Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Don't do that, disallow in robots.txt will NOT resolve indexing issue! What you need to use is meta robots. Noindex, nofollow. Watch this WBF on this subject:

https://moz.com/blog/controlling-search-engine-crawlers-for-better-indexation-and-rankings-whiteboard-friday

Hi there.

No, none of SEO related benefits would ever come from what email you use to login or URL in your profile. The way to use YouTube for SEO is actually to use it (surprise here:) for it's intended purposes - create awesome video content, put compelling descriptions, titles and thumbnails for your videos, grow the audience and, eventually, people will remember your brand, and start coming to your website from youtube, which will indirectly influence SEO.

Cheers.

P.S. Here are some links you might find useful:

https://www.straightnorth.com/insights/youtube-video-optimization-best-practices/

https://creatoracademy.withgoogle.com/page/lesson/discovery?hl=en

https://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/2262954/optimizing-videos-for-youtube-search

https://moz.com/blog/youtube-ranking-factors-whiteboard-friday

https://www.distilled.net/blog/social-media/youtube/youtube-seo/

Hi there.

So, all the pages, from which those backlinks are coming from are non-existent anymore? have they been redirected? do they return 404s? Also, how did you find them? in Google Search Console or another tool?

So, if you found it in Google Search Console, and the original pages indeed have been removed and properly redirected, then it's just time delay by GSC. Otherwise (if those pages are crawlable), you should fix it.

Hope this makes sense.

I'm not sure I can give you some references, I can Google, I guess, but you can as well. It's type of idea-knowledge you get from being in industry for some time. Read the comment below by EGOL, he has good point about number of internal links to the same page as a logic factor.

Hi there.

Well, Google doesn't consider internal links for ranking purposes. However, sometimes it is helpful to use internal linking with exact match anchor text to help understand Google what the page is about. So, no, it won't hurt your rankings if you do what you did, but it won't help it either.

What I'd recommend, actually, instead of using the same anchor text for all of those links, use related keyphrases. So, in one blog it would be "customer success" anchor text, in another blog it would be "success metrics" (or whatever else you are targeting) and so on.

Hi there.

What's the link? Are you sure it's actually not indexed, rather than just dropped in rankings? Also, you say that you added canonical link. I assume that you have added canonical link to page which was ranking? If there is no robots.txt issue, are meta robots used - it could be the problem.

This one is very unreasonable to use - all it does is takes data from AdWords, using FREE API and Google suggestions and gives it to you. No new information, no extra data you can get from them, just a little more convinience, which I can't justify for $88/month.

Hi there.

Usually as soon as link is indexed by a search engine, it has an effect on rankings. Don't confuse with appearance in GWT, since it takes longer and stays there longer than in reality. There are many-many examples of rankings go up dramatically after successful link building campaign (like skyscraping or something).

Hope this helps.

Hi there.

What do you mean by heading tag? H1,H2 etc?

Hi there.

It's quite confusing the way you asking this question - they want two websites, but you gonna make one website? I understand you can use subfolders or subdomains, but if they are exactly the same restaurant, will they have different content? Do they want different designs? If so, what is going to be on main domain?

My suggestion would be to do one website with two location pages. This way, since content is the same they won't have duplicate content issues and it won't be confusing to users in case of different websites with different designs for the same restaurants.

Hope this makes sense.

Hi there.

You need to be owner of account. If you are - click on your profile picture at the top right corner, click on Billing and Subscription, click on Manage Seats at the top nav. Then you can remove seats.

Cheers!

Hi there.

Many use SEMRush (I do to). Also There is Moz Content. It's not really a keyword research, but rather topics research, using which you can come up with keywords as well. The same type of tool is BuzzSumo.

Hope this helps.

Hi there.

My thought is that it was just a coincidence. Usually, responsiveness doesn't affect rankings that dramatically, especially on desktop devices. There are many-many far more important ranking signals than being mobile-friendly.

Make sure that your website is properly optimized, you got good backlink profile etc. Also I suggest to look at your competitors. If they have improved, or there were new companies, which are better optimized than yours, and, at the same time your website is underoptimized - your rankings will go down.

Hope this helps.

Hi there.

Here is a code solution - it adds " - Page: X" where X is a number of page. Add it to functions.php file of wordpress:

<code>php # -*- coding: utf-8 -*-/**
 * Plugin Name: T5 Add page number to title
 * Description: Adds ` | Page $number` to the page title.
 * License:     MIT
 * License URI: http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php
 */if(! function_exists('t5_add_page_number')){function t5_add_page_number( $s ){global $page; $paged = get_query_var('paged')? get_query_var('paged'):1;! empty ( $page )&&1< $page && $paged = $page; $paged >1&& $s .=' | '. sprintf( __('Page: %s'), $paged );return $s;} add_filter('wp_title','t5_add_page_number',100,1); add_filter('wpseo_metadesc','t5_add_page_number',100,1);}</code>

Hi, Pete.

In our case it was one time drop over couple days and then leveled out and stays around the same spot  - beginning of the second page.

What confuses me the most is this: neither us or our competitors have had any major (if any at all) changes in content (at least on main landing and ranking pages). Neither backlink profiles have changed. At the same time our rankings had experienced that drop and we are having trouble recovering. However, main competitors didn't have that drop.

P.S. All metrics in our case are better than competitors.

Any ideas on what's happening / what we should pay extra attention at?

Hi there.

Oh yeah, Many have the same problem. Me as well. And I can't figure out what's going on. As well as looks like there is no info from Google what was update about.

There is a suggestion floating around that it might be regarding backlinks quality, but there is no proof or reliable info about that either.

Here are my two topics I've asked, you can see what people are saying:

https://moz.com/community/q/recovery-after-recent-google-update

https://moz.com/community/q/january-2016-massive-rankings-fluctuations

Sure, no problem

Ouch, then yeah, I really doubt there is anything you guys can do about that. I say try to get fully matching brand name domain now, if possible

Hi there.

There are not many ways for you to get the domain back:

1. Buy it from current owner;
2. If the domain name is complete match of company's name or company's product, and this name is trademarked/copyrighted, you can get the domain back through court, since it would be a domain squatting by former employee.

But, if there is no trademark and domain was purchased legally - I believe there is no way for  you guys to get it back, but buy it from that guy.

P.S. Why didn't you have on automatic renewal?!

Well, if you can improve the quality of backlink somehow - move it to higher DA domain or higher PA page, then sure - go ahead. Just make sure that your efforts would be worth it, cause if you gonna spend 4 hours on it to increase DA by 1, there is no point in it. It'd better to get another link.

Hi there.

In short, Yes, iframes will pass link juice, but to the page, which is a source of iframe, not to pages, which are linked inside the iframe. And no, javascript created links are not passing rank flow.

When using iframe, basically what you are doing is you are pointing to the container on another website, and whatever is inside that container, it's hosted on that another website. That's why rank flows only to src link.

As for JS created links - they are considered hidden, devalued or obfuscated. Refer to this page on MOZ - https://moz.com/learn/seo/internal-link

Hope this helps.

Hi there.

You should see link in Open Site Explorer after next recrawl, which is scheduled on Feb 28 - https://moz.com/products/api/updates

If your blog posts were created very recently or on small DA websites, then it might take till next recrawl.

As for Google Search Console - it's usually detected pretty quick. Maybe couple weeks. But, sometimes for unknown reasons it can take way longer than that - up to several months, but it's unlikely.

Hope this helps.

Well, I at least got the answer on where to dig

Thanks!

Here is an awesome guide to backlink building: https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-link-building

And here is a post on how to do Technical SEO: https://moz.com/blog/technical-site-audit-for-2015

I assume you are new to SEO, and I would recommend for you to either hire a professional or take SEO classes. It's gonna be good investment for sure.

Cheers:)

Hi there.

Well, here is a bummer for you - metrics don't matter. If we were in perfect world, yes, the websites with higher metric scores would be ranking higher, but it's not true at all. There are so many factors Google is including in their algorithms, and nobody knows what those are.

Instead of looking at metrics, look at actual content, on-page optimization. What about technical SEO? Also some of your backlinks have high spam score - that might be hurting.

As for penalilzation - if you were penalized, you for sure wouldn't be #4 - you'd be number #104 if ranked at all. Check your Google Search console for manual actions, if there are none, then you are not penalized, you just need to work harder on your SEO. Which area you ask - nobody really can give you better answer than yourself. You know your website best and you know which areas are the weakest (on subconscious level for sure).

Hope this helps.

Hi there.

Pagerank? It is very outdated metric and it's not relevant anymore.

What I can tell you is to do SEO on your website. Health score from Ahrefs is just about missing title, meta descriptions etc., it doesn't tell you how optimized your website is. Do on-page optimizations, backlink building, technical SEO - and you gonna get ranking results.

Hope this helps.

Hi guys.

This is somewhat a continuation for this topic: https://moz.com/community/q/january-2016-massive-rankings-fluctuations

After that update, several of our clients and our website as well have experienced high fluctuation rankings period, which ended up in huge drops - 10-20 spots. Which, obviously, made everyone unhappy.

Anybody knows what exactly the change was about? What should we fix/take a look at, analyze again?

We aren't using any shady techniques or black hat. Everything is honest. All metrics, number of backlinks etc are going up, no major changes have been recently made.

Please, help!

Hi there.

Uhmm.. Why would you want to do it? If all links are relevant, "need" to be where they are and make sense to user - there is no reason to delete those. If you have some "internal link fishy scheme" going on or something, then yeah, you might want to. Simply delete links or restructure your website(I'd go with restructuring).

Hope this helps.

Hi there.

Well, there is no way to make Google display exactly what you want, but, what you might need to look into is the schema markup for your knowledge graph - https://developers.google.com/structured-data/customize/overview

Also, make sure you have image optimization on the website (alt tags, titles etc), as well as images on G+ account - it seems that that's where knowledge graph images are being pulled from.

Also you need to make sure that everything on your google my business account is properly setup.

And, finally, you can call google and ask them to look if there is anything wrong going on. Other than that - it's the matter of time.

Hope this helps.

Oh my!

This is surely the most ridiculous way to do it I've heard of. There are APIs, plugins and other much easier ways to do it. Do they know about it?

Here: http://bfy.tw/4AqJ - first three links.

Make sure then that whatever backlink building you do, it'd be for domain.com/language, not just domain.com

Hi there.

It's quite simple - Moz crawling resources are way smaller than Google's. So, instead of crawling every single possible page and link, MOZ pays attention to top pages on your (and others) domains, as well as they look at domains, which are more correlated to rankings, rather than every single possible one.

Read here: https://moz.com/help/guides/research-tools/open-site-explorer

Section "FAQ".

Hi there.

These settings are surely weird, especially first one. Your main domain should be main language and the rest should be linked with hreflang. Therefore #2 and #3 would change. Also navigation links, since they are internal, don't matter if they are follow or nofollow in terms of ranking boost, however, you might be cutting off your inside pages from search engine crawlers, which could lead to indexation problems.

Hope this helps.

Hi there.

I always go with human element. But at the same time you also can use number data as well. So, the way you can approach it is to do research for those keywords nationally - since such keywords are not strictly local (unlike apple store near me), there is gonna be pretty much straight forward correlation between national and local amount of searches.

Meaning that if nationally "baby photographer" gets more searches than "baby photo studio", then the same will be happening locally. So, look at national results to find out the "human element", and then you also can check local numbers to see if you get better ideas.

Hope this makes sense.

Hi there.

If understand correctly - sure you can. The question is how much resources you got to spend on this task. For example, you can use product name, and based on it spit out proper url. It would require either creating some type of specific structure for product name or creating some type of specific database with all that information.

Instead of product name you can use whatever unique piece of data on those pages.

Hope this makes sense.

Hi there.

I'm not sure I understand what you are saying. Are tweets copied and pasted into each page separately? Then I don't understand the "populate a twitter feed" part.

Can you explain a little more?

Hi there.

Yes, I would consider 3:2 spammy. The reason is: let's say your website is so awesome that everybody, who you reach out to, links to you, making sure (which is very unlikely) that those links are follow. This would make your website very popular, meaning that more and more people would be linking to you without you asking for a link. By default links are usually nofollow (unless websites' owners/webmasters don't care about who they link to, what makes them kinda spammers already).That would lead to appearance of nofollow links. Since most of not spammy websites would care about follow/nofollow, by default you gonna have many more nofollow links per each of follow. And, considering that we live in imperfect world, many-many people would not be making sure that they are linking to you with a follow link. Therefore, 3:2 ratio means that you are purposely getting only follow links, rejecting nofollow links, and that, my friend, is cheating.

About domains/subdomains - that's pretty much the same. The reason they are split, is that you can have domains, which are mainly nofollow, but those domains can have 1 subdomain, which is purely follow, which means that it's most likely spammy.

Hope all this makes sense.

Yes. But, again, don't rely just on that. It's 1 of thousands signals, and it's surely not the strongest one.

Hi there.

Yes, it will. However, if you just rely on having "wedding" in your name to rank, it's not gonna make that much difference. Also it will limit you in terms of brand associativity, so, if you also do portrait photography, you surely can target it, but if i see your name, which says "wedding photography", i most likely gonna think that this is what you specialize in, therefore you are not good in portrait photography (even though it's pretty much the same, it's just psychologically different).

Hope this helps.

hreflang is basically a way to tell search engines that you have a version of a website per country (or, actually per spoken language).

Read here on what it is and how to use it: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

In your case, since you gonna have US and Canada website you gonna have something like this:

in your header.

Hi there.

There is always some drop in rankings when you redirect anything. Usually this drop is temporary and, if these new pages you are talking about really have better quality content, rankings go up. What I'd look at is backlinks. If those subdomains have somewhat valuable backlink profile - here is where you would suffer the most. Even if you use 301 redirect, backlinks are still gonna be pointing to old subdomain, not new page. In perfect world you'd have to reach out to all linking webmasters and get links changed in their original placements.

I'm so sad now

My question and worry why in the world it happened to "web design houston", for which we have been ranking in top 3 forever. And we haven't done any changes to pages recently.

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

Hi there.

Seems to be weird rewrite rules? or mistake in path finding in template builder?

Usually, you can track where those links are coming from in MOZ or GWT.

Post real urls, it will be easier to analyze.

uhmm.. if you are asking about a company - i can suggest mine

If just for advice - ask it here, on MOZ.

Sure, no problem.

Ok, I see now.

No, you don't have to go back to www-version. What is happening to you is just a crawl delay. It takes a while for MOZbot to "realize" the redirect, especially if you have https.

Basically, just wait. It will be showing properly eventually.

P.S. I noticed you have extra redirect if i go to www.a-fotography.co.uk - it redirects to non-www first, then does another redirect to https. You can easily eliminate this in htaccess. Kinda best practice.

Hi there.

Ok, so, what is supposed to be happening is after you type in your non-www version, it should give you message like this (see attachment):

You entered the URL http://regexseo.com/ which redirects to http://www.regexseo.com/. Because it's likely to have more accurate metrics, we're showing data for the redirected URL instead. Click here to analyze http://regexseo.com/ instead?

If this is not happening, make sure that your non-www version 301 redirects to www. If it does, but you have made this change recently, then you just gotta wait to allow mozbot to crawl this redirect.

As for DA drop, it can be relative. Make sure that whenever you look at DA changes, you look at competition as well. Read this post by Rand: https://moz.com/community/q/da-pa-fluctuations-how-to-interpret-apply-understand-these-ml-based-scores

Hope this helps.

c00Qj1N

However, if most of backlinks are nofollow, then it shouldn't be a problem, right?

And I attached the backlink comparison. There is a huge difference in do/no follow profiles between us and competitors. It can't be that 2% of backlink profile (and it's been like this for long time) all of the sudden made us drop 10 positions.

VekTF8l