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Thank you both of you for the replies.

I try to report as I find them, but will be even more vigilant now about it.

As for Rebecca's questions: It's a algorithmic bad ranking penalty, still call it a penalty since it's penalizing us and reason I think it's penguin is the site in question has traffic patterns that best fit a site suffering from panda and penguin issues. Panda is part of the core algo and hasn't recovered from a single keyword and it's synonyms ranking better than page 5. Penguin is the only algo left that corresponds to the traffic being lost as far back as April 2012. Other reason I say it's penguin is the client's backlink profile is horrid, over 20% follow links are that keyword or synonym anchor text to crap sites, if that's not the trigger for the penguin issue then I'm getting results from doing the wrong things.

Both our redesign and link cleanup have directly increased keyword ranking however every increase that happens isn't passed page 5, I've seen it one page 4 before but only for a day, nothing longer. So it seems to be able to rank higher but is kicked back almost right away faster than it increased. Really seems like it's being " adjusted " after going passed page 5.

It helps a lot like how buying smaller items from the grocery store can add up big and fast.

Say you have a page setup for the keyword SEO, and inside that page you have various other pages off of that one using various longtails like one handles " SEO basics for beginners " with a guide using that keyword and synonyms. And you had a few more that branches off out from the SEO keyword page.

You could use the traffic from the long tail keywords to funnel into the SEO keyword page, helping you rank better ( as long as the content is appealing to the users ) for the keyword SEO.

It's a strategy mindset that wins with longtails as apposed to a brute force approach.

As well SEO having 5,000 per month traffic is a much higher competition than SEO basic for beginners at 40, meaning you have a better chance at ranking higher 1st with that longtail word and having traffic that could be funneled into the harder competing keyword, which at long as you get good metrics from your traffic to that SEO page will increase your overall ranking for SEO as well.

I have a competitor who I've talked about on here before about how they passed us in ranking for our main keywords and that they were a new site ( less than 6 months old ).

Well after further digging a few things were found out:

• Our site seems to have a penguin penalty causing our keywords ( a group of synonyms as well ) from ranking better than rank 30.
• As well our competitor has been using this weird backlink tactic of using SEO sites ( a friend? ), a parent site to prop it up ( footer links and others ) as well has links inside articles that aren't relevant as in having a commercial niche page inside a lawyer site page talking about phone dialing. Then the low DA directory sites.

I'm curious as to if penguin algo will catch them once it comes out, if not penguin a manual review would certainly catch their tactics, but this site is doing everything else other than proper SEO.

What do you think?

It's better to 301 a page if it's relevant than it is to let it go 404. However if it's a service or product you no longer carry, might be better off keeping it a 404 so the page goes away unless you think you'll be using that url again.

404s won't hurt you unless you have a huge number of them, but if you have a page you no longer want and wish for it to be forgotten about, you can let it 404 and will eventually go bye bye.

I ran your site url through Screaming Frog it found more pages than I expected at 30% and was still counting so I took a quick glance at the urls it was returning and found hundreds of urls containing the same words like " vendor " , " foundation " , " js " over and over and over again. Then just did a search for " .js subpage looping ".

About moz saying what your page count was, this is what threw me off, since after I saw the ungodly high amount of urls I did a site:yourdomain.com search in google to see how many pages were being indexed and was returned a normal amount somewhere around 1,240 pages.

The cloaking / anything blackhat is a big deal to get off as soon as possible, even the left over script could be seen as an issue. But in this case it's also causing extra pages to be seen so removing that script will help clear up a great bit of google's confusion, since if screaming frog was having issues so was google then, and could even be why you dropped in ranking.

Screaming frog saw these pages as various different ones:

http://www.stephita.com/articles/Bombonieres-made-to-Match-your-Wedding-Invitations/js/vendor/js/js/vendor/js/vendor/js/foundation/js/vendor/js/js/foundation.min.js

http://www.stephita.com/articles/Wedding-Reception-Invitations-After-the-Wedding/js/foundation/js/foundation/js/foundation/foundation.js

http://www.stephita.com/articles/Pocket-Wedding-Invitations/js/foundation/js/vendor/js/vendor/js/js/foundation/js/vendor/js/vendor/js/vendor/js/js/vendor/js/js/vendor/js/foundation.min.js

All from the article subpage, so I guess that's the home of that script or at least where it starts to make new pages.

***Seems something is going on with your internal link structure, many many many weird urls with duplicate subpages:

http://www.stephita.com/wedding/Invitations/js/vendor/js/vendor/js/vendor/js/vendor/js/foundation/js/vendor/js/foundation/js/vendor/js/vendor/js/vendor/js/vendor/js/vendor/js/foundation/js/js/vendor/js/vendor/js/js/vendor/js/foundation/js/vendor/js/foundation/js/js/foundation/js/js/foundation/js/vendor/js/vendor/js/foundation/js/vendor/js/vendor/js/js/js/vendor/js/js/foundation/js/vendor/js/vendor/js/js/vendor/js/js/js/vendor/js/js/foundation.min.js

Seems it's a .js subpage loop going on, http://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/93844/child-pages-loop

So that handles the huge page total issue, get this handled and maybe peek into other pages and see how they are worded and structured, make sure every page has it's h1 tag but only one h1, h2 - h5 for anything else if it needs it. For a 10 position move, I wouldn't imagine there is a huge number of issues going on. It's really a matter of finding them.

End Update

Curious as I went to run screaming frog on your site and its saying it's only 30% done crawling your site at 8,549 pages, then is showing me 33,359 pages and counting to go!

Do you really have this many pages?

If so, do you need them all?

If you have 30k + pages, odds are you might have some bad pages from all that. Having this amount of pages makes it very hard to do good SEO unless you've been doing good SEO since day one.

I'd say it's not a penalty since you only went from page 1 to page 2, that happens even on good days, often is a sign of competitors one uping you somehow.

If you can, I'd suggest pruning a good portion of these pages unless you have to have them, like they are product pages or such.

At the time of writing this, it's still totaling your total pages it's up to 53,932 pages now and still counting, screaming frog is at 29% to go from 31%.

As for the article about penguin being part of the core, I have read a few articles back in January of this year about that but nothing instead it was an unnamed update and then the adwords update. So far no one has 100% declared that penguin was a part of the core update yet.

And from what you've mention a 10 placement drop doesn't seem like a algo penalty, more like some tactics that were working on your site stopped, or other sites have updated their content and appear more relevant, causing your site to drop to page 2.

Let me give an example as to what penguin penalty could be like, I have a keyword for a client that would not rank passed page 4, and has grown to stay on page 6 and 7. After a recent site redesign where I made SEO top priority when I launched the site, about 2 weeks or so after we saw that keyword rise, from page 7 up to page 3. Stayed on page 3 for a day or two, then dropped back to page 6 then to page 7, stopping right back where it was. This most likely is a penguin penalty, especially after seeing a not so awesome backlink profile with excessive anchor text for that keyword to directories galore as well as comment spam.

I think if you were hit by an algo penalty that you'd be suffering ranking issues on a much more severe scale. I don't think your site sucks, it's just that you always have to keep your site up to date, gone are the days of posting content and walking away. You need to creating new content, promote it correctly, improve it, constantly check backlinks, check competitors, stay on top of current trends of your industry. And changes you make today, won't really show results in SERPs as fast as you'd like. Sometimes it can take time.

Panda is part of the google core algorithm now, penguin is not yet, but is expected soon ( sometime between now and the end of this year soon )

So since penguin isn't yet part of the core algorithm, the key is to submit your disavow list as soon as possible, since it can take anywhere from a month to three months for google to nofollow those links you sent. They start nofollowing the urls once you send it in, but for reasons I have yet to gather aren't as speedy with this process as it is when you use the google fetch feature.

My understanding of how site' recover now from penalties are two fold.

If it's a manual penalty ( such as they get a message from google in their webmaster console ) you fix what they mention and submit a reconsideration request.

If it's a algorithmic penalty, you scour the internet and read as much as you can until you get a little crosseyed then you read some more, fix the issues that relate to your penalty ( or what you suspect is your penalty ) and then you wait, you tackle other aspects of your site's SEO and wait until that specific algorithm is rerun / updated and run, then it's not even 100% that your site will recover right away, might take a bit of time after that.

So once you do recover, stress to your client, your boss, or yourself that this cannot ever happen again, and to never ever ever neglect your site's SEO again or this issue will only be 100 times worse.

Hope this helps!

Hello Robert,

Hope you're doing well,

Seems I just didn't include all the info I needed, making posts as if you all have access to the data I have in my head is a mistake

What I meant is I have 500 urls, after doing a full link audit, 153 of those urls are trashy directory or comment spam backlinks with very spammy site templates, also they often times not had anchor text with main keywords of ours.

Now yes, 153 out of 500 urls isn't that bad, however the 153 urls are more than 3 years old, and our total backlinks has grown from 160 ( a year ago ) to 500 ( today ) meaning at one point in time, we did have a majority of backlinks that were from trashy directories and comment spam, in fact last year ( 160 - 153 left us with 7 possibly ok backlinks )  was the most recent, so it's a very high possibility these urls were the reason we got hit by penguin ( have data that suggest this as well ).

It's easy to get fixated on one SEO keypoint or another, but when you do, just remember to follow the data trail and make sure to see the other SEO footprints as well during that search, you can find a good bit.

Even answering questions from others here helps me find further keypoints to highlight and go through.

If those links aren't doing anything else but redirecting, yes, get rid of those, they aren't helping you and could hurt you if they haven't already.

If they were all from the same domain, i'd disavow that domain as well, but that doesn't seem to be the case. As it was mentioned above by another poster.

You shouldn't need to disavow eventwire.com unless there is a backlink from them to your site, and it's not helping anyone. But remember not to get carried away when using the disavow tool, just remember this nifty saying **" when in doubt, leave it out. when it stinks, disavow the links " . **

No one at google reads these, it's all done automatically now, the comments are for your usage when you look at the disavow list at a later date.

Yes, when you submit your next disavow file, say you disavowed 10 the 1st time and wanted to disavow 10 more, so your 2nd disavow file will have 20 urls in it, 10 from the last time and 10 from this time.

It's best course to download the text file from before and add the urls you want to remove this time to that txt file, add a comment about that time to help you remember or inform others.

Here is an article from 2014 from moz.com that helps explain this further - https://moz.com/blog/guide-to-googles-disavow-tool

Remember you don't have to comment these, but at the very least, comment each time you use the disavow feature at least, this will make things easier on you.

Just be careful, removing even spammy urls could alter your domain authority or possibly worse. always be 100% sure if you want the urls selected to be ignored, this process can take as little as a month and as much as 3 months with some people taking a year to have a url disavowed. And if you make a mistake, that's about how long it can take to correct it.

Just a " heads Up " the Original Poster was saying he had " 301 domains linking to his site, not that he has a domain 301ing to his site "

I've just come from this area for a recent client, Luckily for me it was only 700 urls total.

**I got all the links linking back to my site ( backlinks ) from: **

1. Google Webmaster Tools ( Search console )
2. Moz.com
3. Ahrefs.com
4. SEMrush

Added them all to a spreadsheet, downloaded an addon in google sheets called "remove duplicates" to remove same urls, once that was done, I put as much information for these urls as I could find, both what was already listed from those sites I got the backlinks from. Then I also went and visited every single one of them, listed if they were still working or 404, what the anchor text was, what the domain authority and page authority was and anything else to help, like was it a foreign site or a directory listing or comment spam.

I had over 75% of my backlink profile was nofollow or was a directory / comment spam.

So far I have disavowed 153 urls, I have more but want to do chunks at a time so if something really horrid and unforeseen happens I can reavow ( yes thats a real thing ) the urls a section at a time a wait.

I recommend doing this once to create a master backlink list, and just keep things dated and correct so you only have to add to it each month and keep up to date on your backlink profile!

Since backlinks are on par with content in terms of ranking there is no reason to not be so involved with backlinks.

In niche industries, I've found guest posting to be best.

You search for blogs that relate to your content, you read through their site because if you don't you cannot be personal in your request and that well look automated and you wont get an answer.

Tell them that you want to write for them and have a link back to your site and that you'd like them to write for you and include a link to their site. Then go about explaining why they'd even want a backlink and how it can help them.

This method has worked so far 10 out of 10 times.

Another method I've heard is to try to sponsor a local team, pitch an internship to a college, look for broken links to related content resources.

Thanks for the reply, I agree with your points but also felt I didn't explain the rest of the backlinks quality that well either.

they have around 450 backlinks, 102 use that keyword we want as main as anchor text, the rest of the links aren't all good either.

Most of the 411 backlinks are nofollow it seems, with around 150 of those links being follow. Many of the follow links are under 50 DA and majority of those are directory listings or comment links.

This is why I think they've been hit, since the the backlink anchor text for follow links are using our main keyword and aren't to very high quality sites.

Couple that info with the fact I've had google index that one landing page 3 separate times since our redesign launch a month ago and only that main keyword fails to gain rank, It did make a big jump when we launched the redesign from 72 to 58 then to 41 but 2 days after ranking up to 41 it dropped back to 62 where it has stayed for the week, moving up to 64 and holding.

This is while every other keyword has improved by 20+ ranks, just this one keyword isn't going anywhere, I have around 160 more links to define the DA, follow or nofollow and anchor text if follow, then I will be grouping those follow links into a best to worst list and disavow 10 of the worst urls at a time every week to see how things go.

What do you think?

Hello,

I jumped aboard as SEO for a client, who seems to of had been hit by panda and penguin back in 2012 of April, the panda part I feel I've fixed by creating better content, combining pages that were same topic into one, basically creating a better content experience that relates better to search terms users are searching for.

Once the site was redesigned and relaunched all keywords improved minus one, the main keyword they want to rank for. Created a landing page for it, that is very nicely optimized for that keyword and it's brothers and sisters, however that page isn't used by google since it's brand new with a PA of 1.

Doing a backlink audit I found 102 links out of 400 using the same anchor text as the keyword they want ranked for, they also have synonyms anchor text for other links too but not quite as much.

Most of those 102 domains using the main keyword anchor text are directories, in my opinion I'd declare all of them spam, however there are a few with DAs higher than 50, making me little more nervous to disavow, since I want to make sure we get out of the penalty if we were hit by penguin but also don't want to ruin the ranking for other keywords we're doing better with, since they are longtails and short, but very relevant to users.

How is the best way to determine if a site / directory is spammy enough that it's penalizing you and how could I approach the anchor text issue with backlinks? 99% of these links I cannot have changed, since they're directories I doubt many have had a human mess with them in a while.

Sidenote* If you're going to post a link as a response, try to summarize what that link will be about, as many times links are giving as an answer but end up not really providing the meat we were seeking.

Thank you!

I have had good results using individual product pages with the exception that products that only differ by color, size and material type, can be listed on the same page and create new options like color, size and material so you can list the item by its basic name but by users picking the option types they want, they get the blue 3 foot long granite slab, or the green, 2 foot wide concrete slab.

Have had my pages come up rather nicely from this, not to mention customers stay on the page and fiddle with options rather than click back or 10 other buttons on the site.

I tried adding onto a question already listed, however that question stayed where it was and didn't go anywhere close to somewhere others would see it, since it was from 2012.

I have a competitor who is completely new, just popped onto the SERPs in December 2015. Now I've wondered how they jumped up so fast without really much in the way of user content.

Upon researching them, I saw they have 200 backlinks but 160 of them are from their parent company, and of all places coming from the footer of their parent company. So they get all of the pages of that domain, as backlinks.

Everything I've read has told me not to do this, it's going to harm the site bad if anything will discount the links.

I'm in no way interested in doing what they did, even if it resulted in page 1 ( which it has done for them ), since I believe that it's only a matter of time, and once that time comes, it won't be a 3 month recovery, it might be worse.

What do you all think?

My question or discussion is why hasn't this site been penalized yet, will they be penalized and if not, why wouldn't they be?

**What is the good, bad and ugly of backlinks in the footer: **

1. Good
2. Bad
3. Ugly

I'd like to revisit this issue.

Why? Recently a competitor who was brand spankin new, propped their site up with this tactic, they had their parent company place a backlink to their site in the footer, so they get 160 some backlinks.

I saw this as one of the most boneheaded moves since what I read constantly says don't do this, google will throat check you.

However they aren't being penalized like I thought and read. In fact, they've surpassed my client's site in rankings. It's a bit perplexing to experience really.

So even though others have said :

Don't link externally in the footer

A couple of other rules that I see people violate all the time that Google has made painfully clear in the past few months: Don't link externally in the footer. Just don't. I'm not going to go into the reasons. Just don't do that.

What will happen to sites that link to other sites from their footer?

Hello,

This one I know since I just did it, only in reverse, had to remove someone since they didn't like the notifications.

Click on your circle icon for your account ( in the top right of the page ) or goto " Billing and Subscriptions " and then inside the blue bar click " Manage Seats " And then click " Assign a Seat ".

Hope this helps!

Very good points guys thanks!

• To Patrick: Yes, bad, bad backlinks in some cases, I'm actually in the middle of a backlink audit ( looking at our backlinks directories seem to have scraped us and or even a negative SEO campaign. ) So I want to remove the directories and other sad excuses for backlinks, especially ones using the anchor text of our keyword.
• As for the homepage title I only removed the 1st part of the keyword and replaced with a synonym that was already ranking for the homepage.  Reason I didn't want the homepage to rank, was that it simply doesn't give the searcher what they were searching for, yes it has the links, but not the meat. The subpage I want to rank for this, has about 6 additional paragraphs that explain the meat a searcher will want explained to them when searching for the keyword.

_I can send you a link to the site in private message. _

• To Dmytro: Yes it's a new page the subpage is, with a PA of 1, so homepage easily outranks it, and the homepage was ranking for this keyword before the redesign. So could be an issue of time google needs to see this page changed and the keyword isn't relevant any longer or I'll just need to build up the subpage to the point it takes back the keyword relevance.

_I can send you a link to the site in private message. _

Hello and thanks for the reply!

Backlinks / Anchor Text - ( Seems directories ( the cheap free ones ) have linked to us a good amount of times using our keyword )

Wonder if it will help to disavow some of these, because feel these are hurting us not just their quality but the pages the backlinks show up on changes based on how many backlinks they have, so the total number of backlinks changes + or - 1( or more ) because of these kinda directories.

Content - Homepage was completely rewritten upon redesign, the keyword we want to rank on the subpage doesn't appear at all, minus the anchor text for the link to that subpage. On the subpage itself, uses the keyword 13 times, as well in alt tags for images. Its hard to avoid the keyword being used that many times even, since it describes the material types as well.

Title tags are good, the homepage did have the keyword in it ( naturally ) but changed it to a synonym.

Seems a few backlinks using the anchor text with keyword will help pry the homepage away from the keyword relevance.

How do you feel about that?

Recently did a site redesign, 95% of the site and keywords are matching up in terms of keyword to what page is ranking for that keyword. All and all was expected and pleased with the redesign, except...

A subpage ( PA 1 ) really is a landing page for the main keyword in question is only one jump from the hompage, is it's own category and has the exact match anchor text to its page from the homepage, has a total of 14 total keyword usages.

The homepage has a PA of 28, mentioned the keyword once in the body text in form of anchor link, yet still steals the thunder from the main keyword. There aren't a ton of backlinks, but ones we do have 95% of them goto the homepage.

Subpage in question has a on page grade of A for the keyword, while the homepage has an on page grade of C. No backlinks at all for this page yet.

Subpage even uses the keyword as it's url name, so kinda at a loss to what else I can do, it's a new page, so alll I keep thinking is the issue is the page authority, it's linked to from other pages on the site.

Any suggestions?

Thank you greatly for the effort and time,

All the ideas and suggestions can help, it's certainly a long game.

This should get us started for a bit, anything worth something takes time to complete.

Thank you again!

Of course! We're all in the same boat, Any info I get will be directly passed on in this question section.

You got it!

The industry I have to be secretive about, but will say its a distribution company for commercial equipment that every commercial building needs.

That was the only part I wanted to be private, not the answers related. The rest of the conversation will be here.

I'll respond to this in private, but we can continue this here so it can benefit others.

I'd love some help in this department.

As most ideas I've read seem completely unrelated or unreasonable for a very niche industry, basically to the point I've been completely dumbfounded as to how to approach this.

Guest blogging is extremely hard to do in this industry where there aren't many blogs if any that would even be worth the effort to find them, since normal methods turn up little leads.

We have our manufacturers linking back, but other than that and the trickle we get from directory scrapers and links to actual content, backlinks for niche industries seem like a uphill battle.

Even the blogs here at moz and elsewhere on niche industry backlink building haven't really helped, due to the nature of what is being sold and the parent industry in general consisting of older than millennials and don't use the internet in a way that would assist us in this process.

In some senses seems we could acquire backlinks easier if we sold black eyes or bad luck.

Any advice in this case?

Also just remember even hunters get lost in the forest, knowledge is a quest not an end result.

Question everything

Thanks for that,

Yes I've been under the impression that any external link in a footer is going to be looked at questionably by google, especially if it's promotional in nature. Since it can indicate a paid link.

I've watched a few competitors using that same tactic to increase their overall DA for freshsite starting, they 1st ranked great and quickly dropped for various keywords relating to that link placed.

Thanks again EGOL & Gary

Are we talking about navigational urls in footers? The kind say a CMS will naturally place there?

Or is this about external sites, which I completely understand, I don't understand how navigational menus in the footer, say of the most popular pages on the site could be considered manipulation or a scheme.

I understand the original poster ( Gary ) is speaking of his site's url on domains he designs in the footer, but now this talk has me wondering the wording of google.

Thanks for the further clarification.

Not to barge in but I recently used these two sites coupled with analytics data to see if a drop correlated with a algo update.

I used http://feinternational.com/website-penalty-indicator/ 

Which will use estimated search traffic as far back as 2012 to present and overlays google algo updates ( color coded by type of algo ) so you can see what drop relates to what algo update.

I also used http://barracuda.digital/panguin-tool/

Which will ask to link to your analytics account ( read only ), you'll select the account, and the view and it will do the same as above, overlays the google algo updates to help you figure out what algo you were possibly hit by. ( also give further info about what each algo was and where to read more about it at )

If you don't want to use those kinda sites, your analytics data will be your best resource, looking for big drops after a steady flatline or increase could be an indication of a penalty, but really don't just assume, find out as much info about the algo update you think relates with your drops to see if your site really lacks in the area the algo was about.

Hope this helps!

I'd have to 3rd the wordpress suggestion, if you had a big site with lots of pages and a involved user portal then Drupal would be the goto suggestion. But if it's a smaller site, no need to deal with the issues of a huge site if you don't need to.

Joomla isn't bad, and can be managed but unless you're a webdev you'll want access to info and scripts and by far the most popular choice is wordpress.

Just make sure you do a thorough product audit so you can reduce the overall amount of product before you put them online, this will help SEO drastically, since you'll have less pages that users would draw attention to that don't work too well.

Screaming frog is pretty easy to export to excel or google sheets, as well can connect to google analytics too.

I was going to link a url about connecting but it was 2 years old - if you still want here you go - https://authoritylabs.com/blog/use-screaming-frog-excel/

Watch a few video tutorials and you'll be up and ready in no time, there is a free version but it has a 500 url limit for crawling among other limitations.

I've had good results grouping the keywords by synonyms and longtails.

Using my main keywords and their synonyms on that keywords landing page, while using longtails of that keyword on different material related product pages and product landing pages. Google picked them up right away, but you need to make sure content is there.

Write down your pages ( as long as their not into the hundreds ) if so do the top 50. And write down lists of keywords to target on each page, then the content can be worded naturally to best fit and rank for.

If you do this right, you can rank multiple pages for one keyword due to the context of the content. If it's different enough but still relative google thinks it's all that and so do your users.

I must second Jordan's reply that Screaming Frog is the best you could spend 100 bucks on a year! You can fully crawl any site, and then clicking the internal tab, then dropbox to html, can set these to be displayed in tree view which will as you imagined, display in a hierarchy which makes research 100 times easier.

Plus it's ability to create reports, check for basic but major SEO issues make it one of the most important swiss army knives you can have in your SEO toolbox.

Do yourself a favor and buy the year license, you won't regret it.

Hello, I also run a few adwords campaigns,

What I've been learning is:

• Making sure landing pages are relevant to user's search queries
• Taking about 2 hours a week or more just for negative keyword adding
• Take twice as long as you do for negative keywords for positive keyword adjustments
• Always watch ad listings like a hawk to adjust when a competitor swoops in so you can adjust accordingly
• Maybe set up a few auto reports if already haven't for things like quality score, ad CTR% and cost overall to see where you can improve.
• Change up ads every so often just the wording and save the older wording to use at a later date, just to keep things fresh.
• Using the above, try new action words and measure any changes via the auto reports

Now with the 4 pack listings, seems number 1 isn't the most desired rank, it's number 3 and 4, since when you scroll down just to see organic listings, the 3 and 4th spot is still visible, creating a very pleasurable price decrease overall by 50% in some cases for EXTREMELY competitive keywords!

I don't know how much longer these awesome prices and google's 4 ad pack goof will continue, but it won't last much longer I'm sure, until google get's data and either reverts back to 3 pack or moves number one spot to 3 or 4th spot to recoup their losses from everyone trying to pay less to rank 3rd or 4th.

But you could or might be enjoying that already if your niche handled the 4 pack listings this way.

I'm on this same path since we too cannot use noindex / nofollow due to limited backend interaction with Bigcommerce.

I like to block all cart related pages, which for ecommerce sites can be a boat load.

• /cart.php
• /checkout.php
• /finishorder.php
• /*login.php

just to name a few, then you have the sorting and compare pages, they have to be blocked or a mess unfolds.

• Disallow: /*sort=newest
• Disallow: /*sort=bestselling
• Disallow: /*?page=       ( Big duplicate page issue if you don't block this one with a wildcard, and cannot access your .htaccess file or the backend properly to noindex / nofollow )

Just to name a few, in my case, I only want the meat of the site to be indexed and rank for. Otherwise one client's site was ranking terms that more related to web development than the niche industry they lived in. Plus with a limited index budget, why would you want google or anyone else to crawl pages on your site with no SEO value towards your niche?

Unless you sold carts as in web developed carts for ecommerce sites you wouldn't want much of that indexed anyways, and even in that case, those pages aren't too useful for ranking. At least from what I've gathered in the niche industries.

So far in my experiences, backlinks especially quality ones are a piece of the SEO golden ticket, closer to a full ticket you piece together, the closer to page 1 you get.

Funnier thing is, backlinks are also some of the hardest to achieve SEO wise, even more so in niche industries where even your competition ranking page 1 has blog comments as backlinks, I'm not ditching blog comments, however they really aren't providing much usefulness to your site's user's.

I'm willing to bet this domain is doing just enough SEO that when combined with the backlinks they have, means they get the SERP results they want.

If your SEO is on point, focus on a effective backlink campaign. It's still the closest thing SEOs have that works well for short game, long game is always content that even your high school teachers couldn't say wrong about.

It's very possible, just don't do anything blackhat or try for fast results. What is impossible is getting to page 1 fast, there just isn't a fast way to do it and stay there.

It will take time, 6 months + kinda time, but once there, you'll still be working hard to stay there, but will be much easier.

I agree wholeheartedly that you should be trying to rank for as many keywords as possible, think of it like honeypots, can catch a few bees with one pot, but the more you have, the more bees you'll catch.

Then you craft the content and page creatively and within regulation standards, you can rank a page for multiple keywords that could potentially rank on page 1. But be careful not to use the same keyword on other pages, and if that keyword is part of a longtail, make sure you craft the content to show that the page is about that longtail.

If you stay relevant with the content compared to the keyword, you'll further increase CTR and conversions.

Also I'd like to add, your homepage should be ranking for what your overall site / service does, not the main things it sells nor the main service. Kinda like a very general keyword usage there, since you want more control over how these keywords rank in SERPs.

I just got done redesigning a client's site that had most of it's keywords ( main ones included ) ranking the homepage for those keywords, which was kinda nightmarish, since customers were hurting our overall CPC campaign and our organic results since they were bouncing so much. A homepage isn't going to be the info hotspot a user wants when they search for a keyword, since it normally is the spot you do brief eye catching highlights of items or services. Think of the homepage more like clickbait.

When you have subpages that specialize on keywords, you have a better chance to give the user what they wanted when finding your page in SERPs which will improve overall rankings and if you advertise, can help lower costs and improve quality scores.

You basically answered your own question just didn't realize it, using example.com/key-word-example should be a subpage targeting a main keyword you want to rank for. That way you'll be able to focus on content for that keyword easier, without worrying about other factors that a homepage needs.

Hope this wasn't TL:DR

Just to be clear I used placeholder examples so not to give out too much info to competitors if reading.

But yes to both, it's trying to optimize for the longtail with our main keyword in it, and with the above aside, it would be " laptop bags " is what we want to overall be our main keyword or main keyword group.

But inside that group, we have very important longtails, that use that keyword but are different material types, so " leather shoulder laptop bags " would be one of those important longtail keywords.

We have a landing page for the 2 word keyword, and child pages for the longtails, so that's where I feel it's kinda over reaching to include the 2 tail keyword twice, once in the parent category and again trailing the material type.

If it will help I can include the actual page and keywords in a private message, otherwise I don't feel it's in my best interest to unmask these details.

Hello,

I have a keyword for lack of providing too much info we will say my keyword is laptop-bags.

Now we have a /laptop-bags/  page and inside that page

**/laptop-bags/leather-shoulder/ **

We got a score of 95 for that page.

Now I got a score of 99 when I changed it to

**/laptop-bags/leather-shoulder-laptop-bags/ **

The way Bigcommerce handles is it will use the product category title in the url, page title and site links, to me it feels like it's spammy, as well as on my /laptop-bags/ page, I now have 18 keywords of " laptop bags " on that page when before it was 12, since I added laptop-bags to all 6 categories inside the laptop-bags page.

How would you handle this, use the /keyword/ then /longtail-keyword/ in full or would using /laptop-bag/leather-shoulder/ still rank for leather shoulder laptop bags? I've asked this before and was told to use whatever sounded better to the user, but now moz is telling me different.

I'd also like to point out that I too have come across a new competitor who just popped in with a new url / site and started out ranking us on our major keywords. I mean page 2 right off the bat, when I audited their site, I saw:

1. many 404s,
2. bad link structure but good enough to function,
3. a shoty backlink campaign that was using a SEO company's site 7 times for various keywords just to rank, and had one actual backlink that would be considered whitehat.

The end result after watching them enjoy page 2 for 2 months, was one day while scanning the SERPs found them not on page 2 but on page 9, then they popped back to page 2 three days later. About 2 weeks later, they were page 10 and still are. Seems the got hit or google caught on to their backlink fun.

Stay whitehat, stay busy / productive and always push forward! Slow and steady does win the race.

The url without a slash seems to be the default now, while url with a slash redirects to one without, only for homepage. all other subpages have slashes as preferred and no matter what result in trailing slash, which is a major thing I wanted.

Thank you, am looking into things further via a Bigcommerce post on their forums, however I'm not holding my breath as some responses can take a good bit, since there is a ocean of users seeking responses as well.

Hello, 1st off, let me explain my client in this case uses BigCommerce, and I don't have access to the backend like most other situations. So I have to rely on BG to handle certain issues.

I'm curious if there is much of a difference using domain.com/ as the canonical url while BG currently is redirecting our domain to domain.com.

I've been using domain.com/ consistently for the last 6 months, and since we switches stores on Friday, this issue has popped up and has me a bit worried that we'll loose somehow via link juice or overall indexing since this could confuse crawlers.

Now some say that the domain url is fine using / or not, as per - https://moz.com/community/q/trailing-slash-and-rel-canonical But I also wanted to see what you all felt about this.

What says you?

This is exactly what I was going on about, it's great for onsite and offsite PR.

See about turning some of your guides into infographics, summarizing the data into easier bits of digestible tidbits. In the world of scan happy folks with a perpetual 5 min attention span, longer is better for SEO but not always for the user unless it's presented in a way that keeps them engaged.

Break up text with interactive bits like links or downloadable pdfs, and even images like many others say. Video is always helpful, but balance is even more important. Like a bag of trail-mix, PR needs a proper mixture of content.

As a fellow eCommerce admin, I believe that the best PR / Outreach we can do, is in terms of customer assistance means, what I mean is, customer help aides, information funnels that better explain, then further breakdowns of those explanations.

Reach out to your manufacturers, services that use your products along side their own ( information for items they may use but don't focus on, ( example would be if you sold lawnmower accessories, reaching out to lawn services and pitch your information pages, if they like it, they'll link to it to spread to their employees maybe or even send to clients to further back up their quality ))

When selling items, we can't really reach out to other sites / services about selling our items, that doesn't get much in return, however we reach out to them providing information that relates to them, they feel you're doing some work for them and then become more receptive.

Think back to web rings / circles back in the early days of the internet, if they were done right, sites with relative content linked up and provided this inner circle of related sites that would play off one another's information.

It's the digital's age of scratching their back while they scratch yours.

Thank you!

I've gone through a 301 the urls we were doing good SEO wise with, however I would rather let the ones that panda seemed to not like get 404d and let them start a new with the revised urls as we bring them online at a later date.

This site had most of the SEO mojo going to the homepage since before I got my hands on the site, they didn't monitor backlinks well nor keyword usage and focused on the homepage as the SEO hub. Not knowing to tamper keywords accordingly throughout the site, keeping relative keywords only on the pages they best fit on.

The site ranked so poorly for the urls we're removing, as well the products weren't very profitable it at all. So keeping what worked best on the site was our focus while removing what wasn't helpful to the user or us.

Thank you again for the advice and I've certainly utilized what both of you have mentioned for what we really want to keep. And will be allowing the urls we're not happy with any longer to 404.

Thank you,

So what's the best course of action to take, if I want to keep these categories off the new site but will be adding them later on? How is it recommended to handle the resulting 404s?

I'm sure this happens in other sites, either a discontinuation of a product category, and a consolidation of products in general, or even site's hit by panda, how do they keep the content not seen and not affect them with the 404s if they do remove?

I thought about nofollow noindex but these products they want off completely for now.

We're going from about 664 pages to 130 pages internally.

We'll be removing 531 urls when we launch this new site in a week. All 531 pages are products that we will be working on their descriptions and overall SEO in general, but are not ready to go live with them.

Hello,

My client wants to launch a redesign early, problem is they want to do this without a majority of their product pages, since the bulk of their sales aren't from these missing categories, will the resulting 404s hurt them?

What is up, is the major pages structured around their primary keyword, most of their sales isn't from the product pages, but from the quotes turned into sales. Big ticket items aren't sold through the cart, they are call or email for quotes and normally those quotes are turned into sales once they realize the price is better.

We will be adding these missing categories and products, just one section at a time. Since 404s don't hurt, and we don't rank very well from the products missing, should I be concerned about any thing else?

Thank you