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Got it, thanks so much Ian!

Hi ian, for those of us interested can you share the issues that are causing this update to be rolled back? Also, I like many saw the update and have to explain things to clients and bosses, so it would Ben rest to get a post on the main blog about what’s changing and why things are fluctuating more than usual.

Hey there, I have to be honest that from the screenshots you posted this looks fairly normal to me? I mean, it may be helpful to see the full traffic so we can see what's happening, but it seems that they had a big spike and then it dropped back down, and has been building after that with more spikes and then returning to a normal growth curve.

What am I missing?

I totally agree with you that affiliate links should not help rankings and many mention that they should always be nofollowed, though a lot of people don't (I probably have some followed affiliate links out there somewhere on the Internet).

Philosophically I am opposed to affiliate links helping the target site rank. I've also seen some sites get into trouble for having affiliates link with followed links, so I'd be careful of it myself if i was running an affiliate program.

Well, they are already starting to put ads in there so I expect this to go fully paid eventually. But that said, I don't see the idea of GMB going anywhere soon, but we have seen how they change things all the time and they could possibly rename it while only changing a few things.

Branding has never been Google's strong suit. Just look at their maze of chat apps.

Take it on a site by site basis. Most of these sites have nofollowed all self-created links because of spammers and people trying to use the platform for link building. Shoot, I just did that on my own site

I completely agree with Linda about exposure and referral traffic. If it's a targeted audience, you can definitely drive a lot of traffic from these sorts of sites. I've seen some sites where if you get mentioned, it can literally drive thousands of visits per month to your site.

Hey Mike, that's all going to depend on which ecommerce shop you're using and if they are able to do a reverse proxy like that. Otherwise, subdomain is how you need to go.

Hi there. Good question and one that comes up a lot.

You need to do the following:

• Put the noindex on those pages
• Remove the block in robots.txt
• Monitor these pages falling out of the index
• Once they are all out, then put the block back in place

You both want them to a) drop out and b) then not be crawled, so the above will take care of that for you.

Hope that helps!

John

Hi there -

This is a pretty common setup for ecommerce sites with both content and products. Of course, I'd always recommend doing something like www.footballshirtcollective.com/store/ with your product URLs there, which would likely allow you to exclude advertisers/advertising from those pages.

If you do want to use the subdomain and are already committed to that, then there are definitely ways to make it work very well for SEO.

A subdomain is basically a separate website. You need to do everything for it that you would do for the www subdomain (www is technically a subdomain, after all), including but not limited to:

• Verify in Search Console
• Have GA set up
• Crawlable site structure
• Sitemaps
• Well-formatted URLs (lowercase, hyphens, etc)

Since you are moving the URLs from www to store., you also need to implement direct and correct 1:1 301 redirects from the www. to the store. URLs. DO NOT do a blanket redirect of all the current ecomm www URLs to the base of store.footballshirtcollective.com.

Hope that helps!

Self-promotion - if you're looking for help with migrating your content between platforms, I have people on Credo who can help you - https://www.getcredo.com/bizverticals/ecommerce-platform-migrations/

Hi there, I'd recommend looking into using Scripted for this if you're not a strong writer. You can get awesome content for quite cheap.

Hi MobileDay -

Well, sounds like you have some issues on your hands! Hopefully I can help sort it out.

First, get those redirects in place! There is no reason for users to be able to access it on both non-secure and secure. If you made the move to implement HTTPS, you want your users there as it helps with trust. Also, you're spreading your link equity. It looks like the search engines are ranking HTTPS, but that also means that the links going to any and all http pages are likely not being counted towards HTTPS. This is likely hurting your longtail traffic, which only you can see in Analytics.

Second, your canonicals are relative and not correct. It's rel="canonical" href="//mobileday.com/" />, which I am surprised to see since you are using Yoast SEO (so I guess you are on Wordpress). A quick way to help fix your duplicate content issues is to a) make those absolute and b) point them to where you want the crawlers to go (I suspect HTTPS).

A canonical is a band-aid though and the search engines do not always respect them. The right fix is a 301.

Also, more things to check:

• Are the URLs in your sitemaps HTTPS or HTTP? They should be the one you want to rank.
• You should declare where your sitemaps are in your robots.txt file (I don't see them here - http://mobileday.com/robots.txt or here - https://mobileday.com/robots.txt)
• I assume you have both HTTP and HTTPS verified in Search Console. Look at if your impressions have dropped on HTTP and see what is going on with HTTPS. This will tell you a lot.
• Regarding bounce rates, what else changed? I wonder if there is an issue with your HTTPS implementation and it's not working correctly on some mobile devices (or desktop browsers). Dig into your Analytics to see which platforms and browsers have a high bounce rate, and solve from there. You should also check to see if it's a specific page type that is bouncing a lot to see if there is an issue with that page type.

Good luck!

Hey Kane -

Jumping in here because I told you I would. I've seen it work two different ways.

As you saw in my posts, I have the following configuration:

• Self-referencing canonicals (/es/ canonicalizes to /es/, regular canonicalizes to itself)
• HREFLANG point to each other as the alternate.

When you search "canonical delays with Googlebot" in google.es, the English ranks first and then the Spanish. Of course, with the Spanish search "etiquetta canonical retrasa con googlebot" the Spanish one ranks. This is, of course, a test with two different languages.

I've seen it work with two English-language URLs (Australia and English) where the following is what worked:

• Canonical referencing the primary (English)
• HREFLANG pointing to each other

The title/meta description of the /au/ version disappeared because of the canonical but the /au/ version ranked in google.com/au instead of the regular URL.

The self-referencing HREFLANG seems to not be necessary, but I've never had an issue using it. However, your mileage may vary.

BTW, all of this testing was done by my coworker Dave Sottimano, not me. But these were the findings.

Hi there -

I'm a bit confused about your question. When you say "sub folder" there at the end, do you mean "subdomain"? If so then the question makes sense and that is what I will answer.

First of all, technically www.site.com is a subdomain that is treated the same as subdomain.site.com or othersubdomain.site.com.

So, in my opinion and experience, their rankings shouldn't be terrible just because they're on eg a www2.site.com subdomain. I do wonder though, since they had their main site on another part of the domain and then moved to this one that was originally a test subdomain, if there were issues with the migration to the site that was built on this other subdomain than the original site. You need to go back and do a forensic SEO analysis (or hire someone to do it) to see if 301s are correct, if a lot of links were not redirected, and the like before you even consider moving everything back to where it was before. If you don't do your due-diligence, you're likely going to do more harm than good.

Hope that helps.

John

Hey Andrew, thanks for putting this question to the community! Definitely a good one to dig into and remind a lot of people as to some of the basics.

It sounds like you've done a bunch of the things you should do to migrate your traffic. But, I've found a few things with just a quick glance that are definitely hurting your new domain's ranking ability. Here we go.

1. Your HTTP from your old domain redirects to the HTTPS of the old and then to the HTTPS of the new. Often I have seen that Google will treat chained 301 redirects like this as a 302 redirect, which may mean that some of your important citychurchfamily.org pages are not dropping out of the index. What you want to do is change the logic so that it works like this:

2. http://citychurchfamily.org -> https://citychurchbloomington.org

3. Your www.citychurchfamily.org (non HTTPS) redirects correctly, as does your https://www.citychurchfamily.org.

4. You still have a lot of pages from citychurchfamily.org that are indexed. Check out this site: search for your domain. You need to redirect all of those as I bet there is link equity there.

Another trick you can do to get your old pages that are redirected, but haven't dropped from the index yet out of the index is to create a static XML sitemap with those old URLs and submit that to Google through Search Console. Monitor the indexation (it should drop pretty quick if your 301s are correct) and once they're all out (or very close to it) then remove the sitemap.

Finally, did you do the site migration in Search Console for both http and https version of your old site? That may help as well.

Hope all that helps!

John

So, I think this is a great question and underscores a very important part of SEO - it's not black and white. Some links are obviously paid, others are not. Then we have the middle where we have to interpret what is being talked about as "paid" or "incentivized" links.

I wouldn't consider any of these "paid links" I don't think. The only one that I wouldn't say this about with 100% clarity is #3, but in that case you're paying for the article, and technically you could pay to publish an article without a link, right?

The problem is that money always muddies the waters. By buying an ad spot you are advertising yourself, but it's obviously marked as an ad. Also, if you buy ad space you're probably guaranteed to be accepted as a guest author even if it is "reviewed by submission".

By paid links Google is talking about links that are "meant to manipulate Pagerank". All links manipulate Pagerank in some way you could argue. So are all links bad? No. I could show many examples of paid links that add nothing to the page on which they are. THOSE are the manipulative paid links, not one within a blog post that has a publication price.

Also, going in and paying for a link within an article after the publish date, and especially in an article that was not written by you, is definitely manipulation, even if the link makes sense.

Those are my thoughts. I'd love to hear the thoughts of others, though this topic has been discussed to death in the past few years.

Hi Utahtiger -

You won't be penalized in one sense for having your keywords in your URL again, but you may end up hurting your rankability for the term because you will have two pages optimized for those keywords. I think it would be better to focus on one of the pages (your homepage) for that keyword. This way you can point links to that page that are optimized for that term, instead of having to build links to two pages.

Don't hurt yourself with your onsite SEO. It's more important than a lot of people think

While I agree with EGOL, I'd also do two more things:

1. Check to see if the same issue happens when going to the organization's site when you are at home or somewhere other than work. It could also be an issue because of your office's security settings.
2. Regarding if Google will penalize you, no. If it's a paid listing (eg you're getting listing only because you paid) then it's a bit more of a grey area, but it's also a legit association and so I wouldn't worry about it to be honest. If you are worried about it, then you could always ask for it to be nofollowed. But as I said, I think this is a case where a followed link is totally fine and no search quality reviewer would bat an eye at it.

Good question, Daniel. It depends on what you mean by "sponsor". Is it like people sponsor sections on SearchEngineLand (which are really affiliate links)? Or is it an image that shows that you are a sponsor?

I agree that it's a grey area. Wil Reynolds always points out that if Google was going to penalize something like sponsoring a hospital and having a followed link back, then something has gone way wrong. I tend to agree with him.

Think about if it's adding value to the user and the organization. If it's like what Wil talks about, then I think it's fine. If it's labeled as a sponsored link in line w/ FTC guidelines, it should technically be no-followed. If it's an image that is followed, it will pass link juice (Matt Cutts said so last month in a Webmaster Video). I personally say that a sponsorship where your image is displayed is fine and it does not have to be nofollowed.

Hey Rahul! Definitely a big question here, but let me give it a stab. I've looked at the provided site in both OpenSiteExplorer and SEMrush. Here's what I see with a quick cursory look:

• Your site seems to have done well in late 2011/early 2012, but it has since been hit with what looks to be a combination of Penguin and Panda algorithm updates. So they're seeing your site as relatively low value.
• You have very few links pointing to your site, and they look to be pretty low quality as well. In the space you're trying to operate in, you're going to need many more high quality links pointing to your site to be able to rank well for the terms that will drive you revenue and traffic.
• You've done very little in the last few years (probably because traffic was taking a hit so hard) so you're not really giving yourself the chance to earn new links and get traffic in other ways (social, referral, etc) which can be a good way to build traffic sustainably and longterm as well, which also helps guard you against algorithm updates like the ones you experienced.
• I ran a quick crawl with ScreamingFrog and didn't see any glaring issues (no robots.txt issue, not many non-2** status code pages). Some of your content is 4+ clicks from the homepage, which is something you should look at with your site architecture and will be exacerbated as you start to create more content on your site.

So if I were you, I'd figure out your content strategy (and with that your keyword research strategy to identify your keywords) and with that your link acquisition and promotion strategy. There is a lot of content on Moz and other places on how to do all of this!

Hope that's helpful.

John

Hi Rhys! Great question.

Just to be clear, you're talking about this scenario. You have page site.com/page/ and want to redirect it to site.com/page2/, but you also have children of /page/ that are /page/1/ and /page/2/.

You are wondering what happens when you redirect **just **/page/ to /page2/. Is that correct?

If you do a one-to-one redirect, no REGEX and no pattern matching, then /page/1/ and /page/2/ should remain where they are. You are not removing the /page/ subfolder, but are simply forwarding the /page/ URL to /page2/.

If you are also wanted to move /page/1/ to /page2/1/ and /page/2/ to /page2/2/, then you should be sure that those URLs resolve before you redirect the original URL. From a pure SEO point of view, moving all the pages is the right move to keep your URL architecture clean. Though if you are just moving /page/ to /page2/ in order to test things and are going to come back to /page/ eventually, then redirecting the sub pages is not really necessary right now.

Does that help? If you need to clarify more, please do and I can adjust my answer!