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I've recently used a organic traffic checker that showed you your traffic compared to each google algo update. I was interested in how they derived the organic traffic totals for each month, without having access to our site's google analytics? I've since compared the data to historical google analytics data and it's not wrong, isn't 100% match either but isn't far from fact.

So if they're predicting or making a guess, it's rather spot on, site crawlers and SERPs snapshots only provide so much info, I'm just wondering where they get the rest from and how?

Thank you for the responses, upon further investigation, I did a 5 year data grab and looked at the organic traffic in general, then found another graph that shows google algo updates in coloration to those monthly organic traffic totals and saw that Google Panda hit us a few times back in 2012 and we seem to never have recovered from it.

Which tells me we still have something going on with this site related to panda, but what doesn't make sense is one keyword we try to rank for seems to be affected while other keywords we can increase rank with.

As far as content is concerned, I've created a few completely new guides and even a handbook for users, content wise this site gives more to users than most sites, in fact, haven't seen other sites even have the level of helpful content geared towards the customer other than manufacturers.

Is it possible to be hit with a panda penalty for one keyword for ranking? Or would that only happen from an over optimization issue? Reason I ask is that is for our big keyword ( which is a two word phrase ) with an (s) at the end we're page 7, without the (s) we're page 5. But for our secondary keyword, that uses one of the words from our big keyword, we rank page 3 for both variations with and without (s).

Hello,

I'm trying to explain to a client, as to why certain websites that appear in the top 50 listings for a keyword are there when they don't have very good backlink profiles, and for this keyword, seems you need a high PA above 20 or DA above 25, just to page for page 2 - 3.

Running a full SERPs report, I have seen that backlinks to the page that's ranking seems to be as high of a factor as PA, followed by DA and overall backlink profile. Having a high score in one of these 4 areas seems to increase your ranking. However, going into page 3 and beyond, seems that things kinda take a weird turn.

After comparing the client's site to those ranking on page 2 I could see that all of them had better PA and more links to the page ranking for that keyword, so page 2 I understand why we don't rank on yet.

However, looking at page 3, I see that the client's site in question has better PA, DA, links to page and overall links to domain. Which leaves me to think we have a penalty that's keeping us ranking 50 or beyond. Since our metrics across the boards for what MOZ is showing as ranking factors.  The more odd issue is that looking at the line graph, shows right at the time we implemented sitewide https our ranking for this one keyword dropped, while rankings for our other keywords increased.

Am I to assume it's a keyword density penalty? What penalties are there with a outcome of ranking limits?

Yes I have run a full report, but thank you very much for the resource, I'm sure others will find it very helpful.

From the report I've seen that our backlink profile seems to be our biggest issue of ranking, especially since we lost one of our biggest. And for a niche industry eCommerce site, it's very difficult to find backlink opportunities.

Hoping that after this site redesign we will of increased out DA and PA some, but won't see that change for a few more months at best.

Again thank you for the resource and response everyone!

You're very welcome, we're all in this google together.

I know that issue all too well, happens a lot with sitemap pages, sites that don't declare one type or url structure so they have site.com/ and site.com.

I'm kinda surprised the CMS doesn't redirect the url when you create the friendly url, but glad they agreed to work on it, I would utilize your best offense and get the other customers of the CMS to upvote and squeak their wheels.  Since this also seems like a case of a CMS missing crucial features for site growth.

If they don't fix this promptly, consider if possible a switch to a more commonly used CMS like Drupal, Wordpress or even Joomla, all are established for years with these kinda issues already worked out and in some cases extra addons to help assist. But understand, often the choice of CMS isn't always up to us.

It does seem like for now, best you can do is try and reduce what you can on that page, but could be that the issue will keep presenting itself until the root cause is contained.

Ahh yes, this is a very niche product, they just haven't had enough users to bring up all the various features that are desired. Or just don't understand SEO and how to develop for it, which is something many CMS providers have dealt with or are dealing with.

From reading through the editor guide pdf, seems it really gives you the basic options of site editing, no backend or much frontend control in that aspect either.

Can I ask why the duplicate content can't be deleted? Is it that it's one content piece but being displayed on various pages? If it's not too much content being duplicated, you might be ok.

Homepages in general do this because we as people put forth the meat of the site on the homepage, sometimes it works for us but often in the SEO world it works against us. Homepages should be optimized for the brand name and keywords related to the company or person, almost like a lighthearted about us page without specifics.

Then you place the meat on the service or product pages, so they have the optimized keywords to signal to crawlers that this page is best suited in case someone searches this keyword.

I'm actually redesigning a site right now because their older site was basically targeting all their keywords on the homepage via product listings and summaries of those products, even though the product category pages had great content that was more indepth and relevant, the homepage is also naturally the highest page rank of the site, so seems to get chosen over lesser ranked pages for keywords they both have.

Take another look at your site and maybe list the primary and secondary keywords you'd want each page to rank for, and make sure those keywords are correlated.

The Plastic Surgeon example for keyword targeting would be:

Homepage - **Surgeon's Name, Company, Florida Based, Plastic Surgery Professionals ( etc ) **

Surgeon Service Page - Miami, FL Plastic Surgeons, breast augmentation, plastic surgery breast augmentations, And other longtail keywords related to this niche.

So when both user's goto the page from serps they stay and convert and when crawlers go through, they find the meat of a search query on the page you want them to find it on.

Yes you're right, needs to be in the header,

What CMS is this? The resulting answer would be what determines the possible alternatives. Drupal was one I worked with for a few years and still do, modules and some template editing was what solves some SEO issues I've had experience with. But again, not all CMS are created equal.

I sometimes wonder if Domain Authority takes much time to increase, I've watched a Brandnew site, go from 1 to 9 in about 3 to 4 months, with 47 pages and only 8 backlinks most from a SEO site.

Seems they found a magic solution, since in that same time, I've seen myself and other sites, add content, increase backlinks but since we lost a backlink or two, and went through the reindexing, we've lost points to our DA, mind you my client's site and their competitors in question are 650+ pages including product pages.

I'm starting to wonder if the eCommerce stores in general are being hurt because of the product pages, instead of helped.

Since why would a site with 47 pages be more authoritative on a subject while other sites include actual help content and products that further the keyword in question.

I think the backlinks to that site in question bug me the most, since most are from an SEO site with a 30 DA, but is still enough to rank for the keyword we are trying for in a huge jump ahead of us. Some of this doesn't seem to follow rhyme or reason.

Seems less is more.

I do understand that it's not a good recommendation, however, our site hasn't been ranking better than 15 to 20 for longtails and for the major keyword, we rank 45 to 60 often, the biggest thing I see missing, is the keyword in the url structure, this keyword is basically our whole business. So seeing that this new site pops up, with 47 pages, ranked poorly for these keywords before and jumped from last place to 4 pages ahead of us in such a short period of time, with a DA of 9 and 10 less backlinks than us, and they have the keyword we want to rank for in all urls that matter, really makes you wonder, if all the standards being followed are really what works.

We also have a bigger social media following / engagement than our competition, and I've seen that really have no affect on rankings so far.

Currently I have for our big keyword oursite.com/big-keyword/ and clicking on a material type will be

oursite.com/big-keyword/material-type/

Our competition has **theirsite.com/big-keyword/ **and when you click on their material type

**theirsite.com/material-type-big-keyword/ **

The also have 20 some pages, while we have around 652 as a eCommerce site as well, not sure why they jumped so high in rankings, while their backlink structure is so small still and they have a DA half of ours.

I'm in the middle of a site redesign and very close to restructuring the urls the way they have it, since it really seems to have worked well.

How do you feel about that?

It's best to use dimensions in your img code, since this helps speed up the whole rendering process, and if those images are already scaled both in size and resolution for that image size, then things work even better. This is what image optimization is all about, creating less file waste both in time and size during page loads for the user.

The best way to prevent distortion with images, is to make sure they are scaled for their size and resolution, using a image editing program like photoshop ( paid ) or Gimp ( free opensource ) you can properly scale the images in just a way to keep the pixels at the right variables for the image quality.

Here are a few articles to help explain further.

http://www.sitepoint.com/resize-an-image-in-photoshop/

http://guides.lib.umich.edu/c.php?g=282942&p=1888162

http://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/how-to-resize-and-make-images-larger-without-losing-quality/

And a website that claims will resize without loosing quality, but be warned, I have not used it, just appeared in results and felt it could be of use.

http://www.simpleimageresizer.com/

I'm going through this right now, am a month and two weeks into it so far.

I went through the whole site to confirm no http urls were hardcoded that all urls used either relative or //site.com, images and resources too if you host your own.

After that I made a new google webmaster site for the https version I was about to redirect to. So I could monitor the amount of pages indexed compared to the http site,

As long as you have the redirect in order, there shouldn't be a reason to lose Domain Authority, since moving to a https sitewide is promoted in google seo, via the indexing more of https sites as long as you followed their guidelines: https://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2015/12/indexing-https-pages-by-default.html

As far as I've read and understood, you're more likely to lose DA from losing a high DA backlink, being penalized, loosing a good chunk of indexed pages from google, and so on. Converting to an https sitewide is improving your site and the user experience via adding that extra layer of security, which I haven't heard of penalizing a site for that yet.

Keyword rankings I feel have better chance of improving over time, long term that is, since users will tend to want to click on https sites when choice is with an unsecured site, especially when using credit cards, so that would improve your ranking signals overall.

Just make sure your https site is gaining indexed pages and the http site will drop in total and you're doing great! Keep up any 404 fixes prompt to keep index rate constant.

Hope this helps!

Certainly and thanks!

They chose Bigcommerce so they wouldn't need to worry about security and cart features along with updates that may be needed in the future and not implemented quick enough that it causes a site issue. It's not a huge company so time is better spent on customer quotes since that seems to be what generates leads along side providing the proper information to answer all issues that a user has as redundantly as possible. ( even then it's hit or miss it seems )

They have used magento, opencart, and I believe a few others but have been happiest with BG. But from a SEO and backend developer standpoint, it's kinda a giant waste of time, since logs out after weird idle times, has a limited backend use mainly css and html, minor room for js use without overloading pagespeed since bg uses a good bit of js themselves. And no ability to use custom php anywhere...( pouts )

But looking at it for what they need, it's pretty much the whole package, They didn't want to worry about servers or the security, updating and basically everything a web admin would be handling anyways.

Hello,

Page loading speed is a huge deal, not just in SEO matters, but for user experience that will equal SEO value as well.

From a glance:

1. Images are a big factor - what these means is many images might be saved as too high a filesize or maybe the resolutions are too much for what is needed, normally under 800px by 800px unless you have a image site and even then a image optimization strategy would be helpful there. **Way to fix this: **Go through your images and add file dimensions as well edit their image size to better fit what is needed ( many images are saved as 1000 x 1000 but are rendering as 100 x 100 so you could resave them as 150 x 150 and save a lot of time ) also make sure filesizes are normally under 100kb Read more - https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/optimizing-content-efficiency/image-optimization?hl=en Try sites like this - http://optimizilla.com/

2. You have a good sized redirect chain going, I understand you want to keep link juice going, but maybe look further into what is being redirected and if they are being done as you need them, or if you could stand to prune them a bit.

Mainly though, seems you will see a huge improvement if you do some image optimization, since that is the bulk of your loading issue.

Hope this helps! And I'm sure others can add more about the report, such as browser caching, the search queries in urls and a few others I didn't mention.

Greetings, hope you're doing awesome today!

I have a current client in an industry niche, I got them to do a site redesign, based on the many factors needing correction on the current site. I have a good 40 some items still to address, from my frequent manual site audit / proofreading.

Reason I am here, is that I'm seeking fresh eyes to address anything I may have missed, of course at a glance, I don't expect a site audit, but do have some concerns about url structure and page titles as you move from category to category. It's a bigcommerce site, so some things that are normal SEO actions aren't as simply implemented.

Also, since this is a client, and I'm sure they have competitors using sites like this, I need to keep the url private as well as any specifics, of course for readers in the future, I can or you can mention general issues and solutions.

Thank you and please, if interested, will send url at request, can send both the live and dev urls.

I'm writing meta descriptions for this site, trying to keep them different, however, for two product types, I want to add the same info I added in the other likeminded product's meta descriptions. Is this ok as long as it's not the whole sentence or am I really to rewrite the same info another way, which is hard for " quick shipping available for x amount of colors ".

Any Advice?

Thanks for the responses,

When you say "Purple Puma Running Shoes" tells me a lot more about what the actual product is "shoes" specifically for "running" than a brand name.

Do you mean it's better to use that for the title and in the breadcrumbs?

I wasn't sure if it was redundant to have in the breadcrumbs, Home > Running Shoes > Purple Puma Running Shoes

Since the title was " Purple Puma Running Shoes " too, as this would be the product page for purple puma running shoes, and would be a major keyword phrase.

And how could you not want a pair of pumas! though I'd love a pair of green on blue pumas!

Sorry for the title of this, but didn't know the best way to put it.

I have a question with category naming for products,

To keep things simple, I'll use shoes for this example.

Say I have a category, running-shoes, so the url would be, site.com/running-shoes/ and inside this category I have purple-pumas

so the url is site.com/running-shoes/purple-pumas/

And I have the title Purple Puma Running Shoes

Is that ok, or should I just use the title Purple Pumas ?

The breadcrumbs shows Home > Running Shoes > Purple Puma Running Shoes  then and I wasn't sure if that would be too much? Or how about using another version of the keyword for the title, like Purple Puma Jogging sneakers?

Any ideas?

Thank you!

No physical face to face meetings, being a online distributor, we deal with them on the phone, through email, and sometimes fax.

Hello and thanks for reading!

We have a bit of a rare issue, where we are a nationwide distributor but have a local side that handles all tristate area requests, the sales that happen via local basically don't impact the online side, so we're trying to not focus on local SEO but in a sense worry about abroad local SEO.

We want to try the location based service pages, but not for every state, at most 5 states and inside those pages target 2 to 3 big cities.

Is this a waste of time to even think about or is this something that can be done with a careful touch?

Thank you, I was leaning towards adding the subject keyword that the help was for, but wanted to get a second opinion.

I've been noticing that if you keep user experience in mind, then SEO kinda falls into place. Of course there is the small this and thats to keep in mind, but overall is good to be aware.

Thank you again!

I've been creating new content for our site, lots of help related content, so I created a help hub section. Now the more I go through it, and look at url structure and breadcrumbs, I can't help but think I should be using a keyword in there, but also don't want to over do it, since the keyword we are shooting for is also a subsection of our site, complete with url keyword and breadcrumb. So I just don't want to have too many over redundant titles like keyword this and keyword that, so I came here to get some advice from the awesome community of folks.

Keep help hub so it's:

Url: site.com/help-hub/helppage1

Breadcrumb: Home > Help-Hub > Help Page 1

or

Url: site.com/keyword/help/helppage1

Breadcrumb: Home > Keyword > Help > Help Page 1

So I have 6 big selling item types for our company, it's our bread and butter, now we have subsections for these different types, from cleaning to instructions. We rank number one for various longtail keywords, however, for the two word keyphrase we want to rank for, we don't seem to get passed rank 30 / page 3 for.

Am curious since the long tail keywords for the subpages seem to not garner that much traffic if we should be combining all the subpages to just one item type page and optimize from there for the item type keyword ( a 5 word phrase )

This is for a niche industry, and the major keywords we want are two word phrases that have around an average of 48% keyword difficulty with. They're really no other synonyms to use for these, none that customers are using, and figuring out a plan to rank on page 1 for this phrase is proving difficult to say the least.

Progress is achieved, however it's just dropping back once we see the change, without much interaction from myself. I understand this is due to the bottom of the bucket characteristics but there must be more I can be doing.

Besides being as general as possible when posting questions here. Thanks for any feedback and even crystal ball guesses.

Touche, good sir, these are certainly some great ways to go about this. Especially number 3.

Thanks!

Wonder how long we got until http2 implementation...

So if my manufacturers don't have https sites, I should remove the links to them since it's going to hinder indexing?

Thanks for the http redirecting to https response.

Hello and good morning / happy Friday!

Last night an article from of all places " Venture Beat " titled " Google Search starts indexing and letting users stream Android apps without matching web content " was sent to me, as I read this I got a bit giddy. Since we had just implemented a full sitewide https cert rather than a cart only ssl.

I then quickly searched for other sources to see if this was indeed true, and the writing on the walls seems to indicate so.

Google - Google Webmaster Blog! - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.in/2015/12/indexing-https-pages-by-default.html

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-to-prioritize-the-indexing-of-https-pages/147179/ 

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/google-indexing-https-by-default,30781.html

https://hacked.com/google-will-begin-indexing-httpsencrypted-pages-default/

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-app-indexing-documentation-updated-21345.html

I found it a bit ironic to read about this on mostly unsecured sites.

I wanted to hear about the 8 keypoint rules that google will factor in when ranking / indexing https pages from now on, and see what you all felt about this.

Google will now begin to index HTTPS equivalents of HTTP web pages, even when the former don’t have any links to them. However, Google will only index an HTTPS URL if it follows these conditions:

• It doesn’t contain insecure dependencies.
• It isn’t blocked from crawling by robots.txt.
• It doesn’t redirect users to or through an insecure HTTP page.
• It doesn’t have a rel="canonical" link to the HTTP page.
• It doesn’t contain a noindex robots meta tag.
• It doesn’t have on-host outlinks to HTTP URLs.
• The sitemaps lists the HTTPS URL, or doesn’t list the HTTP version of the URL.
• The server has a valid TLS certificate.

One rule that confuses me a bit is :

• **It doesn’t redirect users to or through an insecure HTTP page. **

Does this mean if you just moved over to https from http your site won't pick up the https boost? Since most sites in general have http redirects to https?

Thank you!

Thank you, especially for the FTC link, I didn't even think they dealt with things of this matter, but there it is.

As for the footer links, I'm staying far, far away from that, I'd only create another page for the customer links to go on, and scheme it as a customer's we've served / dealt with section, listing the link / logo as well as the good or bad words they had, maybe even the products they bought, and how those products held up.

It's been a goal of mine for this company to create as much helpful content as I can think of, then to push brain through a playdoh extruder and get even more.

Thanks again! Love the minds here on this site.

Thank you, I do appreciate it.

I know there isn't much info to go on, without disclosing who it is, kinda hard to do so.

Gave as much info as I could, I'll check the things you mentioned, it's at least something more than I have been doing.

This newly created site has a DA of 1 and PA of 1, no backlinks, no optimized urls, the keyword they ranked better than us on was listed a total of 6 times on the homepage.

Our PA is 29 and DA is 18 for the page that ranks for this keyword.

They really copied a few elements of our site but made sure to change a few things, but also list at the bottom of their site 5 keywords that are crucial to our niche industry but they're all linking to the same page.

Any ideas?

It's an SEO guy running the site, we've watched them toy with adwords trying to be number 1, but not liking the price, so they are here and there with it.

Mainly I don't see why they'd rank better for this keyword, we our site have prolly 500% more content that's both of quality and relevance to our customers, in the form of Pdfs, infographics, help sections, and video.

Very baffled here, any advice would rock!

What would be the negative aspects to sending customer's requests for a backlink in conjunction with asking how their experience with us was?

Backlinks are one of the toughest for our niche industry to acquire and this seems like one of the best angles to cover, since we have .edu , .mil , .gov , and many bigname companies making purchases from us.

Would if be wrong to offer a small 5% discount during their next purchase if they create a backlink with us? Or if we added a " Customer's we've served " section including their logo or text link?

Thank you!

I hope you're all having an awesome day / week / month!

With Bigcommerce, I had this issue as well, and the way Bigcommerce dumps blog tags doesn't allow for any editing to be done for just those pages. So I had to dump my use of blog tags in general, was thinking of creating the tags myself for each blog entry, but haven't gotten around to it, just wanted to remove the tags to avoid the dup content.

I'm sure others may have this issue but also believe most CMSs allow for more customization of this type of section.

Like the 1st post mentions, Content is all about being helpful, humor and facts can only go so far and really in niche industries, you're most likely not going to create some viral sensations.

With that being said, there is no reason that you can't be the goto in your niche for answers.

I'd focus on any content that can help assist your customers to make better more informed decisions of their purchase. This provides trust as well as useful information, allowing the customer to believe in your site more and most times to purchase from you.

But the content that is designed to help needs to span from the beginner to the expert consumer. Nothing can be too redundant or advanced, but just throwing up a few frequently asked questions isn't going to cut it. You want to shower the helpful content and make it easy to find, even located on its own page or on the page it most relates too.

Best way to do this, either look at your content and products from a newbie point of view or if you can't grab someone who doesn't work with those products ( like a family member or friend ) have them take a look and ask them what they get and what they don't. Ask them if they had to come up with x amount of questions, what would they be. Go from them, you can really get a great feel of how users are viewing your site this way.

Hope this helps!

I'd investigate the amount of quality content as opposed to the DA since I have a few sites with DAs lower than 20, especially with the drop that happened before thanksgiving. However, my domains lack backlinks but have more quality content than every single competitor out there in our niche, this in my opinion is google's flaw, using backlinks as the major deciding factor of DA is a big mistake and subjected to much manipulation, such sadness, ( little doge humor ).

You never know how active the domain in question is, and if they have the quality content, you could safely land a nice backlink on a site that will become the authority in their niche causing you to also get a boost.

Like the above post mentions, SEO hat should come off unless you see some sloppy work that will continue to hold a site back. Or you could use the highlighting of said sloppy work, add some corrections and secure that backlink for years to come at the same time helping that site raise their DA in general.

It's time we stop just being focused on ourselves and start lending hands across the net, building backlinks yes, but lasting networks as well.

We're all in this together, let's act like it! This community is a great example of what is lacking in the overall web in general. We are the change.

What are some things I can look into to figure out why google is ranking us on page 5 sometimes page 6, with some slight rank boosts to rank 36 from 48 but then falls right back.

While Yahoo and Bing rank us page 1 consistently, without these big drops back.

I use google search ( webmaster tools ) daily, fix 404s and make sure to fetch new content I create.

Our site is within the Sandbox issue time frame, google 1st indexed the site about a year and a half ago, the site has been through various SEO service checks, and has had those issues fixed ( some bigcommerce won't allow, such as full sitewide ssl and a few other small factors ) but all the big stuff was handled or will be 100% handled after this redesign is complete. But just still seems we're stuck in the google hole again.

We do use adwords, but no clear signs as to why we'd suffer such hardships with google ranking, only thing we don't have optimized in terms of on page optimization from moz is keyword in url, of which will be changing within the next month or two, as we're rolling our a new redesign with SEO 100% at the forefront, nice url paths, with keywords in their url, much more responsive site that uses less resources.

But before we release this redesign, I'd like to find out what toe we stubbed of google's to give us such a ranking blackeye...

We don't have that many backlinks, and I know these are a huge factor, however, building quality backlinks it's harder than walking on water at time and on the same level as spinning hay into gold.

Any ideas community...

Thanks for this, it's been rather helpful, although the example I gave for shoes was just an example. The site currently I'm working on is all about products, and as a benefit to our users we've created further info pages for each product about cleaning and repair. As much as I do see your reasoning for structure to be Services > items   It's strongly a focus to have the products be at the forefront of this and the info about the products such as cleaning / repair inside as a subpage, since they wouldn't mind ranking for each product as well ranking for the cleaning  and the repair of each of those products as well.

So with this extra bit of info, would you recommend the structure from your comment still?

The way we're doing things on the redesign is, still sticking to the shoe example, if we sold shoes, boots and sandals, and someone went to dress shoe cleaning, we'd structure like: site.com/shoes/dress-shoes/cleaning

A more generic way for this same issue ( without the shoe example ) for cleaning information section for a particular product:

site.com/parent-category(Big keyword)/(secondary big keyword)subcategory-item/(longtail for info related pages)subcategory items cleaning

So let's say I have a parent page for shoes, and I have subpages for dress shoes, work shoes, play shoes, then inside each of those pages I have dress shoe cleaning, dress shoe repair, same for work and play shoes.

Would it be ok to use h1 tags like this:

Shoes > Dress Shoes  > Dress Shoe Cleaning

Dress Shoe Repair

Work Shoes  >  Work Shoe Cleaning

Work Shoe Repair

Play Shoes   >   Play Shoe Cleaning

Play Shoe Repair

Would these be considered duplicate h1 tags since cleaning and repair are used for each subpage? In certain niche companies, it's rather difficult to use synonyms for keywords.

Or is it ok to just keep things simple and use Shoes > Dress Shoes > Cleaning and so on? Especially since we have urls and breadcrumbs that are structured nicely using keywords, for this example both breadcrumbs and urls read like sitename.com/shoes/dress-shoes/cleaning.

Any advice?

This is a good answer, but the pages that the bigcommerce tags appear on with the blog posts, isn't editable , it's just aggregating the blog posts based on tags like you said, not sure how to place that nofollow tag on just those tag pages.

Almost seems like they shouldn't be an issue but are because of how bigcommerce is handling this tag process.

I don't want to put the nofollow tag on the blog posts themselves, since I want that content index so it can rank, so still kinda stuck between a tag and a hard place.

Curious why moz would pick up our blog tags as causing duplicate content, when each blog has a rel canonical tag pointing to either the blog post itself and on the tag pages points to the blog as a whole.

Kinda want to get rid of the tags in general now, but also feel they can add some extra value to UX later on when we have many more blog posts.

Curious if anyone knows a way around this or even a best solution practice when faced with such odd issues?

I can see why the duplicate content would happen, but when grouping content into categories?

So far I've gathered that backlinks are really king, however you can't get good backlinks without well written content that serves a purpose. As well you can't do a great job with that content and not keep a good user experience, since why would anyone want to backlink to content that can be helpful if you squint an eye and suffer a few scrolling cramps.

So how would you rank user experience in the everlasting war of SEO for Google?

With this in mind, why would using bootstrap resources pose a problem? I've seen it could add issue to pageload times, however seems minifying could easily solve that. I personally enjoy the use of Bootstrap since it's very easy on the eyes and can have real positive effects when a user looks at content on such a framework.

So I have a site that operates in a very niche industry, reading all I can about building backlink, I've come out of the walls of text with a few tidbits, however they're not very helpful still, since the playing field is so small.

Looking at manufacturer's sites, finding broken links or typos even, pointing them out in hopes for backlinks only goes so far.

Guest blogging seems to have reached it's climax and is slowly rounding the toilet.

They're active in social media, but due to the niche market, a few likes is the best that can happen.

So most efforts these days are around creating helpful resources for users related to the products they sell.

What other ways would you suggest looking into for building meaningful backlinks with other sites?

In these niche markets, it seems very daunting to say the least, while competitors use their own sister sites for some backlinks, this site doesn't have any sister sites.

What has been some beneficial backlink tactics you've employed for niche market sites?

Thank you for responding, again wasn't upset, but was scratching my head as to the various factors that represent the overall DA score. Thanks for schooling me further and have a great weekend.

Now I know & knowing is half the battle...

This still doesn't explain why I read that the indexing was less than desirable this time around and then saw a drop in DA ( BY 10 Points! ) While I've improved the SEO of our site, now I'm reading the indexing went great and the Drop in DA is basically our fault. Not sure what's going on, but still, doesn't make much sense, as I've seen half of my backlinks drop from being shown but have verified them still being there, manually.

So even in regards to the above mentioned, seems we're missing data that used to be there, and that this is the result of the drop. Bigger sites didn't see a drop least in regards to sites like EPA and BBB, however the smaller sites did see a drop in DA.

Just trying to understand all of this correctly and not speculate, can you bring me up to speed on what I may be misunderstanding?

Thank you

I'm still a bit confused, as I've checked our DA elsewhere and get the same results. A 10 point drop, so I'm not really sure of the real numbers here.

Was my DA wrong before today or is Today and onwards going to be wonky until the index issue settles?

Good idea, I did forget to mention I was linking each section's h3 title to the page I got the info from. Thanks for the reply.

I have a large site that sells various products, I have been on a kick creating new content relating to the many aspects of upkeep with these products after purchase, I wanted to create a blog post combining all the info for the group of products, but will be reusing some of the FAQs and even tips, since I'm more or less relocating the info. Since this blog post is using many different sources on our site, using a rel=canonical isn't possible.

Is there anything I should watch out for,

Will rewording / phrasing here and there be enough or should I steer clear of this as a whole?

Thanks for responding, I know that it's a bit of wishful thinking on the part of a time frame things will take place. It's just such a blackeye to see these linkfarms helping competitors rank when they aren't being relevant or useful.

As well seeing places like BBB do some follow backlinking while telling new customers they're " phasing " it out, while keeping the follow links where they are for who knows how long is very frustrating, specially since competitors are sucking that precious link life blood.

In niche markets, backlinks are more valuable than gold.

Certainly and thanks for responding.

1st off, yes, these were found checking OSE for competitors.

For one example goto - http://clanofthecats.com/comic/filler-7/comment-page-1/ and search the page for " bathroom stalls " then inspect that element you'll see it says " nofollow " however, this url was only found by me doing a competitor search and searching " link equity " " external " .

Was wondering if this was just a case of them using the follow linking at one point and then the webmaster of that site changed them to nofollow and this is just an artifact.