content writers on a contract to populate each of these pages with genuine, unique content.

Since this isn't the perfect world, you're probably on a budget that doesn't allow this to happen. Assuming your site is already live, that means you no longer have to deal with the "push it live with sparse pages or spend a few more months preparing properly" conundrum.

That being the case, my suggestion here is always to just do it properly and it takes however long it takes. Assuming you've had the site up like this for some time, your rankings are unlikely to drop in the next month or so. Start populating content from the top down, namely from your primary landing pages to your category pages, subcategory pages then finally the individual products.

In my experience, ~300-500 words seems to be sufficient for a product page so you may be able to stretch that budget with a good writer to maybe 4 or 5 pages, maybe. It's more about offering value that an arbitrary word count anyhow.

You could always get them to do the first few and you follow their lead from there, perhaps getting them to proof-read the first 10 descriptions that you write? Not ideal and I'd only attempt this if your writing abilities are ok (they seem to be?). If you're going to go this route, I'd suggest using Grammarly to keep an eye on your spelling and grammar for you as well - it can integrate with Word if that's your tool of choice or you can type straight into their web app.

Anyhow, back on topic, doing it this way means your most valuable/sold/profitable products will be getting content first and you're not compromising on quality. We've done exactly this with a number of medium sized ecommerce sites and the results are always great (albeit in conjunction with other work we're doing). Naturally, the faster the better but you have to start somewhere.

There was a Whiteboard Friday on this exact topic and I think I just found it but the video is broken and it was old so they don't have the transcript The closest I could find was this one which is also quite old but worth watching. Don't forget that Google's intention is to ignore duplicated content so if you're just copying from other sites, there's a good chance you just won't rank with those pages.

Hope that helps!

Hi Alex,

No problem at all, happy to help!

The naming convention creates an interesting problem. It makes perfect sense now but without understanding your range, it was very confusing. It's great to have an outside set of eyes on these things sometimes, especially since I'd expect most of your SEO target audience to be new users.

For starters, I'd consider changing the nav text from Artificial Grass to something like Our Range or Artificial Grass Range to make it clearer that this is a range, not locations; Artificial Grass is a little more ambiguous.

To further clarify this for people, you could also add a heading to the drop-down menu under that item. Something like "Select from our range below" or "Already know which product you need? Select from our range below" - something that suggests the items in this drop-down aren't locations, they're the different types of grass.

Search engines these days are quite clever so I'd expect that as long as you always reference "Easi-Mayfair" and don't allow variations like Easi Mayfair or just Mayfair, this should be clear enough.

the worry of current email addresses and redirecting the TLDs to the subdirectory.

Don't be too concerned about this. I can't imagine too many users would try to visit the domain used in your email address and even if they do, the redirect is in place and working correctly so they'll end up in the right spot. The .dk email addresses still work so changing all those users over to .com address is likely more hassle than it's worth.