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You generally don't need to take any action on these types of links (you don't need to remove or disavow). Google can see they are just scraped duplicates or a real article and ignore them.

But let's say they were harmful bad links (maybe paid links or irrelevant placed sneakily by you - ie: a link to iphones from a page about dogs), then when you remove links it's always a good stop-gap to also disavow. Because Google might not immediately crawl the URLs with bad links right away, but the disavow they will in theory pick up on more quickly.

Hello!

You can likely just ignore them, as Google is most likely just ignoring them (they are not helping nor hurting).

If you are nervous though, just keep a close on the rankings and search traffic for your site, and specifically the pages the links are pointing to. If you don't see a huge ranking/traffic change the links are for sure not affecting you.

If you really want to be extra careful, you can simply just disavow the domain with the disavow tool. if for some weird reason the links are helping you, you might notice a drop in ranking, which you can just undo by removing the domain from your disavow file.

Hello!

I usually follow this process (bear in mind it's very simplified for this example):

1. Determine the "top target keyword" the page is about - this is your page topic, and also the keyword with the highest volume but also specific enough it's not too general - your term "Alsace bike tour " seems like a good example.

2. Then, I be sure to put this "top target keyword" in the Title tag and URL - as close to the exact phrase as possible.

3. Then, from there it's really about creating the best page content-wise to match the topic, intent, etc of the user searching your top target keyword - and to know this you should study what ranks in Google for it and try to reverse engineer what elements are good/bad etc.

There could be a lot more advanced stuff, but those are the basics you'll want to nail first - and it's the only basic area in which I really worry about where/how the exact phrases occur.

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?

Awesome!

The big issue I see here is that you don't actually have a page targeting JUST "fascinators" - it would be something like https://www.prettycool.co.uk/fascinators.html - kind of like you have all wedding accessories - https://www.prettycool.co.uk/wedding-accessories.html

The reason is, the homepage is not the best page to rank for just fascinators since you sell other things, it's not the best relevance match.

So create a page for All Fascinators

Hi Julie

So in terms of pure accessibility from a technical standpoint, I think you're good. The content from inside the plugin appears to be showing in the HTML of source code, so this means it's perfectly accessible to Google. And to Google, it's part of the page just like other content (even though to you, on the backend, it comes from a widget).

What Roman is referring to, which is a good idea, may be this Top Places schema - https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/top-places-list - which is in Beta, so you have to click "express interest" to see if you can be accepted to try it.

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.

Hello

If you are a single product or single service website, you can definitely use the homepage to present that single product or service.

However, if you sell even just two products or services, you're better off using inner pages for that. It's not that you'd get a penalty for using the homepage, it's just that it's much better site architecture to break the many products/services you may have into separate pages.

Hello!

You probably don't need to do anything, Google will likely know the difference. You can disavow them if you'd like just to be safe.

Unless you see traffic drop and rankings drop (for no other known reason) they are likely not affecting the site.

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.

Hey Dan

Ha! Yes a lot changes but this is one thing that has stayed consistent - it's still totally fine to delete old tags. They will result in a 404, but those 404s are generally harmless!

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.

Hi Howard

Both Joseph and Gaston's tips here are great.

Just adding that for backlinks, you could choose a handful of your most authoritative/important backlinks and ask the sites to update the link. It's probably not super needed from a ranking standpoint, but can help Google pick up on the migration signals faster - and I find it's actually a great reason to reach out to sites and reconnect. Definitely update any backlinks you have control over (in social, profiles etc)

I definitely recommend following Aleyda's checklist that Gaston linked to.

Nowadays with Google I would just consider most if not all of those bad links non-existent. In other words Google is ignoring links more than "punishing" you now.

You may have ranked temporarily until Google caught up and then just stopped counting the bad links.

However, IF you get a manual action notice in search console, then the site IS being "punished" and you need to get that removed.

If you do not get a manual action notice, I would just make pretend you're starting from scratch, and you have to build your authority from the start. because of this, there's no time period to wait until it's "fixed" - you most likely will not just recover back to ranking where you were, because the site didn't belong there in the first place.

In general, also, I would focus a lot of your SEO efforts not just on links, but lots of other things like great design, great content, building a known company, getting early traffic with paid channels, doing CRO, creating great UX etc.

There are a lot of resources out there

https://backlinko.com/link-building

http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies

https://yoast.com/successful-linkbuilding-strategy/

http://www.linkbuildingbook.com/

Two methods that consistently work for me are Guest Publishing and replying to HAROS, but both NOT in quantity - just very selectively on high authority sites, with high-quality content, building relationships with the publishers and going for the ones that actually driving referrals and brand awareness (not just doing it for the link).

Hello!

For product URLs I would go with the "flat" structure and just do shop.com/product-name (Option 2)

Hello!

I can answer this from a Google / SEO perspective (a non-moz tool perspective).

First you want to be sure the secure subdomain content is not indexed.

• If the secure subdomain is NOT indexed, leave the robotos.txt crawl blocking in place. You don't want and don't need Google crawling secure pages and payment pages. Just be sure they truly all are private pages. If they are NOT indxed, the crawl block is best - this will prevent google from crawling, and if they can't crawl they can't index.

• If the secure pages ARE indexed

• remove the robots.txt crawl block.

• Add meta noindex on all the pages

• Wait for them to be noindexed (removed from google)

• Then, block them from being crawled with robots.txt - which will prevent them from being crawled, and thus prevent them from being indexed as well.

Hello!

Pretty sure the issue is that this content requires a user action before being seen. Google will not crawl/index content which is not loaded until the user interacts. This post is a great 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will show you how to use Chrome's 'inspect element' as a better way to see what's going on.

But in general, the content needs to load before a user action takes place (even if in JS) and yes Google is getting better, but won't look at anything behind a click. Google just confirmed this at their recent I/O conference, stating that they do render JavaScript but it could be a week after they first render the normal HTML.

-Dan

PS - Huge apologies for the delay in answering, Moz was having technical issues with the backend of the forum, affecting the ability to reply to some questions.

Thanks for the follow up! There was also some indexing issues going on with google last week (pages were taking hours to get indexed, even using the fetch and render tool) so maybe this was somehow related. Glad it's resolved for now!

Hello!

Were you able to fix it? To sum up the other answers, this could be a few things:

• a redirect in your .htaccess file

• a redirect in a plugin (yoast, or a separate redirects plugin - some plugins even create redirects automatically)

• or autogenerated by your theme/wordpress

I would work in that order looking for it,

Hi Jamie

There could be a number of reasons this is happening. It's tough to say for sure without knowing the site and taking a look (feel free to mention that if you can).

But I would check all the basic accessibility stuff first, ie:

• Make sure you are allowing crawling of the old site and new site (not blocking with robots.txt)
• Be sure your 301s are setup for 1:1 content/page matches - in other words - don't 301 a bunch of old pages to the homepage, because this can confuse google and also it doesn't pass any value anyway (references here and here)
• Check that your canonical tag usage is correct - ie: a canonical if used incorrectly can point the wrong signals at the wrong page)
• Make sure you have the old site/property registered in search console, and see if the indexed page #'s are going down.

ALSO: What you're seeing in SERPs might be based upon old anchor text and links (off-site signals) - you may want to see if you can update old back links from an anchor text standpoint.

But any details you could provide would be helpful!

Hi Jocelyn

First thing, is missing meta description (especially on those pages) are not an issue really.

I also just crawled your whole site with Screaming Frog SEO Spider, and didn't find those links or pages internally either. And I also don't see any of them indexed in Google.

I would maybe wait a few weeks and see if the error sin the Moz report go away. It could have been something temporary.

-Dan

Yes there can be big impacts, as template changes may result in any of the following changes:

• Design and UX
• Site Architecture
• Internal Linking
• Page Speed
• Other possible inconsistencies between themes, depending on your WordPress setup in general (title tags, structured data, etc)

In general, to mitigate against these, I would do the following:

• Design and UX - at minimum take a 'gut check' and be sure the new theme is a design and UX improvement - ie: is content still above the fold? Are there any weird scrolling issues (I see this sometimes with themes that try to be too fancy), are the menus still easy to navigate?
• Architecture - make sure the new theme doesn't break anything like your URL structure, or pagination links to archive pages etc.
• Internal linking - aim to keep your menus (main nav, drop downs, footer, sidebars) exactly the same at least for now - if your footer nav has links to important pages for example and those links go away, this might hurt the performance of those pages.
• Page Speed - as Donald astutely noted, make sure the new theme is at least the same in page speed, or better an improvement. You can use a few tools like WebPageTest or GTMetrix to test.
• Other - also as noted, try to get your SEO settings situated correctly before making the switch, and use the Yoast plugin. Then when you switch your theme, be sure the Yoast plugin settings are still primary and your new theme has not overridden anything.

Hope that helps!

-Dan

Hello!

I wanted to make you a screen video as it's a bit more nuanced, here's the link:

https://www.useloom.com/share/ebddf32363444e6a9cbc2ddfab639612

(Sorry for my voice- had a cold!)

It's 5mins, definitely watch!

But in very brief summary - Google is ranking two types of content: property listing style pages, and articles. You can have two pages - one of each type and they won't cannibalize each other.

Hi Andrew

Here a few things to check or rule out:

• Are those pages accessible to be crawled (not blocked with robots.txt etc)

• Are they also internally linked? (ie;s crawl with Screaming Frog, starting at the homepage and see if they turn up)

• Is the page actually indexed (search the URL in Google) but just not showing up in Search Console?

• How long are you waiting before resubmitting - also does it literally get half way down the list, or do you mean 50% are not indexed?

Overall, I would just submit the sitemap and you don't need to keep resubmitting. I would rather do some crosschecks to make sure the URL is accessible (crawlable) and even maybe indexed already, just not showing in the report. Usually, there's some other issue with the URL besides a sitemap issue - and like you mentioned, I'm not sure how long you're waiting, but it can indeed take weeks for them to show up.

Hi Roxanne

There's two general ways you go can:

1. Will the pages be exactly the same or very similar (like 95% or more)? If so, and you want to be 100% sure Google ranks the right one and consolidates their signals, you can use a Canonical tag. Point it from the page you don't want to rank to the page you do want to rank.

2. If the pages are different - different content, menus, functionality (can you purchase on one but not the other?) etc... then don't use a canonical - but do everything you can to

a) make them different,

b) make it clear to users the products exist in both places,

c) cross-link them if you can,

d) try consistently promote one over the other.

I also _highly _recommend you check out this great new post on duplicate content by Alexis - it's one of the best I've seen!

Hello

I was able to find your site and took a look at it. Indeed some pages are not indexed.

It seems like it's because they are very similar in content. Your Location pages don't offer much unique value besides just changing the city name and some of the content a little bit. I'm sure Google is looking at it as low quality content, that duplicates the same purpose.

If you want to index and rank separate city pages they need to be super unique and specifically add value for the user in each location. The content feels spun (created programmatically) even though it might be manually created, there is still a lot of just copy/pasting etc. Think about what it would take to have a 100% unique page, with unique content for each location (testimonials, photos, information, maps, service info etc).

If they are not the city pages that you're referring to, please link to an example so I (and others) can take a closer look!

Hope this helps!

Hi Alex

If I understand this, you're changing the literal file folder on your server, but to the user and in the browser the URLs and folders stay the same?

If so, there's no danger here. Just redirect and URLs that do change.

-Dan

PS (I think James, understandably, misunderstood the question - you only need to worry if URLs in the browser change.)

Hello! Roman's answers are really good, but thought I would add some info as well.

Article or BlogPosting Schema can help in some of the following ways (vs hentry)

• Give search engines backend / structured info about the contents of the page
• Google's reference on Article schema shows all the snippet and SERP features
• Using article schema is the only way to get into 'in depth' article spots on Google
• I've had luck with Google showing the 'Last Updated' date in search results, which shows a newer date when using it in conjunction with article schema

So even though you'd technically be doing a 'blog post' I would use the parent Article schema as it's more widely recognized.

Hello! Actually, often having more results can sometimes increase the CTR to either result

But either way I wouldn't be concerned about CTR in that sense. I would worry again about if users are enjoying your pages once they land on them.

You can, however, still work on improving CTR in general to both pages by making your titles and descriptions better - more clicks = more traffic anyway!

Hi! The Moz tool is not being more specific as to what element is a duplicate? (ie: description, title, H1, etc)?

I ran it through Screaming Frog and it only found a few H1s that are a duplicate, which is not even a big issue really.

If Google is currently ranking both, I would actually leave it and let both of them be indexed and rank. I've seen this happen quite often where Google will rank two results from the same domain. Since they are doing this already, they are technically not cannibalizing one another because Google seems to have decided they are not duplicates and are not filtering one out of the results.

I've seen this happen quite often where Google will rank two results from the same domain. Since they are doing this already, they are technically not cannibalizing one another because Google seems to have decided they are not duplicates and are not filtering one out of the results.

Since they are doing this already, they are technically not cannibalizing one another because Google seems to have decided they are not duplicates and are not filtering one out of the results.

Instead, I would be sure you're cross-linking between the two, and focus on user engagement for the traffic you are already getting (ie: goal completions, time on page etc) and focus on really satisfying the users who are landing on each result.

I think it's your handling of the /ar/ version and multilingual setup.

On https://new-waves.net/ you have:

• rel="alternate" hreflang="ar" href="https://new-waves.net/ar/" />

But you should self reference the English version:

• <code>https://new-waves.net/" /></code>
  

And you should also add that to the /ar/ version of every page.

Here's Google full documentation on hreflang:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

Hi Corey

Don pretty much nailed this answer. I'll make sure to answer your specific questions:

• You're not negatively affecting your ability to show in search by noindexing tags. They almost never rank or get traffic since they are just pages of thin content. Noindexing them does not affect your other pages.

• No other repercussions - unless you have a random tag archive getting traffic. Check your analytics, and if so, you can individually leave specific tags indexed with the Yoast plugin. I wrote a post all about this a while back: http://www.evolvingseo.com/2012/08/10/clean-sweep-yo-tag-archives-now/

• You would have to figure out how to have unique title tags on each page - which is honestly more effort than is worth it. The Moz tool is showing an 'error' of duplicate content but the issue is just more that tag pages don't have much value and can just be noindexed and then ignored.

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!

Hello!

You should check the actual status code of your custom 404 page - does it actually return a 404 Not Found?

You can check in a variety of places:

• https://urivalet.com/
• https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/googlebot-fetch

Or install the Redirect Path plugin and it will show the status code in your browser.

Hello!

I would suspect the homepage drop was unrelated to the login page changes. As Michael says, it was probably just a coincidence!

Hello!

Welcome to the world of SEO, and Moz

Before making any big changes, I would do a few things:

• Keep an eye on your daily rankings for the top keywords to that page. Quite often these sort of rankings changes are normal to a certain degree. I would give it some time and keep an eye on the flux to get a sense for how much they are moving around.
• To piggyback on that, definitely be sure to track / watch rankings and metrics for many keywords, not just the top volume keyword.
• Also - did you see a NET loss in organic traffic to the page also? Sometimes, because of all the long tail keywords, despite losing ranking for a top keyword, you may not lose much traffic.
• Track competitors rankings too! You'll probably also see their rankings shifting around a lot - and this is a great way to tell if the ranking changes are just 'normal' for your space.

As you can see, a lot of good SEO is about having clear data that paints the whole picture

Now to your question specifically, I highly doubt that would trigger a keyword stuffing issue. Google is pretty good at mapping out the contents of the page. They likely know this is user generated content, and don't count keywords in there the same way they do you 'main' content.

I would dig around for common accessibility or technical issues - like mobile friendliness, do a fetch and render in Search Console (and make sure the images etc are accessible) etc.

But in short, unless you see a very clear drop in rankings, traffic across many pages and many keywords it's likely 'business as usual' with normal algo fluxuations 

Hi There

Doing a little research, I understand s.w.org is for emojis. This can be disabled if you don't want to use emjois:

• https://wordpress.org/support/topic/disable-dns-prefetch-of-sworg/

It seems like the Google Fonts one is nothing to worry about:

• https://generatepress.com/forums/topic/dns-prefetch-fonts-googleapis-com/

I'd say for any drops, 4-6 weeks is pretty reasonable. To agree with Kevin again, most drops are user error (not doing redirects correctly etc) or as he said, major design/UX changes.

You may want to also be sure to implement an XML sitemap right away, and submit it to Search Console.

Also try to keep your internal linking the same where possible (menus, breadcrumbs, sidebars etc).

Hello! Kevin pretty much answered it but just wanted to add a few things:

1. To prioritize pages to check etc, export your top landings pages from Google Analytics. Run those through Screaming Frog SEO Spider in list most to check status codes and be sure they redirect. This way you're accounting for the highest trafficked content as a priority.

2. Schedule the exact switch for a low traffic time of day/week to be cautious.

To reiterate what Kevin said - having working redirects is the essential component here!

Hi John

Google's public statements about this say that the length of your domain contract makes no difference. In the big picture, maybe if Google needs to dig for signals, perhaps it could have a .001% (tiny) impact, but I'd imagine they are using much more important signals. In other words - I wouldn't really even worry about it

Garrett - to my knowledge Google does not use og:description if the meta description is blank.

Hello

Yes - after you do the redirects, Google will gradually start to show everything in one property. It may take a few weeks as they re-crawl everything.

But as far as your rankings, this might help a little bit, but there are a lot of other factors. Without knowing the industry, keywords etc it's really tough to say what else might be holding you back. There is no penalty for this kind of duplicate content.

Hope that helps!

Hello

I would consider https and www to be the "correct" version of all pages, and be sure all other versions redirect to that.

So:

• http www - redirects to https www
• http non-www - redirects to https www
• https non-www - redirects to https www

Just also be sure all of your internal links, canonical tags etc match the https www version

Search Console should reflect the changes as soon as the correct version is indexed and re-cached.

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 Simon

Just so you know, this won't really cause a big problem in terms of Google and rankings or your site performance. There's two things you can do:

1. In Yoast SEO, go to Titles & Meta -> Other - and check off 'Noindex subpages of archives' - this will prevent subpages from even getting in Google in the first place.

2. You can set unique titles for subpages by using the %%page%% variable. Go to Titles & Meta -> Taxonomies and under Categories, Tags etc - do something like: %%tag%% %%sep%% %%sitename%% %%page%%

%%page%% will output something like 'Page 2 of 4'

Hope that helps!

-Dan

PS - Really nicely done wedding photos!

Hi Brian

Dan (Moz Associate) here. Bernadette and Excal pretty much nailed it. Just wanted to add that OSE, Search Console and other links tools may not always display every single link that exists out there on the web (especially OSE - OSE is the most 'filtered' index, showing mostly quality/relevant links and filtering out the most spam etc).

Regardless, the best course of action is indeed to be sure your broken pages return a proper 404 status code, and Google will handle the rest