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Hello, my friend.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6216428#content_mismatch

Read the "To Fix" part

Hi there

You said "Since I added them my organic traffic has seemed to have dropped". Organic traffic to those exact pages? or other pages? You should be able to see it in Google Analytics under landing pages.

The only thing I can think of is that organic traffic is directly related to rankings, so, have you seen drop in rankings? were those pages you changed ranking for many keywords?

Hi there.

Do you see any negative results so far? Any hints at it? How spammy are those links (anchor text, DA/PA of linking pages etc)? Did/do you have manual actions taken by GWT/search console? How is your MOZ OSE spam score?

What I would recommend, if you have a suspicion that disavowing those links would help, is to disavow small part of them, let's say 100-200 and see the effects on your rankings, DA/PA and other metrics.

Hope this helps.

Hi.

The way to fix the problem is to know where it's coming from. When you are using browser's network tab, you can preserve log and see where 302s happening. Also you can see those pages in moz and other tools. I clicked around and found that it's happening in product categories and when you click on products. Obviously, since most of the website pages are product pages, you get 45%+ 302 redirects.

Now as how to fix it. Honestly, I'm not gonna be able to tell you, because I don't have your website's code. But find where those redirects are happening (by the way I don't even see any url changes, so maybe this is a problem as well), see how it's setup to work. It can be plugin errors or WP settings.

As for htaccess - I believe https rules should be before any other rules, all "R" should be R=301 and RewriteEngine on should be only one time.

Hope this helps somehow

Thanks for response!

Well, basically, as I mentioned, the problem was due to http-header robots tag. So, after removing it, and requesting "fetch as google", it's all up and running now. The crawl time proves that as well.

Thanks for giving me idea for looking into cache times in the future though!

Hi there.

I am a little confused - you want to use iframe on duplicate website to hide the duplication? If so - it looks very spammy and shady. I assume that new website you want to produce has enough unique content and value, otherwise you will have many troubles with penalizations and stuff.

Me too!

Hi there.

Looks like redirect (rewrite rule) loop. Check your htaccess.

Hi there.

Good backlinks, social media engagement, interlinking and more traffic to those pages (with good engagement metrics of course) are your friends here

Hi again. I've seen it. Quite honestly I disagree with absolutes being a priority. The arguments, presented in that WBF don't really work for me against the pain in development (I believe she mentioned even more drawbacks). Also, from my experience I have not seen any (at all) benefits in any way (SEO or loading speed) from having absolutes, rather than relatives.

Howdy.

Is this affiliate program spammy or tricky in any way? if not, meaning that everything is straight forward, no link exchange or any black hat seo, there won't be any repercussions. Many companies have affiliate programs which are true part of their business model, and there is nothing wrong with that.

Well, if they are actually fixed, you can do "fetch as Google" for the whole domain.

Howdy.

As far as I understand, there is no such thing as duplicate content just for images. Duplicate content is more for the page as a whole. Especially, since you guys redirected all the links, you shouldn't have any problems, since google will simply "realize" the change.

Now, it's better to make sure that images (and all the other resources) available only through one protocol - http or https.

Hope this helps

Hi there.

Well, one thing is for sure - do not block tags in robots.txt. That won't help anyhow for sure.

As for organic rankings - at the last company I worked for, I've seen some instances when tag page was ranking for a longer tail keyphrase. So, I would keep tags somewhat SEO friendly. But, as you said, main reason for tags nowadays is UX. Therefore I approach it this way - UX/navigational help first, but, if possible, also make tag SEO friendly. Also 10 tags is too many to my opinion. I believe that recommendations are 2-3 tags, maybe 4, but over that is a murder.

Hope this helps

It wouldn't matter if links are in the hidden div or not. As long as they are in the code - it will "dilute".

Hi there.

It's known that comment section is not awesome at all in the eyes of google, typically due to spamminess, so attention paid to such sections is way lower than to other content on the page. Also, as far as I remember, Disqus is being loaded through deferred JS, into an Iframe, meaning that it would not be even considered as part of your website. Also, plugins like that are usually loaded with deferred JS, which means your loading times shouldn't be affected. Therefore, it shouldn't really matter what you do to it to do impact (if any at all) on your SEO.

Concentrate on your own content, my friend.

Howdy.

The one metric is surely not a reason for changing a domain. Instead of worrying about DA is not pooping up, ask yourself the questions about rankings, traffic, engagement etc. So, how have rankings done up? did traffic improve? Do people have brand/domain recognition?

If any of the answers are yes, don't worry about DA. There are bunch of other ways to track your backlink building efforts. Eg., as you said, Trust and Citation Flow. MOZ has similar metrics as well.

Hope this helps.

So, Couple things I noticed.

1. Backlink profile is very poor. Ahrefs and MOZ OSE showing poor profile history (did you guys get hit by penguin or another update at some point?), and currently you have very few backlinks and referring domains.
2. Also, there are no backlinks to the actual page, so that decreases your chances.
3. Anchor text cloud is nothing but brand name, which has some negative impact (or rather no positive for given keyword).
4. On the page, it seems to me that there is a mix of german and english languages (not sure if that would have impact on rankings, but surely looks strange to a user).
5. Page is overstuffed with "sophos sg" to the point of ridiculousness

In conclusion, have some backlinks improvements (including internal linking and anchor text usage), considering you are only #13 for given keyword, you gonna on the first page in no time

P.S. This is just what i saw in a glance, SEO audit might be of a good help to you guys.

Howdy.

In short - no, it doesn't matter. There are several videos from Matt Cutts on this topic. They're a bit old, but still apply.  https://www.google.com/search?q=server+location+matt+cutts&espv=2&source=lnms&tbm=vid&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiGveX-uurRAhUCr1QKHbtYClkQ_AUICSgC&biw=1745&bih=864

Howdy.

It seems to me that you have duplicate content issues. Do you guys have any canonicals at all? How close is the content from one website to another?

So, if you want both websites to rank for the same product, which seems a bit pointless to me, since you'll have to double up all the efforts, budgets etc, you would need to have unique content on both sites, unique descriptions, all meta tags etc.

If you want only one to rank, then yes, canonical will do it. Also the link mass will have a lot of effect. Basically, if your large site has let's say 100 times more links with relevant anchor texts and from relevant websites, it can still be ranking over the microsite.

Hope this helps

So, the reason I recommend having images loading only through one resource is the "insecurity" of https connection, if any resources are loaded not over https. You might have seen that sometimes instead of green lock in a browser bar, it can show yellow exclamation mark - that's one of the reasons. And also it's just cleaner, if everything is loaded the same way.

Here is a link to resource about mixed content: https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/security/prevent-mixed-content/fixing-mixed-content

Howdy,

What type of analysis are you talking about?

Howdy.

I typically set it up with accordance to this: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/enhance-site

And basically go down the list. So, logo, contact info, breadcrumbs, reviews, sitelinks, social etc. Just follow all the suggestions under "help google present you" section in the left navigation column.

Hope this helps

I believe they do get indexed, don't have any physical proof as of the moment. The easy way is to simply set it up on a test landing page, then request manual recrawl through Google Search Console of that page. and see if it gets indexed.

Very weird. Apparently it's not that uncommon. I just wonder how Google decides that it should be shown in different language. People are recommending to ask this on google support forum here: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!home Because it's google "fault", not facebook's.

Do make sure that all the targeting, multi-language content, settings etc are all properly setup though.

I always go by rankings Cause when you do link building, you target specific keyphrase/topic. So, i check if overall amount of links increased from domains (or with anchor texts I want), then I simply check rankings. Ahrefs' rank is a quick metric to look at as well.

No problem

Thanks for the response.

Medium will not work for us, since we need to have a blog ON our website, on the same domain, in a folder. That's why WP usually works. Medium would take all the SEO goodness from our domain

Ghost and Jekyllrb - haven't used of these guys, but aren't they third party hosted as well?

Howdy folks.

I'm trying to find any good alternative for adding CMS blog to custom website. Most people, us included, are using WP, but, as we know, it's really painful to work with, easily hackable etc etc.

So, I wonder if anyone knows of a blog platform, which can be installed on our own websites for blogging, but without drawbacks of WordPress. Any nudge in correct direction will be appreciated. Thanks!

Hi there.

First, "...the understanding that there would not be any loss in page rank" - where did you get that info? 0.o It's well-known fact that there always be a downdraft with a period of recovery.

To answer your question - yes, you'll recover (assuming all 301s were done correctly). But it will take time. The problem is that your shop initially had the power and authority of your main domain (when it was brand.com/shop/blabla). Now, it's a brand new domain, with no history. And yes, even though you have redirects, it's still much closer to starting new domain, rather than redirecting domain completely.

Think of it as instead of building second story on top of existing house, you have to build brand new building with foundation and all, using some materials from your existing house. Who suffers? - both. You are taking away from existing place, and it will take longer and more resources to build up new place. Is it beneficial? - Sure, after both buildings are built - you'll have 2 great places to live in.

Hope this makes sense

Hi there.

First, if you are ranking #1 already, and want to move those pages, you must have great reasons. There is a chance, quite a high one, you won't be ranking #1, or even potentially even on the first page for some time.

Considering that you must move these pages, I'd just create exact copy of those pages, literally. Just copy paste onto the new domain, 301 those links, and let new domain sit for a while with these pages, make sure that they are ranking etc. After that you can move all content - text, images, metas etc into new platform (if let's say you are switching from wordpress to magento or something like that).

Hope this helps.

Hi there.

Unfortunately, there is no way to do what you are asking.. Sorry. You already did what you should have - change all links to website in GMB, social sites etc, copied the content over. Other than that - there is nothing you can do really.

The only thing which could be possibly remotely helpful is GSC address moving tool, of course, you'd still have to have access to old domain GSC - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/83106?hl=en

Hope this helps.

Couple ways you can go about it.

1. Is any of the traffic going to the old spammy domain any good? Does it convert? If not, then don't worry about redirecting,  there wouldn't be any point, only spam signals

2. If there is some good traffic, then do IP limitations, hostnames limitations etc. That can be done in htaccess or on the server itself. There are other more elaborate ways to filter out spam traffic as well, but that depends on how you or your IT guy is familiar with it. One of the simplest solutions is to route all traffic through CloudFlare, it has quite nice spam filtering, and it's free.

Hope this helps.

"... maybe a lot of traffic will convert. "

WILL convert? so it's not converting now? If so, it's kind of optimistic that will change, no?

Since you don't own old domain, you can't really reliably do anything about it anyway.

At this point, I would say not to forward at all, start from scratch.

Yeah, your suggestion makes sense.

Keep the old one while the new one is ranking up.

Now, here is perfect scenario for you - keep working on the new site, and get full ownership of the old one. Then through IP blocks, cloudflare, removing all spammy backlinks etc, get rid of all or most of the spammy traffic and signals. And then redirect.

Hard to say who and why is putting you on those websites.

The only way to truly get rid of those backlinks is to reach out to those websites' owners. You'd have to obviously find someone who speaks the language.

Now, what you can do though is this:

1. Disavow all those crappy links - that'll get Google to lower the "spam score" of your website;
2. Block all traffic by IPs, geolocation and/or hostnames/referrers (that'll prevent from actual unrelated traffic)

That should clean it up pretty good.
Of course, that requires full control and ownership of that domain and website code. If you can't get that - again, my suggestion is just to part ways.

You are always welcome.

If you got more questions, you can always hit me up on my Twitter @DigitalSpaceman