This schema defines the name of your business, it should just contain your business name (and nothing else)

"Name:_ This is the name of the business you are talking about_"

If the name of your business (legally, the name you trade with) is "ABC Dental", then this should be set to "ABC Dental"

Editing your business name for SEO is something that Google frowns upon at the GMB / schema level. Lots of the information which affects a businesses' prominence in the SERPs is cross-fed from schema, but also from Google My Business

• https://cognitiveseo.com/blog/20273/google-my-business-tips/

For Google My Business, it's frowned upon to conjoin your location and business name (indeed this can cause GMB penalties)

"[Don't] Stuff only keywords in the title: Don’t take the advice above badly. If you have multiple keywords, just focus on the main one and keep the secondary ones for your website’s pages. A good example of keyword stuffing which you should avoid is the following: “Arcadia: Hotel, Motel, Bed and Breakfast, B&B, Restaurant in London. Google doesn’t like that and will often hard suspend pages that do this, so avoid it." ~ Cognitive SEO

• https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en-GB

"Your name should reflect your business’ real-world name, as used consistently on your shop front, website, stationery and as known to customers. Accurately representing your business name helps customers find your business online.

_Add additional details like address and/or service area, opening hours and category in the other sections of your business information. _

For example, if you were creating a listing for a 24-hour coffee shop in Southampton city centre called Shelly’s Coffee, you would enter that business information as:

• Business name: Shelly’s Coffee
• Address: 324 Poppy Street, Southampton
• Hours: Open 24 hours
• Category: Coffee shop

Including unnecessary information in your business name is not permitted, and could result in your listing being suspended. Refer to the specific examples below to determine what you can and can't include in your business name." ~ Google

Since Google frown on building out the business name with keywords (yes, EVEN location based ones) for GMB, and since LocalBusiness schema and GMB data serve similar functions for Google - why would they think any differently?

As such I'd personally not include your location in your business name specifically (either through schema or on GMB) as the benefit of doing so will be slight, whilst the risks may be more substantial (GMB / rich snippet spam penalties)

Oh dear what a kerfuffle. People are always searching for new negative-SEO assault deployments!

In February 2018 Moz actually covered the subject of cross-domain canonical tag usage:

• https://moz.com/blog/cross-domain-rel-canonical-seo-value-cross-posted-content

Apparently it can work but only under very specific circumstances:

• The content of the 'canonicaling' URL matches the canonical destination
• The headline of the 'canonicaling' URL's content matches that of the canonical destination
• In-Content Links of the 'canonicaling' URL match those of the canonical destination

So unless the content on their pages happens to be almost identical to the content on the page on your site which the tags are linking to; they're pretty much boneheads and this isn't a major concern.

In all likelihood nothing bad will happen but you could try using Google's Disavow tool (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main) to send them a signal that you do not wish to be 'associated' with the spam-site in question. It is unknown (or at least I haven't heard) whether the disavow tool covers canonical links. I would think that it would at least prompt Google to fundamentally disassociate the two sites.

More than likely those behind the attack are fully aware that it is extremely unlikely to harm you. They probably have a network of machine-built sites launching the same (fake) attack against thousands of webmasters. My guess is that they are preying on ignorance, hoping that some webmasters will pay them to take the tags off.

DON'T fall for it

Second vote for homepage, especially if OP is using JSON-LD method

FYI!

Only her homepage 301s to her new site.

Some of her deep-link 404-ing URLs do not 301, and those are the ones which Moz picked up:

https://www.poppyporter.com/racing_wings_earrings.html

If you load the above URL, you will notice that in the URL bar it **does not **change to .co.uk. The 301 is homepage (or maybe 'key-page') level only

The domain is in fact, not parked and still hosts custom 404 pages and other content :')

If you get any warnings in SD tester, the schema will probably still be used. It's a different story for 'errors', if you get errors then your schema probably won't be used and the issues will likely be re-raised in Search Console later

Your main thing to do when introducing schema is to nail the basics, then experiment with isolated additions later to see what difference it makes. Don't try and shove it all in at once and make a big mess for yourself!

I would add LocalBusiness schema on your homepage if possible. You can also use Logo schema on the homepage too

I am assuming the site isn't yours and doesn't belong to you. That makes things trickier and it means you'll be working with estimates, but it doesn't make things completely impossible!

There are tools which monitor Google organic search positions and paid ads (AdWords) in order to specifically estimate the Google traffic which a site or web-page might be earning.

SEMRush is one tool (paid, though you can get some limited data for free):

• https://www.semrush.com/info/wikipedia.org

You can see a little chart here:

• https://d.pr/i/P2GoDU.png

They basically look at search and ad rankings and then estimate traffic by pitching CTR (click through rate) data against ranking position data. It's very ballpark, but it is at least something you could look at. SEMRush also has a "chart tool" whereby you can input sites and metrics and build comparative charts (quite nice). Keep in mind you can only see traffic data by Google region (e.g: USA / Google.com or UK . Google.co.uk) and getting to an all-encompassing global view can be tricky (and time consuming)

Ahrefs costs more but we have found their traffic estimates to be more responsive, accurate and easier to manage (especially if you just want to see flat global data):

• https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/overview/v2/subdomains/recent?target=wikipedia.org

Again, it's a paid tool with some free data. You want to be looking here:

• https://d.pr/i/4KJVOM.png

The only thing you are seeing there, is organic (SEO) traffic, not PPC (paid search) traffic. Although the data is narrower from one perspective, it's much easier to get global data. In addition to that, I do find the data to be more accurate, especially since the search volumes which Ahrefs uses within its traffic estimates contain click-stream data to enhance accuracy:

• https://help.ahrefs.com/keywords-explorer/faqs-and-troubleshooting/how-accurate-is-keyword-search-volume-in-ahrefs

That being said, nothing is perfect:

• https://help.ahrefs.com/site-explorer/faqs-and-troubleshooting/why-dont-the-organic-traffic-numbers-reported-by-ahrefs-match-those-i-see-in-google-analytics

Some people have even done studies comparing different tools, including SimilarWeb's traffic forecasting which I have little / no experience with:

• https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/how-accurate-are-website-traffic-estimators/

I heard down the grapevine a few years back, that SearchMetrics (which is quite expensive) is actually pretty good at all this stuff. What I was told was that, they buy ISP (internet service provider) data and use that to forecast and estimate traffic to different sites instead. If that is true, it would be by far the most accurate traffic data available, but would come at a premium.

I believe that earlier on in my career, I had a little play and it was pretty robust. Platforms change though, you'd have to contact them to see if they still offer similar data.

As you can see, there are different options with different strengths and weaknesses. Accurate, digital, legal competitor surveillance technology is seldom free. Even if you're not buying the data from the competitor (who would never sell it to you! Plus it might be fiddled...) - you're still paying someone. Either someone who resells ISP network data, or someone who has 'done something clever' to get more accurate Google-traffic forecasting than the rest.

Hope this helps

You can use Screaming Frog to do this

Crawl the whole site, then once it's done save the crawl file (File->Save) so you don't lose the project (important, in-case you accidentally export the wrong thing - you can load it back up again!)

Then go: Bulk Export->All Outlinks

That will get you the data you need. It will list all the links on the site, including links to resources (as long as your crawl settings are right, it can be somewhat of a learning curve - if for example you neglect to even crawl pages blocked by Robots.txt, if you neglect to crawl links inside of CSS or if you don't use the JS crawling method correctly you might miss stuff)

The spreadsheet will contain loads of columns containing data on the links. One will show you the referring page / source URL, the other will show you the link target / destination. On the link destination column, filter by your desired URL (which in this case would contain /image-name.jpg or similar)

Once that's done, on the left you'll see all the referring URLs. Sorted!

If the data which is created by Screaming Frog is too large to be analysed in Excel you can export to CSV instead of XLSX. You can then proceed to:

a) Upload it to a local MySQL database for analysis with MySQL queries

b) Use a big-data CSV manipulation tool, like Delimit instead to narrow the data down. Once it's narrow, re-save and then analyse in Excel

Problem solved!

This is a pretty good question and the answer can be variable depending upon the level of authority which your domain has currently accrued.

One of our employees always touts this site (not one of our clients) as having superb navigation:

• https://www.virginexperiencedays.co.uk/

There are several aspects to the navigation and URL structure - and how those different elements interact.

Even the faceted navigation impacts the URL structure, for example you can build very specific (niche) URLs like this just using the on-site UI:

• https://www.virginexperiencedays.co.uk/multiple-car-experiences/yorkshire-and-humber/100-250/4-stars

So if you wanted to see driving 'experience days' for multi-car experiences (drive more than one car) within Yorkshire and Humber, which were between £100 and £250 with a 4-star or higher rating... the pages listed there would be the ones!

If you load that page, you can see that all of those things have been set in the sidebar based filtering (faceted) navigation. WordPress has issues in terms of reflecting faceted navigational choices properly in the URL structure, especially when more than faceted navigation filter is active. You then have to choose between pretty permalinks  or having multiple filters accessible to users simultaneously, not ideal. Due to that I'm pretty sure some kind of bespoke (or heavily customised) CMS would have been used to get everything all working in one place as it should.

In addition to all that neat stuff, if you hover over the top menu entries you'll see that they expand and are pretty comprehensive. That's called a 'mega' menu and re-distributes SEO authority very efficiently, so long as all of the links are accessible in the 'base' (non-modified) source code. Surely this is just the way to go for everyone right?

WRONG!

The cited website obviously has the backing of Virgin and some pretty colossal promotional activity going on behind the scenes. That's not insider info, Virgin is a huge multinational corporation! Anyone examining their backlink profile using publicly available data would say the same thing.

If you're not already riding a very high SEO authority stream, chances are that this type of navigation could actually lower your ranking results.

If you have loads of authority, you can tip it down channels to really soak up a lot of long-tail traffic with this very granular type of site-architecture which leverages great navigational/URL-structure interplay.

On the other hand, if you are a smaller site (of any description) - it's like using an irrigation system with only one bucket of water to supply it. That bucket could have kept 2-3 plants alive for a few days, but spread evenly among hundreds of crops it makes literally no difference (and everything dies together, oh no!)

Implementing very advanced navigational structures too early can sometimes cause your small amount of SEO authority to 'bleed out' and achieve relatively little (or nothing) over thousands of pages.

It's great to be ambitious, and all of these great tactics can work (on any site, not just news or experience-day sites) but they all have a proper time of adoption. Adopt too early and you risk flattening your prior achievements in a void of poor results. Adopt too late and you risk being left behind as your peers take a chance and (potentially) make something more of themselves

It's not just what you do, it's when you do it (if that makes sense)

On a news site, or any other site - I'd say start simpler and as you accrue more SEO authority, redistribute it and gradually increase depth of navigation, URL structure and content granularity

Here is your basic decision:

1. Flatter URL structure and condensed nav helps the site build up authority and win a few mid-to-high tier terms
2. Deeper URL structure with expansive nav helps reap the long-tail and gain massive amounts of traffic, but only once your SEO authority reaches a certain threshold. Before that point, you'll just bleed out

Hope that helps

Omg I haven't seen AWStats in years good on you for knowing what it is and that it even exists!

Your traffic figures though, don't prove that the hits are coming 'from' Google. So Google Search Console could be right (maybe those visits aren't from Google)

Search Console only shows your Google clicks (NOT visits), nothing else. It's data from Google's end, it just means people aren't clicking on your search results although they are sometimes seeing them (maybe they are bland and uncompelling)

Even clicks don't = traffic. Errors can happen between the click and the site loading which mean that a click isn't necessarily traffic. Google's data in this area can sometimes be sampled, so you could be right that GSC is wrong - but I wouldn't say it's overly likely (especially since it's data direct from Google)

You can get traffic from Google without getting any users visiting from Google, e.g: if you are visited by Googlebot. Just because Google is indexing you, that doesn't mean users 'from' Google are visiting you

Analytics may have better data for you, if you have Google Analytics installed 'properly'

No - translations don't count as duplicate content, but you should ensure that your site has a proper multiregional build-out (e.g: site.com/press-releases/artice (EN) vs site.com/fr/press-releases/artice (FR)

You should properly 'build out' the site in an international way, don't use low quality auto-translate plugins or live-translation features. You will need all your hreflang tags set up properly, so Google knows they are alternate language page variants (see: https://yoast.com/hreflang-ultimate-guide/)

See this from 2011: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=UDg2AGRGjLQ&feature=emb_logo where Matt talks about whether translations are duplicate content. AFAIK Google's stance hasn't changed loads. The translation must add value and you must use human-translated content (written by someone competent enough, that it doesn't read as if it was written by a machine)

More recently John Mu (from Google) has said that auto-translated content won't gain penalties but the rankings will suck so basically still get humans to write stuff: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-auto-translating-content-penalty-28413.html

Interestingly Google recently said that they think there may come a time in the future where auto / machine-translated content is acceptable: https://www.seroundtable.com/machine-written-content-google-guidelines-28338.html

... but as of now, it's still considered poor and against guidelines!

Not sure on the date / time querying aspect, but instead of using "inurl:https://mysite.com" you might have better luck checking indexation via "site:mysite.com" (don't put in subdomains, www or protocol like HTTP / HTTPS)

Then be sure to tell Google to 'include' omitted results (if that notification shows up, sometimes it does - sometimes it doesn't!)

You can also use Google Search Console to check indexed pages:

• https://d.pr/i/oKcHzS.png (screenshot)
• https://d.pr/i/qvKhPa.png (screenshot)

You can only see the top 1,000 - but it does give you a count of all the indexed pages. I am pretty sure you could get more than 1k pages out of it, if you used the filter function repeatedly (taking less than 1k URLs from each site-area at a time)

Pages that I like to call 'core' site URLs should go in your sitemap. Basically, unique (canonical) pages which are not highly duplicate, which Google would wish to rank

I would include core addresses

I wouldn't include uploaded documents, installers, archives, resources (images, JS modules, CSS sheets, SWF objects), pagination URLs or parameter based children of canonical pages (e.g: example.com/some-page is ok to rank, but not example.com/some-page?tab=tab3). Parameters are additional funky stuff added to URLs following "?" or "&".

There are exceptions to these rules, some sites use parameters to render their on-page content - even for canonical addresses. Those old architecture types are fast dying out, though. If you're on WordPress I would index categories, but not tags which are non-hierarchical and messy (they really clutter up your SERPs)

Try crawling your site using Screaming Frog. Export all the URLs (or a large sample of them) into an Excel file. Filter the file, see which types of addresses exist on your site and which technologies are being used. Feed Google the unique, high-value pages that you know it should be ranking

I have said not to feed pagination URLs to Google, that doesn't mean they should be completely de-indexed. I just think that XML sitemaps should be pretty lean and streamlined. You can allow things which aren't in your XML sitemap to have a chance of indexation, but if you have used something like a Meta no-index tag or a robots.txt edit to block access to a page - **do not **then feed it to Google in your XML. Try to keep **all **of your indexation modules in line with each other!

No page which points to another, separate address via a canonical tag (thus calling itself 'non-canonical') should be in your XML sitemap. No page that is blocked via Meta no-index or Robots.txt should be in your sitemap.XML either

If you end up with too many pages, think about creating a sitemap XML index instead, which links through to other, separate sitemap files

Hope that helps!

It depends what you mean by 'alias'. If you means configuring the old domain to properly 301 redirect all URLs from the old site to the new site (so the old site becomes inaccessible, due to serving as a redirect platform) then yes. If you mean doing something else, like pointing the old domain to your new site - other than by 301 redirects, it's probably not a good idea for SEO!

This is very true for multi-section articles (which span multiple addresses), and less true of articles which have only one address yet break down into multiple addresses in terms of UGC comment-based pagination

There are several ways to do this, some are more accurate than others. If you have access to the site which contain the web-page on Google Analytics, obviously you could filter your view down to one page / landing page and see when the specified page first got traffic (sessions / users). Note that if a page existed for a long time before it saw much usage, this wouldn't be very accurate.

If it's a WordPress site which you have access to, edit the page and check the published date and / or revision history. If it's a post of some kind then it may displays its publishing date on the front-end without you even having to log in. Note that if some content has been migrated from a previous WordPress site and the publishing dates have not been updated, this may not be wholly accurate either.

You can see when the WayBack Machine first archived the specified URL. The WayBack Machine uses a crawler which is always discovering new pages, not necessarily on the date(s) they were created (so this method can't be trusted 100% either)

In reality, even using the "inurl:" and "&as_qdr=y15" operators will only tell you when Google first saw a web-page, it won't tell you how old the page is. Web pages do not record their age in their coding, so in a way your quest is impossible (if you want to be 100% accurate)

There's a few things you need to marry up if you want to do this. You need the referring page or domain / hostname (to validate that the session came from a backlink you know about). Once you filter the data down like that, you just need to filter by user-agent ("googlebot" - or any user-agent string which contains "googlebot"). Then you just want to look at the IP address field in the tabular data and you have your answers!

Here's the problem, most IP-level data is contained within basic server-side analysis packages (like AWStats which is installed on most sites, within the cPanel) or alternatively you can go to the log files for much of the same data. Most referrer-level data (stuff that deals with attribution) is contained within Analytics suites like Adobe Omniture or Google Analytics.

In GA, you can't usually get to 'individual' IP-level data. There used to be a URL hack to force it to render, but it was killed off (and many people who used it were banned by Google). The reason for that is, Google don't want too much PID (Personally Identifiable Data) harvested by their tool. It creates too many legal issues for Google (and also, whomever is leveraging that data for potentially nefarious marketing purposes)

Since you won't get enough IP-level data from GA, you're going to have to go to log files and log analysis tools instead. Hopefully they will contain at least some referral level data... The issue is, getting all the pieces you want to align in a legally compliant way

Obviously you have your reasons for looking. I'd check if you can find anything on your CPanel in AWStats (if that's installed) or get the log files and analyse them with something like Screaming Frog Log File Analyser

I can't promise this will return the data you want, but it's probably your only hope

Read what EGOL wrote. It depends upon the nature of your blog pagination

There are a few reasons you could have pagination within the blog area of your site

1. Your articles have next buttons and different parts of the article are split across multiple URLs. The content across the paginated elements is distinct

2. Your post feeds are paginated, purely so people can browse to pages of 'older posts' and see what your wrote way back into your archives

3. Your blog posts exist on a single URL, but when users comment on your posts, your individual posts gain paginated iterations so that users to browse multiple pages of UGC comments (as they apply to an individual post)

In the case of 2 or 3 it's not necessarry to have unique H1s or Page Titles on such paginated addresses, except under exceptional circumstances. In the case of #1 you should make the effort!

Don't think this is possible with your site's (current) architecture as the parts you want to link to are 'generated' and exist in the modified source-code only, rather than the base source code.

Basically you can extend a URL using the hash-anchor (#) to connect to certain areas of a web-page, which are marked up a certain way.

**I can take your URL here: **https://www.sacramentotop10.com/business/chamber-of-commerce/

And extend it to jump straight to your footer, for example: https://www.sacramentotop10.com/business/chamber-of-commerce/#footer

This is because the footer always exists in your web-page's base (non-modified) source code:

• view-source:https://www.sacramentotop10.com/business/chamber-of-commerce/ - (this link will only work in Google Chrome!)

You can see the reference for your footer here:

• https://d.pr/i/AnLonX.png (screenshot)

That is a view of the page's non-modified source code, before any scripts (JavaScript etc) have run. That's what you get with right click -> View page source

Once your scripts have run, things look a little different. The modified source (which you can access via right click -> Inspect, using Google Chrome) is richer and paints a fuller picture

Here's the same area of code again but viewed via the modified source:

• https://d.pr/i/BRXg3B.png (screenshot)

As you can see, the modified source code (less Google / SEO friendly - as Google won't always execute your scripts when crawling!) contains the actual text for the copyright notice in your footer. The base source code (un-modified, more Google friendly as it's always read by Google) does not contain the actual text, only the ID which scripts need as an anchor to generate that text for you

Your problem is that, hash anchors which should work and open that window for you - won't work because all that content is stored in the modified source code (not in the base source).

Let's say you wanted to link to this one:

• https://d.pr/i/iQVOPs.png (screenshot)

And you wanted to make a link, that deep-links people just to this part here:

• https://d.pr/i/QvAwIe.png (screenshot)

Now technically if you inspect that frame, there is something with a decent ID to hook onto:

• https://d.pr/i/kMUsDO.png (screenshot)

So this link should technically work:

• https://www.sacramentotop10.com/business/chamber-of-commerce/#busi-3328-1

But sadly it doesn't do squat (I also tried https://www.sacramentotop10.com/business/chamber-of-commerce/#3328-1 and https://www.sacramentotop10.com/business/chamber-of-commerce/#3328).The reason is that, the content (pop-up window, text etc) for specified ID only exists in the modified source code (after scripts have run) but not in "View source" (the non-modified source code)

Check it out:

• https://d.pr/i/5GqIVY.png (screenshot)

You can see the 'hook' which JS grips into (to populate the content), but if you search for any content inside of the pop-up **window in the base (**non-modified) source code:

• https://d.pr/i/HhUdJK.png (screenshot)

Let's use that text ("Folsom Chamber of Commerce") as an example. Now go to the basic source code:

• https://d.pr/i/CmXVaP.png (screenshot)

Guess what?

• https://d.pr/i/7b2UrU.png (screenshot)

Bam! There's nothing there. Your problem is, you're trying to link to something which doesn't exist until scripts have run. You can use hash-anchors ('#') to deep-link, but not to generated areas of a web-page (as far as I am aware)

This functionality would require a restructure of your site in some way.

Google doesn't tend to like 'clone' sites and if it detects them, one of the web properties will be nerfed. Google wants people to 'add value' to the web, and then reward them with traffic. The path is not supposed to be, build one site - clone it, get double the traffic. This is also to keep Google's search results diverse

Seriously, how annoying would it be if you searched for something and every link was the same site with a different name?

In situations where you gained extra traffic illegitimately, there's not much that you can do (technically or otherwise) to re-capture the traffic that you shouldn't have been getting in the first place.

If I were you, I'd be looking at this decision more in terms of: "this will help to plug a gap and stop further deterioration". If Google think you have been gaining traffic that you shouldn't have been getting, fixing the problem won't cause Google to give you 'bonus points' that see your site(s) return to illegitimate traffic levels

If you are looking for quick and easy ways to succeed in SEO, know that the lifespan of such techniques is limited. In actual fact, you're lucky not to have received a penalty on both sites.

This is not a case of "how can I make some quick traffic again", it's a case of "how can I demonstrate to Google that my behavior is changing, and avoid a penalty for my main site". Sometimes the benefit, is NOT losing everything you have!

Darin Pirkey made some good points, but I don't think it's a case of 'the benefits of moving outweigh the risks of leaving it'. My POV is very similar but slightly different. I think that 'the risks of leaving it as it is are greater than the risks of merging the web properties' (but then... I'm a bit of a cynic)