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That specific meta data tag is for Facebook. There's a good chance if that issue is showing in your audit then you may not have a meta description present.

You can always manually look at the source code for this tag: "<meta name="description".

I wouldn't stress about it too much updating meta descriptions is usually low priority item.

Best of luck!

That link you placed to your site is no follow btw.

That's a good idea - you could even display a banner ad that pops up anytime a user accesses the site "Shipping on all products delayed x weeks due to global pandemic". I think people would be pretty understanding.

I took a quick look and it appears as though your site was ranking a bit at one point. However, it looks as though your rankings took a nosedive.

You went from roughly 2k+ keywords ranking in some fashion to almost nothing. Without probing further it's hard to be certain what happened exactly but it could be a penalty.  And it might have to do with the forum links you've built or your content.

I'd review your content and make sure it's unique and that it provides value to the searcher. I'd also do some sort of link audit and consider removing any irrelevant forum links that were created.

Best of luck!

Absolutely, you're welcome. At least you know there are no major technical issues. Have you done any keyword research? Are the terms you're targeting too competitive? I noticed you don't have a ton of backlinks and you seem to be targeting the travel niche.

That could be one issue.

I would recommend running your site through a technical audit. Here's a good template for that: https://www.distilled.net/technical-seo-audit-checklist/

Hey, I took a look and it looks like your site is fairly new. It's likely Google is still crawling and slowly indexing content on your site.

I'd use a web crawler like Moz and/or Screaming Frog and make sure all the pages are easily accessible. Also, try requesting the "Live URL" in Search Console to see how Googlebot views the page. You should also double-check to make sure your XML sitemap is up to date and submitted in Search Console.

Also, it just takes time for a new site to get indexed and ranked. I know it sucks but it doesn't happen overnight and you have to be patient. Keep producing good content and try to build some initial backlinks to get started.

Best of luck!

I'd be extremely wary about buying any gigs on Fiverr, to begin with. Also, there's anecdotal evidence to suggest buying domains for link equity alone won't work.

Here's some more information on that topic from Search Engine Land.

Best of luck!

Sometimes if you have a manual penalty you will receive a message through Search Console. Other times you'll have to pay close attention to your organic traffic and rankings to see if you've been impacted by any recent algorithm updates.

I've never heard of a site being penalized from bolding too many keywords but I'd pay special attention to how you acquire backlinks and make sure you're producing unique content.

Out of curiosity have you noticed any drastic drops in rankings or organic traffic to warrant your site being penalized?

Image Format
I believe the preferred performance is WebP. But I usually try to use png over jpg.

Compressing Images
I think what might work best in your case is some sort of plugin like WP Smush. If you have a ton of images I'd invest in a tool or plugin that dynamically compresses images as they are uploaded to your site.

I like WP Smush because it also strips out the metadata associated with images along with compressing them.

If you have a ton of images it could be an attractive solution for you that you can scale.

Outside of another plugin, you could try some sort of cloud-based solution to dynamically compress images before you upload them.

I've tested an open-source image compression tool called Caesium in the past. This tool reduced some of my images by almost 40%. It performed better than the plugins I was using but I'm not so sure it would be a scaleable solution for you.

Out of curiosity, how bad are your load times? Are you currently running into site speed problems or are you trying to make incremental improvements?

The technical term is a Digital Millennium Copyright Act. There's a bit more info on this page to get you started: https://support.google.com/legal/answer/1120734. It's been a while since I've filed one of these but let me know if you run into trouble I'm happy to help.

Also, I'd only use this as a last option. I'd still reach out to the company and see if they will no index the other site.

Best of luck

Sorry to hear you have to come on board and clean up someone else's mess :/.

The first thing I would do is reach out to the development company and request they remove the extra site. It's very likely it's having an impact on your organic visibility.  If that doesn't work you could request Google remove that website from its index based on a violation of intellectual copyright laws.

The second thing I would do is a detailed audit of all your redirects. It's likely there could be a few key missing redirects in there somewhere.

Request a copy of all redirects within your Htaccess file and make sure: they are topically relevant(think 1:1 matches no blanket redirects), and no redirect chains present.

Also, go into your GA and pull the top 100 or so pages with any sort of historical organic traffic and make sure they are redirecting properly.

Another thing which I'm sure you're aware of but whenever you migrate domain names there can sometimes be an initial drop in organic rankings.

Best of luck

Depending on what CMS you're using you should be able to add a meta no-index tag sitewide fairly easily. I know with WordPress there's an option in the backend under "Setting", "Reading" Discourage search engines from indexing this site that should allow you to apply a meta no index tag site wide.

If you're not on WordPress you should be able to edit your code and apply a no index sitewide. You might need a tool like FileZilla so you can set up some sort of FTP access and edit your Header file directly.

Cheers

I would leave all the disallows out except for the /wp-admin/ section. For example, I'd rewrite the robots.txt file to read:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/

Also, you kind of want Google to index your cached content. In the event your servers go down it will still be able to make your content available.

I hope that helps. Let me know how that works out for you!

Hey there --

Blocking resources with the robots.txt file prevents search engines from crawling content the no-index tag would be better suited for preventing content from being indexed.

However, previous best practice would dictate blocking access to /wp-includes/ and /wp-content/ directories, etc but that's no longer necessary.

Today, Google will fetch all your styling and JavaScript files so they can render your pages completely. Search engines now try to understand your page's layout and presentation as a key part of how they evaluate quality.

So, yeah this might have some impact on your SEO.

Also, if you're using a plugin to cache content you should want Google to crawl your cache content. And in my experience, Googlebot does a good job of not indexing /wp-content/ sections.

So, for your example page, https://example.com/wp-content/cache/minify/df983.js it shouldn't end up in their index.

Hope this helps some.

Hey there,

Did you receive a manual penalty notice in your Google Search Console account? I took a look at your site and noticed a significant fluctuation in the total amount of keywords ranking that started around September 3rd.

I'd start by researching any algorithm updates and look at any recent development changes you may have made. According to SEO Round Table, there was a lot of fluctuation around August 29th - 30th.  So, it's possible you could of been impacted.

Best of luck!

Hey Carrie,

The first thing I would do is figure out which version is already indexed by Google or like other Mozzers have stated pick the version with the higher page authority according to Moz.

Also, in the event, your CMS doesn't handle the trailing slash issue you can update your Htaccess file to set up dynamic redirects to whichever version you prefer.

Daniel Morell has a good guide on htaccess SEO specifically there's a section on how to force trailing slash within the htaccess file.

Good luck

Hey there,

Yeah, I'd go ahead and Implement the canonical tags to the higher-performing website on category and product-level pages.

However, if you're feeling a little unsure I'd recommend testing it with a sample set of pages and just monitor the impact to your client's site and adjust accordingly.

That's a bummer they won't let you consolidate the sites though. 

The other thing I'd probably consider is investing a bit in local SEO since your client sells home good products.

Hope that helps.

According to a Google post on their webmasters blog the mobile-first indexing is more about how they gather content and not necessarily about how content is ranked.

I ran your website through Google's Mobile-Friendly Test and everything looks fine. You can check it out here for you: https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly.

However, when I ran the mobile test I noticed you are blocking a few content resources within the robots.txt file. I'd update that so Google can access the /wp-content/ folder and properly index images within that folder.

Back to the mobile issue, personally I don't believe those two issues will be too impactful unless it is impacting the overall user experience.

I hope that helps some.

I would block those directories from being crawled by Roger Bot. The thin content warning is a false positive. You can block Roger Bot from crawling those pages within your robots.txt file.

I hope that helps you out some.

I think the easiest way to figure out whether or not Page Rank is properly flowing to those deeper sub category landing pages is to crawl the site with Screaming Frog.

I don't remember if a Moz crawl pulls page rank for every page but if not crawl your client site with Screaming Frog and connect to Moz's API. This will pull in the Page Rank for every page and you can sort to find out if there are any issues.

How does the hamburger menu look like on mobile? I'd be curious to see what the engagement looks like when the entire menu opens by default.

That's great! I'm glad to hear that.

Personally, I've worked with a wide variety of content management systems and part of being an SEO consultant you have to be able to adapt to the clients specific business needs. The appeal to Wordpress is it's easier to implement SEO changes by using plugins. For example, if you have an image heavy site it's easier to set up a plugin to dynamically compress images and add another plugin to cache static resources to improve your site speed.

Whereas in a custom CMS you may need to work with a developer to implement certain changes and it can become costly on your end. But with Wordpress there comes possible performance limitations and security vulnerabilities since it is an open source platform.

Does your old site have a content management system by any chance? If not it may be easier from a content creation standpoint to stay within Wordpress. For example, if you wanted to add a new page because you identified a content gap would your developer need to code a page from scratch or do you have templates that can be easily implemented? How difficult is it to implement title tag and other metadata updates vs. using Wordpress?

I hope that helps some. It's kinda hard to give you a concrete answer without knowing what your backend system looks like and what limitations would be imposed by making the switch. In the end, it's not enough to have a sharp looking site if it's not driving leads for your business.

In regards to keyword targeting the first goal is to write in a way that is natural for the end user. You shouldn't focus too much on trying to include your core keyword a specific number of times there isn't a hard and fast rule for that.

What I would look at instead is keyword density. This will take into account your longer form articles.

But you shouldn't focus too much on hitting certain keyword targets but focus more on producing great content that solves a particular pain point.

Hope that helps some.

Personally, I include the main keyword within the Title Tag and the H1 tag. I've also noticed ranking increases or decreases whenever I remove my target keyword from the title tag too so as a rule of thumb I include my core keyword in the title and H1 tag. I also work it into the main body content of the page I'm working on. If the page is relevant and on topic then it shouldn't be difficult to work your target keyword into your body content in a natural way.

But the important thing to remember is to write in a way that is natural for the end user.

I hope that helps some!

SEO takes time to yield results and I wouldn't worry much about your domain authority being .1%. Reading your response I don't personally see anything that would signal alarm bells yet. Also regarding WordPress, I am not a fan personally but I use them for my personal websites. The issue with WordPress is everytime you add an image, plugin or whatever it will create a new page and multiple files for your CSS and Javascript files. CSS and Javascript are what add interactivity to your website. This can slow your website down over time and cause unnecessary bloat. Now that Google ranks websites based on the mobile version of their site and speed is a ranking factor I would definitely keep an eye on your site speed.

However, if you account for these issues and take the proper steps you should be fine. The main concern I'd keep an eye on is site speed. If your website is loading fast and being indexed within Google then that's a solid start. As far as the hosting provider that's not important for SEO necessarily. It comes back to having a website that loads fast and is responsive.

Also, steer clear of Fiver and anyone who offers to get you backlinks for cheap or quickly. Any backlink that will help your business will not come easy.

Moz offers a lot of good resources to get you up to speed. I'd recommend reading https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo.

Hope that helps some.

I can't see you being penalized for building backlinks through hosting events. Just make sure you arent 'paying' for links and you should be fine. Here are Google's guidelines on linkbuilding.

Hope that helps.

I believe the on page content could be causing an issue. If these 400 pages have similar content then that could be the issue.

However, in July there were some algorithm updates from Google but these appear to be mostly centered around Mobile Speed Updates. But if you have a mobile site with reasonable load times you should be fine.

But, what I'd want to know is how unique is the content on those 400 pages?

Sorry I couldn't attach the screenshot. But I wouldn't panic too much a lot of times websites tend to experience a loss in rankings after web redesigns so I'd give it some time and see if rankings improve. In the meantime, I'd look at updating the code to remove the extra title tag and fix the body tags.

The issue is that there are duplicate title tags on the site. You could have a developer remove the extra title tag that say "Your SEO optimized title". Then, you would need to work with a developer to correct the tag issue also. Currently, there isn't any content within the tag just leftover generic text "page contents". I'm not a developer but it appears as if it's an issue with the theme and these appear to be generic default settings. You can view this on any page of your site by pressing "CTRL U" on a PC and then pressing "CTR F" and search for <title>or <body> and you should be able to see the code issues.</p> <p>The Moz report could be incorrect I looked and you definitely have more than 50 words on certain pages but the majority of the pages are thin content. I wouldn't pay too much attention to that report.</p> <p>Also, just because Moz or another tool can't recognize certain content doesn't mean Google isn't actively crawling and indexing it. To double check this take a page where Moz is telling you there is 50 words or no content and do a "fetch and render" in Google Webmaster tools. This will show you how Google is viewing the page and will be a more accurate representation of what they are viewing.</p> <p>I hope that helps clear up the situation a bit more. Like I said I'm not a developer so that's my best guess as to what's going on.</p></title>

Google doesn't penalize for incorrect schema but the added attributes wont show up in search results. The issue comes in when people try to manipulate structured data to add rankings and additional info in the serps when it isn't applicable to that particular category. You will be fine but I'd look into getting it fixed.

Hope that helps some.

I crawled your site and you have roughly 30 pages with under 300 words on them and the rest of your pages are under 1000 words or so. I'd recommend building out some of the content on these thinner pages.

You also have some paginated urls with a /page/ folder attached to them that you could apply a meta no index tag to and remove from Google.

I'd also look at disabling your current SEO plugin because "Your SEO optimized title" appears on all the pages and is causing your duplicate title tag issue. And I know meta descriptions aren't a ranking factor but all yours are blank and it's a great opportunity to build these out to drive extra click throughs from Google search results.

I hope that helps a bit.

It's kinda hard to understand what's going on without looking at the source code. But my first question is did you implement 301 redirects from your Wix site to your WordPress site, I believe Moz looks at the content within the

tags on your site. Also, did you set up your WordPress site within search console and submit your XML Sitemap? That will let you see any issues with your content being indexed.

Back to the thin content issue if you do indeed have thin content on your pages it's possible you are being penalized. Google is pretty explicit about having thin content that provides little or no value. I'd do an audit of your web pages using screaming frog or Moz and review the word count for some of your key pages.

Hope that helps some.

I don't believe you will incur a penalty but you won't get the full ranking benefit if it was visible. Google does discourage showing search engines one version of your site and searchers a different version. But I don't believe you will incur a penalty from hiding an H1 tag.

As a general rule of thumb anytime you are hiding content/text it will hurt your SEO efforts. Anytime you hide content it will have less ranking influence. Both Moz and Search Engine Journal touch on this particular issue. Personally, I see no issue hiding content behind "Read More" accordions and I haven't ran any personal test to see how that content is handled by Google. However, I wouldn't be too keen on hiding H1 tags since they are weighted heavier than content within

tags.

Hope that helps a bit.

First I think it will take time for Google to completely disassociate the old domain from the new domain. With that being said have you tried to disavow all the spammy backlinks on the old domain? You could also meta no index the entire site and get it

You could also either meta no index the entire site and get it de index from Google or block it from being crawled within its robots.txt file. That is probably the closest you could come to deleting the domain.

I hope that helps some.

What I would do first is look in Google Analytics and see which Organic landing pages are referring traffic. If those pages are showing a 404 error then I would redirect those pages. I think at this point you will need to prioritize your redirects and investigate ways to improve your site speed.

Use Google's page speed tool see where you are having issues and compress images, cache static resources, and minify HTML, CSS and javascript where you can.

I hope that helps some.

A rel canonical tag is more of a "hint" or "suggestion". It is entirely possible Google believes the urls are not equivalent and has decided to ignore the canonical.

I hope that helps some.

I think the mentality behind that is it would be too easy to manipulate. People could just buy expired domains and redirect them to their website. I am going through a similar issue with a website.

I would put your old website through Moz's opensite explorer and identify the backlinks. Then I would reach out to all the domains that linked to your old website and ask them to update the link.

Also, did you do a domain level redirect or redirect each individual page?

That should help you out some.

I think the low domain authority may have something to do with no backlinks to the new domain. From what I have read and experienced domain authority is not transferable. Even though the redirect is in place your new domain does not benefit from the backlinks/authority of the old domain.

What you could do is reach out to websites linking to the old domain and ask them to consider updating their backlinks.

I hope that helps some.

Your welcome I hope that helps you some.

Why yes they can. You can actually leave off the Index/Follow tags. By default Google along with other major search engines index and follow links, pages etc.

You may have already done this but have you implemented noydir and noodp meta tags?

Have you created segments within Google Analytics for organic traffic being referred by Google that is specific to Canada?

Did you submit a nested xml sitemap? What you could do is segment your sitemaps based on categories then you could see if there are: no index tags, robots.txt blocking a section or maybe those pages are too deep.

For now I would check to see if anything has a no index tag and review your robots.txt file.

Hope that helps some.

Is it possible to beef up those lower quality pages with better content? If they are important main content pages I would imagine you would want to improve those pages.

However, if you were going to block them I would recommend a  tag within the header of those pages.

Hope that helps some.

According to a test done in Search Engine Land, Google bot can crawl and index those links in Javascript. So you should be fine.

You could see a drop in ranking. It is difficult for a single web page to be relevant for a large set of keywords for searchers.