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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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