Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Kimberly

I don't think Google did anything to purposely hurt the site. The AdWords and Organic search depts are really huge in themselves, and I don't think there is much cross-conversation there. What sort of quality scores are you getting from AdWords for your pages? Are they good?

Bounce rate is a weird metric. A lower bounce rate could be bad too, because users are maybe not easily finding what they want on the landing page and are forced to click around.

Definitely play with the ads. Keep specific notes about what you change and when. And keep in mind, it may take some time (weeks) to reflect in any ranking change.

You should also make a proper 404 page in the template/design of your site - it's just the default server message. These sort of things help show Google you are a responsible site owner

Internally, you should also avoid linking to 301 redirects. Link straight to your final URL. For example you link to http://www.homespellingwords.com/About (capitol A) but it redirects to http://www.homespellingwords.com/about (lowercase a). This hurts crawl efficiency and reduces how link authority flows through the site. This happens a LOT on your site, so update all your links

Hey Robert

What do you mean you "can't touch everything"? Do you mean edit the image title, alt text etc?

Looks like you basically have four places images are ending up at the moment;

1. http://www.drumbeatmarketing.net/wp-content/Cimy_User_Extra_Fields/ look like user avatars - http://www.drumbeatmarketing.net/wp-content/Cimy_User_Extra_Fields/aaron/avatar/Aaron-Cohrs-small.jpg
2. http://www.drumbeatmarketing.net/wp-content/themes/drumbeat2/ looks like as Lynn was saying theme images such as - http://www.drumbeatmarketing.net/wp-content/themes/drumbeat2/blog/img/seo-blog.png
3. http://www.drumbeatmarketing.net/wp-content/uploads/ which is the default image upload location for WordPress, such as - http://www.drumbeatmarketing.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Adobe-001.jpg
4. http://www.drumbeatmarketing.net/wp-includes/images/smilies/ - for "smilies" like http://www.drumbeatmarketing.net/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_razz.gif and there's only two of them

As Lynn said there's not much of a ranking issue here. If this was a gigantic site, I might suggest some sort of crawl optimization.

Also, I generally avoid plugins like the plague unless they offer a real super value add - and in the case of media management the built in WordPress media management is pretty solid for most sites. But it does look like this is the theme determining the location of some of these, not plugins (except for maybe those avatars).

-Dan

Hi Kate

Wanted to be sure you saw Barry's reply over on the Google forum. He also seems to think this would be fine, but I do agree with his recommendation to target all bots, not just Googlebot.

I also was able to find your page in Google and checked the cached version. Google's cache looks the same as the live version, so I think you should be fine.

Hi There

One thing to check - do you have the exact version of domain registered in webmaster tools? So www or non-www and http or httpS? This has to be exact, webmaster tools considers them all different sites and you can get limited data if the wrong one is registered.

That would be the biggest cause of discrepancy. If this is not the case, there are many times Webmaster Tools data can lag behind, or be different than the index. I would go with what you see in actual Google searches though as the "final answer".

OK so what I would do there is;

1. Add meta noindex tags to the child pages.

2. Wait for them to drop out of the index (check for them every week or so with site: searches or cache:)

3. When they get noindexed, then add rel = nofollow to the links within the HTML that points to those child pages so they stop getting crawled in the future. You can leave the noindex in place if you want.

Hi Joey!

I would just run a crawler like Screaming Frog - and if your PDFs and Images show up in the crawl report, then Google will be able to find them and index them. Since they are behind a login, that's the only reason they might get blocked. Also, you could try to submit them to Google with the "Fetch and render" in Search Console and "submit to index".

I agree 100% with Hutch and Patrick. Your best bet is to dive into whatever analytics data you have for the content. I would probably follow a rough procedure like:

• Identify content no one is looking at, is not ranking, is old/poor - start there and you can probably trim out the lowest quality stuff - remove completlely or just noindex to be more conservative
• Then find the other extreme - think 80/20 - find the obvious highest achievers and those are the ones you'd most want to maybe move over or maintain in some way. If any high achievers are getting traffic despite being old/poor - that won't last - so update them.
• The hardest to figure out is the mediocre performing stuff (moderate visits, moderate search visibility). I would probably put all the moderate content in a spreadsheet. Categorize it by topic. Figure out what can stand alone, or be consolidated. Basically you want to arrive at a situation where every piece of content you keep is, if not recent, at least still quality (quality as defined by: unique, well executed, good design, good UX, helpful or entertaining).

The content audit process mentioned by Patrick is a great way to do this analysis with data, but you can also just use some traffic and basic segmenting in analytics as an easier method.

You could also try some tools like URL Profiler, which cake make such an audit process a little easier.

That's just decided if you should keep it - when it comes to migrating I guess it depends on your ultimate vision for the company / branding.

I wouldn't try any tricky things like putting a canonical to say your site is the original source. Google probably knows this is not true, and a canonical is just a "suggestion" so there's no guarantee they will honor it. I would be more in favor of migrating it to your site, removing from the old with a 301 redirect to your site and maybe just a note on your site saying "this article originally appeared in ...." and be really transparent with the user.

Hey there

So Chris is right, this isn't always the meta description showing, but often snippets of text based upon what the searcher typed. But Google is getting the text from somewhere on the partner's website.

One thing you should do is check Google's text only cache - type cache:www.domain.com/url-name (adding cache: in front will give you Google's cache - and then click "text-only" in the top right. Search for the text in question there. It's possible either the content is "hidden" somehow but crawled, or maybe it used to be there, and it's still in Google's cache even thought the current page is different.

Hey Joey

They would just need to be able to crawl and access it somehow. So you'd want to link to that content from public pages, or maybe try putting it in an XML or HTML sitemap, and as mentioned try "submitting to index" in Search Console. But yes, they'll index it as long as they can crawl it from somewhere else. Running the crawler on your site and seeing if it gets picked up is a good way to see.

Hi Joost

It would be better to just "noindex" anything except view all. Then once they are gone from the index, set a block in robots.txt so they can't be crawled anymore. That fixes the issue at the source, the canonical is more of a bandaid. So:

1. Add a meta "noindex" tag to everything except view all (I am not 100% sure how in your wordpress setup - there's no one way, it depends on your setup).

2. Monitor the indexation of these pages in Google and wait for them to be removed (you can check with just searching for the URL in the search bar).

3. Once they are all gone from the index, block crawlers from accessing them by adding a line to your robots.txt file blocking the 24/48 URLs - again, I don't know the exact code for your robots.txt because I am unsure of your URL setup, but a dev or someone can help - or feel free to write back with these details and I'll try to help further.

To add to Bradley's answer, which would be my choice plugin, after it's installed you can test it with webpagetest.org or Google PageSpeed Insights - and basically see if any of it's elements are causing a slow load time, and you can use things like caching or a cdn to work against any slowness the feature might add.

I see, thanks. Hmmm... did anything else change besides the re-design? Did the images URLs change, or did where they were being hosted change?

The current implementation doesn't show any issues, but I wonder if things were properly done in moving to the new design. Did you always have a slideshow format? Did the code change or just the design?

Hi Joost

Can you provide examples of how all your URLs are setup? What does the URL look like for view all, 24 items etc etc?

Unfortunately I don't know enough of the specific intricacies of how each plugin performs for speed. But you pretty much named all the top plugins I can think of.

What I am suggesting is, to choose your favorite plugin and then use caching and maybe even a CDN to help with pagespeed.

Webpagetest shows you are using neither right now: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140108_9E_b84581251c692e8e31f098c5f3ad5917/ - and it shows that images are not compressed either.

So in other words, make everything else about the site as fast as possible.

If you examine the waterfall view for example, there is a file taking over 1.3 seconds to load --> http://screencast.com/t/UooUNXsuiZ

Here's one of the best posts I've ever seen on speeding up wordpress - http://www.wphub.com/tutorials/speeding-up-wordpress-website/

Thanks! Hmmm did it clear Search Console without any errors? I see an error in my browser --> http://screencast.com/t/VLWhg8EyR3Dd

Hi There

I don't think you need to worry about the sitemap being indexed or not - it's an XML sitemap, not an HTML page users will need to find. It's accessible to Google, and they will use it to crawl the site. Have you submitted the XML sitemap to webmaster tools? If so, make sure it's free of errors and you should be all set!

https://support.google.com/sites/answer/100283?hl=en

Hi Mike

That is odd for sure. I could see this being tricky to diagnose over a Q&A so I'll suggest some more things and ultimately you might want to try to see if someone can help.

These are just guesses / possibilities;

1. Do you have any caching plugins etc? Try disabling those
2. Try disabling / enabling Yoast. Your settings should remain.
3. Try one by one disabling other plugins and seeing if it changes.
4. Are you using a theme that could conflicting? Check your theme settings.
5. You may want to try Yoast support directly - he typically will claim it's not his plugin causing an issue (and 99% of the time it isn't) - so might be tough to get help, but that would be the ultimate source I think of a solution.

Beyond getting hands on with it, that's what I could offer as some other guesses. It does sound like something possibly simple. I would keep exploring all options! If you do find the cause feel free to write back and let us know.

Thanks! OK, yes I'd make your Sitemap and HTML image URLs the same.

Also, that's a LOT of images, so I'm not surprised Google is taking time to index them.

Also, there can sometimes be a delay in Search Console data. You can always be checking Google itself to see what files are indexed.

Hi Dirk

My opinion somewhat varies. They have been requesting webmasters unblock css, js and images for some time now so they can evaluate the layout and design with their algo. Most of the elements I mentioned can be done algorithmically. The poor font color, the lact of padding / margins, the lack of social buttons, poor text readability because of no line breaks.

I'm wary of user engagement metrics, especially as being reported 3rd hand.

Side-note - as we all know, they do have a "mobile-friendly" UX test, which evaluates basically the same types of things for mobile - there's no reason they can't for desktop but just haven't told us.

First off, I'm not sure I'd lose sleep over some shuffling around of just 5-10 positions. These are going to move around a LOT day to day and week to week. I'd worry if you completely dropped off pages below you were.

But pro-actively speaking, obviously you want to improve. The trick here is "Flour Sack Towels" is a really crowded and competitive SERP. It's not only competitive to rank there, but insanely competitive to get clicks.

Instead, I'd maybe use something like http://keywordtool.io/ and get some more specific searches off of "flour sack towels" - look for more specific searches where you know you offer one of the best solutions and focus on some more niche rankings.

Beyond that I'd zoom out and look at some more global site wide things you can do to improve. The thing that strikes me is that the site appears somewhat generic. I'd really work on upgrading your branding - you want users (especially new ones) to feel really comfortable giving you their credit card information to buy stuff.

• Put some real people on your about page: http://www.acshomeandwork.com/about-acs/
• Fix the lack of padding in product descriptions: http://screencast.com/t/ZOUStle7paT
• Fix the spacing issues here: http://screencast.com/t/dtqiUDv3ZW
• The whole top header area I think could be improved: http://screencast.com/t/1NPxiotb56 - I'm not a designer of course, but I can tell you my very first look at the site gave me a feeling like "this site does not look professional". I think the search bar is kind of big, the login area icons etc are funny. I bet if you upgraded you header it would cast a much better impression for users - which will trickle down to SEO because of user metrics, brand memorability etc.

Hi Kate

I don't think it would be looked at as cloaking. One thing I would definitely do though to check is a fetch and render in search console. In the render, the Googlebot view should be the same as the browser view. You can also check the cached version of the page as well.

Joost

I think you'll need to get a developer or someone involved to help execute, but here's the ideal scenerio:

1. Add meta "noindex" tags to ?show_products=24 and 48
2. Make your 'view all' URL ideally just /product-category/t-shirts/ - with no parameter - or if you have to, maybe /t-shirts/all/ - your goal here is to keep it consistent and NOT the same parameter as the other pages
3. Then, whatever consistent URL you have for the 'all' - don't add "noindex" to that (keep it indexable).
4. Wait for Google to remove 24/48 URLs from the index (you have to just check every week or two with site: searches)
5. Once they are noindexed, block crawling with robots.txt with this line:

Disallow: /?show_products= <---but ONLY use that if you've changed your 'view all' URLs to something else! You ideally want a different URL structure for 'view all' vs. not view all to control crawling and indexation more easily.

Hi There - Donna is correct. This is for Publisher and a company G+ page, not an individual author page. Instead to enter your G+ personal page, try going to User->Your Profile and adding your G+ URL. Yoast should then add the author URL in the as he describes here: https://yoast.com/push-rel-author-head/

In general I would stick to paginated. Scrolling may add to page load time, and can sometimes frustrate users if they are trying to just get to your footer. Paginated is a very standard and expected method by users and search engines

Yes this should be doable, just follow the instructions here: https://codex.wordpress.org/Giving_WordPress_Its_Own_Directory and note that there is some specific info for IIS in there.

Yes exactly. Set the author of each post in the post editor, and be sure that author has his/her G+ profile link in their user settings.

Hi Joseph

It's usually totally fine to leave your company name in there by default. Then if a particular page title is too long, you can edit the title tag on an individual page basis and create a title without the business name.

Hi Aron

This prior question has a really great answer as well as this one.

In short, it depends how many keywords / topics you're targeting. It can work fine for a "one-topic" site but if you'd normally be targeting separate keywords for several or more pages, that's where you'll run into SEO trouble.

Look near the code and see if there is indication if it was added by a plugin - or see if you can find "

Hi Ben

A blank meta description will not hurt your rankings. However, if you want to control what users see to entice them to click, that may be something worth considering.

Also, Google's guide on meta descriptions is really nice!

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35624?hl=en#1

Hi There

I don't know of a plugin or easy way to do this. Your best bet is to just keep an organized spreadsheet or list of what content you want to 'republish' when and go in manually on that day and update the date.

EDIT: If your desire is to feature certain posts on the homepage, you could also reconfigure the homepage to show featured posts you specify.

Hi Dan

Check your source code and do a Cntrl=F search for "hentry" and see if you can spot the code and any indication of if it's a plugin or where it's from. It would either be a plugin or coded into one of your theme's files (like post.php or header.php etc)

I think the data highlighter is for less code savvy folks - I have never used it, but I would give it a try as an alternative. Before you go tagging stuff, I would determine if/what on your site actually needs to be tagged too

Hi Roman!

Honestly, this depends a little on:

• What the product is
• How competitive it is

Because in some cases, if it's a clear/straightforward product and there's not super high competition, you could possibly rank with one page. But if the product has a lot of search query variations, is complicated, and has high competition, you may need more content.

As Martin pointed out, you can build the authority of these pages through other content - whether that's internal content linking users to the product, or external.

You can actually also try running facebook or instagram ads for the product - perhaps for some direct traffic benefits - but also because this can sometimes boost the rank of the page you're advertising.

A final detail - make sure your top targeted keyword in the title tag Not a huge boost, but will help a tiny bit!

Thanks Sarah!

An alternative resource might be my article on Moz about optimizing WordPress for SEO

https://moz.com/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success

There are also some prior Q&A threads that address duplicate content in WordPress:

• https://moz.com/community/q/wordpress-category-archives-index-but-will-this-cause-duplication
• https://moz.com/community/q/utilising-wordpress-attachment-pages-without-getting-duplicate-content-wwarnings
• https://moz.com/community/q/moz-analytics-telling-me-i-have-duplicate-content-issues-how-to-fix-this

Hope these help!

Hi Joost - I'll try to tackle each of the questions one by one:

• About categories, I'm not sure of the specifics, but you'll definitely want to find a category variable that just pulls in the category name for you. What that variable is, I am not sure off the top of my head.
• The way I'd look at it - you don't want to end up with a "category" that's so deep or specific it only have a couple products in it. You may as well rank a product page instead. So long as your categories have maybe 5+ products which makes it useful for the user, you'd be fine I think.
• I wouldn't worry about duplicate content. The "duplicate content" scare from years back is only a penalty if you are scraping content from other sites and building a whole website off of other people's content. I would just judge each page individually and aim for it being as helpful to the user as possible - in terms of trying to predict their questions, fears, doubts, etc in terms of actually purchasing the product

Hello!

I don't think it would be beneficial to worry about moving just a few pages. Instead, do what you can to link back over to relevant pages on the main site from those blog pages, and try to drive users to the main site if appropriate. Google will also look at traffic patterns in addition to links and pass more value from the blog pages to your main site if they see user behavior as such.

Hey Michael

I wouldn't be concerned, Google stated recently that blocked 3rd party images should not be an issue.

Hi

You are most likely still seeing "A description for this result...." etc in Google because they may not have re-cached the page yet.

If the site is crawlable with a tool like Screaming Frog SEO Spider, or a header checker like http://urivalet.com/ - it's also accessible to Google, you just need to wait for them to re-crawl.

Let us know if you need more help!

Hello!

Generally, the only value tags hold would be to provide and extra detailed internal navigation on the site. Categories are for the broad topics, and if you wanted, you can also tag posts with more detailed topics or with some other categorization convention (ie: you could classify trail types - "fun", "challenging", "scenic" etc). And then provide a way to navigate to them by linking them in a sidebar, etc

Other than internal navigation though, tags really hold no value - so you can totally just delete them and rely on categories.

Hi Allie

Stramark has the right idea. That aspect of Yoast is a tool just for you to help with keyword targeting. It doesn't actually impact the SEO of your page though. You could try something like Moz's On-Page grader. Unfortunately, knowing if you can get Yoast's tool to work, would require knowing how the site was in fact coded. It might be a simple fix, or it might be tricky. I'd see if you can ask the developer though, maybe it's an easy fix.

-Dan

David

It's hard to tell from that image if the SVG title is nested like in this example: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/SVG/Element/title - can you let us know?

Thanks!

Hi Chuck

As Donna also mentioned, there was a small update which was finally just confirmed by Danny Sullivan of Google: https://searchengineland.com/google-confirms-small-search-ranking-algorithm-update-this-past-week-306103#.W7AVMNe0y5g.twitter

So that is the most likely reason for the drop you saw.

As with any traffic change, I would recommend segmenting your traffic data by both queries and landing pages (this can both be done in search console) - to isolate which/if specific pages and keywords saw drops. If so, you can then determine if it was a site-wide drop, or specific to a set of pages and keywords. If site-wide, perhaps it is more technical related, but if keyword/page specific it could be more closely tied to the algo changes.

Hi There

I agree with Peter. You can 301 redirect your old images to the new ones. Leaving the old images won't hurt anything, but would be good to delete them to free space up on he server (why not).

Hi Steve

Yes, it sounds like if you're looking at pages showing in search for only one query they may be ranking interchangeably, or simultaneously.

Have you manually performed searches in Google (de-personalized etc) to see if you have multiple pages showing, or if they are switching? Also - do you track daily rankings for these keywords? That's another way to see what's ranking there - rank trackers like Authority Labs will show you all URLs ranking for a query.

Would there be any other reason two different users might get a different page? Location, language?

How specific is the search query vs. how targeted/focused are your pages? Or is there overlap in content? It really depends on the types of pages and content as far as determining your next step. Normally, we do see secondary pages occasionally ranking for one query, but your percentages sound high (unless you are getting two results a page).

Hi Simon!

As John said, a link to your site or a little more detail would be helpful here.

There's a lot of reasons a site's visibility could be low (a technical issue, low-quality content, poor keyword/page alignment, high competition etc). I know you're saying these things check out, but it's better to be able to take a direct look at things.

It could also just be a metrics/data issue or misinterpretation. For example, visibility percentage can be impacted artificially by the keywords added to a rank tracker.

A better way to look at it might be - have you seen a major change/drop in clicks in search console? If so, can you narrow it down to a specific date or segment it out to find specific keywords or pages that lost visibility?

Hello

Ahh ok, missed that detail.

I created a quick video for you ---> http://screencast.com/t/IKkEikyr

I think this is a bit of a complicated situation which will be tough to diagnose and fix in a Q&A thread. I would suggest catalog the different settings of your site in a spreadsheet like I show in the video.

Essentially, the canonical settings are just "suggestions" for Google and not "directives" so they will ignore them if they think they have been set in error.

I would start by clearly defining the end result you want (what pages should be crawled, and what should be indexed) and work backwards from there to apply the right settings.

I would probably try to use noindex, robots.txt etc before resorting to a canonical.

You could take all of the suggestions above, but I would actually make sure redirection is the best choice. Watch Matt Cutt's video here about what to do with expired products: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tz7Eexwp_A - he explains that in some cases users may prefer to see a 404.

Hi

I have a quick question.  Why do you have no internal links?  Something is weird there, are those metrics for your homepage?  Maybe you should check that you don't have "nofollows" on your links.

Also, your slice of the pie for external nofollowed links is bigger in proportion than competitors.  You may want to focus on getting more followed links.  Nofollowed links aren't bad and its good to have some too.

-Dan

EDIT: I see Ryan has pointed out the internal link situation - and again, I would check to be sure they are not nofollowed either in the robots meta tag or in your anchor tags.

Hi Michael

I don't think this is a concern in terms of a penalty or anything severe. But I would say, if you'd prefer the other breadcrumbs to show up, perhaps try some breadcrumb structured data (unless you have already?) - to get the preferred ones to show up.

https://developers.google.com/structured-data/breadcrumbs

Laurie

It should be clarified that Moz's Domain Authority, while a really solid metric, is not the metric Google has or uses. And domain authority can have a few artificial quirks. So I would not be alarmed at all.

That said - can you explain where you are seeing the two different number? I see a Page Authority of 39 for both http and https - and I see a domain authority of 27 for both http and https.

Now, even IF Moz has two different numbers for http and https, again, this is not what Google is doing, it's just an approximation.

Setting a canonical from https to http is just a band-aid and I would not recommend that approach. I would recommend having a site-wide 301 redirect so if a user lands on the https version of a URL it redirects them to the same version of that page on http. Or vice vera, whichever version you are prioritizing.

I have to respectfully disagree with Dmytro and Robert - as mentioned, Moz's metrics are not Google metrics - and the best action here is always to prioritize http or https with redirects.