Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Andrew, this sounds like it could be a question of EAT (expertise, authority and trustworthiness) something that Google places a very high value on. In a nutshell, Google wants to rank domains that are proven to be experts in their field and they place much higher value on EAT then they do other classic SEO tactics like keyword placement.

Heres a hypothetical: If you, a large media site that focuses on a variety of topics, published an article about how a vegetarian diet is beneficial for your health that was written by a journalist and not a doctor, it would have a relatively low level of EAT. However if my smaller niche site that only focuses on health related issues and publishes content from doctors, nurses, trainers ect republished that article, it would have a higher level of EAT.

There are several ways to improve your EAT, if you have qualified people writing content about their areas of expertise you should let the world know. Tweet about them, include their names in articles and give them an "about us" or "about the author" write up on your site.

You can read your fill about EAT in the Search Quality Evaluater Guidelines if you need more details.

https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.co.uk/en/uk/insidesearch/howsearchworks/assets/searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf

Hi All,

This question is for an eccomerce site with a very large sku count (over 3million individual sku's). As the person responsible for SEO on the site, I am often playing catchup to some of our web merchandisers. My question is this: Will creating sub-catagories that have a page title and H1 tag that include the top level category name plus a refinement be competing with each other and the top level category for rankings?

The products that I am specifically talking about are Funko Pops! (some of you might collect them). There are different sub-sets of Funko Pops such as Funko Pop!: Rocks, Funko Pop!: Movies, Funko Pop! Television ect. Im worried that if I create many pages with these titles/h1 tags that they will end up competing for the query "funko pops"... something I worked hard to rank above Amazon for.  Any thoughts would be appreciated!

Hi all, I have a question regarding changing the size of my sitemaps. Currently I generate sitemaps in batches of 50k. A situation has come up where I need to change that size to 15k in order to be crawled by one of our licensed services. I haven't been able to find any documentation on whether or not changing the size of my sitemaps(but not the pages included in them) will affect my rankings negatively or my SEO efforts in general. If anyone has any insights or has experienced this with their site please let me know!

Thanks for taking the time to answer that, what interested me was the order of pages that were returned for my site when using the "site:" operator. Have you experienced any rhyme or reason to the order that those pages are displayed?

Hi All,

Sorry for the potentially confusing title. I am trying to find out how google ranks the pages of your site when you search "site:yourwebsite.com".

When I did this with my website I was surprised what pages showed up on the first page, there were  sub-category pages in the top 5 results and top level category pages that weren't on the first page. I have been unable to find information as to how google returns these results, is it the same algorithm/factors that make pages rank highly in a regular search, or does it have something to do with how recently google crawled these pages. Any feedback would be helpful.

Additionally, if anyone has worked through a similar scenario I would be interested to know if there were any insights you gained from finding out which of your pages google returned first.

Thanks for the help!

Jason

Hi everyone,

I've run into a worrying phenomenon in GSC and im wondering if anyone has come across something similar. Since August, I have seen a steady decline in the number of pages that are indexed from my site, from 1.3 million down to about 800,000 in two months.

Interestingly, my clicks/impressions continue to increase gradually (on the same pace they have been for months) and I see no other negative side affects resulting from this drop in coverage.

In total I have 1.2 million urls that fall into one of three categories, "Crawled - currently not indexed", "Crawl anomaly", and "Discovered - currently not indexed"

Some other notes - all of my valid, error, and excluded pages are https://www. , so I don't believe there is an issue with different versions of the same site being submitted. Also, my rankings have not changed so I tentatively believe that this is unrelated to the Medic Update.

If anyone else has experienced this or has any insight to the problem I would love to know.

Thanks!

Hey Jordan, thanks for the input. I've gotten mixed information on whether using  (

) to hide h1 tags can get you penalized by Google, whats your take?

Hey guys, I've read mixed reviews on this. Does anyone have an answer to whether or not hiding h1 text  (

) negatively effects SEO in 2018. Thanks for the help!