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@billslawski Hi Bill, It's great to see you. I hope you are doing well.
Most of my domains are on the registrar's automatic renewal. Although I have a couple domains set to automatic renewal but I have prepaid them out beyond my reasonable lifetime - cause I don't want to rely on the registrar and I don't want to take a chance that I might forget. If I get SEO benefit for that, great!
I would increase the amount of great content and improve the quality of the content that is already in place. Content is what people link to. Great content = quality links = high DA.
I would not call it nefarious. I would simply call it duplicate content that Google will not be pleased with. Google can see lazy efforts to get links - and you are giving a reward to people who accommodate you. It's duplicate content. Google will likely ignore most of it. If you do this at scale don't be surprised if none of these links are counted.
If you stop doing the things that cause the DMCA hits and start over on a new domain then this problem will be gone.
I agree. Get Hemingway or Grammerly and rewrite from scratch without looking at the original.
Yes, you can make lots of changes to an article after it is posted.
When I am working on an article, I upload it as soon as a have a top image and a couple paragraphs. Then, over the next few days, I upload sections of the article as I get them finished.
I often edit sections within a day of their first upload.
Two or three years later, I often find something new to add to the article. At that time I add the new material and give the entire article a critical reading that usually includes lots of updates and new information. I believe that these are often immediately beneficial to rankings.
I don't know if rewriting a couple hundred articles to capture the ad income from a few thousand sessions per month will be a good use of anyone's time.
Does this site have a another stream of income? Paid links, perhaps?
The image is property of XYZ company. If you want to use it you will need to contact them for permission. Or offer to pay them a license fee. Or do whatever they ask in exchange for its use.
Many images are not available for use by anyone no matter how much you offer to pay.
Using images belonging to another company can result in civil or criminal liability. If you willfully use an image, knowing that you are not entitled to use it, you can be liable for damages of up to $150,000 per image.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statutory_damages_for_copyright_infringement
Lots of people steal my images. We file DMCA claims with Google search, complain to Google Adsense, and complain to hosting companies. Those complaints result in images and the pages where they appear being blocked from search, removed from servers, or Adsense being turned off on those pages or on the entire website. Those are easy for a copyright owner to accomplish. If repeated infringement occurs, I have an attorney who is ready to file formal complaints. We have done these things hundreds of times.
So, get permission, use a stock photo, get a camera and take your own photos. We spend thousands of dollars every month on images and will do what we need to do to protect our property.
If the rankings of the criminal defense pages have direct links then those links are helpful to any query that any page of the site competes for. So, I would not delete them.
There are law firms with strong websites that rule the SERPs for everything in their town. Their office takes any call that comes in, accepts the cases in practice areas where they have interest and expertise, and refers the rest to other firms for a referral fee.
We get tons of content offers. Many offer to pay us. Some offer free content. In over 20 years, we have only accepted a few of these offers. Here are the reasons...
First... 99% of the time the content is far below our editorial standards. Trash. Prattle. We would be ashamed to publish it. It is so bad we are not even interested in working with them.
We are not interested in being a platform for link builders. If they are building links with articles we know that they might be doing enough of that to get in trouble with Google. Google knows that people use articles, guest posts, etc. to build unnatural links. Just today at Search Engine RoundTable, Barry had a post about that - saying that links in guest posts should be nofollowed.
I will say that we have received golden content offered to us. Content of the highest quality. But, the authors of this content simply wanted to have their content on our website, so they could share their work with our visitors. These were professors and scholars who are all about writing and publishing. They did not have links in the content to their personal websites or to employer websites, or to any websites that might be concerned about links. These authors knew nothing about links. One gave us three or four articles and we then starting paying him to write about topics that we needed. His articles have been some of the best performing on our website.
Right now I have a dilema. A highly qualified author with excellent content repeatedly emailing to get his article published. But, he is with a website that is hard core linkbuilders and they will get angry if I nofollow their links. So, I will keep deleting his emails.
Do you think you have a good domain for a website targeting... Scottish Wedding Photographer? Just askin'.
Make a list of the content pages that you could write that would be most valuable for your site visitors.
Start writing, don't look at DA for six months, do what is valuable for your visitor, create what they want, create what will help convert sales on your site.
Do you know that Google does not use DA? It is a Moz number. It will not win anything for you.
So instead of watching a number that means nothing, spend your time on content that will win your wars. The more you look at DA the less work you will get done.
The specific page has..... >500 domains linking to it.
This is rocket fuel. Irrelevant articles help lots of websites.
Find the person who wrote that article for you and give them a really nice gift.
Ask them to write another article about plants in the office.
Ask them to come up with some great photos of plants (that you are legally able to distribute as screensavers, branded lightly with your domain) and give them to people.
Advertise the new article about plants on the popular page, advertise the screen saver on your popular page.
I don't think that you are going to kill a software giant with irrelevant articles but I believe from experience that they can be very helpful to your rankings. Plus, we make a few sales every month to people who landed on our website to consume irrelevant content - and the products that we sell are irrelevant to the content and damn few people want what is sold on that site.
Spend your time building something great on your main website. I sure would not build an outhouse on is.edu.
I honestly believe that Domain Authority is a decoy that takes you away from the basics of making a great website, the basics of winning on the web, and the basics of making money.
If you spend your energy on making a great website, making money, and winning on the web then you will have something tangible for your efforts.
If you instead spend your time chasing..... What can I do to get high DA??... then the energy that you spend is inefficient.
Working to build high DA will not directly make your website great, make you win on the web, or make you buckets of money. Chasing high DA when your goal is something else is like trying to kill a rabbit with a ricochet.
So instead of shooting at a rock with the hope that your bullet will bounce off and kill the rabbit, you should instead just shoot that rabbit.
DA worship is not a good use of your time.
So, how big of a mega menu are we talking about?
Ten links? Fifty? A hundred?
I think if you go waaaaaayyy to big it can be a problem with both usability and SEO. But the SEO problem is not in the link dilution.
Wow! Tom, that was a very generous and expert response.
Nice work!
Chris links to a lot of moz content. The one that I like best is a Whiteboard Friday by Rand.
https://moz.com/blog/seo-photos-visuals-graphics-whiteboard-friday
Pay special attention to K) (note that he explains it before he points to it) K) is all about having great organic rankings in websearch for the keywords that you want to appear for in image search.
Thanks for the additional information.
I am surprised that your image search traffic dropped.
Did you change the URLs of the images, change their file names, change their alt attribute, change their size (file or pixel), change where they are hosted?
I'd slap some big Adsense on it and enjoy! 
I believe that one off topic page will not hurt anything - especially if the page is an outstanding example of content for its topic.
I know sites that publish on a wide range of content and have fantastic rankings. These sites were once single topic, then departed with a single page that struck gold - and then started plowing that field into a hundred pages, and soon ranking #1 for the single-word root keyword. They then hit gold on a second topic, and a third. Now these sites have diverse branches but have found ways to interrelate the topics.
I don't think that Google has a problem with conflation. You might even make Google think that the two topics are complementary.
For me...
- Academic traffic is down because schools are closed... but, I can see many visits coming in from course management systems.
Retail traffic is good. People are still buying online, but if they don't have work for a while, I expect sales to slump.
Some article pages are getting crazy traffic. Others are getting less than normal traffic. It depends upon the topic.
This problem has been around for over 20 years and thousands of companies who have used shortcuts lost a domain to penalties and algorithms. They call this the doorway page problem, the jump page problem, the cookie cutter page problem, the portal page problem, and a dozen other names.
If you want all of these pages you will need to put a team of people onto the task of writing substantive content for each city. If this company is truly large enough to deserve thousands of doorway pages then they should have the resources to author substantive and unique content for each one.
Please reread, noting the bold words below...
This type of error or sneakyness is one of the most common causes of rich result removal.
Incorrect selection of the category, or improper use of the code.
The sentences below are copy/pasted from the Report Spam in Rich Results Page. This type of error or sneakyness is one of the most common causes of rich result removal.
"A rich result may be considered spam if it harms the user experience by highlighting falsified or misleading information. For example, a rich result promoting a travel package as an Event or displaying fabricated Reviews would be considered spam."
Source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/contact/rich_snippets_spam?hl=en
In the question between a subfolder and a subdomain... it is clear and it is murky...
Search engines say things and often do the things that they say. They also do things without sayin' that they did them and you are left to figure out what happened or how things work on your own.
If you have been running websites for a long time (24 years here), you might know that Google and other search engines have treated subdomains and folders differently, identically and murkily. It depends upon what year and month you are talking about.
**The constant is that subfolders have always inherited ranking ability from their parent domain, and will likely do that into the future. **
So, if you want assurance into the future, using a subfolder is your best bet.
Looking at DA... it is irrelevant in the subdomain and subfolder discussion. DA is a moz number that kinda correlates with search engine rankings, but just part of the time. Ranking ability and DA are different things.
Go to archive.org to see your old title tags.
Your SERP CTR can drop when Google changes the SERP interface. They can slap more images, ads, videos, "people also ask" , news and various types of rubbish that absorb the clicks before your organic rankings are seen. Competitors above or below you could start adding kickass prices, free shipping, or free beer to their title tags.
.... but, my usual suspicion is that the developers monkeyed with something.
Any advice on DA ratios to procure & frequency of procurement would be welcome.
This suggests that you are going after manipulative links.
The best way to gain links is to "earning" them with high quality content rather than building them.
You are selling products where knowledge, practice and skill can improve a person's satisfaction. You need educational content and video demonstrations.
You are selling products where a complex decision is needed to make a purchase. Again you need educational content and demonstrations.
You are selling products that require some maintenance. Yes EC and VD.
A very similar business to yours is Braun. They have a great website with lots of high quality, professionally-done informative content with lots of videos. I am a customer of theirs and their website has been very helpful. I have gone there several times and will go there again in the future. Check it out. I bought their product twice because their website was so helpful.
I agree with Gaston, that setting your goal on a DA target is not the best approach.
I set my goals by deciding what content should be on my website to make it an outstanding resource to my potential clients (for a site that sells products or services) or my potential audience (for an informational site). What content would you need for your site to serve the needs of the visitors you desire to attract?
You can make a very ambitious content list that might take years to produce, or you can take it in stages - by topic. All of my sites were started over ten years ago. One achieved its content goal in two years. The others have a content goal for which the goal posts have been moved outwards every few years. I don't think about DA. I think about the next article to write.
Tom Zickell has it....
Honestly, money spent on high-quality content and high-quality work will go up not a very sexy answer but an honest one.
Twenty years ago, content conquered the SERPs. It still does today. I think it still will tomorrow.
If you listen to Google when they say "do this"... "do that".... "make this code".... "make that code".... "mark this up".... "mark that up".... then, next month, Google doesn't use that stuff any more. My point is that chasing "trends of the year" is very costly.
So from Tom's answer... spend your time on high-quality content and you will not go wrong (unless you write mediocre content and think that it is 10x).
And, from his answer... "high-quality-work"... to me that means... improve your content (text, images, data, media), improve your navigation, improve the appearance of your site, make your title and description elicit clicks. This is old school stuff that we should focus on always.
"Trends of the Year" are often (usually) decoys away from what is long term successful.
"hiking tours Italy" is really broad and there is a lot of fine detail.
I think that you need to go to Italy and do some hiking. Then you will have first-hand experience, know what people see, know the routes they take, know the destinations, have real photos... Each of these is a separate topic for content. You could spend a year hiking in Italy.
Spend a month hiking the vineyard country of Tuscany, another month hiking on Sicily and seeing volcanic landscapes, a month in Abruzzo with history and views of the Adriatic. Hike in the day, write every night.
People want more than a "hike". They want to see stuff, they want to learn things, they want experiences. Each part of Italy is unique and has different types of hiking.
If your one post per month is the best post on the internet for its topic then you might be able to compete in a sleepy to semi-sleepy niche. If there is meaningful competition, then you will probably not get very far.
Twenty years ago, when the internet was new and competition was not stiff, I used to have a lot of sites. Today I have three and have three people helping me every day. These people are not noobs. We are doing great, but we are in the fight of our lives.
You must have enough writing talent and the resources to be competitive in your niche. Search for the keywords for which you want to compete and look WHO is there. Those are the people or companies that you must beat. Can you do it? Can you beat their content and their posting volume? If you look and you think you can beat them then go for it. But the more projects you have running the less competitive you are going to be in any one of them.
If I was starting out, I would put all of my effort into the site that best matches my expertise and talent. When I get it kicking ass then I would think about a second site, but then only realizing that working on the second site puts my first site at risk.
Another thing that can produce mixed content is... you have an https page but within that page your display images, videos, widgets and other resources that are brought in from an http source.
Yes, they will notify you.... but.... they must be able to find your contact information.
If they notify you, they will provide information about the infringing resource and they will let you know who complained.
"I've had someone tell me that google doesn't pay attention to H3 tags -- only H1 and H2. "
Pay this person no mind in the future.
The answer given by Nicholas White is perfect.
Here are some of the many things that can cause a page to disappear from the SERPs.
** Another webmaster grabbed your page and published it on his domain and now he is ranking for your keywords instead of you.
** You grabbed another webmaster's page and published it on your site and now that page on your site has disappeared from the SERPs.
** You have built or received links on other websites with anchor text that matches the keywords that you are no longer ranking for. (a page falling from the SERPs for this usually has a number of exact match keyword links)
** Your page has text or an image or other intellectual property on it that belongs to another person and they filed DMCA to Google. Now your page is not ranking.
** Another person has filed a false DMCA to Google that accuses you of taking their content.
** You have accidentally placed a no index for this page on your website.
** A hacker has placed a no index for this page on your website.
** These pages are relatively new and are in-and-out of the SERPs like many new pages do.
** You have done (intentionally or innocently) some sin and now Google has whacked your page.
Usually one of the above will account for a page missing from the SERPs. There are other reasons... but the above usually nail it. Rarely, Google will temporarily lose track of a page (really rare but can happen).
It is always possible that a title tag change with decrease the relevance and optimization of a page for some keywords. Changing the title tag can also change the click-through rate.
A few years ago, we were doing some aggressive title tag experiments. We were changing title tags every few weeks on about 80 pages. On about the fifth iteration, all of those pages dropped out of the top ten and stayed out of the top ten for a few months. Fortunately they recovered, we waited a while, changed to our best test results, and the pages have been ranking great for years.
A lot of the "related product" widgets are presented with images and an article title, and sometimes with short article descriptions of the articles. I don't think Google has a problem with them. We use them.
But, you said these were "footer links".... and I would not use that. And, if someone came to my office and wanted me to add naked footer links, I would kick them out the door.
We don't compete in your space, but we do have a site that competes by keyword overlap with sites that advise on alternative medicine. The overlap consists of at least 100 keywords, many of which have a monthly volume of 10,000+
The comparisons of our site vs alt med sites are as follows...
university degrees and government-issued licenses vs. author panache and social cred
scientific terminology vs. common language (which has a higher search volume)
factual information vs. lore and creative writing
Over the past two years, on three occasions, we have received substantial improvements in rankings and traffic as the alt med sites have dropped. I attribute it to Google wanting the SERPs to be populated more with formal credentials and technical prose rather than with lore and panache. We intentionally improved how our E-A-T is displayed about two years ago and I think that has been helpful.
In these situations, a person can only guess at what might be doing this, however, other sites similar to ours have seen the same improvements at the same times.
Imagine the population of people who are interested in the bedroom topics that you have written about... I think that they would fall into three groups...
people that enjoy the "dirty talk"
people who don't care about it - they just want to read the content
people who are put off by the "dirty talk" and don't share the content or even read it very far
I think that group 1 would continue reading if the language was cleaned up, but if the language was cleaned up group 3 might appreciate the content and read it and value it. Google might have a similar view and discriminate against "dirty talk", unless the searcher has safe search turned off. So cleaning the content up might improve rankings.
You said... "this one continues to tank". What exactly does that mean? A slow and steady ranking and traffic decline? A slow and steady loss of traffic through external links? Or have there been a small number of sudden drops in visitors, in rankings, in revenue?
If your answer is "slow and steady" then I would bet that much of the loss is coming from the increased competitiveness of the internet and the emergence of new competitors. Anyone who owns a 15 year old site that has not been getting a lot of regular new content and existing content improvement is seeing this.
If the losses are small and sudden, then it could be algo changes at Google that is knocking the site because they don't approve of something. Just speculations.
I agree with everything that effectdigital has posted.
If that page about visas is pulling in the traffic and not converting, I would make sure that it has some visible Adsense on it.
Several years ago, I added one wildass article to one of my sites and lots of my visitors consumed it. So, I added another, and lots of people consumed it, and the both of them were pulling in good traffic from search. Today, there are about 100 articles in this vein on the site, and the category page for this content ranks #1 for a one word query related to this content that most people would think to be crazy difficult. This stuff pays, and the rest of my site has no problems ranking for anything.
If you merge these five sites the results will probably be kickass. Simply kickass. I believe that the strength of all of your pages will benefit in terms of Google performance. You might also find some cross-selling and cross-content promotion that is extremely valuable.
I like this method because it will probably be easiest to do... https://newtoplevelsite/site1/products
But, I like that method if and only if these sites do not have a lot of duplication. If there is a lot of duplication, I would do the long and tedious work of totally restructuring on the basis of topic.
About this question... "Does anyone have any experience with how the DA would flow through to the new site?"
I would not give it a single moment of thought.
I think that it is extremely risky. The more work and money that you have invested in the website that will be the recipient of the redirect the greater the risk.
This is a methond for people who do not have a big investment in their website and are simply looking for a low effort way to gain a small amount of ephemeral juice.
Don't make any special effort to get custom anchor text. Allow the webmaster of the linking site to decide. Then your link profile will look natural.
PDFs can be canonicalized using .htaccess. Google is usually very slow to discover and obey this but it can be done. However, if your PDF is not close to being an exact copy of the target page, Google will probably not honor the canonicalization and they will index the PDF and the html page separately.
PDFs can be optimized (given a title tag) by editing the properties of the document. Most PDF - making software has the ability to do this.
You can insert "buy buttons" and advertising in PDFs. Just make an image, paste it into the document and link it to your shopping cart or to your target document.
PDFs accumulate linkjuice and pass it to other documents.
Use the same strategies with PDFs as you would with an html page for directing visitors where you want them to go and getting them to do what you want them to do.
Some people will link to your PDF, others will grab your PDF and place it on their website (in that situation, you lose the canonical but still get juice from any embeded links), and benefit from ads and buttons that might be included. Lock the PFD with your PDF-creating software to prevent people from editing your PDF (but they can always copy/paste to get around it).
Other types of documents such as Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint documents, Google images, etc can have embedded text, embedded links and other features that are close to equivalent to an html document.