Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Okay so I've moved a site I work on to https finally... wasn't easy, but I won't go into the whys and hows of that.

Everything is working fine on the site and my rankings are holding steady but when I went into the GWT today I noticed that my main site (www.domain.com) has lost inquiry and traffic data almost entirely.

So I quickly added and verified the https://www.domain.com URL (even though it doesn't ask for the protocol when adding a site) and saw the traffic.. kind of. Only 2 inquiries and a few pages indexed.

Now I realize I need to submit a new sitemap and am currently working on that but don't know which account to upload it to. Do I really need two GWT sites separately and why is the other one still getting the impressions and clicks?

Basically I'm looking for somebody to shed some light on how to handle this migration from a GWT standpoint. I've attached 3 screenshots to illustrate what I'm talking about. Should be obvious what's what to those who read this post.

The Analytics shot is to show that I haven't actually lost traffic in this time and eliminate the fear of penalty or anything of the sort.

Thanks!

wbPpwVw.png YJifLiR.png cRVgqRN.png

Unfortunately I sincerely doubt it has anything to do with your sitemap changes.

Seeing as how Google released a major Penguin update Friday, the fact that your rankings were lost Saturday morning seems to fit that timeline perfectly. It would be a pretty crazy coincidence otherwise, and sitemap changes truly should not affect rankings like that.

A quick look at ahrefs to peep your backlink profile and it does smell a little fishy. The growth in linking root domains you've had over the past few months has been pretty intense.. huge leap from april thru july and that's indicative of some blackhat SEO work.

Your anchor text seems to be keyed to a lot of spammy phrases like "promotional products" and **"corporate gifts."**This could also be triggering the Penguin penalties. I see a lot of links from sites like "freeseodirectory.com" and that's another red flag right there.. directory links, forum spam, etc.

Start digging through those backlinks, check your google webmaster account and watch for notifications of manual action. It still could be an algorithmic penalty even without notification though.. Just check out your SEO practices. You should know what you're doing to gain links and my guess would be it's in violation.

Good luck!

I tried to confirm that example and came up short. Were you able to?

This is so funny to me because I've literally had this exact same argument at executive meetings. I've lived this nightmare!

It doesn't matter that the two brands target different verticals. What matters is the product, as you've pointed out. You can target different verticals from the same domain. But competing domains are a no-no.

I would go back to focusing on how beneficial it would be to combine these. Try the concept of subdomains with them. So have a parent brand let's call it just that, 'parent.'

Then you will have your consumer vertical and your smb vertical, right? so you can go consumer.parent.com and smb.parent.com -- Have them branded differently but not violate Google guidelines while still bettering your SEO situation and improving DA/organic traffic and visibility.

Does that pitch make sense at the high level I threw it? Could you run with that?

I'd track down their examples also as that doesn't sound right to me. My CEO threw me examples and I shot them down on the spot when this happened to me.

Don't give up! You know you're right

You're absolutely right. As I said, I've gone down this exact same road before and that's exactly what was asked of me. My response was that Google has beefed up their penalty policies, reference eBay, BMW, and so on (big brands are not immune), and that you do seem to have a penalty already hitting you.

The site ranking drop in particular: Have you looked at your GWT to see if there are any manual notices? If it's a penalty and you need to submit a reconsideration request, that's your opportunity. Tell them that when you do that they will be going over your site with a fine-tooth comb. (Again this may be stretching the truth but we have to get them to understand what we know to be correct.)

The best course of action in this conversation that will be 100% truth is to explain how merging the brands will benefit your SEO. Explain that you can incorporate different vertical targets within the same domain and create content more finely tuned for each. Come up with a specific site map and present it in a purdy picture. domain.com/vertical-target etc

Show what it will look like and then explain how having all your backlinks pointing to one domain will benefit the domain and company and help you to outrank your competitors rather than spreading it out between two. This should sell them more than the penalty fear.

Good luck!

You need to combine these sites into one authoritative domain. You've spread yourselves thin, not to mention are most likely in violation of Google's guidelines.

Forgetting about the latter for a moment, think about the split domain authorities between your two prominent sites. Wouldn't it be nice to have those combined? (Of course keep in mind 1+1 will not equal 2 here, but you get my point.)

If you look through Google's webmaster guidelines you will see the part about having multiple domains selling/promoting the same product or service. That is what you are doing. There's a good chance one or both of your sites gets banned from SERPs if Google finds out about this.

It is also just going to be so much easier to create content, market, and SEO for one singular domain. You can attack different verticals from it, you can redirect everything (via 301 unless you have penalties that will carry) back to it, and continue your strategy to gain new markets. But competing with yourself isn't doing you any favors. You're absolutely correct to question the logic here.

I've fought this battle before and it's not an easy one. CEOs are not easily convinced that starting multiple brands is a bad idea. They have a funny way of reasoning it. However, you need to assert your knowledge. That is what they hired you for.

Good luck!

Hi again Peter,

That is very interesting and I see your confusion here. I repeated the same test and was given the same results without your brand name in query.. Still when Google is listing the title they are listing your brand name.

It seems to me that they really want your brand name to show in this title. Why? I'm not entirely sure. But that's what they're adding to your title here..

Try shortening your title on that page by a word or two and adding a pipe (|) and "Mobify." Make that your test page for this issue and see what Google does with it when the change populates. I have a funny feeling it might pull your full title at that point.

Most sites out there try to drag their domain/brand into each page title anyway. You can call it "best practice" or just a "funny habit" but I feel like this is what Google is looking for with your site.

I'm incredibly curious, so if you don't mind trying this out and reporting back I would be greatly appreciative.

Thanks and good luck!

This was intriguing to me so I dug in a little and I have an initial theory here:

In the example you provided you seem to be searching with your brand name only. "Mobify" is bolded telling me that was a searched keyword.

The title tag for the page in question reads: "25 Top Design Upgrades to Make Your Mobile Revenue Skyrocket [SlideShare]"

My bet is that because you do not have the brand name in your title tag, Google is looking to display something that does carry this particular keyword. In this case it is looking for something with the word "Mobify" in it and finding it in the URL. If you take out the SlideShare portion of your title and replace it with "| Mobify" my guess is this problem will go away.

Look at the other URLs you are having this problem with and tell me if the brand name is missing from it but present in the searched query.

Let me know if this works!

Interesting, we are actually talking about this in another thread at the moment. Check out the comments here:

http://moz.com/community/q/any-research-on-how-much-better-display-advertising-works-when-targeting-an-audience-graph

I think it's best used as a drive for branding as opposed to conversions. Conversions are great if you get them, but it's a low spend to get your name out there. Much like a radio commercial for Burger King while you're sitting in the drive through, it's still worth the low spend per impression for your logo to hit some eyeballs and be further imprinted in your target's cranium

Do read that thread though!

Build some links! You have a grand total of zero links pointing to this domain from zero sources with a domain authority of 1 (the minimum, basically zero).

I'm not sure why you're worried about your home page showing up when your domain/company is googled right now. I think you have bigger fish to fry. Those types of things will work themselves out as your SEO campaign takes off (ORGANICALLY!)

Googling "docslinc" at least brings your domain to the first results. It's an FAQ page, sure, but it's you. Google is in fact indexing your entire site but that may not last long either as you do have some pretty major duplicate content issues approaching... Go to google and search this query - site:docslinc.com

You'll see something like 1700 pages indexed and the VAST majority of them are duplicates of sign up and login pages. Examples:

https://www.docslinc.com/login.php?dctid=Mjg=&prid=NTI=&tim=MTQ6MDA=&dt=MjAxNC0wNy0yMg==&bkap=inst&brkt=MzA=&apptid=&ins_plan=&spl=1

https://www.docslinc.com/login.php?dctid=Mjg=&prid=NTI=&tim=MTQ6MDA=&dt=MjAxNC0wNy0yMg==&bkap=inst&brkt=MzA=&apptid=&ins_plan=&spl=1

https://www.docslinc.com/login.php?dctid=Mzg=&prid=NTY=&tim=MDk6MzA=&dt=MjAxNC0wNy0xMQ==&bkap=inst&brkt=MzA=&apptid=&ins_plan=&spl=1

(Yes folks, those URLs are slightly different)

They are all being indexed separately and that's a Panda Penalty waiting to happen. You need to get rel canonical tags on those pages and point them all to one or no crawl them altogether ASAP.

That dupe content issue will not solve your original question, but is very important nonetheless. To be honest I don't think your original concern matters all that much. Just get to building your marketing campaign and the rest will follow.

Good luck!

"Over exposure of PPC" is not a thing.. Google will never penalize you for spending too much

So that's not your problem. You have a lot of bots disallowed in your robots but I don't see google bot out.. Ahrefs is out but they're still reporting you have the vast majority of anchor text phrases being the exact term you're looking to rank for... That's dangerous, and just the type of thing the Penguin algorithm looks for. I'd work on a wider array of branded anchor phrases and less keyword-rich like that one.

You might just be in tough competition also. But since you so suddenly disappeared something tells me there's more to the story.

If it were me, I'd start picking away at that anchor phrase issue but focus on getting some content created. Put a blog on your domain and start coming up with awesome articles and insight... Something people will find interesting and want to share.

Sorry my advice is non-specific.. Full-disclosure I'm totally distracted by the World Cup Final at the moment

Yes we'd really need to see the site to give you a good idea of the issues but it does sound like a penalty of some sort. If you were on page 1 and then dropped off the face of the Google there's a good chance you were hit.

As Keri said, check webmaster tools for notices. Also share with us your link building strategy. Do you handle it yourself? Do you sub your SEO out?

Most of all the domain will help.

Yeah whether they exist on the same server or not is irrelevant.. If they are separate domain names selling the same product/service from the same company with the same content then you're lookin' for trouble.

If it's all unique no problems.. they'll have separate IP addresses and domain names no matter.

I will be there as well for my 2nd MozCon and can't wait!

Nothing about your image sizes will affect your page's organic web results ranking.

I wouldn't worry about this.

Mike's absolutely right. More importantly (and no offense) that is a terrible description line.

I would worry more about readability and less about keyword stuffing in your meta description. This is the second line that's going to get someone to click on your link instead of everyone else's.

Try and think of how it will look on a SERP instead of what keywords it has. Think about why you would click your link instead of some other link. That's the most important factor in this particular line of code, if you ask me.

You can have the best organic placement possible but if your site looks spammy and boring you won't get the clickthroughs you want.

Good luck!

I may be biased, but I could not agree more with EGOL (again.)

Look around here. You might like what you see.

Good luck!

Hi Carla,

I'm not a Moz Associate, but check out this URL for your answer: https://moz.com/researchtools/crawl-test

It doesn't really matter when you run the reports, the bots/spiders are crawling and refreshing their index on set timeframes. When you "run a report" you're doing just that, you're getting a report of the last crawl from that particular bot.

So for example, OSE's last refresh was on **May 21, 2014 **and it's next isn't til June 18th.

That being said, none of them are going to be perfect and complete also.

When you say "unlikely that Google is using old data" it makes me think you're focusing on the GWT backlink analysis which is arguably the weakest of those mentioned.

All of those things combined should explain why you are seeing things that may not be there. Hope that helps.

Hi Jay,

I'm not seeing a certificate warning but that's because nowhere on your site am I being directed to an https://---- address.

I poked around a bit and didn't see any of your internal links reference the secured site so I'm not sure why you're seeing this message. In order to get the certificate warning I have to force an s at the end of the http and obviously nobody else will be doing that.

That all being said, if you don't have any reason to have the site secured then don't worry about renewing the SSL cert and move on. Look for any internal links that are absolutes pointed to the https (run a site search in the html) and change those. I honestly recommend moving to relative internal links anyway but that's kind of a personal preference..

Good luck!

Mr. Painter said it perfectly.

With that said, I think the decision of whether or not to use canonical tags depends partially on what the varying URLs are. If they are like the books/author example above the Canonical tags are for you.

However a lot of people mistakenly think that using canonical tags to solve the non-www to www duplication is a proper solution when in fact you need to 301 in that case.

So if your URL duplication issues stem from http://books.com/author and http://www.books.com/author then you need to put a redirect in place instead.

Just wanted to add that tidbit on just in case. Good luck!

I have a heck of a time with authorship. I have one site I cannot get it to work for even though Google's rich-snippet testing tool says it's active, proper, and functioning. It most certainly isn't in true SERPs. So... Bleh

I see. Well first of all, the Moz Rank and Domain Authority don't actually feed information to Google and are nothing more than a slight-indicator of what's happening. If your DA went from 17 to 14 this could be for any number of reasons but even if it went back up to 17 all the sudden you wouldn't see any difference in traffic or SERPs just based on this number alone.

I'm not sure why it would disappear for 10 days and then reappear, to be honest. Could be any number of things. But I wouldn't worry about it if your placement has since returned.

I would worry about the pages being blocked by your robots.txt that you don't want blocked. Am I understanding that correctly? Do you have an example of that?

Michael's questions are spot on but based on the timing and a quick glance at your anchor text profile I think it's pretty safe to say you were hit by Penguin. I'd assume there was some shady link building done to your site in the past through a link-blast service or some black-hat SEO.

Your site has a ton of links with the anchor phrasing of "wedding dress" or some variation thereof. I would suggest that you do some research on Penguin penalties and how to clean them up and definitely check Webmaster Tools for penalty notifications.

This is a good community to stay close to throughout this process. There are a ton of helpful people here who can help with questions along the way.

Good luck!

Based on this quote: "This only a 3 month old web site with a minimal back linking profile, we're talking less than 100. No one has been working on the site," none of this is surprising to me. You have a young site and you're not working to market it. So yeah, you're gonna see your rankings disappear.

Why some of the pages have been de-indexed could be for any number of reasons. I think the only way to tell would be to post your URL and some of the fine folks here could take a look.

But besides that mystery, the best thing for you to do is roll up your own sleeves and get a good SEM campaign going for this domain. That's the name of the game!

Good luck!

Have you checked your Google Webmaster Tools account? Resubmitted a new and current sitemap?

Couple pointers to increase your onsite SEO:

Alt tags - I see very few alt and title tags on your images and when I do see them they don't seem to be attacking specific keywords. Do so but not in a forced manner, keep it organic and relevant. For example your home page is title "Mobility Aids" yet that keyword only exists 5 times on the page and zero times in images titles or alts.

Also with your images you might want to consider naming the actual file something other than padlock2.png or things like this... That is a personal preference and I can't really back it up with data but I swear it'll help.

Your blog is a bit funky. The titles of the most recent articles are simply chapter numbers and tell me nothing about the content. It makes me not want to read them at all. You need to try and attract users with your content, not deter them.

Another article I randomly clicked was something about an Interview you did. This was the entirety of the article:

"Just got back from interviewing a mobility scooter user for tips and advice... Is there a better way to get advice than from someone who owns and uses a scooter. Probably not. Finished video coming soon."

That's it. It was posted in August. See right away as a user I feel like you aren't trying and don't want to return. I bet your bounce rate is rather high and length of visit rather low. These factors matter for sure. Engagement is arguably the most important thing when it comes to your design.

Speaking of design, it is kind of all over the place. I didn't really understand the layout and had trouble navigating. I looked for the blog which was found via a weird button at the very bottom of a very long wordy home page with weird formatting. At the top of the home page is a "usefull articles" button which goes to a page with a few titles that are underlined and say "read more" and then more links pop up and it doesn't even look like you can click the "read more" part because it's not actually a link but instead a clickable div and my run-on sentence here is an attempt to illustrate the confusion I experienced. Whew.

So I guess what I'm saying is you should focus more on improving the design, layout, and usability of your site. Please don't misconstrue my comments as demeaning or poking fun at your site. It isn't terrible at all. I just think addressing the issues I've pointed out might actually go a long way to improving your ranking. The social stats are great but if users land on your site and leave immediately due to poor UX then it's all for not.

Hope this helps. Don't give up!

Well it's true that the articles are independent in content, but these pages are simply the index/teasers for said articles. I'm not sure you need your archive lists indexed so much as the articles themselves, so why not use Canonical tags to solve this problem and canonical them all to page 1? (or whatever one holds the most recent blogs)

Hope that helps/makes sense.

It's true that 404s have a place and can exist just fine so long as people aren't landing on them. Think of it from a usability standpoint; if the link exists somewhere on a foreign domain and is pointing to your site, you should 301 it. That way if somebody clicks it they don't get dropped into 404-hell.

Otherwise don't worry about it. Google will eventually stop looking at pages that 404. They're only notifying you in case it was a mistake and you want to capture a potential audience that is coming through that link.

Best practice is to 301 broken links if they receive traffic or have some link juice you aren't interested in losing. Also be sure and create a custom 404 page for any that you may miss out there so that at least the person arrives on a page branded by you with easily accessible links to find what they might be looking for.

Not sure about multiple 301s in an htaccess file (I'm more accustomed to an IIS server) but my guess would be that it shouldn't matter. They aren't pointing to different places and crossing back to eachother so you are in no danger of a redirect loop. I would imagine the spiders will follow one of them and ignore the others.

Hope this helps and good luck!

Yeah this has been a problem for me too recently and it's prevented me from visiting and contributing as often as I'd like.

I use multiple browsers in an attempt to workaround but never succeed. Firefox, Chrome, all do the same. I click Remember Me always and when i hit the Q & A link it logs me out. If I go back to profile without doing anything else I'm logged back in again and can get to analytics and everything. It's just the Q&A page that I have trouble with in getting logged out.

This isn't a constant. I've tried deleting cookies, using different browsers, etc and sometimes I just can't win and give up. But obviously it's working for me currently so who knows.

Anyway, not trying to complain just trying to help. Good luck and big thanks to the Moz Support Squadron.

Yeah maybe "love it" was an overstatement. I'm just so relieved that the annoying cover image is gone.

Yeah I love it. So much better than the giant cover photo, that was driving me bonkers to be honest.

No different than building your desktop really, as far as technical on-site SEO tactics are concerned.

You say "responsive" but then imply that you are building a separate mobile site. I always recommend building one responsive site but do understand that there are occasionally instances where it doesn't make sense to do so.

Point being, if you're truly building a responsive site then the on-site SEO considerations will be the same as you are building for all devices.

This doesn't tell me anything. If you at least had dates in there you could compare traffic dips to Google Algo Updates/Refreshes.

I understand you can't reveal the domain but I will be shocked if somebody here can tell you anything without further information. This place is full of brilliant minds, but that would take some sort of a mind-reader to tackle...

Your homepage has this tag in your header:

name='robots' content='noindex,nofollow' />

That's your problem. Remove that.

I agree with Chris. Ask yourself this: Would my customers/visitors ever want to visit these pages and do they offer any value to the target audience?

If the answer is no, nuke it. That should be the way we all decide how to do anything in a post-Penguin/Panda world.

Please share your domain. Otherwise all we can do is guess.

Check out this article by the awesome Kristina Kledzik from Distilled: http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/responsive-web-design-distilledlive/

They hosted a meet-up not too long ago (in Seattle) going over this with Matt Fordham of WINTR and we all walked out of there convinced that there was no other option than responsive. Responsive or bust!

I personally think there are 1 in 100 exceptions to this rule that should have separate mobile sites (Motrin is a good example that Avinash brought up at Mozcon) but I don't think your carport friends need a separate mobile site.

Good luck to them!

Yes this happened to me just moments ago. I cleared my cookies and it's back to working now.

Oleg is correct, you need a 301 to solve this ASAP.

However, this method only works for Apache servers. You need to determine what type of server the domain in question is being hosted on. It will either be a Linux based Apache server or a Windows IIS environment.

If it is the latter your method of redirecting will be entirely difficult. Google "how to 301 in IIS" for instructions, but really your hosting provider should be able to do this for you.

Yes take another look at that robots file for sure. If you provided us with the domain we might be able to better help you.

Also, go into Webmaster Tools and poke around. Check how many pages are being indexed, look at sitemaps, do a fetch-as-google, etc.

I'm not sure how this is still a conversation. The topic creator's site has been indexed and the current title and meta description is showing in Google's SERPs...

So... There's your answer?

It generally takes like a day, tops from my experience.

Yours is done and updated. I'm not sure why you think it isn't. I'm looking at it now for that search string and it's showing me the same title that is displaying on your homepage. It is also displaying the meta description listed in your source code. (NOTE: Your meta description is too long so it is not entirely displayed.)

I updated my site's title the other day and it was done by the time I came into work the next morning.

Perhaps clear you cache, make sure you're searching de-personalized, etc..?

Use spreadsheets and other tools like OSE and Majestic and dig in. Roll up your sleeves and get after it. I wouldn't start with Webmaster tools, it's not the best, but whatever you do export your reports to excel and start narrowing 'em down.

Remove domains you know are good or search for domains you know are bad, etc.

Filter search in OSE to remove nofollows and internal links.. There are things you can do to narrow this down but it will be a daunting task, no question.

Yeah or clear your cache or restart or something.

This is a non-issue. It's only happening to you, I'm afraid.

Correct to assume but incorrect to think that's enough to get ranked. "Link juice" decays rather rapidly as it spreads out across your site. So yes, your rankings will fall.

What you need to do is get a marketing campaign going. Build content, gain organic links, and continue to grow engagement. You've got the technical aspect sorted (it seems) so now it's time to get people coming to your site. Social/blog/etc to build your community.

Good luck!

Oh yes absolutely I hadn't caught that. That will certainly help you rank better but you should be sure that this is the branding you want. Branding may be the single most important aspect of your company, so lock it down and roll with it.

Good luck!

Well this is going to be tricky because Google will always want to rank sites that are most relevant to what it thinks users are searching for. I'd have to bet that 99.9% of searches done for "convert media" are looking to... convert some sort of media.

That means you're going to have to try and trick Google which is always dangerous. However you can probably do this while staying within Guidelines.

For example, I'm looking at your backlink profile and specifically at your anchor text hierarchy. Typically a domain's anchor text should be varied between the domain itself, the brand itself, images and variations of the former. Your anchor text profile does not have any links built with "Convert Media" as the anchor text. This is definitely a big part of why it isn't ranking for said keyword.

I see the words "ben stein" as the number two most linked to anchor text... What the what?! Ben Stein? As in, win Ben Stein's Money?? Also I see "contextin" as having the most links so I'm assuming you recently changed your domain and brand.

Anyway, I think the best thing you can do is change those (you should also get rid of any spam links you may have..) to your actual brand and domain and continue building more organic links.

Good luck!

I'm sorry to be the negative-Nancy here, but I sincerely doubt Google will respond to this situation.

If it were me I would just float on and forget about it. The only time I would take action is if a client or potential client was somehow seeing this, which it sounds like they are not. I would definitely take a screenshot of the page and document it (just in case) and probably disavow it with a note in the comments section of the disavow file as to what is happening (as short as possible.)

I'm  convinced that if anything Google reads those comments sections 1% of the time somewhere between 30-300 days from their upload.

In other words, don't take too much action until it's actually affecting you. This kind of shady company will die off.

I recently discovered a "web design firm" who was linking to my company saying they built our website. I personally built our website from scratch so this is clearly not true. We've ignored them.

People are weird.

Well put, thanks Dan. I'm going to stick with the 302 "temporarily." Wink, wink.

After all, everything is temporary right?!

Interesting, thanks for your insight as always EGOL. Upon further research I have found a few double listings but they have been for specific software and the double listings are of the developer's domain. So that makes sense to me.

Either way it seems the algo is making exceptions for certain domains depending on keyword and their authority to the actual search term.