Welcome to the Q&A Forum

You can control parameter handling in Google Search Console and direct Google explicitly how to treat parameters.

If Google deems a parameter page worthy of being indexed it will index. But if you edit the parameter handling in GSC as mentioned above, they will usually/always follow that.

If you get links to a parameter URL and it canonicalizes to the non-parameter, that link equity should flow just find to the non-param page. Triple check meta robots, robots.txt, canonicalization setting to be sure.

Yes, I think this will make it easier for them for sure and should theoretically help your links pick up.

If you want to be 100% safe you don't violate any guidelines, just make sure you're not explicitly telling them they have to link back in exchange for product, but you can encourage and if they do on their own free will it should be fine.

Never heard of a penalization around over-optimizing images, I think that's a very small concern.

Like EGOL said, optimizing the file name with keywords and dashes is actually one of the best ways to go. Google's image search engine is very rudimentary so it uses the filename as a large % of the image ranking algorithm. Would take the approach of describing the image succinctly in the alt text while including and image.

As far as helping the page rank in the normal SERP results, images have a very small contribution. So it's a best practice but don't waste too much time on it unless it's a massive site where you can apply scalable changes all at once.

A lot of SEO's recommend Distilled's training course as the default. It goes through a lot of topics and is just $40 a month, so a good way to get the basics covered, although they also go into more advanced topics.

Meta keywords are not still a thing, at least in Google search!

So looking at Strasbaugh, and answering some comments you made:

• You're right, it's not mobile responsive - this can be a detriment, but it's not going to knock them off the first page in most cases just because of that. It's a small percentage of the overall factors
• Site design - I feel that I have pretty high standards, but I wouldn't call this "old and frankly, terrible" - I'd say it's decent for this industry. Keep in mind they're not trying to be a creative design agency website
• Domain age can be a helpful factor if it truly is old
• Unfortunately, the Moz bar isn't the best source to find a high volume of links (yet) - using Ahrefs I see 70 linking root domains, which is pretty decent for a local firm
• Video, H1, H2, blog/content updates - those can be signals but are not deal breakers if other factors exist
• Titles are important, but they're not totally bungling them. They at least have their core phrase "financial advisors" in there, although yes all the pages should have rewritten titles
• One thing that's likely helping is that its links have generally good anchor text. Mostly "Strasbaugh Financial Advisory" in the link anchor. This is something that I thought Google would have discounted more by now, but that's not the case, it's still a strong signal
• Lucky for you, if they're a competitor, is that in looking at their traffic on Ahrefs, they actually don't get a ton of it, it's only about 53 visits a month. The important thing to note is that your example keyword exactly as you phrase it "Financial Advisor in Colorado Springs" - gets 0 searches a month. The keyword "financial advisors colorado springs" gets 20 searches a month and they are ranked #4
• Looking a page like http://www.strasbaughfinancial.com/who-we-serve - they have decent helpful informaiton on there. It's not 10x or even 2x content by any means, but it's better than what I see on a lot of these local financial firm websites

Hopefully that helps! The good news is that if you think what they're doing is minimal, then you should be able to replicate and improve and then rank!

I think it's a great idea to stoke demand by creating blog posts before the product pages are up.

If you think about it you're suggesting two options: do nothing or do something. If your product pages won't be up for awhile, might as well put that content to use, which will help you uncover a few things:

• How difficult is it to rank for product related keyword?
• How much natural demand is out there for my products already?
• Are people willing to sign up for a waiting/mailing list for my products?
• What types of content do readers find most compelling on my site or in my niche?

I wouldn't wait because you never know what delays there will be in the future, so might as well start now.

Switching platforms, such as to Shopify, is always a pain, but if you're going to be migrating pages anyways, a few blog posts won't be a huge technical challenge.

Possible SEO consequences/recommendations between blog posts and product descriptions:

• They are two different things. When reading blog posts, people are looking for information, stories, ideas, etc. When people read product pages they want to know details and FAQs about that product specifically. There will be some overlap, but keep the goal of the user in mind.
• That said, you can use some of the product descriptions within blog posts, but I wouldn't just copy/paste. There's no such thing as a duplicate content penalty, but it's usually not a good idea to replicate pages across your site word for word.
• When you write blog posts about your products, link to the product pages from within the post. You always want to prioritize product pages for your money keywords, and blog posts for more informational/long-tail/high volume, but low difficulty keywords - two different strategies.

Hope that helps! Let me know if you have follow-up questions!

Thanks for the update Erin - totally understand if it's outside the company's bandwidth, although Moz's perks will be missed on my end!

Just jumping in here even though it's an old question.

The thing is, Moz is crawling the pages and showing duplicate titles, but if you have page B using rel=caonical pointing to page A, then Google will reference page A.

It's ok if page A and page B have the same title if using rel=canonical, because Google will follow that directive most of the time.

So if Moz is surfacing duplicate title tags but they are canonicalizing, it's safe to ignore Moz's flagged issue. Don't always take it at face value.

It would most likely be a waste of time to go change all the page titles for the duplicate pages if you're using rel=canonical.

It's awesome that you have such an aged domain, but I would agree that it sounds like a mouthful and it's hard to get strong branding around it. If you're planning to be around for awhile, I'd recommend making the change from a brand standpoint.

In order to tell if you'd lose rankings on the "web design" types of keywords, I'd recommend doing an analysis of how much your keyword in your domain might be helping over not having it. You might do this by pulling the page authority of your pages ranking for competitive keywords and compare those to your competitors' page authority scores for the same page type competing for the keywords and check if it seems that you have the advantage boosted by the domain.

You could also analyze the anchor text profile used to help rank your pages and see if it's strongly positively influenced by your company name to help rank.

Even if you do find additional boosts from your domain name, I'd recommend making the change!

You're right on target, it's not a good idea to index search results. Google doesn't want to crawl or index other search results in its own search results. There are some exceptions for gigantico sites like Yelp or TripAdvisor when showing their search results pages are actually the best option, but if you're not at that level and especially if you're an ecommerce site, it's not recommended.

You wouldn't be harming anything by excluding search from your robots.txt file. In fact, many top sites exclude search results to preserve crawl capacity and for indexation reasons.

You'll also want to look at parameter handling in Search Console, this article from Google will get you started.

I don't believe there is such a thing as keyword dilution. Could be wrong as things change hourly in SEO, but haven't heard it myself.

The best thing to think of is targeting for the highest volume keyword as well as a long tail keyword. In other words, you want to target long tail keywords that also include a "head term". To put it a 3rd way, if you're targeting a head term, might as well include a long tail keyword.

I prefer your #2 above.

It includes "web design services" up front in the title tag which is great, but you're also including longer tail keyword with the rest of it.

As a quick grammar fix, you would say "Web Design Services with Focus on Conversion" or "...with CRO Focus" or "...with Conversion Focus" (last one not ideal though)

Excellent reply. Too often as SEOs, as we get deeper into the community we care more about what other SEOs think and how to create content for other SEOs than for our actual clients.

I'm just as guilty as anyone, as my posts tend to get a bit technical.

But the first principle of SEO is keyword research. And if the keyword research shows that SEO guru is a searched term with opportunity, go for it!

I would say a few factors at play

• Just guessing, but if the ranking in question is "best g9 led bulbs" then the post outranks partly because it's in the HTML page title tag and H1, while it's not in the product page
• While only part of the equation, the blog post has over 500 words and the product listing page has under 250. Word count isn't the only metric, but it's a large influencer
• You have one internal link from the blog post to the product listing page, consider building out more - this is a good starting guide https://www.gotchseo.com/internal-linking/
• There are some longstanding SEO basics that may still apply here, such as using the keyword early on in the page, having content higher in the page, etc. While not always possible on ecommerce pages, keep in mind when there's opportunity

Hope that helps, let me know if you have any further questions!

Most of the time, you'll get really high numbers if you have 765 pages in your site and the home page is accessible in the navigation from every page. It's like this for 99.9% of sites, where the home page is accessible from every page.

I think that simply, you have 765 pages on your site, and they only have 28 or 33.

Is that the case when you type "site:websitename.com" in Google search?

Really hard to know for sure without knowing the industry/vertical, but it sounds like you've started somewhat of a system for scaling this up.

I would estimate a half-hour per article with time to upload to the CMS included in that, so around 15 pieces I would estimate is fair. Again a lot depends on the research and ultimate quality of the content, but it sounds like it's fairly straightforward.

One thing you could do to help is identify what features are being identified over and over, and see if you can help with some Excel spreadsheet magic.

I managed a project like this in the past for golf course descriptions, and since there were about 1,500 of these, using Excel came in clutch.

Yes you want quality content, but if you're listing features over and over, then you should use tools to help speed up the work!

Agree with Chris. It's more of a recommendation. If you have a low authority site, you might want to take a look at the volume of links. Like if you have 500-1,000 links per page that might be a bit much. But natural navigation menu links are nothing to worry about.

The old directive of "don't have more than 100 links per page" is kind of old, but worth remembering as a heuristic, but don't limit yourself to that if you have a good UX.

Not sure if it completely disappeared or just moved somewhere else. Would be curious to hear!

For different products and services, they should have their own page. You should detail out your products and services first like you would explain them to a human and then build keywords around those.

I don't know myself - is waste management different from waste recycling? Is waste management a general category and waste recycling is a subset of that?

Definitely watch this: How to Build a Killer Content → Keyword Map for SEO - Whiteboard Friday as well as this A Step-by-Step Process for Discovering and Prioritizing the Best Keywords - Whiteboard Friday and you'll get all the answers you need!

I would follow the Whiteboard Friday methodology, since clearly Moz has thought about this strategy (I hope). They post the Wistia video on their site and then post a YouTube video.

You'll only ever see YouTube and Vimeo videos in the search results with the video snippet, you won't see a Wistia video snippet. If you want people to link to your website, then having it embedded with Wistia only is the way to go and don't post it on YouTube. But if you're looking for the most video views and exposure you should do both.

There have been a few changes since this post, but this post by Phil Nottingham has the best breakdown on the options.

Yes I agree with Paul, the www and non-www are still resolving separately, this needs to be fixed and is part of your problem, assuming the site in question is TapGoods which you never confirmed.

Hey Isabelle - which do you not know how to check, the analytics for those 3,500 pages or the links to them?

For the analytics you'll just go back in time to when those pages were receiving traffic and check. To check the individual pages for backlinks pointing directly to them, you'll want to use Open Site Explorer, Ahrefs, or Majestic to get that data. Using at least 2 of those will give you the best data on which pages are getting links.

I would investigate as to which metrics Moz Pro is using to decide if those pages are high priority to fix. It could be that Moz Pro is basing the high priority signal on the backlinks, so dive deeper into that to find out what's triggering that and then fix that problem!

As far as the correlation in movement, as I'm sure you know it get's exponentially hard to move from 5th to 2nd place than it does to move from 12th to 9th place. In the post How Long Does Link Building Take to Influence Rankings?, Kristina points out:

"The pages that I observed that were already ranking on the first page of SERPs didn't show much of a rankings increase with one link, barely moving over one spot in 22 weeks. In contrast, pages ranking on the second or deeper pages of SERPs took off after 8–9 weeks."

If you can elaborate on what you mean by "since the links I need are really just safe links (they don't need to have power)" that would be helpful. If you actually want your rankings to improve, you're going to need links with power. Also on that article, Kristina notes:

"Unsurprisingly, a higher DA will have a bigger effect — in fact, you can see that the average rank change for a page that got a link from a site with a DA below 25 actually dropped after 13 weeks, then recovered to barely two ranks up.

I generally have a rule that I don’t want to spend any time or money on sites with DAs under 25. This chart shows that they’re not completely devoid of value, but be prepared for a very, very small change in rank with these guys."

Most people here will tell you that some directory links are worth having in place, but often they're not going to move the needle much, so I wouldn't spend much focus on more directories if you already have directory links. Some directory links may even be worthless.

As far as your home page link ratio, most sites actually have 90%+ of their backlinks pointing to the home page. So that's actually a pretty natural profile. What would be unnatural is if you only had 10% of your links pointing to your home page, and like 50% pointing to a product or lead gen page. That being said, yes if you want a page other than the home page to increase rankings, you will need a few high quality links pointing to that page.

There's not a ton of data out there on the link ratios, but here is a summary from Joe Hall on Internet Marketing Ninjas:

"If you have ever looked at, at least a couple backlink profiles, you should already be aware that organically most links point towards a domain’s homepage. This happens naturally because the home page is the most relevant place to link to when mentioning a site. The link distribution ratio is the ratio of total backlinks pointing towards the homepage; to the total backlinks pointing towards the rest of the site. The more balanced the ratio is, the more links are pointing to supporting content. Domains that have balanced Link Distribution Ratios tend to have engaging content. And also link equity is spread more evenly."

Also Brian from Backlinko mentioned this on 7 Ways to Protect Your Site Against Google Penalties:

"Deep links vs. homepage link ratio (you want at least 40% of your links to be deep links)"

As far as cheap and easy links, many will tell you links worth getting aren't cheap and are rarely easy. But a few ideas that are often recommended:

• Subscribe to HARO and look out for opportunities to contribute to articles and be quoted, you'll often get a link back
• Guest posting is not dead if you write for relevant related sites in your industry. These are fairly guaranteed and safe links, but you'll have to do the outreach (conv rate usually 10-20%) and write the post
• Linkable visual assets such as intstructographics, infographics, and helpful visual images are fairly scalable. These also take time to build and promote, but you'll see the best value over the lifetime of promoting these.

Hopefully that helps, let me know if you have any other questions!

You would not set the canonical URL on the product page to your preferred category, that would send the signal that instead of having the product URL rank in search, you would prefer one of the product's categories, which would be incorrect.

It sounds like since you've already set a canonical URL for certain categories, so you're on the right track. For instance if you have 5 categories with very similar lists of products on those pages, it sounds like you are canonicalizing 4 of those pages to the 1 most authoritative of the 5.

In summary, you would only set a canonical for a product page if you had the same exact product spread across 5 different product pages. For example, if you had /mens-glasses/versace-primo/ and then for some reason every color had its own page because of your system, such as /mens-glasses/versace-primo/black, /mens-glasses/versace-primo/blue, /mens-glasses/versace-primo/red - then you would need the canonical on the product page back to the main page without the color subfolder.

To address a part of your question, it's generally ok to assign the same product to multiple categories if that's useful to the user. Unless you have a massive site and you're maxing out your crawl budget, I don't think you need to sweat too much on duplicate content issues, unless you're receiving really strong negative signals. For instance, Moz might show that some of your pages are duplicate, but it's more informational, and you don't always need to take sweeping action.

One strategy to fix duplicate content issues on category pages, is to write unique content for each category page and make the category page an actual destination page rather than just a navigational page.

This is a great metaphor:

"Finally, will moving all of this content damage Site A?   Yes.  This is cutting out body parts similar to arms and organs.  When this content leaves the traffic flow into Site A will drop.  The number of linking domains and pages will drop.  The offer of this content to entertain existing visitors will be gone.  The size of that loss will determine the impact.  Rankings of remaining content might fall if the loss is great.    If arms and legs or heart or brain are extracted then expect Site A to suffer.  But if lesser things are lost then the damage will be lower but some damage will happen.  Search engines and visitors will all notice.  Enthusiastic visitors will find the content in its new home and they might move with it."

Will definitely be using this for future explanations!

Hey Anirban - internal linking is definitely a good tactic for the right sized site.

There's a pretty good overview of internal linking over on this Quicksprout video, one highlight:

"But, to find out how to get the most bang for your buck, you want to find the pages that have the most authority. Those are the ones that you want to link from to the pages you’re trying to rank.

Let me show you what I mean. We’re at Open Site Explorer. What I did is, I put in the home page of my site and pressed the search button. When you’re here, it’ll automatically rank inbound links coming from other sites, but that’s not what we want. We want pages from within our site. So, click on the “Top Pages” tab. When you do that, you’ll see the page authority of all the pages on your site. Starting from highest to lowest, these are the pages that you want to build internal links on, pointing to the pages that you actually want to rank."

Brian notes that you can automate some of it if you have thousands of pages, but you shouldn't rely on it too much since there's not enough anchor text diversity:

"I’m not a huge fan of doing the automated, because if you do it like this, you’re not going to have a lot of anchor text diversity which may get you dings for over-optimization. If you have a site with thousands of pages, you will need to maybe do some automation and at least have some of your internal links done by a plugin or some piece of software."

This Moz Academy lesson also has some good tips on internal linking:

• Make links relevant, and useful
• Don't stuff keyword into anchor text too much, and don't overuse footer links
• For huge sites, you can use sitemaps well and include them in the footer (see 5:00 into the video)

I recently wrote up a summary of ecommerce internal links best practices, but the ideas apply to non-ecomm sites:

• Link product pages together via the description if they're related
• Tell a story in blog posts of your products and link to those product pages
• Link blog post content to relevant category pages (underutilized)
• Make category pages more user-friendly with content, and link liberally to relevant internal pages
• Use user-generated content/curation pages to help you naturally build internal links at scale

Hopefully these ideas point you in the right direction, let me know if you have any followup or more specific questions!

If you haven't used Screaming Frog's SEO Spider to scan your site and show internal linking pages, that can be another great tool to help you out.

Hey Isabelle,

From the How Should You Handle Expired Content? post, I agree that those 4 steps outlined are the best questions to ask:

1. Was there significant traffic (and not just organic, but also consider direct) coming to this page?
2. How can we provide the best user experience?
3. Has this page received external links? How is this page currently internally linked to?
4. Is there content/resources on the page that users would still find useful?

Were those 40 pages you chose to 301 the only pages that were receiving any type of traffic, or are there perhaps more out of the other 3,500?

If some of those 3,500 pages have links from external websites linking to them, make it a high priority to 301 redirect those URLs to related category or product pages.

If some of those 3,500 pages are receiving decent amounts of visits to them still (you can see this in Google Analytics) then you can consider 301 redirecting those to improve UX and recover some traffic that may be bouncing. Set a threshold depending on the size of your site, maybe only recover URLs that have more than 10 visits a month or so.

As far as seeing the errors in Search Console, it can be annoying sometimes, but Google shows a lot of stuff as informational and it doesn't necessarily need to be acted upon. Here's a related question on Moz about that. If the pages are long gone, you don't have to worry about Google showing them.

But if you're wondering how Google is discovering these, it's possible there are old sitemaps they're crawling, or even pages on your site that link to those old pages. Definitely run a Screaming Frog scan on your site to try and uncover those.

I agree with ViviCa1's methods, so go with that.

One thing I just wanted to bring up though, is that unless people are actually visiting those pages you don't want indexed, or it does some type of brand damage, then you don't really need to make it a priority.

Just because they're indexed doesn't mean they're showing up for any searches - and most likely they aren't - so people will realistically never see them. And if you only have a one-page site, you're not wasting much crawl budget on those.

I just bring this up since sometimes we (I'm guilty of it too) can get bogged down by small distractions in SEO that don't really help much, when we should be creating and producing new things!

"These also seem to not be working and I am wondering if it is because I re-submitted the sitemap with only the index page on it (as it is just a single page site) could that have now stopped Google indexing the original pages to actually see the 410's?"

There was a good related response from Google employee Susan Moskwa:

“The best way to stop Googlebot from crawling URLs that it has discovered in the past is to make those URLs (such as your old Sitemaps) 404. After seeing that a URL repeatedly 404s, we stop crawling it. And after we stop crawling a Sitemap, it should drop out of your "All Sitemaps" tab.”

A bit older, but shows how Google discovers URLs through the sitemap. Take a look at the rest of that thread as well.

Not sure how the pricing compares, but PageOnePower comes to mind. They have an Agency Partnership service - from what I remember seeing on some pricing in the past year, they're about $85/hr. I think that's about the cheapest you'd get from an agency that has any sort of reputation. I'm not affiliated with them at all, have just been aware of them for years.

Another route if you care about price would be to train up a college student - although that would take a lot more oversight and add in some training and risk costs on your part. Let us know what you go with so we can all learn

This is definitely still a sound strategy, especially since you're essentially cleaning up parts of the web! You're reclaiming links already pointing to the clients site, so it's a fairly straightforward strategy. The title led me to believe you might have been snapping up deleted domains and redirecting to the client site, a general gray-hat strategy.

A few issues to watch out for:

• In order to recover the most value, try to recreate the original content on your site that the external sites were linking to. For example, if you had 30 external links to a resource page that's now dead, it would be best to recreate that page if it still applies to your business rather than 301 all the links to the home page
• Be wary of redirect chains, Google will stop following a few redirects chained together (4 or 5 hops)

Here's a good article from PageOnePower on the subject as well.

The first thing that comes to mind is if you have the correct version of the URL in Search Console. It's best to have both versions of the URL, both the www and non-www version.

Assuming it's the company linked in the article, you should be using the non-www version in Search Console. Without seeing the configuration in there myself it's hard to know exactly the issue. Actually when trying both versions of the site, assuming it's TG, both versions (www and non-www) which is not ideal - you should have one redirect to the other!

You're right, Moz's OSE doesn't show any links [see screenshot 1].

But in Ahrefs it shows a bunch of domains [see screenshot 2].

I still don't see the Dallas News links in Ahrefs either, so you may want to check another backlink source like Majestic to see if they have it.

It's strange that Search Console wouldn't pick it up, which leads me to believe it's something off with the Search Console view. Be sure you're looking at the https:// version of the site as well.

Let us know what you find out!

aAaXl Fc7Ep

Sounds great! Let me know what impact you see from the changes, curious to hear!

Good point EGOL on showing that after you crush your main market there is actually an opportunity to produce secondary sites, I hadn't thought of it in that way before.

The simple answer may be that users enter through organic traffic, add something to their cart, then go to some other tabs or do some comparison shopping, the session times out (after 30 minutes is standard) and so when they come page to the cart page directly they start a new session but they're still tagged as coming from organic.

David Sottimano has a really good write up on this Deepcrawl post:

"If a user enters a site via Google / Organic, allows the session to time out, and then navigates to a non-indexable page, that non-indexable page will be credited as Google / Organic Landing page.

I had been skeptical about this for a long time, even though experts like Mike Sullivan answered me on Quora, I had to test this many times to make sure this was actually the case – I also had a former colleague double check my test results (thanks Tom Capper)."

Another post on Jfet.io discusses the same idea:

"My guess?  People are adding items to their cart, then doing comparison shopping or coupon hunting.  This process lasts over 30 minutes (maybe they wander off to lunch or for a coffee break), and when they return to the browser with your site’s cart open, a new session starts.  In that new session, the landing page is the cart and it’s direct traffic.  Because GA rolls with the last non-direct source, it’s attributed to search/email/whatever."

I'd recommend testing out all the action items on both of those posts and see if their solutions work. My take is that it's probably people revisiting their cart after a timeout session! Let me know what you find out.

This is definitely an old-school tactic that used to work, but doesn't work as much anymore. My opinion is that this particular tactic is not working too well for them anymore, but they haven't updated those sections. The funniest part is that they have "CyberSecurity PR Firms" & "Cyber Security PR Firms" pages to capture the tiny nuance in spelling.

From what I've witnessed, landing pages built with SEO in mind do still work, and can be a best practice, but not to the degree that this firm is doing it. They should combine a lot of those pages, build out the content a lot more on each page to make each page genuinely useful, and improve links, social shares, and CRO on each page if they really want to improve those. Just doing a quick search of the "Cyber Security PR Firms" term I didn't see any site in the top few results that looked like the one you're talking about, so it seems that this isn't working for them

So the answer isn't black and white. It's not about having 50 keyword targeted pages vs nothing at all. If you look at HubSpot, they have a lot of landing pages that focus on their software's features, such as https://www.hubspot.com/products/marketing-automation. Or Zapier's many app pages https://zapier.com/zapbook/.

At one point I thought this tactic was completely gone, but if done well it can do a lot of good!

A few thoughts - pretty good explainer video, I would imagine that would take a ton of time to write!

First impressions on user profiles:

• From looking at a few of the profiles, it seems like you'd be missing out on a lot of good user data if you simply retired these profiles permanently. From a search engine perspective, it sounds like they're not bringing in much on their own. But there's also qualitative and quantitative data that you can glean from all of those profiles to inform and create content, charts, data, reports, etc for your site. You can map out all the user profiles to create personas for your site. You wouldn't want to trash these and lose the data.

• I do see the point on the content being somewhat thin, but thin content pages don't always harm your site if they're serving a purpose on your site. If you look at Moz's profile pages, some of them aren't very meaty if the users haven't contributed many posts or comments. So it should be evaluated on a case by case budget.

• What you can do - and I believe Moz does - is if the user hasn't been active in the last year, you deactivate/archive their page until the user signs in again. That way you only have active user pages. Conversely, you can leave the profiles up but just automatically noindex those pages that aren't being used so that the crawl budget isn't being wasted. Another idea is to automatically noindex some of the pages under a certain word count threshold.

• Yes the user profiles may be eating up your crawl budget when Google crawls the site, so you wouldn't necessarily want the profiles being crawled above other important pages if the crawler is hitting it's limit. Check out Search Console to see the crawl activity and stats (under Crawl Stats)

• It looks like you have 8,000+ profiles currently indexed - which is both good and bad. Good because it's proof that Google is able to crawl all of those profiles and deems them worth indexing. Bad if you don't want all of them indexed or to waste your crawl budget.

• You are write that all of the title tags are the same. I would automatically rewrite those and run a 90-day experiment to see if you can actually get some long-tail organic traffic to those profiles. Perhaps in aggregate they can actually bring in some traffic. Or maybe you'll learn after 90 days that they just don't rank for anything and so aren't worth spending time on.

• One thing I noticed is that you don't have an XML sitemap designated in your robots.txt - https://www.hairlosstalk.com/robots.txt I would add multiple XML sitemaps to your robots.txt by creating a sitemap index. The WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast does this well for your WordPress pages, but you should make sure your shop and profile pages get their own XML sitemaps as well.

• You should submit all sitemaps in Search Console and track the page indexation % for each XML sitemap.

• You should also run a cohort report in Google Analytics to see if those with profile pages on your site have higher engagement rates than non-users and let that inform your decision as well. Do they purchase more than others? Visit more often? You don't want to chop off a community that contributes to the health of your site and revenue.

• From a UX perspective, it's a funk thing to have your headers and design different among the WordPress, Magento, and Blogs sections. I'm sure you're aware of that, but it's definitely something that stands out.

• Action items:

• Rewrite all title tags on user profiles (auto generated is ok) and test for 90 days to see if the traffic changes

• Also optimize the profile pages with on-page best practices as well

• Generate XML sitemaps for each section of your site, and submit them in Search Console

• Create some type of programmatic way to deindex old or extra thin profile pages

• Run cohort reports on profile page owners vs anonymous visitors

There's your free mini-site audit! Let me know if you have other questions!

Some other examples that come to mind, since it seems that so many ecommerce site owners overlook this opportunity:

• Home Depot - note how this top level category page - http://www.homedepot.com/b/Building-Materials/N-5yc1vZaqns and also a sub-category such as http://www.homedepot.com/b/Building-Materials-Drywall/N-5yc1vZar3d include great images, helpful tools, the actual products for that category, and also descriptive text at the bottom. All a shining example of ecommerce category pages with great SEO
• REI doesn't try to optimize as much as Home Depot but they do a good job as well - https://www.rei.com/h/cycling
• This is a decent example of a B2B site including some optimization on a category page - http://www.coastalcreative.com/product-category/large-format-prints/
• A good example of a category page not feeling like one - http://www.chameleoncoldbrew.com/our-coffees/ready-to-drink/

Those come to mind first. It actually is hard finding ecommerce sites that do category page SEO perfectly!

The one thing I've learned, is that every industry is different. Some are easier than others.

For example, if you create a design infographic and pitch it to bloggers, this works well in the design and tech industry. If, however, you create a travel infographic and pitch it to travel bloggers, 90% of them will ask for payment or will ignore you. The difference is depending on the person's goals of the receiving end of your outreach.

Travel bloggers want to make money through their blogging, they get hit up by international travel companies constantly, and they want their blog to be a personal expression of themselves, which makes it tough.

Design and tech blogs have a strong sharing community, where they are trying to build audiences and discussions and their own visibility, and they most often are not trying to get advertising for their blog posts, but rather want to offer customized consulting services.

Those are just two examples of differing industries. Some are tougher than others, and the same link building methods will work in one but not another.

I'd recommend taking the stair-step approach where you start with the most guaranteed method and work your way up. For example, you can generally find guest posting opportunities for most industries, I'd start with that. Don't put to much pressure on posting on the most amazing site ever, just start with a decent one and work your way up the ladder. After you get a lot of those under your belt, move up to infographics and more shareable content, then create tools, reports, etc.

You can make good progress in about an hour a day to start! Good luck!

Yup - for this first time, I think ever, one of my clients DA jumped up about 10 points to a number that's more in line of where I thought it should be, based on industry standards. At the same time, the two closest competitors dropped by 5-10 points each, which was very relieving. It was relieving because I had been monitoring their own content and links for the past few years, and much of their links have been spam or purchased links. I had been waiting for their drop for awhile, and now there's vindication!

So for the first time in awhile, I'm very impressed with this update, and from my narrow perspective, the new index seems to be right on the money.

Here are some best practices based on your situation:

• Make sure you've used the change of address tool for the subdomain - "Request an address change.
  Use the **Change of address **tool when your site move entails a domain or subdomain change, such as changing from http://fish.example-petstore.com to http://example.com or http://example-petstore.com." See https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/83106?hl=en
• Also - one thing to do with your XML sitemaps is to ensure that both your old and new XML sitemaps are still submitted to Search Console. This will allow Google to read the old and the new. When it reads the old XML sitemap it will follow those URLs and redirects to find and index the new URLs. You can remove the old sitemap only when all of your new URLs are indexing to your standards.
• If you're getting 0 traffic from Google, check your Search Analytics in Search Console to make sure you're actually ranking for at least long tail keywords. 0 traffic means there's a problem. Check your robots.txt and Meta Robots to ensure everything is properly set up. Do a "site:yoursitename.com/blog" search in Google to make sure your blog URLs are ranking. Also search for your website name to make sure the blog is ranking for the site name at least.

Good luck!

EGOL - awesome example, and I think it perfectly applies to many many industries, especially ecommerce. It has a bit of a pessimistic outlook at the end, but that's the reality for many online brands who are juggling too many tasks to try to beat, or even compete with, the mega retailers.

What I was imagining you would head towards was that HappyJoe realizes that Google doesn't reward him for his 10x customer support, so after he shuts off his phone he moves the hundreds of questions and answers to his website to create 10x content out of it, and he lives happily ever after.

You might have experience with a similar client but I'd be surprised if someone bought the drill from Amazon and then called HappyJoe for support. Maybe if they have no one else, they have to. At the end of the day if Google wouldn't recognize him being a helpful guy, he needs to build out a massive online help and support center with tons of training docs and videos, right?

In response to the part about "you need people to miss you", a good example would be the owner of a small quaint Italian restaurant in your neighborhood that everyone loves. The owner moved to your 2nd rate smallish big city from Italy 10 years ago and just loves what he produces and his customers. He's constantly making the rounds every night complimenting, talking to, and cracking jokes with customers. When he's not around people miss him. He has a distinct opinion and perspective, and that's why people keep coming back.

Scaling this up and broadening it out to all businesses, I think it means focusing on a specific segment of your market and putting your stake in the ground, forming an opinion, and keeping the conversation open with that segment of your customers. I mean if you read some company blogs, they're just checking the box to say they have a blog. They're not going deep and passionate and getting opinionated.

Off the top of my head, https://baremetrics.com/blog has an awesome 10x brand blog. It's opinionated, helpful and goes above and beyond. I trust http://www.thekitchn.com/advice more than I trust allrecipes.com or something generic. I love how Ian is a honey badger in his posts - https://www.portent.com/author/ian - he writes like he talks and that's way more engaging than perfectly formatting a long post.

I would view the Moz blog as going deep and connecting with the audience. Contrast that to HubSpot, while although they are volume animals, they kinda just pump out mehh content and let you find the golden nuggets.

Just a few examples so far! It's an open discussion so I don't have a proper conclusion.

Thanks for the response Chris. My assumption is the same as yours in that doing some type of local SEO for just one distinct city shouldn't hurt broad national rankings. The interesting thing about this situation is the competitor site makes no note of any locality at all, they're not trying to scale local rankings nationally - they just don't mention it. While my client's site and a 3rd competitor focus on 1-2 cities and don't do as well as the non-local company. Thanks for your input and hope to continue to hear from others!

Thanks for your input Miriam, good to hear from your experience of having clients that double as a local shop with ecommerce not being demoted on national rankings.  Good to have your input as another data point!

I've read a good amount here and in other blog posts about strategies for national brands to rank locally as well with local landing pages, citations, etc.

I have noticed something strange that I'd like to hear if anyone else is running into, or if anyone has a definitive answer for.

I'm looking at a custom business printing company where the products can and are often shipped out of state, so it's a national brand. On each product page, the client is throwing in a few local keywords near where the office is to help rank for local variations.

When looking at competitors that have a lower domain authority, lower volume of linking root domains, less content on the page, and other standard signals, they are ranking nationally better than the client. The only thing they're doing that could be better is bolding and throwing in the page keyword 5-10 times (which looks unnatural). But when you search for keyword + home city, the client ranks better.

My hypothesis is that since the client is optimizing product pages for local keywords as well as national, it is actually hurting on national searches because it's seen as local-leaning business.

Has anyone run into this before, or have a definitive answer?

Try to isolate as many changes as possible.

Everyone wants to do a big splash relaunch, but unless you're a serious brand, you don't need to do some fancy huge explosive relaunch.

Each of these are big variables, and are best to not do all at once:

• Changing domain name
• Changing website design
• Changing website URL architecture
• Changing platform

The worst is when people try to do all of those at once! It seems that you're staying on Drupal. The above article mentioned by Dirk is very good.

A few things to always remember:

• Noindex/hide your development/staging site
• Always double check your robots.txt after launch
• Always double check your Meta Robots directive after launch
• Always 301 redirect page for page your important pages receiving links and traffic if those change
• Verify before and after everything in Analytics and Search Console
• Create a checklist of everything. Almost 100% of even the smartest people will miss at least one thing in a relaunch.

Gotcha - makes a lot more sense now. Moz's DA/PA is clearly the gold standard that most in the industry rely on, but I didn't realize the extent of the processing required to make that happen. Even more props to Moz for the BHAG of taking on such a complex task all these years.

I would say it depends on the size of the site, if it's a large site, you can be wasting Google's crawl capacity by having it spend time following 301 redirects from nonexistent pages.

Google does a pretty good job explaining the soft 404 conundrum:

Returning a code other than 404 or 410 for a non-existent page (or redirecting users to another page, such as the homepage, instead of returning a 404) can be problematic. Firstly, it tells search engines that there’s a real page at that URL. As a result, that URL may be crawled and its content indexed. Because of the time Googlebot spends on non-existent pages, your unique URLs may not be discovered as quickly or visited as frequently and your site’s crawl coverage may be impacted (also, you probably don’t want your site to rank well for the search query [File not found]).

We recommend that you always return a 404 (Not found) or a 410 (Gone) response code in response to a request for a non-existing page. You can improve the user experience by configuring your site to display a custom 404 page when returning a 404 response code. For example, you could create a page containing a list of your most popular pages, or a link to your home page, or a feedback link. But it’s important to remember that it’s not enough to just create a page that displays a 404 message. You also need to return the correct 404 or 410 HTTP response code.

Here's the thing, if you keep it as a 301 redirect from the old listing page to the property overview page, that old listing page will stay in the search index longer since you're not showing a true 404 response code. So if people are in the search results and click on that listing there's two ways of looking at it: if they click on the non-existent listing, well at least you'll still be driving a little bit of traffic to your site and hope they look at other properties. On the flip side it's a poor user experience since they were expecting to see that property page when they clicked from the search results, but instead are just being led to another page.

I think the decision lies in the size of the site. If it's a huge site, let them hard 404 and follow the best practices. If it's a small site and you're hoping people stick around serendipitously, you can probably keep doing what you're doing.