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https://moz.com/blog/comprehensive-analysis-domain-authority

https://moz.com/blog/domain-authority-seo

Hi Cristiana,

It sounds like you need to implement hreflang on your sites.

Hreflang can be complicated but you can start reading about it and how to implement it here: https://moz.com/learn/seo/hreflang-tag

Cheers,

David

Hi wonderdome,

You are correct that Bit.ly is for shortening links but it isn't something you use for link building and it doesn't make the link for valuable when you use it.

And that it a huge number of bit.ly links - it must be a huge site! My guess is they use bit.ly links for all of their social media posting.

Cheers,

David

Hi Fubra,

You can disavow at a domain level, so no regex is required (and I don't think it will work).

Just add "domain:" before the domain, eg. domain:spammysite.com

Marie Haynes wrote a good guide to using the disavow tool here if you need any further information: https://moz.com/blog/guide-to-googles-disavow-tool

Cheers,

David

Hi Chuck,

It's strange to me that the "NOINDEX, FOLLOW" would be automatically added to these pages.

The canonical tag is correct so I wouldn't use "noindex" here - it's redundant.

John Mueller from Google recently explained why canonical and "noindex" shouldn't be used together: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-noindex-rel-canonical-confusion-26079.html

Cheers,

David

Hi Sonar,

Sorry to hear about your migration troubles!

I don't think you will find generic advice too helpful, but I'd be happy to take a quick look to see what's going on and possibly give you some specific recommendations.

Are you able to share the domains with me in this thread or through PM?

Cheers,

David

Hi smithcorona,

By default, Search Console will display the global average rank of you keywords, while Moz and Ahrefs will show you rankings for a specific country.

If you choose to only look at the average rank of your target country in Search Console, you should see the results are more closely aligned.

Cheers,

David

You might be able to get some highly relevant referral traffic from forums, so forum links aren't completely useless.

But as Logan and Martijn said, if you are doing this type of link building purely for SEO reasons, then your time is definitely better spent elsewhere.

Cheers,

David

Hi Bruce,

There was a bit of a debate about this recently - whether a cross-domain canonical could be a new type of negative SEO attack: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-negative-seo-via-canonicals-redirects-25614.html

But I personally don't think it would be a successful negative SEO strategy.

Having disavowed the domain, I think you have taken all the precautions you can and I wouldn't be too worried about this having a negative impact on your traffic and rankings.

Cheers,

David

Hi Rajesh,

Yes, you are correct.

If an image links to your site with no alt text, it will be reported as blank anchor test. It's always best to use alt text and make sure it's descriptive of the image.

Cheers,

David

Hi DigitalMarketingSEO,

This sounds like it's Google having some issues with your React website.

There are plenty of good SEO for Javascript guides out there that I would recommending reading through:
https://www.elephate.com/blog/ultimate-guide-javascript-seo/
https://builtvisible.com/javascript-framework-seo/
https://www.briggsby.com/dealing-with-javascript-for-seo

How did the "Fetch and Render" look? Was Googlebot able to see your page exactly as a human user would?

Can you share the URL here (or PM me)? I've done a lot of work on JS sites and I'd be happy to take a quick look to see I can give some more specific advice.

Cheers,

David

Hi jacleaves,

I'm interested to see how this works out for you!

Please post an update after you've finished your work

Cheers,

David

Hi Nigel,

I agreed that what you said is the best solution in this case but noindex can definitely be done in robots.txt.

I'm not sure of the questionable sites you've seen it mentioned on, but I'd consider Stone Temple and Deep Crawl to be reputable sources.

That said, I always like to test things for myself!

I tried robots.txt noindex on one of my own big sports news websites a little while ago because I didn't want to manually set thousands of old posts to noindex. The robots.txt noindex worked fine.

Cheers,

David

Hi Nigel and Jens,

Just to clarify - noindex is valid in robots.txt for Google but it's not recognized by Bing.

Here's a case study by Stone Temple on using noindex in robots.txt: https://www.stonetemple.com/does-google-respect-robots-txt-noindex-and-should-you-use-it/

From their case study, it was found to be pretty effective, but not 100%. It would be a good solution for large websites, but if you're only looking at 100+ pages I would do as Nigel said above and implement the meta robots noindex tags.

Cheers,

David

Hi jacleaves,

The problem here is with your canonical tags (more info on canonical tags here).

This page: http://amishdirectplaysets.com/playset-details/?mfgID=A-1&catID=4

Has a canonical tag pointing to: http://amishdirectplaysets.com/playset-details/

The same thing is happening on all of your product pages.

I would change all of your product pages to use "SEO-friendly" URLs and have a self-referring canonical tag.

Eg. your example page: http://amishdirectplaysets.com/playset-details/?mfgID=A-1&catID=4
Would become: http://amishdirectplaysets.com/playset-details/a-1-standard-climber-vinyl-playset
And the canonical tag would point to: http://amishdirectplaysets.com/playset-details/a-1-standard-climber-vinyl-playset

Cheers,

David

Hi Jeff,

You can use hreflang to target the same language in different regions.

Google provide a good example of this about halfway down this page: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

Like in the example here, you may want to use the US version of the site as the English default and specify regions for the rest.

Cheers,

David

Hi Wickstar,

In addition to geo-targeting in Search Console, do you also have hreflang tags on all sites?

If not, you should definitely add these (more about hreflang here: https://moz.com/learn/seo/hreflang-tag).

Aleyda Solis created this great hreflang Tags Generator Tool that can make implementing hreflang very easy - especially with the new XML sitemap export option.

Cheers,

David

Hi Steven,

Is your goal to have Google rank both pages for searches like "self storage vancouver"?

Ranking two pages is going to be very difficult (but not impossible) to achieve and I would consider combining the locations into a single Vancouver self storage page. From there, users could see both locations and choose the one that's more convenient for them.

I'm not sure if you would have any issues with this - are they franchised businesses?

Cheers,

David

Hi Christian,

The current robots.txt shouldn't be blocking those URLs.

Did you or someone else recently change the robots.txt file? If so, give Google a few days to re-crawl your site.

Also, can you check what happens when you do a fetch and render on one of the blocked posts in Search Console? Do you have issues there?

Cheers,

David

Hi Eddy,

Edit: this was already answered before I could post my reply. But I've left the example.

The issue with the meta robots tag is that you are using curly quotation marks around robots and noindex:
You have:
“robots**” content=“noindex”/>
Instead of:
name="robots" content="noindex"**/>

This will fix your issue.

Cheers,

David

Hi Dawn,

Sounds like you may have recently switch to https?

If you did and you are still viewing the http Search Console account, you should expect to see a huge drop in all areas of this account and you will need to setup a new https account to view accurate data.

Cheers,

David

Hi tiagoarruda,

For a while now, it seems to be Google's strong preference to have the brand name (rather than keywords) at the front of homepage titles.

It is very common for Google to re-write your homepage titles if your brand name isn't at the front and I think it's unlikely that you'll be successful in having it changed.

Cheers,

David

If you are going to drop an affiliate link in your comments, I think you should disclose that it's an affiliate link - not just say "referral link".

Hi Masonman,

I generally "noindex" tags in Yoast and for really big sites I will also block them in robots.txt (after I know they have been removed from index) - but it depends how you are using them on your site.

Before you "noindex", check GA to make sure your tags pages aren't getting any organic traffic. If they aren't, I would go ahead and set them to "noindex".

If you want to then block them from being crawled, you must wait until the pages have been removed from index. Otherwise, they will remain indexed because the pages can't be crawled and the "noindex" tags won't be seen.

Tags only exist to help users find similar content. You could check GA pageviews for your tag pages to see if people are actually using them - if they aren't, you might decide to stop using them.

You have a few options here...I could give more specific advice on what I would do if I knew more about your site, but I hope this helps!

Cheers,

David

Hi Andrew,

This question is asked a lot on here.

Fluctuations in DA are going to happen as each Mozscape update will be different and may not pick up the same links to your site.

You should check other tools to make sure you haven't actually lost any links that may be causing the decrease, but you shouldn't really be concerned if your DA decreases sometimes.

If you haven't seen it, Rand did a Whiteboard Friday on the ins and outs of DA/PA which you might find useful: https://moz.com/blog/link-count-metrics

Cheers,

David

Hi John,

For visualizing internal link data, I think Sitebulb is the only tool that does it automatically.

You can do it with Screaming Frog data but it's a bit of a process to visualize it (check out this guide if you're interested).

Cheers,

David

Hi SEO Analytics,

You can start understanding how Google ranks websites by reading Moz's Beginner's Guide to SEO.

Once you've finished reading it, read it again.

Cheers,

David

Hi Ryan,

It would be best to use Screaming Frog if you want a true indication of your internal link structure.

https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/

Cheers,

David

The penalty mentioned in the article wasn't even a link based penalty...

The Moz spam score looks at the quality of links pointing to a domain and has nothing to do with spam content on pages - so that score is irrelevant here.

Having the penalty removed could have been as easy as clicking the 'Request a review' button so Google would check to see that the domain no longer contains any auto-generated spam.

I would also have to ask why the person even wanted these domains? They are clearly up to some black hat SEO tactics and should probably stop complaining about Google penalties...

Hi Gianluca,

Just on what you said here:

"Formally, I don't see any mistake in how the hreflang has been implemented in the 2nd url, because if you really mean to have it canonicalized toward the 1st, then is totally correct to use the canonical url in the self-referential url and the en-ie hreflang annotations."

I kind of understand what you're saying about it not being wrong, but is does the hreflang become redundant because the URL is canonicalized and doesn't validate?

For Screaming Frog, did you have it set to "Respect Canonical"? If so, could that be the reason no errors were found?

Without having access to GSC, I like to use Dejan's Hreflang Testing Tool to quickly check for hreflang errors - and it does report errors with the example URL.

Cheers,

David

Hi Becky,

Along the lines of what James said, it's because this is not the canonical URL for the product.

The URL is: http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/0-4-tonne-wll-6mm-single-leg-wire-rope-sling-580a078n

But your canonical and hreflang tags don't match this URL.

You will get errors for any URLs that don't have a self-referring hreflang tags, and any URLs that don't have reciprocal hreflang tags from the alternate versions specified.

I would work with your devs to only display hreflang tags on canonical URLs - not on canonicalized URLs.

Cheers,

David

Hi Gaston and Gamajunova,

It's true in your example that http://site.com and https://site.com are completely different URLs to Mozscape (and more importantly, search engines), but only their PA would be different - their DA will be the same.

The PA 1 is normal if that exact URL (the https version) has never received any links in the past, but the DA drop is significant and I would suggest looking at another tool like Ahrefs to see if the domain has lost a lot of links recently.

If you haven't lost any links, I would say the latest Moz index hasn't crawled many links pointing to your domain - so it's reporting a significantly decreased DA.

If that's the case, don't worry too much about your DA. It will come back eventually and it won't have any impact on your organic performance.

Cheers,

David

Hi Katarina,

There are a few tools you could use to do this but I would recommend SEMrush.

Cheers,

David

Hi ricoplaza,

There isn't going to be any negative impact but it's also not going to be much benefit to you (if any benefit at all).

Just because you resubmit your sitemap, doesn't mean Google is going to crawl the URLs in your sitemap instantly.

For your e-commerce site, if you are wanting to speed up the indexing of new products or product categories, you can use the 'Fetch as Google' tool in Search Console to request faster indexing.

Also, news sites don't need to resubmit sitemaps to have their content indexed faster. Sites that are in Google news will have a news XML sitemap that is basically a direct feed for Google to index their news content instantly - no need to resubmit sitemaps.

Unless you've made some major structural changes to your site, you don't really need to worry about resubmitting your sitemap.

Cheers,

David

Hi newwaves,

Your site has a lot of low quality links with exact-match anchor text like "seo companies in qatar", "web development qatar", "web design qatar", "digital marketing companies in qatar". In fact, just about all of your links are spam.

As an SEO provider, I'm sure you are aware that these types of links are exactly what Google's Penguin algorithm targets and they are not going to help you in the long run, even if you have seen some benefit in the short term.

I don't know if you have disavowed these links, but I would say that the Google algorithm is doing it's job here and has identified the spam tactics used on this page and is choosing not to rank it anymore.

You should do a full backlink audit asap and disavow all your low quality links. You should do this before you receive a manual penalty.

Cheers,

David

Hi yukung,

Did anything change on the page when you moved URLs? Was it redesigned? Content changed? Anything?

If any changes were made, it's possible that these are the reason for the decrease in traffic...but it's hard to give good advice without knowing the URL.

Are you able to PM me the URL?

Cheers,

David

Hi Frank,

It's hard to say if it's an issue or not without knowing the URL.

Only reason I could think that Moz would be reporting no title tag and you are seeing a title tag is that maybe there are two title tags on the page...

Are there two? And is the first title tag empty?

Cheers,

David

Hi Jonathan,

There's no issue in publishing content as it's ready.

Check our Rand's WBF from last week where he says the publishing frequency doesn't exist.

If it's good content covering new topics for your site, you can only see good results.

Cheers,

David

Hi bridhard8,

In your example, "SHOP NIKE SHOES" is the anchor text because it's the text between the <a>tags.</a>

<a>Change that button text and you change the anchor text.

Cheers,

David</a>

Hi Luke,

I don't think you have anything to worry about with making the improvements in one go.

As long as you are improving your titles to make them more relevant to the content on the page (and not just jamming them keywords), you won't be upsetting Google and you would only see positive results.

Cheers,

David

Hi Ben,

You won't get any benefit out of this and I wouldn't recommend doing it just to get "art" in the domain name.

I'd 100% stick with the established .com domain.

Cheers,

David

Hi Annabel,

OSE and other link tools may tell you if a site is linking to you, but they are not foolproof because it depends on whether those tools have indexed those links - which could take months.

The best way to check if a site is linking to you is with Screaming Frog.

Crawl the site you want to check and go to 'Bulk Export' > 'External Links'.

This will give you a spreadsheet with all the external links on that domain and from there you can find any links to your domain.

Cheers,

David

Hi Wozniak65,

OSE is not the right tool to use for checking internal links and I'm not sure why you would want to find an alternative to Screaming Frog for this?

If you want to use the best tool for the job - use Screaming Frog.

Cheers,

David

"create some backlinks using the keywords" sounds super dodgy!!

You shouldn't be the one creating links to your site.

You have really good content and I don't think you'll have much trouble getting links to your site with a bit of outreach and relationship building with other quality sites in your niche.

Don't ruin your awesome content by link building like it's 2010.

Cheers,

David

Hi Chris,

I quickly ran your site through Screaming Frog and found that this new page is not linking from your site anywhere - it's what's known as an "orphan page".

By not linking from the site, it is not receiving any "authority" from your domain and you will have a hard time getting it to rank for anything.

The first thing I would do is to make sure it's linking from your site and check how it's going in a few weeks.

Cheers,

David

Hi Julian,

The reason your GSC account isn't reporting your images as indexed is that they are on a different subdomain to your GSC account - GSC will only report indexed URLs that are on the exact subdomain of that account.

And are the images actually used on the site? None of them showed up in a Screaming Frog crawl...

Cheers,

David

Hi Marielle,

Why do you want to "enhance your DA"? It is not associated with Google and has no impact on your rankings or traffic - it is a third party metric.

With a new website, it might take Moz a couple of months to crawl links to your site and start reporting on your DA, but it honestly doesn't matter.

It's better to focus on real metrics from Google Analytics or Google Search Console.

Cheers,

David

Hi Ryan,

Yes, this is the major problem with point-to-point keyword ranking reports and the reason I don't use them (take any increases or decreases with a grain of salt.)

It's possible with these type of ranking reports that G might be testing something at the time the keyword ranking is checked, which could cause it to be reported at a much higher or lower position than you would normally see it.

When looking at keyword rankings, I prefer to look at the average ranking position in Google Search Console because it gives a better indication of how keywords are performing over time.

Cheers,

David