It shouldn't show EXACTLY the same data! Just so you know, if you are looking at search query data or anything like that, all you are seeing is Search Console's data which has been 'piped' into GA with no modifications. You need to look at separate stats like sessions, users and / or page views under "Acquisition" to see GA's 'own' data (which is not from GSC)

Obviously if you look at the GSC data in GA, it will be the same as on GSC, as it's literally copy-pasted over. Don't get a false sense of security from that, it corroborates nothing

You need to see if under acquisition, you have any sessions from Google. If you do, then GSC's click data is obviously wrong and cannot be relied upon. Try splitting by default channel grouping, source, medium, or source/medium

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'

The only thing it changes IMO is delete rel=prev / next tags to save on code bloat. Other than that, nothing changes in my opinion. It's still best to allow Google to rank paginated URLs if Google chooses to do so - as it usually happens for a reason!

I might lift the self referencing canonicals, maybe. Just leave them without directives of any kind, and force Google to determine what to do with them via URL structure ('?p=', '/page/', '?page=' etc). If they're so confident they don't need these tags now, maybe using any directives at all is just creating polluting signals that will unnecessarily interfere

In the end I think I'd just strip it all off and monitor it, see what happened

"Lets say i am a dwi lawyer and i have multiple locations. These are merely examples for cities and keywords.

• _Home page is Criminal defense lawyer - this is the term we should be targeting. Maybe i can target the state name, but i am losing so much SEO weight by not leveraging this home page as the main page for this term. _
• _Then we have a location page in south Boston  that is "S Boston DWI lawyer" as the title tag. _
• _Then we have another location page north Boston that is "N Boston DWI Lawyer" as the title tag. _

I can leave the city name off the home page title tag,  but then what do i do with these pages that are pretty much competing with one another? I know the home page will not rank since none of the locations point to it, and only to a location page.

_I was thinking about creating one page with both locations and having both G map listings go directly there, but that doesn't make sense because other locations do not have the same setup. Or choosing the most central location and pointing that to the home page and let the rest have a locations page. _"

Obviously have your main keyword on your homepage, but unless your site has a unique value proposition (watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AmRg3p79pM - only watch until Miley outlines common mistake #1, the rest is pretty much irrelevant here) that trumps that of all your competitors (who may have been operating in the area before you) - don't expect to suddenly jump to number 1. Your popularity massively affects your rankings and having a unique value proposition for end users massively affects your quality and volume of organically created backlinks

As to whether you should have separate pages for S Boston (South Boston) and N Boston (North Boston?) - that depends on your implementation and the keyword volumes.

• "n boston dwi lawyer" - 0 estimated monthly searches in the USA from Google's Keyword Planner
• "north boston dwi lawyer" - 0 estimated monthly searches in the USA from Google's Keyword Planner
• "s boston dwi lawyer" - 0 estimated monthly searches in the USA from Google's Keyword Planner
• "south boston dwi lawyer" - 0 estimated monthly searches in the USA from Google's Keyword Planner

Pointless! Let's try slightly broader terms:

• "n boston lawyer" - 0 estimated monthly searches in the USA from Google's Keyword Planner
• "north boston lawyer" - 0 estimated monthly searches in the USA from Google's Keyword Planner
• "s boston lawyer" - 0 estimated monthly searches in the USA from Google's Keyword Planner
• "south boston lawyer" - 10 estimated monthly searches in the USA from Google's Keyword Planner

Still pretty bad. If I could 'quickly and easily' find evidence that Google though people were searching for these terms regularly, or broader variants - and that Google didn't 'group' their search volumes (and thus thought they were distinct search entities as per Hummingbird) I might say yeah, have two separate pages and on each page create one of those Google maps that draws a border around an area (usually created with zipcode / post-code data) which would illustrate your area of service and the cut-off boundaries

Since there isn't much volume here for these kinds of terms, is local SEO really the answer for you? Is it even going to benefit you that much? Is it even going to make a difference, whatever you do? I'm not really sure about that, looking at the data behind Google's searches

Experimenting with more terms it does very much seem that South Boston could be worth targeting independently, but North Boston is really not even worth bothering with:

• "n boston legal" - 0 estimated monthly searches in the USA from Google's Keyword Planner
• "north boston legal" - 0 estimated monthly searches in the USA from Google's Keyword Planner
• "s boston legal" - 10 estimated monthly searches in the USA from Google's Keyword Planner
• "south boston legal" - 10 estimated monthly searches in the USA from Google's Keyword Planner

Actually, people seem to care more about the distinction of 'greater' Boston and what that means. People care about South Boston and Greater Boston, rather than North / South divide of Boston:

• "n boston " - 10 estimated monthly searches in the USA from Google's Keyword Planner
• "north boston" - 480 estimated monthly searches in the USA from Google's Keyword Planner
• "s boston" - 40 estimated monthly searches in the USA from Google's Keyword Planner
• "south boston" - 12,100 estimated monthly searches in the USA from Google's Keyword Planner
• "greater boston" - 2,900 estimated monthly searches in the USA from Google's Keyword Planner

So go for South and Greater Boston related terms if possible and divide it up that way:

• "greater boston legal " - 20 estimated monthly searches in the USA from Google's Keyword Planner
• "south boston legal" - 10 estimated monthly searches in the USA from Google's Keyword Planner
• "greater boston legal services" - 1,900 estimated monthly searches in the USA from Google's Keyword Planner
• "south boston lawyer" - 10 estimated monthly searches in the USA from Google's Keyword Planner

If you have no base of operations in Greater Boston, maybe you want to fundamentally reconsider that as somewhere in Greater Boston might be considered more lucrative from a search POV. Maybe North Boston is part of Greater Boston, I don't know - I'm from the UK! I'm trying to see it a bit like London and its various districts (North London, South London, Greater London, Camden, Covent Garden etc)

With all this info coming together, I'd say don't really bother with North Boston much at all. I might Create a South Boston page and reference Greater Boston on that a lot, drawing up a Google map showing your bordered service areas (highlighting South Boston, your office in South Boston, and then surrounding Greater Boston - all on ONE map)

I'd talk a lot about the legal scene in South Boston, why the product is more relevant there (when people in North Boston don't seem to even care much for legal aid at all). I'd illustrate that your core focus in is South Boston with aspirations and clients in and around surrounding Greater Boston - where it seems like the real money is

Without an office in Greater Boston somewhere, rankings in that area (those areas) will be slightly hampered, but competition for "greater boston legal services" is "low" (at least for PPC, but it's probably also low for SEO as well) - so you might make some ground and get a bit of traffic more quickly

If having a South Boston specific location page which does not really reference North Boston much (or pollute itself with that term) necessitates for UX purposes that you also need to create a North Boston page, fine do it. Just don't expect it to bring much traffic in (based on what I am seeing!)

"_Finally the home page will not rank well for any major  terms. The location page does rank for the fictional south Boston DWI lawyer, but the other listing does not show up. The home page does not show up in the first ten pages either.  One other aspect is that the home page ranks for terms that I am not even targeting. _

_These pages are all targeted on specific keywords so that they do not overlap or compete, but some pages are the services main outline, but the location pages have their own version. _

I have removed all mentions of the same keyword from the home page.  I made a few changes about 2 weeks ago and already noticed movement in rankings days later. "

Strong technical SEO and keyword 'cannibalisation' avoidant deployment 'allow' you to rank well. They don't make your site the best page for Google to rank. All they do is clear your roadblocks, but if you don't have enough fuel (popularity, value-add propositions) to be competitive and win the race - don't expect to win

SEO is not a substitute for a business offering which may not be more competitive, than all others sites ranking above itself. SEO helps your website to rank appropriately, where an unbiased user would expect to see it in Google's rankings

It's likely that they will be valued a bit less but the effects shouldn't be drastic. Even if you just had one massive page with all products on the ones at the top would likely get more juice anyway

If it's a crazy big concern, think about a custom method to sort your products

That sounds like a negative SEO attack, let me explain that for you. In the past, the volume of backlinks mattered more than their quality (before PageRank was refined more, before Google's Penguin algorithm updates)

As you can imagine, this was heavily abused so Google took measures to counteract the worst of the SEO industry. They created clever algorithms which attempted to determine, whether links had been built 'just for SEO' or whether the links in question were truly relevant. For sites attempting to manipulate Google's rankings, they de-valued the linking sites or in the worst cases, applied manual penalties - nullifying all their rankings

Again the industry adapted to Google's changes. People learned that if they created links which 'looked like' they had been manufactured to raise Google rankings, they could penalise the site they were pointing to (enter: Negative SEO)

Google's algorithms have come on since then but IMO still take a harsh line and have a very difficult time distinguishing between manipulative links and negative SEO links

As such, it's wise to take action on this kind of stuff. Whilst a disavow project may slightly lower rankings a small amount (as an SEOs view of what's a bad link, is never 'perfectly' aligned to Google's view) - it's still worth doing. If you ignore such things for too long and they mount up, instead of seeing a small dip - you can lose ALL your rankings (when Google's algorithms fail to evaluate the links correctly)

Personally I'd take action, especially as some links are porn related ('bad neighbourhood' links)

The best thing to do is download all links from all the main backlink sources (Ahrefs, Moz, SEMRush, Majestic SEO). Once this is done you can use something like URL profiler to set metrics against each link (adding of course, your referral traffic data from GA). You can weight or balance these metrics in a new column in Excel, and then evaluate which links are good or spammy

At the end of the process, you have a list of domains to disavow. At Effect, we've got really good at this actually. Even though we always tell clients they could see a small dip in results, in many cases they don't even see that. Then they can have peace of mind ,that their backlink profile (at least for a few months, or couple of years) is 'insulated'

Email address is on our Moz community profile if interested

This is a great, technical SEO query!

What you have to understand is that whilst Google 'can' crawl JS, they often don't. They don't do it for just anyone, and even then they don't do it all of the time. Google's main mission is to 'index the web' - on that account their index of the web's pages, whilst vast - is still far from complete

Crawling JavaScript necessitates the usage of a headless browser (if you were using Python to script such a thing, you'd be using the Selenium or Windmill modules). A browser must open (even if it does so invisibly) and 'run' the JavaScript, which creates more HTML - which can then be crawled only **AFTER **the script execution

On average this takes 10x longer than basic, non-modified source code scraping. Ask your self, would Google take a 10x efficiency hit on an incomplete mission - for 'everyone' on the web? The answer is no (I see evidence of this every day across many client accounts)

Let's answer your question. If all the products would be visible in the base, non-modified source code (right click page, then click "view source" - is the data there?) then there is a high likelihood that Google will see and crawl it

If the data (code) only exists with right click, inspect element - and not in "view source" - then the data only exists in the 'modified' source code (not the base-source). In that scenario, Google would be extremely unlikely to crawl it (or always crawl it). If it's a very important page on a very important site (Coca Cola, M&S, Barclays, Santander) then Google may go further

For most of us, the best possible solution is to 'get' the data we want crawled, into the non-modified source code. This can be achieved by using JS only for the visual changes (but not the structure) or by adopting SSR (Server Side Rendering)

Hope that helps

It would be the best you can do in that situation

Google doesn't use rel=prev/next any more: https://searchengineland.com/google-no-longer-supports-relnext-prev-314319 - so forget about it unless you think it has benefits for crawlers other than Google

I would do the redirects properly, so redirect the old paginated URLs to the same page (paginated URL) on the new site

Google usually doesn't list paginated content but it can do sometimes. A good example of this is when you type really specific queries into Google and find that Google is linking to a topic on a forum. Quite often you'll see Google linking to paginated content there. Why? Because that specific page of the topic, is the part where the thread really gets answered (or gets its best insight). Maybe some people link to that page of that thread specifically, and it becomes more popular than the first page

In those situations, Google's usual view (that first page should be canonical) gets overridden. So whilst Google 'usually' makes the first page canonical, sometimes Google can change its mind if popularity metrics suggest a different paginated URL should be canonical instead

As such, you don't need rel=prev/next (which Google doesn't even use) and you don't need to put canonical tags on paginated content pointing to the parent (which might disable Google from overriding the default canonical URL). I would properly redirect all the old paginated URLs, to all the new ones - so Google doesn't get confused

This is a really good answer.

OP also needs to check the data they are looking at. Is it link growth data, or actual static link data? Some charts make it look as if your links are disappearing, when what they are really saying is less domains are 'creating' links to you over time (aka your link growth is slowing)

If OP is sure that their actual links are shrinking over time, Steve gave great answers

Here are some others:

• People re-designing their websites and streamlining their content, some links get removed as some old content (which may contain links) doesn't make it onto the new site
• People killing their own content even if it's not part of a re-design, removing old blog posts etc (which may contain links)
• People un-linking their internal links to insulate their own PageRank better, which leaves you with un-linked citations
• People adding no-follows to their links. These links should still be detected, but they won't count to your SEO any more
• People blocking the indexation of content that contains links (e.g: putting Meta no-index and / or robots.txt blocks on blog posts which contain links) as a risk nullification measure
• People moving their site from one domain to another. The new links from the new site should be found eventually, but often there's a trough where a backlink tool will see the old site is gone but it won't have found the new site yet!
• More people opting out of having their site crawled by backlink data suppliers (e.g: blocking rogerbot, Moz's crawler in robots.txt)