Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hello! Glad to hear the project should soon be progressing!

I haven't worked with automated translation in a while, so I'm not sure how good an automated solution would be nowadays, but a native-speaker editor at the least is probably necessary (and perhaps optimal if the jargon is particularly unusual).

A story for an example: my father is a swimming coach and was teaching some Arabic speakers, so he tried to translate the training session (full of swimming jargon) into Arabic. Everything went surprisingly well, besides the translation of "distance per stroke." The tool didn't know that "stroke" in swimming means the same thing as "stride" in running, and the translation read "distance per heart attack."

Yes, the "drop" in traffic (or drop in reported traffic) is because the analytics code doesn't have time to kick in before the redirect script takes over.

If you were to move the refresh script to the bottom of the code and the analytics to the top, the likelihood of reversing this goes up. We had a similar problem with a client site in that they had a very heavy piece of conversion optimisation software running at the top of the code and our tracking code at the bottom. Users clicking from search to the home page usually knew where they wanted to go quite quickly, and would click away before our tracking code had loaded. Client was desperate to know why our SEO traffic had gone through the floor. It had not. We had them reverse the analytics and CRO codes and our traffic "came back".

JS is executed in the order it's included in the code, so moving it should work. Should being the key word - I am not 100% on this.

I am not sure how to place a delay with JS so hopefully someone else can chime in on that one. Meta refreshes allow a short time delay - does anyone know what the correct way to do this for solely mobile traffic would be? Acknowledging that meta refreshes are not recommended for SEO, but they are a popular way of defining a short delay in redirecting a user.

I would say to redirect the internal page to the new website unless you know that the page receives a decent amount of traffic _internally _(i.e. people navigating to this page from within your existing website) and you have a decent sales funnel / conversion process in place. In other words, does the existing page have value other than just being about the subdivision?

If not, redirection is probably your best bet. Ensure internal links that exist to the individual page at the moment are updated to point to the new domain.

Cheers,

Jane

Bizarrely, I just answered quite a similar question to this about five minutes ago...

Have you looked into the rel="alternate" tag option? Sometimes this is also referred to as the "href lang tag". You can place these on both the UK site and the .com, indicating that the UK site is "the same" but is targeted for UK customers only. This is basically canonicalisation with a geo-targeting twist: it negates the issue of duplicate content whilst reinforcing that the .co.uk is for UK audiences.

More information on the tag is here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

The .co.uk replacing the .com in UK SERPs won't be immediate, but this is a fairly safe option for rankings. Can you also use a javascript lightbox when a UK IP is detected on the .com site, explaining that UK customers have to purchase on the .co.uk and providing a link? It isn't good to automatically redirect based on IP, but a JS pop-up / lightbox will be ignored by search engines and will allow any remaining UK traffic to the .com to make its way to the appropriate website.

Does this help?

Cheers,

Jane

Hi there,

This is pretty much exactly what the rel="alternate" tag is for. Have you looked into that option? This allows you to use the .co.uk for the UK and the .com elsewhere: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

You will have trouble ranking a .co.uk in countries besides the UK, although moving everything to a .com in the future might be an option as well. However, it should be perfectly feasible to rank both sites with proper geo-targeting like this.

Hi there,

This somewhat depends on the structure of the website. These are the options, using the structural idea you have put forward:

example.com/plumber/london

example.com/plumber-london

example.com/london/plumber/

example.com/london-plumber/

The first would be a good structure if you have a parent "plumbing" page, which links to a range of locations in which you have plumbing services listed: London, Manchester, Bristol, etc. Each location would have its subfolder after /plumber/

The second example would work if you do not have a London page or a Plumbing page, but just a page about plumbers in London. This is true for the fourth example too.

The third example would work best if the parent page is a page all about services across London, them you have a page about plumbers coming off that page.

You should be able to rank any of these structures, but I would say this relates more to the hierarchy of the website than it does anything else.

I have direct experience with this.

It looks to be pretty useless to contact the authors of old posts and ask them to insert links to your site, with anchor text or without. This was a very very popular link development tactic three of four years ago. It was pretty easy to scale and it was effective.

For Google, negative the positive effects of this tactic was likely quite easy:

• Cached versions of a page contain no external link to www.yoursite.com
• Page exists for extended period, gains PageRank
• Link suddenly appears on page to www.yoursite.com, often with optimised anchor text
• If you're being really obvious about it, you've paid for this link and set a time period of one year for the link to be up. All of a sudden after a year (or a set period), the link disappears, and www.yoursite.com seems to have a lot of links that disappear from older posts after one year. This is so blindingly obvious and easy enough for amateurs to spot: it's unfeasible that Google can't spot this too.

A natural link is going to appear in a new blog post, not an old one. How many times have you gone back and edited an old post to include a new link? I can think of once or twice in my history online where I have done that with the legitimate intention of adding a good resource to the article. I am not adding links to insurance websites, jewellers, etc.

A new post may or may not acquire authority, but if you are trying to place links based on authority, look at the website the new post will go up on. Do its posts regularly receive a good number of links, decent traffic, social media attention, etc.?

This tactic of placing links on old blog posts was effective in the past, but I would be confident saying that its effectiveness en masse disappeared some time around 2010.

Hello fellow Kiwi!

Moving the links to the company's social profiles won't make any difference to how well www.mountainjade.co.nz ranks, but it will make them much less visible and probably result in fewer clicks to each one. Do visitors to the website click on these at the moment? I would expect that traffic to drop substantially if the buttons are placed in the footer.

I honestly don't see these as a contributing to clutter or being an issue - they are fairly discrete both in terms of coding and aesthetics at the moment.

Hi there,

A 404 certainly isn't the best way to handle a new URL / page before it is populated with content. It is good that Google isn't finding these pages yet (as you state in a later comment), but keep in mind that it could - the pages aren't linked to, but there is never any particular guarantee about what Google will and won't find. It's highly unlikely if you don't link to them, but still - it's not worth taking the risk. As you also say, there's no stopping anyone else from linking to the pages and / or for Google to go on a exploratory mission of its own.

As a note, internal 404s / 410s ("Gone") are perfectly okay if they're appropriate for the situation, i.e. a page has been removed. Not ever removed resource has to be 301ed elsewhere. This isn't the case here though.

To my mind, blocking bot access to these pages while they are empty is a better option, and noindex / follow would achieve this. I believe Er_Maqul has misunderstood what you were saying here - there is no "nofollow" in this situation.

I would say that popularity has a lot to do with it, plus the overall reach of your site. The appearance of sitelinks for the misspelt two-word name variation is a very good sign that the brand is recognised and growing, and that you're on the right track as far as growth goes. I would expect sitelinks to show up for the one-word brand name if you maintain a good, quality level of link development, content promotion, social activity, etc.

This really depends on the context and how well the title flows. Would a title like "Real Estate in Santa Monica, LA, Santa Barbara and San Diego" accurately target the phrase [real estate san diego]? Not particularly well but a high quality website with great links could still rank for that query with such a title tag (although it would be far better for said imaginary website to structure its website differently to target each location, but this is just an example).

"Example Location" is probably the better choice, but again - it depends on the readability and relevancy to the page's content.

Hi there,

The answer here is always very subjective. It is perfectly natural for businesses to link their sites together. Why would you not do that? Google understands this; the relationship between businesses owned by the same entity can and should be partially represented by links. Moz links to Open Site Explorer's website. Amazon.co.uk can link to Amazon.fr. If I link my blog to a website promoting consulting services, this is natural and fine.

What Google and other search engines want to figure out and discount is if you create a huge network of websites, attempt to obscure the fact that they are all owned by you, and link them together in some pattern that attempts to increase the SEO value or all or some of them. That's manipulative and you can't expect such a tactic to work in the long term. Effectively hiding a network like this is usually costly and time-consuming and barely worth the effort in the end (although some folks still do it very well).

Google likely doesn't pass the highest amount of authority between links where the linking sites are clearly owned by the same person or company, but there is nothing "wrong" with interlinking the sites you own.

Your competitor is likely ranking well due to a number of factors, not just because their websites are linked together.

If the links are nofollowed automatically by the sites' content management systems, they should effectively be ignored by search engines. That said, search engines most likely at least take into account where your nofollowed links come from, and it won't look good to have a large number of nofollowed links from spammy sources. Of course, these aren't spammy sources.

If the links are followed, they pass PageRank, but can also attract low-quality commenters (who don't care if a post is 48 hours or 48 weeks old). You might leave a good, constructive comment as the 4th comment on a post with a followed link through to your relevant site. Comments one, two and three might also be high quality. However, if the links are not automatically nofollowed by the CMS, spammers can and will end up adding endless comments to the thread with their spam links in the future. This isn't great for your site, as it means you're linked to alongside spam and thus part of a bad link neighbourhood of sorts, despite that not being your intention.

Having a selection of comment links should not hurt the site, but do be wary and very selective about where you post these links. Because comment-based link development was such a heavily-spammed tactic (and still is for some people), you need to be very careful about how you link in this manner, even if it is not for SEO purposes.

I agree with Keri, but would add that from a purely technical perspective you'd be best to avoid getting links from pages where a lot of poor-quality links have been left already, either by the person who wrote the blog post or by other commenters. There's reason to believe that "bad neighbourhoods" are best avoided in order to not draw comparisons between your site and spam. Sometimes you'll be naturally linked to by a page or blog that also links to poor-quality content; this isn't a huge problem in an of itself, but there's no need to encourage it.

Hi there,

Which structure is best depends on the structure of the website from an information architecture point of view more than anything else. For example, do you have a main California page, to which you link to a San Francisco page, on which all the services in SF are listed? Or do you have a landing page for professions such as plumbing, to which you link to different areas, i.e. California and San Francisco?

If California is the parent and SF / plumbing are under that, then /ca/sfo/plumbing would make sense. And vice versa.

I would say, however, that you should only go through the process of 301 redirecting existing URLs if you feel that the site is at a clear disadvantage because of the current URL structure. You can lose a little authority when you 301 one URL to another, and rankings can suffer / fluctuate as a result. Most go back to roughly where they were before, but this is not guaranteed. We generally advise avoiding 301s / URL changes unless it is undeniably necessary.

Cheers,

Jane

Hi there,

This isn't a problem, and is quite a common way of presenting content on the "same page" as far as the source code goes without having it all appear on page load. Where this would get you into trouble is if you are presenting a lot of content behind different tabs, or if that content was vastly different to the topic of the page that appears on page load.

If you are using CSS to tab between the content, none of it is uncrawlable.

Ideally, I'd ask to see examples of the companies' work within these platforms for other clients. I agree with Prestashop that many companies have made many different platforms work for them in a variety of ways. Modern platforms are usually not too bad for SEO no matter what you go with, but all have their particular issues. I would not worry too much about keywords further down the URL structure; there are many more important factors for best SEO practice, and it's possible / likely that this is not an issue at all anymore. Where the ecommerce platform is hosted also should not be an issue.

The quality of site they can produce within these platforms would be my concern, and it's possible that a company with a "less desirable" platform can actually produce something that is of an overall higher quality, including when it comes to SEO. I'd definitely seek as many case studies / examples as possible.

Hi Asif,

The numbers you see in WMT will be fairly accurate: the numbers for site: searches are rarely accurate, so I wouldn't pay them too much attention. You can usually trust what you see in WMT though.

Cheers,

Jane

As Devanur says, this will achieve your goal. It's worth reiterating that there is nothing inherently wrong with /index.php URLs as long as you cannot access the same content without /index.php. For instance, if www.site.com/page1/index.php exists as well as www.site.com/page1/, then this is duplicate content and should be fixed. I imagine this is your current situation because this is most common when /index.php is being added to URLs.

However, if only one version of every page loads and that version has the /index.php extension, this is not automatically bad. It's preferable for the extension not to be there for the sake of URL tidiness and because this does move the content one folder-level away from the root (not a huge issue, but probably best avoided) however.

If you go through 301 redirects to shift the old URLs to the new ones without /index.php, your rankings should not suffer. There might be a little bit of ranking fluctuation as Google indexes the new URLs and acknowledges the redirects, but nothing permanent. It's worth noting that this is not an absolute rule, however, and that there is always a risk of lowered rankings or rankings not returning to what they were before after a 301 redirect though.

Cheers,

Jane

These are all great pieces of advice. You might also want to check out Moz's list of recommended companies. A lot of these companies offer link development services and should prove reliable.

Hi there,

Sorry, can you clarify - are you saying that your client supposedly has links on pages like http://www.sammorganhomes.com/wp-fav/backup/supplement/semitruckleasing.html, but that those pages redirect to the spam site?

Hi there,

This is horribly frustrating, but the difference is that they're Facebook and YouTube and the rest of us aren't.

That's the short version. The big boys and girls get away with a lot more than normal folk Also, a widget from a huge brand is going to make less of an overall dent in the make-up of the site's backlink profile than it is for a brand that is not enormous.

The longer version is that this method of link acquisition was spammed pretty badly a few years ago. Moz's former CTO Matt Inman (better known as the Oatmeal comic writer) wrote a post about doing this six years ago. He achieved very good results very quickly using widgets / badges. The post is here: http://moz.com/blog/widgetbait-gone-wild

As you can see in the post, Matt's method of gaining links was blindingly effective. He's a good comic writer and a smart guy who knew how to tap into a lot of people's egos and interest for links. This was also in 2008, so long before everyone had seen the Buzzfeed-style "which city should you live in?" quizzes go around Facebook. However, he abused the method (as he readily admits) and he got caught.

Anything that has been abused like this is on Google's radar and they don't like it. Less interesting versions of this sort of link dev include newsletter sign-up forms with "email marketing managed by X" links and similar. It seems very unfair and disingenuous on Google's part that smaller businesses are penalised or at least not helped by these kinds of links, but it's certainly true that a smaller business (and by this, I mean "smaller than Facebook") gaining hundreds or thousands of links in two weeks is a far bigger shift in backlink profile than Facebook gaining hundreds of thousands of links constantly from all sources, including widgets.

Hosting these pages as subfolders instead of subdomains should be fine, and is the "traditional" way of presenting new content with the highest likelihood that the content will inherit authority from its parent domain from an SEO point of view. They should rank just as well as if they were on subdomains or separate domains.

Separate installations and themes should not make a difference; Google will be absolutely clear in its understanding that these sub-brands are related to the main brand and to each other, so assuming you are fine with this, different design and CMS installations will not make a difference.

Hi there,

The first question, as the others have stated, is whether the content has been duplicated. If so, that's a problem no matter where the websites are located.

However, if you have two totally different websites from a content point of view on the same topic, hosting them together should not be a big problem. The only issue would be Google's understanding that the two resources were owned by the same entity, and therefore ranking them together might not constitute the most diverse user experience for people searching on the topic. Google reads registration information as well, and also understands that some servers / hosting services host hundreds of thousands of websites so some topic cross-over is natural without the sites being owned by the same person or company. If you had two sites selling pet food on the same dedicated server for the sole purpose of having two sites rank for the same pet food queries, I'm not 100% sure Google would ignore their hosting though.

The ideas above are all great. I would add that local addresses for branches / outlets are great if you have them. Being able to supply local addresses definitely indicates that you are not solely located in one town.

Hi there,

This is an incredibly broad question that you'd really need to hire a freelance consultant or agency to work on for an extended period for best results The issue of how and where to promote a new website is pretty much a cornerstone of online marketing.

As far as link development goes, I would start with the link building category here on the Moz blog. There is link development and promotion content on there dating back almost ten years (clearly the older stuff might be quite outdated now).

"If I wanted to change my home page URL, (currently along the lines of "http://example.com/home") would it be a good idea to change it to "http://example.com/dallas-auto-repair"?"

I have to say no to this particular example. Realistically, your home page probably shouldn't sit on an internal URL like this anyway; is there a reason why the home page is not sitting on the root?

If you were to follow this exact example, it sounds like your home page targets "Dallas auto repair", but that there is an internal page targeting "Dallas auto services" as well, which sounds like a good recipe for having internal pages compete against each other for the same type of rankings.

We advise caution when implementing redirects: if there is no good reason besides "this would get a keyword into the URL", it's usually not a great idea. If you need to change the URL for a number of reasons, putting keywords in the new URL is a good idea. Say you have long, complicated dynamic URLs that a CMS has created: you'd be best to make these static URLs for a number of reasons. However, if you have a URL like www.example.com/auto-repair-services, I would definitely not 301 redirect that to www.example.com/dallas-auto-repair-services just to get the word "Dallas" in there, for example.

301 redirects sometimes don't seem to transfer the exact authority / rankings from one URL to another, so unless there is a very good reason to go through redirects, I would not do it.

As Matt Cutts says in the video Prestashop links to, a short period of downtime should not hurt at all. Google understands that short outages happen fairly regularly. If you know that the site is going to be down for longer, try to serve a 503 server status, indicating that the site is "unavailable" rather than "not found" (404) or "gone" (410).

Some URL were lost during the drop of server, what should i do? Create again? Delete on GWT?

What exactly do you mean by this? That the rankings were lost or the files were deleted? If the files were deleted but you want those pages back, re-create the files and upload them again to the same location they lived in before, i.e. re-creating the same URLs. If you mean that some URLs lost their rankings but that the files / URLs still exist, you will need to wait a little while to see if their rankings come back. I expect that they will: a 12 hour downtime should not hurt you permanently.

Brand new pages can fluctuate in rankings for a while before they seem to "settle", yes, but for some queries, results are different day in, day out. There is no set time period for a new page to "find its place". Google seems to sometimes test whether new resources "deserve" good rankings: the page may seem high-quality - if Google ranks it well for a short period, does the page attract traffic? Does that traffic stay on the site? Do people bounce back to the SERP and choose another resource? Does the page attract links? Social media attention?

A page may drop down in rankings for a time, rising again as its attracts more links. There is really no good rule to go by, besides understanding that a brand new page with good rankings may not have great rankings forever, and that SEO work is still required to keep its rankings high.

I think an overall better solution would be to work on developing a strong enough website that the site is given sitelinks, indicating a stronger brand that has extra real estate space at the top of the SERP. With subdomains, you might be able to rank second or third as well and I've definitely seen this happen (although can't replicate it right now). However, Google usually tries to show relatively diverse results, even for company names. You might have trouble ranking content on the same domain, even presented as subdomains, in both top positions. It's more common for Google to pick a social profile, a separate company resource and perhaps a review site for the top results, rather than listing link after link from the same root domain.

The canonicalisation option would probably work, although I too wonder how necessary it is to create two totally separate websites. Unless it's really vital that the branding be very different, I would look at developing different areas on the same root domain so that you do not have to put 301 redirects in place, work on the link development for a new domain, etc. Canonicalisation is certainly a viable option though.

Hi Tiffany,

There is a difference between all of these URLs, as far as Google is concerned. If a URL has any one characters different to another, Google considers it to be different. This is true even if the pages each URL loads are exactly the same.

For all of these URLs, you should choose one that you consider to be the "proper" URL. Call this the "canonical" URL - the correct version. There is no gold standard for which versions you should choose, besides for one, which I'll get into later: https://www.abc.com/ is realistically not better or worse than http://abc.com/.

However, you might have a good reason why the entire site should be on HTTPS URLs, i.e. on secured as opposed to unsecured URLs.

Some people choose to not use the "version" of their site that loads with "www" - again, there is no benefit or detriment either way.

For the abc.com/blog/ example, the general rule is that **if more content site beneath the /blog/ subfolder, the URL should have a trailing slash. **If "/blog is just a page with nothing housed beneath it (i.e. there are no pages like www.abc.com/blog/2014/post.html), then you can leave the trailing slash off if you like.

No matter which versions you choose, all alternative versions should be 301 redirected to the canonical version (the one you chose as your preference). If you choose http://www.abc.com/ and someone types in https://abc.com/, they should be 301 redirected to http://www.abc.com/.

The other option is to place the canonical tag on each "alternative" version, pointing to the canonical URL of that page. This means that https://abc.com/, etc. load, but the canonical tag tells Google that the primary version is not on this URL, but on the one you specify in the tag. This is quite easy to do: each URL will be pulling its content from the same file (that is, there are not usually two files for the home page, one populating www.abc.com and one populating http://abc.com - it is the same file being displayed on different URLs). As such, that one file needs to have the canonical tag indicating your desired canonical URL. Each page requires its own canonical tag, indicating the desired URL.

301 redirection to the canonical URLs is the traditional way of getting this done.

Cheers,

Jane

Then you'd want to avoid the canonical, but it's unlikely that the page will rank well if you have copied it from a reliable resource like a government website. Google tends to try and filter copies like this, although sometimes you see the same thing ranking over and over again on different sites because those duplicated resources are legitimately the only relevant results for a user's query. When Google does filter duplicate results, it will try to pick the most authoritative resource to rank, discarding the rest. In a case like this, it'll pick the government website 99.9% of the time and discard copies.

If you really want that page to rank, you'd also want to avoid linking to the original source as well, as linking was a good way of specifying the source before canonicalisation. I wouldn't say that it's a good idea, though - there's no point adding duplicate content that lacks canonicalisation to your website when you don't need to, even if the content is a good resource.

The link might be enough but I am not sure what a Googler would say to the question. They might advise you to add a canonical tag due to the entire page being a duplicate. Using the canonical certainly can't hurt your site at all, besides the fact that that page won't rank (which isn't an issue). The rest of the site remains totally unaffected.

Hi there,

Sorry this question has gone without more responses. I wanted to follow up.

I agree with William that this is more of a usability / conversion question than SEO. In general, this is not an SEO issue although I would lean towards keeping pages' structures the same, with the same markup. I do not know if Google operates in a way in which it develops expectations of a page based on other pages' content / structure, but it could do, and in that case you'd want to keep things standard.

From a usability point of view, keeping things standard can mean you can create expectations in your users, and you can also effectively test conversion improvements and A/B or multivariate test pages. This can be extremely profitable from a sales perspective.

Hi there,

May i also then ask why should we do "Regular download / checking of your own site's backlinks"

By this, I mean conducting a regular download from Open Site Explorer of your links and checking to see if they have increased or decreased in number, what the quality is like and which type of links you'd like to get more of. You can also download your links from your Google Webmaster Tools account, but it is good to have more than one source of backlink data because different services usually show a slightly different picture due to their crawling capabilities, etc. Other services that do this include Ahrefs and MajesticSEO.

I would say that if you are going to renew, definitely use a few hours of SEO time a week to get familiar with the toolset and what it can do for you. $99 a month can go a long way if you take advantage of what's on offer, but I agree that it is a waste if you don't use it. The good thing about learning to use the tools yourself is that you can save hundreds of thousands of dollars on consulting if you can do a lot of this yourself. Understanding the tools and what they tell you also means that you will be better able to pick good external consultants in the future if you get to the stage where you can employ / contract someone to do SEO for you.

Hope this helps!

Cheers,

Jane

Hi there,

Realistically, the tag should be used for duplicates, yes. How "duplicated" a page is, is subjective: a page with 50% of the same content as another page is probably going to count as duplicated as far as Google goes... where that line of duplication acceptability goes isn't something any of us really know.

For pages where the content is totally different besides the header and footer, you technically shouldn't use canonicalisation. However, experiments have shown that Google honours the tag, even if the pages aren't duplicates. Dr. Pete did an experiment when the tag came out (admittedly a few years ago) where he showed that you could radically reduce the number of pages Google had indexed for a site by canonicalising everything to the home page. I personally had a client do this by accident a couple of years ago, and sure enough, their number of indexed pages dropped very quickly, along with all the rankings those pages had. As an ecommerce site that was ranking for clothing terms, this was very very bad. It took about six weeks to get those rankings back again after we fixed the tags, and the tags were fixed within about five days (should have been quicker but our urgent request went into a dev queue).

So the answer would be that Google seems to honour the tag no matter the content of the pages, but I am pretty sure that if you asked a Googler, they'd tell you that it should only be used for dupes or near-dupes.

Hi Ruben,

There are no negatives to streaming content like this (G+, Facebook or Twitter) that we are aware of, although it isn't likely that these will be seen as "constantly updated content", especially due to how some of these feeds are coded. Often, they use iframes or similar that don't actually show Google's bots what is in the streamed box: Google just sees that there is a Twitter widget or similar on the site. For other types of streaming, Google can read and index the content but will still absolutely understand that it comes from a third party. That said, good social interaction is a good sign (although not a confirmed "ranking factor") and thus can be considered a positive.

Hi Alan,

I replied to you about this on another thread, but I wanted to reiterate:

My SEO firm claims that Google looks at link profile only when there is a Penguin update and that these only occur once or twice a year.

This is not correct. Google only looks at removing or handing out Penguin penalties during a Penguin update (1, 2 or 3 times per year is the norm), but regular sites with regular link development can improve at all times. Link building might take a month or so to really show progress, but Google crawls and updates its indices almost constantly. It's simply not true that you will only see ranking improvements once or twice a year.

Similarly, you can lose rankings if you lose links that were counting, outside of a Penguin update.

Regarding DA and PA - yes, you can rank well with any combination of these. They are not indicators of how well you will rank, but a gauge of what your site's authority is relative to every other site Moz analyses, based upon backlinks. DA and PA are configured in a way that is meant to best represent how Moz believes Google values backlink profiles, but clearly Moz doesn't have access to Google's actual algorithm or measures of which links Google counts / discounts / values / doesn't value.

Also, "can I rank well" depends on what query you want to rank for. You will easily outrank a far higher authority website if your site is much more relevant to the query (although it's annoying to see high authority websites pop into SERPs for queries that they're not particularly relevant for, and it does happen from time to time).

If you have relatively low authority and you're trying to rank against similar websites with DA / PA scores in the 70s or so, your job is likely to be a lot harder. That said, it can still be done with focus on the specific niches you're interested in and work on improving the number and quality of links pointing to the site.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Jane

Hi there,

Is this still happening, or does it seem to have been taken care of?

Cheers,

Jane

This indicates to me that something is wrong besides waiting for a 301 redirect situation to be properly indexed / acknowledged. This is not currently a ranking factor, but there have even been murmurings of Googlers favouring HTTPS sites - it's certainly a plus to be on HTTPS URLs in Matt Cutts' opinion - http://www.seroundtable.com/google-ssl-ranking-18256.html

At the very least, the move should not hurt you, especially not for brand terms two weeks later.

Unfortunately I am really not sure what the problem is likely to be, assuming that everything about the redirection has been done by the book and you are not seeing any errors on that front. A continued drop might warrant a request for reconsideration, but that is a last-ditch effort in most cases.

If you are happy for the second page to still exist but not rank, you should use the canonical tag to point the second page to the first one. This will lend the first page the majority of the strength of the second page and perhaps improve its authority and ranking as a result. However, the second page will no longer be indexed because the canonical tag tells Google: "ignore this page over here; it should be considered the same as the canonical version, here."

Again, this can benefit the first page, but it does mean that the second page will no longer rank at all. Only do this if you are okay with that scenario.

Cheers,

Jane

The reason you can't see individual referring keywords from which a site is getting traffic anymore is because of Google's policy on not showing the vast majority of these in Analytics. Instead, you see "not provided" listed alongside a lot of organic traffic figures. More about "not provided" here.

Others' answers about using Webmaster Tools, etc. are our best way of analysing the keywords used in organic traffic nowadays.

I didn't get the impression from this question that the old site / domain was penalised. Correct me if I'm wrong, zharriet, but I got the impression that what you're saying is that you changing domains, redirected www.oldsite.com to www.newsite.com, but that at some point in the future, you want to use **www.oldsite.com **at some point in the future for another part of the business. As such, you want to know when you can "turn off" the redirect without harming the new rankings of www.newsite.com, using www.oldsite.comfor new content.

The answer to this is really hard to give: some sites don't seem to benefit much from having old domains pointed at them. Others benefit for a period before that benefit seems to disappear (meaning that you will have needed to build a good number of news links to the new domain).

It is impossible to say what the effect of removing a 301 redirect at some point in the future will be, but the safest way you can ensure that this doesn't harm the new site is by building a robust platform of good on and off site SEO for that new site so that it can withstand having any benefit of the old site's 301 taken away.

Hi Teddy,

Does this seem to have been resolved, or are you still receiving the notice about an invalid URL?

With two hours a day, I would develop a weekly routine that involves some of the following, some on a daily basis and some once / twice per week depending on what sort of activity / results you are seeing:

• Daily check of Analytics and Webmaster Tools (404 errors, messages, crawl stats, etc.)
• Full set-up of Moz Analytics to take advantage of analysis and tracking here; daily / weekly checking of campaigns (Moz emails weekly updates, which are useful).
• Regular download / checking of your own site's backlinks
• One or two content projects per week (more on this later)
• Regular site crawls with a tool like ScreamingFrog to complement what you're receiving through Moz, checking for on-page errors, redirects, etc.
• Short check of SEO news outlets like this one, Search Engine Land, Search Engine Roundtable to ensure you understand algo updates, interesting and relevant new ideas, and industry news, but perhaps without getting bogged down in blog posts / news that is not relevant to your business.

Regarding blog posts / content and low readership, think outside of your target market when it comes to readership. A good example of a company doing this recently was Aviva, a UK insurance company. They didn't optimise the potential links aspect of this, but they could have done so for a very good result.

They conducted a study on the over-spending of first-time parents, showing how much money is "wasted" on things parents / new babies don't really need. The mainstream press covered this pretty well: I actually read about the study in a hard-copy newspaper rather than online. Online, they did not conduct outreach well to take advantage of this study (lots of mentions from newspaper websites, etc. with no links), but the premise of the study was great.

Why was it great? Because insurance is pretty boring. But new babies are not boring to Aviva's target market, and they are not boring to a whole lot of other people besides. The baby industry is worth billions worldwide. They very effectively tapped into a subject that a lot of people would talk about, and that subject is at least somewhat related to what Aviva does (personal / family financial services).

So what about the delivery business?

Well, how about a study on the amount of money lost worldwide from delivery accidents, poor packaging and logistics, etc.? People tend to like stories about the wastage / saving of money at scale.

Or a study showing the average number of miles traveled by different types of products in international shipping, e.g. "the average piece of lamb from New Zealand travels X,000 miles from its farm to grocery stores, given that New Zealand ships lamb to Y countries worldwide. Z,000 tonnes of this is frozen whilst N,000 tonnes is chilled", etc. Tailor this to what you usually ship or leave it generic, focusing on logistics as a whole. As in the Aviva example, it doesn't have to be super tied to what you do - Aviva does not sell nor specifically insure baby products.

What you're looking to do is create content that is relevant to your potential customers and to other people besides, but is not necessarily about your subject matter if your subject matter is pretty boring. Your potential customers or "people in your industry" might not read or write a lot about the industry, but they are people with interests nonetheless, and you can tap into what DOES interest them.

Google will choose a snippet it feels is appropriate based upon the user's query, and often doesn't choose the meta description. Do your descriptions show up as the snippet if you search for a query related to their content, rather than for a site:"mywebsite": + "key phrase" search, i.e. just [key phrase]?

I have to disagree that an "SEO specialist" would complete any of these tasks, to be honest. They are all very outdated techniques that are no longer likely to result in any improvement in rankings. You could complete each all of these tasks in one or two days if you went for easy enough resources.

That said, it takes a lot longer and has many times more benefits if you do the following, which could be the modern version:

• Create ten pieces of unique content for specific audiences and promote them on five or six different social networks with the intention of having that content appeal to the user-base of those audiences.
• Contact eleven different bloggers or reporters about the unique pieces of content you've created with the intention of having them feature that content, write about it or otherwise mention / link to it.
• Identify ten different high quality local or niche review or directory sites in the target industry, audit them for quality and relevancy and work out the best place to submit or request a listing.

Content creation on this scale alone could take months. Outreach can take a few weeks with follow-ups, negotiation and discussion. The audit / review process of relevant listing websites might take a week or two given that most directories / review sites are not great in quality and you'd want to find the absolute best resources for your niche and site.

Just redirecting an otherwise inactive domain (no website, etc.) will not help the site you redirect it to much at all, even if it has DA / PA. Google reduced how much this tactic helped quite a long time ago. If you bought an active website, transferred its contents to your existing site or created a similar-topic area on your existing site, and redirected pages to their most relevant resource on your existing site, you should see some benefit. However, just buying and redirecting domains is highly unlikely to result in your rankings improving.