Hi Mark,

As Dubai is in the United Arab Emirates, so if you were dealing with English language, I believe you would use en-AE for tags like the rel="alternate" tag.

Radically changing rankings are normal for a new site, or a site with little authority. Established sites with good off-page optimisation rank more steadily, holding the same or similar rankings week after week.

We would need to see your site to decide if you had an over-optimisation problem, but I find that unlikely - the ranking issues you describe sound more like the site lacks strength. Generally, social media sharing, bookmarking and forum promotion are not enough to make a big difference, especially in more competitive markets.

Hi Jason,

To add to what Yusuf has said, is there a specific reason why the whole site has to use SSL, rather than just the parts of the website where sensitive information is passed? If so, I would be tempted to recommend that the e-commerce pages (products, categories, etc.) remain on HTTP URLs.

Cheers,

Jane

Hi there,

Have you looked into the SEO guides available here on Moz? There are a lot of important on and off page factors to get right in order to gain good rankings. Have a look at the Beginner's Guide to SEO - it is not specifically about forums, but all the points included are important and count for what you're looking to do.

As Chris says, you need to look a off-page optimisation as well. It is very difficult to have a site rank well with little or no off-page work. Check out the link development category on the blog as well - there are years of great content about off-page work in there.

Cheers,

Jane

Google handles special characters in URLs, titles, etc. just fine now - a page like http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Château_de_Versailles uses the proper accent on the a, and is displayed properly in modern browsers as well as in Google's results.

There should be no impact on rankings, although it's safe to say that best practice would include using the proper characters, as they certainly benefit usability.

Hi there,

Since Domain Authority is a Moz metric, it is not affected by CTR due to Moz not being able to determine or collect this sort of data.

As far as CTR and PPC influencing search rankings goes, there are good reasons why Google would not rely on either metric too intently. For one, it would be very easy to mimic a very bad bounce rate on a competitor's site: set bots to click on search results to a competitor website, click straight out.

It would be a big conflict of interest for PPC to influence SEO either positively or negatively, and although none of us are naive enough to believe that Google always does everything with the best of intentions, they would be in a world of trouble if this type of behaviour were proven.

CTR and bounce rate are so easily influenced / manipulated by factors outside of quality, authority and relevancy that I assume their influence on rankings is quite low. Sure, this data is valuable to Google, but it won't be a signal that has a huge amount of relevance.

Hi Phillip,

Try using the On Page Optimization tool under "Search" in your Moz Analytics account to grade each page for the term. It could be that the internal page is better-targeted for the term, even though it's only loosely related.

It's also possible that the subpage has received a high number of links from third parties, although this is fairly rare. There is no chance that the home page is under any sort of filter or penalty from backlink activity (e.g. too many anchors with the target term used as anchor text, pointing at the home page?). Although also not terribly common, Google has been known to penalise pages but not entire websites, based upon the page's backlinks.

You can also try linking to the home page from the subpage and including the target term in the link, but not linking to the subpage from the home page.

Hi,

I'm with Philip on doing this selectively. Many users find content hard to digest in the manner it was intended when they have no idea if it was written in 2006 or 2014. If your industry is one where time really doesn't matter or change anything, this may be different. From an SEO point of view, Google still knows when it first crawled a piece of content, so not including a date won't fool Google into believing the content is fresh when it's not.

I agree that creating evergreen content where appropriate is also a good move - articles, case studies, etc. that can be updated where appropriate (and blogged about + linked to to spur re-indexing).

If you see a marked drop off in traffic to or engagement in a post from 2+ years ago that used to be successful for the site, I'd consider re-writing the post with a current slant, linking to the old one from the post and being upfront about the fact that you're refreshing an old article. You can move engagement to the new post. If there really isn't anything new to say about the subject, you can still cover it again "for new readers" and redirect the old post to the new one, canonicalise it or leave it as is if there are no duplicate content issues.

Hi there,

If you are using the canonical tag and it is displayed properly on the UTM URLs, pointing to the canonical URL, then these links will pass value if they are followed. There are a range of reasons why someone might use UTM tags - a lot of services tag outbound links with this for tracking purposes. I would definitely try to get links nofollowed if the UTM (or another metric) clearly identifies that they are paid links and could be picked up by Google either manually or algorithmically, but the fact that the link contains the tracking code won't absolutely determine it as paid, and you can still gain authority from these links with correct canonicalisation.

Cheers,

Jane