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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.

One outstanding question for me is if you see fewer pages/visit when someone lands on your homepage than when they land on a deeper page? Is your brand big enough to be able to track branded searches/visits?

Hey John -

Thanks for coming here and asking your question. From my looks at your site as well, I don't see anything glaring that would keep that page from ranking.

Unfortunately, sometimes Google picks a random page to rank (on small sites like yours this is often the strongest on the site, which is the homepage) and seems unwilling to want to change that ranking page. A few thoughts for you on how to get the correct page ranking:

• Rewrite your content on this page. It is stuffed with keywords (your main keyword appears 10 times, "Jekyll Island" appears 30) and doesn't read naturally. You're writing for 2007-era search crawlers, not 2017-era users.
• Your site is way over-optimized. When I look at your About or Portfolio pages, why are these optimized for specific [wedding photographer] keywords? This doesn't make any sense for users.
• Build links to the page you want to rank. Get some local citations (from Better Business Bureaus, wedding venues, etc) to this page and I bet you'll pop in your rankings.
• Mention different venues where you have shot weddings in that area. This will help give semantic relevance to your page.

Hope that helps.

Hey Vahid -

A few questions for you:

1. Have you seen a drop in traffic to either?
2. When you search the brand name in Google, does the correct title appear?

The site: command is notoriously misleading a lot of the time, so much so that some Googlers have hinted that it might be going away. I also don't read your language so I can't really investigate too much further other than looking at canonicals and such and they all seem correct.

I wouldn't worry about it too much. If you have the same content on both, then you should look into making that unique to each site, and maybe change the page title on the wrong one to see if that helps.

Hi Anna!

Did you do any other site architecture or design changes to your homepage? Sounds like overall your site is performing better (though not as quickly as the year before) with the changes but your homepage had something changed that would have affected this.

That, or if they are unique visitors then you may have lost some key rankings or a key traffic referral source. Or, quite simply, this isn't connected with the redesign and your marketing was less effective in the past year possibly because your resources internally were going towards the redesign.

Have you dug deeper into different traffic and referral sources to see if this could have led to it?

Yeah it's super strange. I've not seen it happen before, but these sorts of anomalies pop up from time to time. As long as you haven't seen a drop in traffic or conversions, I honestly wouldn't worry about it beyond doing what you've been doing and trying to build your brand by building links to your .com site, which is resolving properly.

Please let us know how it all turns out!

Hi there -

Very strange situation! I took a look and see that your site redirects correctly (just one hop to your new site), the canonical is set correctly, etc. But I see aptitus.pe ranking in your home country search engine.

Looking at other places online, your .com is linked from your Google Maps entry and other main places where this sort of thing can cause issues.

To me, the next step would be to:

• Reach out to some of these sites (OSE link) to ask them to update their link to the .com
• Double check your .pe robots.txt and htaccess to make sure they are functioning correctly (sometimes stuff changes and we're not aware of it)

I'd be careful of taking your old site out of the index manually, because it should happen automatically with the 301s especially since your redirects have been in place for so long. Maybe try to Fetch as Googlebot the old homepage so that Google sees it and maybe then they'll respect the 301.

Hope that helps. Please report back.

John

Hi Ricardo -

I definitely agree with Donna's answer about whether it is a good strategy or not (yes, these additional links to new pages can definitely help) from a pure link acquisition perspective. I would, though, encourage you to think of it beyond just the links that you are receiving.

Think about it as an ongoing relationship and a way to continually get in front of their audience. Build your name there (and get whatever referral traffic and links you can), then use that to get columns on bigger publications that have more traffic. I know of quite a few agencies/businesses that have built their client roster or customer list off the back of consistent content marketing like this.

It's the deep not wide content strategy, and IMO works best long term.

John

Hi Sno!

Great question here. International SEO can definitely be a tricky beast! And I'll definitely take you up on that free dogsled ride in Lapland if I can help you

Some questions for you:

1. .se is Sweden, yes? And Lapland is in Finland, right? Is your domain targeted just towards Sweden in Search Console (assuming you have that set up) or is there no international targeting set? Though from looking at your page you're in Kiruna, Sweden, so this shouldn't be an issue.
2. The page is cached, but I see that it hasn't been recached (or potentially even crawled) since Dec 26, 2016. Link to cache.
3. How long has this site been live? I am not seeing any external links to it. You're not up against any hugely formidable competitors, but they do have more links than you. So work on that!

By the way, I did a search for your term and see you ranking #74 in Google.com. So yeah, build some links and get that ranking up!

John

Hi AdvertisingCloud -

Thanks for your question. It's definitely one that gets asked pretty often.

Honestly, you should do what is right for the user. Do you have multiple of the keyword (eg widgets) and not just one (eg widget)? If so, use the multiple because it's what the user who is looking for multiples will want to see. If the latter, use the singular.

If you're really concerned about losing rankings, build more good links. That'll help out across the board with your rankings.

Hope that helps!

John

Hi Pamela! Great question here. I dealt with something similar a few years ago with an ecommerce client.

I love that your client is thinking about consolidating all of the products under one brand. From a pure branding perspective, and also ease of updating and lowering technical overhead, this definitely makes sense. Right now they're spread across a bunch of sites and there is likely no cohesive brand. And if you're doing good SEO and thus content marketing and building links, you are dividing your effort by 4 or he is paying 4x what he needs to in order to have his business where he wants it to be.

It's also an interesting question to me because of this - even if you ranked 1-4 for all 4 of his sites (which is honestly unrealistic), would he be making more money than having one site where all the attention is focused to convert as many people as possible? I have to believe that having one site is best, though you'll need to honestly do the math on how much traffic all of the sites are getting and if you can honestly get that same amount on just 1 site.

If you are going to consolidate them, your option B is the one I would go with. Redirect sites B, C, & D into site A, making sure you are doing 1:1 301 redirects. I don't see this as being spammy at all to be completely honest with you - your client owns all 4 sites and it consolidating them. It may take some time for the search engines to honor all of the 301s, but this feels like exactly the use case a 301 is meant for.

Hope that helps.

John

I love this question, Adriaan. It's one that a lot of people have asked over the years and that a lot of people have had to deal with over time especially with ecommerce sites like those you work on.

As you well know, there are multiple ways to handle duplicate content:

1. The way you are proposing, which is moving to a static URL structure that always keeps the same order
2. A web of canonicals like you seem to have set up (and it sounds like you have it set up correctly)
3. The whack-a-mole approach of periodically looking for duplicate content and implementing redirects, which can lead to further issues with internal redirects. This is not a good scalable option.

SEO is all about processes. If you have a canonical process that is working for you and has been scalable (eg you are not manually specifying the URL for each new category created, which is probably done when the merchandising team or feeds update the site), that works to a certain extent.

However, this is like treating a bunch of cuts on your hands with bandaids but not dealing with the fact that a) you only have so much space on your hands and can only apply so many bandaids, and b) that you're still getting cuts on your hands.

I prefer to deal with the root of the issue, which in your case is that you can have multiple URLs targeting the same terms based on the user's (or Googlebot's!) crawl path on your site. I am assuming that you are only putting the canonicals in your XML and HTML sitemaps, by the way?

If I were you, this is how I would tackle your problem:

1. Make sure you are only putting in the canonical URLs to your XML sitemaps. Start here.

2. Do a full crawl of your site and pull all the URLs that are canonicaling elsewhere. Then get your log files and see how much time the search engines are spending on these canonical'd URLs.

3. Also check to see that Google is indeed respecting all of your canonicals! At this scale of canonicals, I'd expect that they are semi-often not respecting them and you are still dealing with duplicate content issues. But again, that's just a hunch I have.

4. Make a decision from there, off of discussions with your engineers/designers/etc about how much work is involved, about if you think it's worthwhile to make the change.

I am **always **a fan of eliminating pages that are canonical'd and not serving a purpose (example: a PPC landing page might be canonical'd and noindexed, and you don't want to remove that page). My suspicion in your case, as well, is that having /brand/mens won't convert any differently from /mens/brand.

At the end of the day, you need to decide how you want your site organized and if your customers (the people buying things on the site) prefer to shop by brand or by gender/sport/whatever. This will help you decide what way to architect your URLs and your site's flow.

Hope that helps!

John

Hey there -

What a great question! It's definitely a very involved one and not a decision to be taken lightly. In fact, I was just having a similar conversation with a group of people recently when one of them posed it as well.

First of all, let me make a few comments around Domain Authority and how you should be thinking about it. Domain Authority is a metric created by Moz that correlates to how likely a website is to rank. That said, it's still unclear how the search engines are treating subdomains as they can be on different servers, be completely different technologies, and targeted to different countries as you well know.

That said, I am always a fan of consolidating link equity. If you move from a ccTLD to a country-specific subdomain and do all of the permanent redirects correctly, two things will likely happen:

1. You will consolidate link equity from many different domains to your one overall domain, which should help with rankings/traffic
2. You can consolidate your brand, which may help with conversions.

That said, you need to do your customer research and see if they'll trust eg france.site.com as much as they trust site.fr. There are definitely ways to make country-specific subdomains work very well for SEO, but this migration should not be done solely for SEO reasons in my opinion.

Hope that helps.

John

Hi Olivia -

Thanks for the question. It's definitely a good one to wrap your head around as anytime you change URLs it's a large undertaking and a lot that can go wrong.

What should happen when you move from HTTP -> HTTPS and have done everything correctly (not chaining redirects, etc) is that your HTTP pages will stop ranking in favor of your HTTPS pages which should take their place. Some people have seen a small improvement in rankings from moving to HTTPS, but for the most part people just saw a swapping out of the ranking URL to the HTTPS URL.

Make sure you annotate Analytics when this goes live so you can make some correlations from the move. Sometimes people have seen an increase in clickthrough rate because users subconsciously trust HTTPS sites more.

Good luck!

Thanks Thomas! So canonicals should be self-referencing, if I'm reading that image correctly.

Hey MV -

What you say here I don't think is the correct way to be thinking about it:

"My thought would have been that the sub domain is only as good as the main domain and in this case the main domain isn't strong because little or no content is hosted on it."

As I said in my original comment, there isn't really a "main domain" with a technical implementation. Your subdomain should be able to rank just fine as long as it is the canonical, has links to it, and the migration was done correctly from the old to the new. I still suspect that there are a lot of links left to the old site setup that are not yet benefitting where your site is now.

A subdomain is a separate site from another subdomain, so site.domain.com is different from www.domain.com and has its own ranking potential. Links to www.domain.com may have a knockon effect for ranking site.domain.com, but you also need links to site.domain.com to really be able to rank.

With the right setup (which you put), yes indeed. What the HREFLANG does is specify the country that different parts of the site should rank for.

So you'll have site.com/ with hreflang for gb-en and site.com/ch/en/ with hreflang to ch-en. Do note that you'll have to have hreflang for every page. So if you have site.com/blue-widgets and target that to gb-en with hreflang, you'll have site.com/ch/en/blue-widgets targeted with hreflang to ch-en.

Make sense?

It's been a bit since I've done hreflang with canonical tags as well, so definitely look into what is required there.

I think Patrick has asked a lot of fantastic questions around this, but let me just say that it's highly improbable that just one link will cause massive ranking fluctuations like this. Have you done the analysis to see if there are others that have been built that you were not aware of as well?

I'm also a bit confused on your question of "Why Google is not stopping them even though they claim that such back-links will be taken care of?" First off, Google says that they are just devaluing bad links not penalizing, even algorithmically, for them. I don't buy it. I think they're heading in this direction, but they're definitely not there yet.

If you're really concerned about this one link, disavow it and keep moving. Go build good links and develop great content that you can do outreach around in order to get the links that will help you rank.

John

Hey there -

Great question. If that's what's happening, then someone definitely bought the old domain with links to it and redirected it. I've also seen this done TO people in order to pass an algorithmic penalty onto a competitor. Nasty stuff.

That said, while this isn't strictly whitehat, it can be super effective to buy old dead domains with links and redirect them into your own site. It actually works very well for SEO purposes! But, it comes with its risks as you have to do a lot of due diligence on the domain you want to redirect as there could have been some dodgy things going on and you don't want to risk passing along a penalty to your own site.

That said, I wouldn't undo the redirect unless you think it's hurting you. Move on and focus on other things to build new links.

The better thing to do, IMO, is to find these dead sites and pull their backlink profiles, then go and do outreach offering your site as a replacement for that site that is now dead. It's called broken link building and it works really well!

Hope that helps.

John

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

I'm with EGOL on this one. It has to be a local ranking, as I am in Denver and don't see them in the top 100 for the [custom sign] query (I used to work in that space, actually). I see local sites and way down in deep pages I see random sign companies in random cities.

I bet all of the following is coming into play, beyond what EGOL said:

• Results are likely personalized to you since you have obviously been watching this site and been to it, I would guess, more than a few times.
• Localized results and they have citations squared away well. Check for local listings etc to see if they have those. If they're hyperlocal and you're local, this would explain a ton.

I do see one redirected domain into this one, so I actually wonder if they are doing something like that (buy dead domains with links, redirect them in) that is kind of undercover, if you will, but really works. Could be something else to investigate.

Hope that helps.

Don't do it. I have friends who have owned PBNs but came under so much heat from Google and others that they ended up selling them and getting out of it.

Things like this are always caught eventually. It may work for you short term, and if you're in that business of churn-and-burn sites and they're your own (not a client's) then I see no harm in it really. It's your own choice.

But if you are building a longterm business, this is a short term tactic that will only hurt you in the long run. Time and money better spent doing real marketing activities to build your traffic and brand over time.

Good luck.

There are definitely some good answers here already from Kevin and Patrick, though I think I'm going to go a bit more general.

It sounds to me like you have been concentrating heavily on your head terms. So you're singularly focused on a small subset of terms that you now rank quite well for, but does not leave you in a very defensible position. Let's say you have 4 SERPs that are driving you most of your traffic. You get pushed down even 1 spot in each and you've lost a ton of traffic.

If I were you, I'd look at a few things:

• What are other sites in other niches doing that you are not? EG building links via strong content, receiving a ton of referral traffic, building partnerships with other sites in their niche, etc.
• From a pure SEO perspective, do what Kevin has suggested and look at how you can build out longer tail pages (which you should have been doing all along to minimize what you're currently about to face) as well as building links that these competitors have no hope of getting.
• Diversify your traffic sources. Referral, social, etc. If you're local, look at local advertising options to solidify your brand in the minds of your potential customers.

I do want to leave you with a bit of hope, though. I used to work for a big PubCo, and when they went to enter new markets or expand offerings they, as most big companies do, found it quite challenging to unseat the incumbents. So being in there already is to your benefit and hopefully you won't actually face too much of a challenge from them.

Good luck!

Hey Danny, sounds like you have a big migration project ahead of you! As others have said, you're going to have to do mass 301 redirects to the site you want everything to live on moving forward. You should also engage with an international SEO consultant to help you out with this, because you're likely going to need country-specific subfolders and use HREFLANG to send the search crawlers for the right languages to the right pages and rank them accordingly.

Happy to recommend some if you'd like.

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

I definitely agree with EGOL and Julie that both of those would happen.

HOWEVER, I do think there is a way to make this super useful to people and have it not be spammy. Charge for it. You'll have to figure out how to initially seed the community (it will be a community after all) with links and how to divide them up according to verticals/types of links, but if you don't let people be anonymous then you can keep it high quality (seeing Rand upvoted a link as opposed to Linksinator757 is super valuable) more easily.

Fun thought experiment for sure!

John

Does it work? Yeah, probably. For now.

Should it work? Probably not. I obviously haven't seen the sites, but if they're hosted on the same hosting account with the same IP address, then it wouldn't surprise me if this was eventually hit. And if it was reported, it definitely would not pass a manual review by the Google spam team IMO.

As others have said, it's super risky. Just a few weeks ago I didn't let someone join my platform to provide local SEO services specifically because they are doing this sort of thing as their main link acquisition tactic for their clients, and while it works right now it's definitely very grey hat and will stop working at some point. I've spoken with people who used to operate Personal Blog Networks like this, and they always get hit eventually.

I'd also hate to be the SEO brought in to clean this sort of thing up and get the clients that this company loses ranking again. Lots of small businesses sound like they'll be harmed because of this, unfortunately.

Hope that helps!

John

Oh boy this is a fun one! Full disclosure: I used to run marketing/growth on HotPads.com for about 18 months and we targeted some Section 8 queries, though as you say the space is very opaque and full of spam. It's also a hard space to monetize because Section 8 is low-income and most of these landlords are not making much money from their properties, so they in turn don't have much to spend on marketing etc.

Tough space, as I said.

A few things I take exception to in your original post that I'd like to clear up first:

• Don't be looking for "link exchanges". That tactic died in 2010. Instead you could look to establish relationships with other bloggers talking about low-income ways of living and exchange posts on each other's sites. This is a totally whitehat way to do it.
• You can absolutely get .gov links. Why not? They link to good resources as much as anybody else.
• Look at local chambers of commerce and places that have low-income housing pages and reach out to them asking them to link to some of your articles, or share via social media, or in their email newsletters. It's much easier to get links once you've established yourself as an authority, but of course it's an old chicken-and-egg problem.

If I were you, I'd take your main competitors and see where they are getting links from then figure out how you a) get those links and b) where the gaps are. If you identify, for example, that .edu sites are awesome link acquisition then go crazy getting a big old list of them and doing your outreach. Sure you'll get some of the same links, but I bet you'll get a bunch that your competitors don't also have.

Hope that helps!

John

Hey Matthew, there is really no good way to know if they are negatively impacting you or not. And 15 links really isn't that many, so if you have even a halfway decent sized link profile I honestly wouldn't worry about them and instead would just keep on doing what you're doing to build good links.

It's not much work at all to disavow the entire domain, so I'd take the 20 minutes to do that if you're really worried and then keep on going.

They're likely showing for your site in the tools you're using because of outdated indexes, whether any of the main link tools or even Google's Search Console data. When doing link removal work in the past I've received full link reports from all the major link indices and then de-duplicated. Doesn't sound like you really need to do that in this case, but this would be why you're still "seeing" them.

Hope that helps!

John

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 there! Does your site have subfolders or subdirectories targeted at your specific countries and their languages? Because the best and right way to do it is with a subfolder like site.com/ch/en/ targeted with HREFLANG for ch-en.

Some links I found that might help - https://www.brightedge.com/blog/seo-for-multiregional-websites/ and http://www.amazeemetrics.com/en/blog/seo-tutorial-geo-targeting-with-hreflang-tag

Hope that helps!

Absolutely. I definitely do not believe that Google is just ignoring bad links now, and Penguin can be a really hard one to debug once you think you have been affected especially since they aren't really (from what I have seen) announcing them anymore because they folded it into the main algorithm.

When you have a manual penalty for manipulative links, sometimes you have to go the hard way of disavowing after you've tried rounds of getting them removed and it's still not enough. This may be the main reason, along with negative SEO, that Google has left that tool in Search Console. I don't expect it to go away anytime soon.

Interesting times we live in.

Hey there -

Assuming you are talking about an XML sitemap, not an HTML sitemap, you shouldn't need to Fetch your site when you do this. You're literally telling Google about your pages through your XML sitemap, so they should crawl that sitemap pretty fast.

You are most welcome! Best of luck!

Hey Kit -

This is a question I am seeing coming up a lot recently! I think you'd be well guided to either get in and do a deep analysis on your own site or hire someone to do one to get to the bottom of this. There have been a decent few people sharing some screenshots of Search Console (Barry rounded them up here) where some saw drops, others saw steady, and still others saw increases.

The results you see from AMP seem to heavily depend on the correct technical implementation (and Search Console shows you errors) as well as the type of SERP feature you are in (regular organic, carousel at the front or buried deep, etc).

Hope that's helpful.

John

Hey Ricky -

Great question that I think a lot of small businesses and companies deal with. While on the one hand Google's guidelines say "Do not ever pay for a link", that gets really fuzzy in instances like local business bureaus (where you pay a membership fee and happen to get a link on their site), scholarships (where you're giving money and happen to get a link), and a lot more. Even the old Yahoo directory (retired in 2014 or so) was $300 a year and was followed and everyone had it. So the question is a lot more nuanced than "should I or shouldn't I?"

In this case, I would shy away from this specific instance simply because of the following:

• They are actually advertising different types of links depending on what you pay. They also don't say where the additional links for the higher price will go.
• They're willing to link deep for more money. This is a red flag.
• Their WHOis info is private. Not a good sign for an above-the-board company.
• They have another directory on this same IP. If that one got hit, so would this one.
• They may have a DA of 56, but if you look at their links they're (almost) all comment links that were likely built with an automated tool.

All of these are red flags to me. The fact that it is topically relevant to your site is a good thing, but in my opinion the bad definitely outweighs the good.

Spend your money creating things and then outreaching them to get the links that will actually build your business.

John

Hi Jay! Great question here.

First of all, kudos to you for looking to kill duplicate content with fire. As a marketer but foremost a writer, I am all about great writing and not doing this duplicated/spun stuff to try to rank. It won't convert anyways.

I put out a call to my followers on Twitter and one of them recommended https://www.killduplicate.com/en. I haven't personally used it, but give it a shot! It comes highly recommended.

Hope that's helpful!

John

Agreed. If you can make them awesome, then roll them out slower and do a lot of promotion around each. You'll get more bang for your buck.

Hey there -

Definitely a super valid question. I would also question why you'd keep some of the content that is, in your words, "content on similar topics distributed across both posts and pages." If they're competing with each other for rankings, you should be looking to combine some of them. You may already be doing that, in which case good work!

To your direct question. I wouldn't recommend writing custom code to make the Posts work as Pages. It's actually pretty tough to make this work within WordPress, and if you want them all to have site.com/(category)/(url-slug)/ as their URL, you'd be best served to use either a Page or a Post, but not try to combine the two. This will also make future management of all the content a lot easier as you won't have content all over the place.

I hope this is helpful!

Hey Woolbert -

Definitely something you need to solve. If this keeps up, your site may be either marked in the SERPs as having potentially malicious code or even worse they may show a layover from the SERPs warning people, thus driving them away from your site.

You need to clean up your site. First, remove the offending files. Then contact Google to let them know what you've done. Then implement stricter controls for what can be uploaded or not. Without knowing your site, it's impossible to know how feasible this is, but it's what you need to do.

And finally, make sure your site is running HTTPS.

Good luck.