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We lost our Google organic ranking (position 1 - 3) for our highest converting key phrase (cotton tees) in February.  The ranking was for our homepage (brandname.com) which is very image heavy and doesn't have much readable content.  We noticed that all of our competitors are ranking above us for their category page, not their homepage.  The difference between us and our competitors is that we specialize in this key phrase and they just offer one category of the key phrase.  For example, we only sell cotton tee's and they sell cotton tees, handbags and shoes. When we dropped we noticed that Google began showing our homepage AND category page in the results, so we pointed our brandname.com to brandname.com/cotton-tees canonically. The idea was that this would assure that the homepage and category page were not competing with each other.  The homepage was not really optimized for cotton tees so we thought this might help. 1. Is there any harm in removing the canonical and allowing both pages to rank? (We're also working on redesigning the homepage to add more readable text & optimize for cotton tees.) 2. Our homepage URL used to be "brandname.com/cotton-tees" and we consistenly ranked between 1 and 3 for cotton tees during that time.  We modified the homepage URL because it seemed spammy and are now just "brandname.com".  Does it make sense to go back to the URL with the key phrase in it if that is our main product and we want to rank for it?

Hello! We were ranked on page 1 in Google for the past 10 years for a specific key phase until this February when we were pushed to page 2. When analyzing backlinks via majestic.com we found that our backlinks haven't been consistent, we typically have around 1,000 or less, but in February they dropped, then began spiking inconsistently (from 3000+ to a few hundred, then back up). Not sure how accurate Majestic's reporting is but we've also noticed some sites which are spamming our site with links on their low-quality and porn content websites. Is this type of backlink inconsistency normal, or is this something that could be negatively impacting our rankings? UttesqA

We noticed around 7 websites which with domains that were just recently registered (with privacy protection). They are using our website keywords/titles and brand name and the sites are mostly porn / junk sites. They don't link to our website directly but use a javascript onclick redirect which is why we think we aren't seeing them in our backlinks report.  We've been in business for over 12 years and haven't come across sites like this before.  We recently lost our first page rankings for a few of our highest converting key phrases and have been digging in to possible causes. Just wondering if these sites could be impacting our results, and how to figure out if there are more like this? Examples: nesat.net
flowmeterdirectory.biz
finnsat.net
dotsjobs.net

We are in the middle of a redesign and would love to get rid of our left navigation.  It's currently full of SEO rich categories and has been the same for 10+ years.  Our programmers think removing the left navigation will have no impact on our SEO. As SEO's, do you agree with this?

Is there any reason NOT to code in tables (other than it being outdated) for SEO reasons?

We'd like to add more content to our ecommerce site so are considering adding a wordpress blog.  Which domain option is the best for SEO? domain.com/blog blo.domain.com blog.wordpress.com

Does anyone know what this company does? We're seeing 400 errors with URLs tagged "vebidoo" Example: &tag=vebidoo_com-21 It says they are a people search.  Can't figure out what they would be linking to us for?

We just found out our password protected development site has been crawled.  We are worried about duplicate content - what are the best steps to take to correct this beyond adding to robots.txt?