Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Your homepage is probably more powerful than your category page and that is why it outranks it.

The category page, if it was strong enough to rank in the top ten, would likely be on the first page of the SERPs with your homepage - or instead of your homepage.  That tells me that it lacks strength rather than relevance.

The first thing that I would do is make sure that I have taken advantage of all opportunities to build internal links to the category page.  These would be links within paragraph text or a breadcrumb system of links throughout the site.

I often add lots of text to category pages.  This can be details about the items shown on the page, relevant information at the top of the page, relevant sidebar information, or supplemental information at the bottom of the page.  Use these to make links to relevant secondary pages within the category.

That's what I would do.  If that isn't good enough then you need links from external sites to obtain enough power to rank higher.

If you have a site with a very limited product range (such as the items in your main category), then this might be a good idea.  Visitors will see the focus of your business when they land on your homepage and they can dig a little to find ancillary and accessory items.

However, if you offer a lot more than this main category, and the "more" are unrelated items, then making such a heavy emphasis on your homepage might not be a good idea.

Bottom line:  I would make this decision based more on customer expectations and where you sales are focused, rather than basing it on an SEO strategy.

I'll take domain mentions any day.

Here's an article on Moz...

https://moz.com/blog/panda-patent-brand-mentions

Lots of people make gifts to get their biz name on a brick, get their biz name on a plaque, get their biz name on a race car, get their biz name on the outfield wall, get their biz name on a huge sports arena - or a building or a law school.    So there is nothing wrong with giving a gift to the library and having your domain - the name of your biz - listed on a webpage.  If they charge you more to link it then its a paid link, if they don't charge you for the link its not paid.  You should make the gift for the purpose of doing good, not for the link.

Ask if the gift can be acknowledged on the website as "The staff at YourDomain.com"

Who knows, they might link it for you.

You can give to charities and use your domain name as the donor.  That will get you a domain mention, which some people believe to have value, but is safer than a link.

Go to SEMRUSH.  Check keywords that bring competitors big traffic and where I am not yet competing.  Make pages that will defeat theirs.

Flood and Dilute:  I would add more images that are optimized for the query.  Flickr, client's own sites, wikimedia, any other site where you can upload images that will appear on a relevant page that is optimized for the query.  These must be a diversity of extremely relevant, high-quality images that will draw clicks.

**Purchase Exclusive Rights to the Provocative: ** And have them taken down, then submit DMCA against any infringers.

what should we do to make sure that we aren't diluting our ranking power?

If I was in a low competition niche then I might be able to get both pages ranking in the top ten.

If this is in moderate or higher competition, then I would be afraid that I was going to war with a rubber knife.

Why don't you post your questions here so everyone can see the responses?

You can also file DMCA against the sites that are stealing the content - and if they are running Adsense ads, complain there too while you are at it.

If there are a lot of sites copying this content you can easily file DMCA reports rapid-fire using the "Copyright Removal" form in your Search Console.

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dmca-dashboard

Fill out the form, submit, use the back button, change a couple lines of the form and submit again.  Adsense complains can be filed by clicking the information link in the ad and navigating to the complaint form.  Very easy to file these quickly too.

Before you start filing DMCA rapid fire, and getting their adsense turned off, be sure you have a clear understanding of copyright law.  Google is required to tell them "who done it".  That means that the website owner is going to get your name as the person who had their site whacked.  They can sue you if you are making wildass complaints.  One meeting with an IP attorney to explain your situation and hear his/her cautions might be adequate.

Sometimes this targeting comes from your content on other websites.  It could be your content on one strong website or many weak or even spammy websites.  These weasels grab your page and slap it on their website(s) and then Google gets confused about "Who owns this content?".  Google says that they are pretty good at knowing who owns what content, but I don't think that they are as good at it as they think they are or as good as what they are saying.

This problem can be especially bad if you publish lots of new pages and the spammers can easily identify them, grab them and republish.  Blog content with posts identified by month all on a same page or retail sites with a "new products" page could easily be targeted.

I think that watching Google patent filings is an extremely important thing for an SEO to do.  Google applies for lots of search-related patents and it is likely that much of what they apply for is never put into practice.  If you want a single source to watch for Google patent information, explained in plain English by an experienced SEO, then Bill Slawski's site is where to watch for it....

http://www.seobythesea.com/about-seo-by-the-sea/

There is some indication that Google is able to count and may be starting to count "links that are used".  They have filed patents that say that counting "links that are used" could be included in their algos.   Information on patent filings that feature this can be found here.

From casual observation, I believe that affiliate links to Amazon product pages, move those Amazon pages up in the SERPs.

Does anyone else have an opinion on this?

Philosophically, I think that affiliate links should not be counted in the rankings, even if they have not been nofollowed.  I  think that Google and other search engines should be filtering these links because they are compensated.

Thanks for your thoughts.

My feeling is that wysiwyg leads to code bloat and generally fewer optimization opportunities. I have no real evidence. Is there any reason not to use the wysiwyg editor?

If you are working really hard to make great content and a great website, then you want to be sure that your code is as good as you can make it.  When wysiwyg is used, you are trusting your SEO to a coder who many or may not know anything about SEO.

Because SEO is a competitive endeavor and because one screw-up in the code can be fatal, one must either check to be sure that the wysiwyg code is perfect of take control of the coding yourself.

I found a long time ago that I can only bet on myself for certain things.  My work isn't perfect, but my work on a bad day is often better than the work of many "professional service provders" on a good day.  So I bet on myself.

Any time you  transfer part of a site you transfer away the strength of that portion of your site.  Your page count will drop, there will be some drop in visitor engagement and the number of inbound links and linking root domains will drop.  I would be prepared to see negative impact on existing rankings.

This is commonly done by people who own multiple retail sites.

If you 301 redirect the pages to a site that is overall much stronger, the rankings of your pages might increase.   If you redirect them to a weaker site, your rankings might fall.

This type of move can also change the strength of the site where they were originally.  If these pages have a lot of external links pointing at them, then the value of those links will move with them to the new site.   If these pages don't have a lot of links and there are a ton of these pages, then they could be like adding noncontributing weight to the site that receives them.

You will also need to do some cleaning on the old site.  All of the internal links that point to these pages will need to be assessed.  Some you might just delete, but there might be some opportunities to link to the site that receives these pages.

And, for customer continuity, you might want to have a posting on the original site that tells customers that you are still selling these products, but that they have been move to another website owned by your company.

I think that nobody replied because this is a really complex situation.  It could be something that went wrong with the http to https conversion.  It could be something entirely unrelated.

So, a good answer to your question would require much more work that what a person might be able to give in a Q&A reply.

If this was my site, my first question would be to dig into my analytics from before the first switch was made and compare to now.  What you want to find out first is what pages lost rankings.  Is this confined to a single area of the website or has the entire site been demoted.   Rankings analysis is the best way to do this.  If you don't have rankings data then dig into the same question by looking at traffic.

Look at that and let us know what you find.

If this was my site, I would be fighting to keep the breadcrumbs.

If the 62 domain has valuable content, move it to the 91 and do 301 redirects page-by-page.  That will keep the search traffic for those pages flowing.  And, since those page will be on a more powerful domain, the rankings might go up.

The 62 domain should be left on hosting with the 301 redirects permanently in place.  Let everyone know that that hosting and the redirects should always be left live.  If you don't do that then the flow of clickthrough traffic will be lost and the ranking value will be cut off.

Don't expect the 91 to get a big rankings boost.  Since the metrics are logarithmic it is small in comparison (about 1/1000th).

PPC might be helpful.  I don't know because I don't use PPC for promotion.  I don't like spending money on it.

Maybe someone else will support the idea and give advice.

If this company only does business within a short driving range of their offices, I would get local name, address and phone information on every page of the website.   That will help you rank for "viking cooktop repair in pasadena" and other local queries which are probably more valuable than ranking at #51 for "viking cooktop repair".  People search for their local repair person.

I would also be looking to get links, brand mentions, etc. from websites that serve the areas where the company does business.   Links from across the world or on the other side of the continent or state are not as valuable.  Some reviews would be helpful.

You need to demonstrate that you are a strong and established LOCAL business.  Go learn about ranking in the local SERPs if you have not learned how to do that yet.  On Moz, look for posts by Miriam Ellis

site:moz.com miriam ellis local search

and also information on this page...

https://moz.com/blog/category/local-seo

I went to Google and searched for "viking cooktop repair".  I went down through the SERPs and, yes, all the way down to position 100, I was still seeing title tags that were relevant for this query.  Often they had the exact query in the title tag.  Often they had two of the three words but there was no doubt that they were relevant.

This is an example of a query where there are a lot of competitors, and, although they are small, local, weak, and sometimes ignorant, they have moved onto the turf and own it.  When a new competitor arrives 20 years late for the fight, he can't walk in and obtain priority position by default.

In this situation, Google might be waiting to see more than links.  Other sites have twenty years of history, ten years of history, they have brand mentions, type-ins, user behavior data, reviews, a history of phone book presence... and Google is looking for confirmation.  This site went up last summer and already has 266 links.  Google probably knows that those are built links.  They are waiting for more data to confirm that the company is real.

Some people believe that it is very important to maintain 301 redirects for a long time.

If you have mydomain.com redirecting to mynewdomain.com and remove the redirects, then any links from xyz.com that point to mydomain.com will not go to the proper destination.  All of their clickthrough traffic will be lost.  And, if you remove the 301 you are letting the flow of ranking value to chance.  Will Google forget where those links are supposed to go five years from now.  (they might not be archiving this stuff as well as you think)  How about other search engines?  Or new search engines.

I have redirected domains a few times and all of those domains still have their redirects in place.  The cost of maintaining them is usually going to be very low compared to the possible losses.

All of my redirected domains will be in place when I go to my own funeral.  And, in the "urgent" section of my business continuity plan, my heirs are instructed to protect those old domains and redirects as if they were caches of gold.

Enter your site as a direct visitor to your old URL.  Then dig into your analytics to see how you are counted.

I wouldn't add phone numbers in the meta description because I want people to click into my website - rather than see a number in the meta description, then dial.

Write your meta description to elicit the click.   Google knows when searchers click, they don't know when they dial.

Do everything possible to elicit the click... offer free phone consultations, free beer, anything to get the searcher into your website.     Just make sure that you deliver what you use to elicit the click.

I have written a number of business reviews for yelp and have done a good job of it with photos, generous descriptions, etc.

But, yelp often does not show them.  When I first started writing reviews they never showed them.  Then, after I had written a couple dozen a few of my reviews began appearing without digging for them.

From what I can see yelp shows the reviews of people who have written a lot of reviews, who are connected with other yelp members, and who have written lots of reviews that have been favorably received by others.  If your reviewers are not hard core yelpers, a lot of those reviews will be buried.

I am confident that they are helpful.  In small markets, nothing more than these can put a website on the first page.   Iin large competitive markets, more will be needed.

This guy is a high brow.  Tell him to write content that will earn links from the resource pages of law school websites and that will beat everyone - if he has what it takes to pull it off.

Nice work, Hurf.

That was a great and very generous review.  Among the highest quality given at Moz Q&A.

Taylor has some great ideas.   If you want to look at their on-page history you can go to archive.org and see versions of their pages from the past.

Many times, you can tell if a company has been doing SEO by watching their rankings go down.  I am serious here.

So, a better measure of "is this a company who is going to be competitive" is to look to see if they have a steady stream of content that is valuable to their potential customers and business credibility being added to the site.  This does not have to be an enormous stream.  Instead it simply needs to be quality and published regularly.   This is what I would fear and respect in a competitor.

This might be a problem.  If you submit a DMCA agaist a page and that DMCA is rejected, Google will often not accept a second attempt.  This seems to be a problem with Google's DMCA system.

Good luck.

I don't believe that this will be of any help.

If the blog is on your domain and has good, genuine content, and the commercial pages are on that same domain, then I don't see any problem or risk in doing it occasionally if the topics of the category pages are naturally referenced in blog article content.

Now, if you start stacking and stuffing and going wild with tons of links or links on low quality pages, then it could become a genuine problem.

Most likely, one of two things happened.

A) Either your site got hit by the algorithm and lost rankings.....

B) Or..... your competitor was favored by the algorithm, moved up, and you lost rankings.

There are other possibilities, unrelated to the Google update, but checking if one of these, and which one of these, hit you is important to understand your next step.  If you have a position tracking project running on SEMrush you can add competitors to the project and see who moved up and when.

Since Google has not disclosed what this update was based upon, it is hard to know what can be done.  It might be based upon how links are valued, how content is valued, user behavior, or something else, or a big mix of things.

Sidebars are fantastic.

They are great placed to add photos that are relevant to your content, great places to display ads, great places to promote your best content and great places to promote related content.   All of my sites have a sidebar that is right-sized for skyscraper or rectangular ad units.

In my opinion, 80 to 100 words is really really skimpy.   You would gain more by increasing the quality and detail of your post than by changing the number of external links.   Google is probably going to put more emphasis on your content and how your visitors respond to it than they will put into evaluating your external links.  In addition, I think that you will gain more from Google if you have highly-related, high-quality content on your own site and are linking to that.

I almost didn't go look at that Walmart page because I thought that they were above keyword stuffing for SEO purposes.  However, I did go look at was surprised.

I my opinion, WalMart has added a few hundred words of total yada yada yada text that is designed for nothing other than search engines.  They probably know that humans are not going to read it and they floated it so low on the page that nobody is going to see it.   So, without knowing who did this and their intent, my guess is that this text was created for nothing else other than SEO purposes.   They want some paragraph text on the page and have done a fine stuffing job on it.  Overstuffed in my opinion, but done in a way that search engines are probably not going to be concerned about it because it is in natural language.  This stuff might have positive ROI.

If it is possible to add the analytics code to the pages, I would do that and let it run for a couple months.  Then you can make the decision with full data.

Are these pages pulling in any traffic?   Can you trace that traffic through the shopping cart?

301 redirects no longer lose pagerank.

https://moz.com/blog/301-redirection-rules-for-seo

But, even though there is no loss of pagerank, I would recode those links promptly if they were on my website.  Each redirect places load on the server, creates a small delay in page delivery, and it is simply best practice not to redirect links on your own site.

Write using the same words and style as your audience.

If you have an audience who wears suits, coveralls, flip-flops or cowboy hats, they will immediately know if you are using the wrong language.    A lot of people send me "guest articles" and in two sentences I can tell if they are wearing the same type of clothes as my audience.

I would be thinking about these topics....

**  How many other companies are purchasing or have purchased this data?   Is it out there on lots of sites and the number is growing?

**  Since this is a low-ranking competitor, how much additional money would be required to simply buy the entire company (provided that the data is not already out there on a ton of other websites.)

**  Rather than purchasing this content, what would be the cost of original authorship for just those words that produce a big bulk of the traffic.   Certainly 10% of the content produces over 50% of the traffic on most reference sites.

**  With knowledge that in most duplicate content situations, a significantly stronger site will crush the same content on the original publisher.... where do I sit in this comparison of power?

You are right that links on Wikipedia are "nofollow" and because of that, you normally would not expect to receive pagerank or other "linkjuice" flowing into your page.

However, having a citation link on wikipedia gives you a brand mention, which Google can see and which I believe is valuable.

It also gives you a flow of traffic, which based upon a recent Google patent, may produce some value in the link ( https://gofishdigital.com/did-the-groundhog-update-just-take-place-at-google/ )

If people visit your site through that link, they may be impressed with your page and decide to share, link, tweet, etc. and that could result in followed links, more traffic, more mentions, etc.

All of the above are "good things" and some might be help you in the Google rankings.   I'd place a decent bet of money on it.

Nobody reads it.

How do you know this?

If you search for "living room chairs", you're just going to want to see a big list of living room chairs - not read content about living room chairs, how to choose one, etc

I would never assume to know what my visitors want.  I am a 70-year-old-introverted white guy who has lived in rural areas all of my life and... I could go on, but my point is that I am not in any position to judge what my visitors want and don't want because they are very different from me and there are so many of them.

will Googlebot see content on how to choose a living room chair and say "Yes! This is really helpful content"?

This could be an entirely separate article on a separate page of the website.

Or, this content could be at the bottom of a category page but offered to the visitor near the top.  Sometimes people don't think about how many different options there are and are befuddled when they land on a page with more options than they were prepared to consider.

You are placing your bet on just tossing up a bunch of chair images because that is easy.  Yes?

But you are here asking the question "is that what Google wants me to do".

I'd say you can

A) write this stuff on a separate page

B) write this stuff on the bottom of your category page,

C) you can do both with unique content.

I am saying you should do both B and C (and do a damn good job on the work), then publish and see what happens.   You might be surprised.

I have never disavoed a link.   Not one.

Yes, lots of these spammy websites link to my websites, but I think that Google is smart enough to know that they are not meaningful sites.   I simply don't think that it is a good use of my time to query who is linking to me, go out and sniff those pages, decide if they are worthy, and spend time on disavow.

I think that it is more important to get my next page up and keep focused on advancing my business.  I don't think that Google expects me to engage in hand-to-hand spam fighting - especially against automated content built by spammers.

There are a lot of dynamic websites out there that shuffle content several times per month, week, day or hour.  Your client's link might have been indexed but is really only there 5% of the time.