Hi Pat:

Thanks for your answer/response! Our URL is www.metro-manhattan.com

To answer your questions:

1. When we moved the site to a new theme/database the URL structure did not change. However, about a year before we migrated to a new domain and and went HTTP to HTTPS (secure) so there are redirects. 301 redirects were used.

2. All the on page optimization moved when we changed themes.

3. Yes, there are some unnecessary URLs, but they are managed by robot.txt.

4.  Gzip compression/caching/cdn has been implemented to speed up site. My SEO provider is constantly adjusting but the site is not particularly fast.

If we were to custom develop the same functionality without purchasing a theme, would the performance (Google Page Speed, GT Metrix) be much better?

If we are satisfied with the structure, design and functionality of our site, is custom coding a costly venture?

Thanks, 
Alan

Last year we purchased a $79 them and coded a new designer our real estate website. The  database of listings was transferred to the new theme.

A year later we realize the new theme is not that fast; does not perform great, so despite optimizing our server we are not getting very fast performance.

So, my question is, can we take the design, the CSS of our current theme (and database) and transfer it to a better performing theme?  We are in a very competitive niche and our website must perform quickly both desktop and mobile.

If this is feasible is this a major production? Note we are very happy with the design and this would solely be to improve download speeds to improve the user experience and get better ranking.

Thanks,

Alan

Hi Joe:

About 35% of our traffic is derived from mobile so maximize mobile conversion probably worth the effort.

Do you think it would be most effective to display the phone number as an actual button with a similar design as the other 2?  Is there any form of protocol for displaying phone numbers on mobile devices?

Thanks, 
Alan

We are attempting to keep the number of CTAs (Calls to Action) on our commercial real estate website to a minimum. Our adjusted design (see attached) has 2 CTAs. One is "Contact Agent" the other is "Schedule a Tour". We are focusing on the listing page, which is the primary product page and critical in terms of CTA.

Our mobile version does not show a phone number while the desktop version (also attached) displays a phone number.

Should the mobile version also display a button a phone number? Some members of our target audiences, business owners and executives who are often in their 40s and 50s may prefer to call us up rather than communicate by written message. Any suggestions for elegantly displaying the phone number without causing confusion? I have read that the number of CTAs should be limited so I am on the fence as to whether or not to include a phone number

Thanks, 
Alan

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Hi Lauren:

Do on page factors influence Domain Authority as much as building back links? This is a really key question!

I need to decide whether to invest resources in building back links or improving on site SEO. How about internal links? How much do they contribute to domain authority? At the moment my site lacks internal links, would adding them in a relevant manner improve domain authority?

While I greatly appreciate your last response it is somewhat ambiguous.

Thanks, Alan

Hi Again Lauren:

According to Rand Fishkin's post:
https://moz.com/community/q/da-pa-fluctuations-how-to-interpret-apply-understand-these-ml-based-scores

Domain Authority is predominantly determined by backlinks  from other websites rather than on site SEO factors (content quality, internal linking). This contradicts your response somewhat which make things really confusing. Now I don't know whether to allocate resources towards building backlinks from other domains or whether to work on improving internal links and contents.

If you could please clear this up it would be much appreciated.

Thanks,

Alan

Hi Lauren:

Thanks for your response. I was under the impression that domain authority was solely determined by external backlinks. So, are you saying that domain authority can be increased by improving the internal linking structure between pages and improving the quality of pages?

Our site has many, many "orphan" pages. From what you are saying, improving the internal linking structure would improve our Domain Authority, is that correct?

Also MOZ shows certain title tags, URLs and descriptions as too long, some are duplicate and some missing. Would correcting these help improve domain authority?

Is it safe to say that improved Domain Authority would increase the likely hood of improved ranking?

Thanks, 
Alan

There are 2 or 3 URLs and one image file that dozens of toxic domains are linking to on our website. Some of these pages have hundreds of links from 4-5 domains. Rather than disavowing these links, would it make sense to simply break these links, change the URL that the link to and not create a redirect? It seems like this would be a sure fire way to get rid of these links. Any downside to this approach?

Thanks, 
Alan

The vast majority of the 140 domains that link to our website are very low quality directories or and other toxic links. Only about 20-30 domains are not toxic (according to Link Research Tools confirmed by out manual inspection of these links).

Would removing some of these links improve of MOZ Domain Rank? What if we cannot remove them, can NOZ detect a disavow file?

In general would improving the ratio between good quality and poor quality links improve domain authority?

Thanks,
Alan

Hi Mick, thanks so much for your detailed response.

We took a terrible hit, losing 85% of traffic (65/day) a year ago. In April, we migrated our domain, got an SSL certificate and filed a disavow simultaneously. Everything was done by the book. The redirects implemented perfectly. The design, content of the site remained the same when we implemented this.

In December we launched the first upgraded version of the site since 2013. Within 2 weeks much of the traffic recovered. Bounce rate is way down, visitors click on more pages and spend more time on the site. We are now back up to 50 organic visitors per day.

Now I don't want to do something that will mess things up again. But I see the link profile is so awful that perhaps cleaning it up could b beneficial. No guaranties of course.

I wonder how long Google would take to index links, 3-4 months?

Regarding requesting link removal, I understand and agree, probably total waste of time.

Thanks, 
Alan

Hi Michael:

Thanks for your feedback.

Most  503 error links are from low quality directories, so I would disavow anyway.

We would disavow the majority of our links in one shot. Any risk of doing this?

Is there a reasonable chance that our ranking would improve significantly by disavowing these links? How long does it take Google to process the disavow? Is there a way of checking if Google has actually processed the disavow?

Also, do you think we should reach out to these webmasters and make a written request to remove the bad links? We tried this 3 years ago and it was a total waste of time.

Thanks,
Alan

We are using link detox (Link Research Tools) to evaluate our domain for bad links.

We ran a Domain-wide Link Detox Risk report. The reports showed a "High Domain DETOX RISK" with the following results:

-42% (292) of backlinks with a high or above average detox risk
-8% (52) of backlinks with an average of below above average detox risk
-12% (81) of backlinks with a low or very low detox risk
-38% (264) of backlinks were reported as disavowed.

This look like a pretty bad link profile. Additionally, more than 500 of the 689 backlinks are "404 Not Found", "403 Forbidden", "410 Gone", "503 Service Unavailable". Is it safe to disavow these? Could Google be penalizing us for them>

I would like to disavow the bad links, however my concern is that there are so few good links that removing bad links will kill link juice and really damage our ranking and traffic. The site still  ranks for terms that are not very competitive. We receive about 230 organic visits a week. Assuming we need to disavow about 292 links, would it be safer to disavow 25 per month while we are building new links so we do not radically shift the link profile all at once?

Also, many of the bad links are 404 errors or page not found errors. Would it be OK to run a disavow of these all at once? Any risk to that?

Would we be better just to build links and leave the bad links ups?

Alternatively, would disavowing the bad links potentially help our traffic? It just seems risky because the overwhelming majority of links are bad.

Hi Jeff:

Happy to report that improved metrics are not caused by bots or any unusual spikes in traffic. So I think we are seeing a legitimate improvement. Last year we focused on UX improvements. Will focus on content and links this year in order to solidify our gains.

Thanks for your input!!

Alan

Hi EGOL;

Thanks for your input. I am receiving a dramatically increased number  customers inquiries from the redesigned site. Hopefully there is a reasonable chance that Google will reward us with improved rankings. But I guess time will tell. 
THANKS, 
Alan

Our relaunched website has a much lower bounce rate (66% before, now 58%) increased pages per session (1.89 before, now 3.47) and increased session duration (1:33 before, now 3:47). The relaunch was December 20th.

Should these improvements result in an improvement in Google rank? How about in MOZ authority?

We have not significantly changed the content of the site but the UX has been greatly improved.

Thanks,

Alan