Hi Karl,

That's tough! Unfortunately, I've heard of a lot of weird stories like that, where Bing gets confused. Have you shared a sitemap with Bing, which only includes non "www" URLs?

Best,

Kristina

Yeah, I'm not sure. One idea would be an algorithmic penalty that is rechecked every few days (although most articles I've read say that algorithmic penalties are applied and then stay applied long after the problem has been fixed). Another is that someone at Google applied a penalty manually, then someone else removed it, then someone else put it back on again.

But neither of those seem likely.

At this point, all I can think of is looking into the keywords themselves. I haven't done that so far, though, because I don't know Italian. Can you share them anyway, though, so someone else in the community can help?

Weird. So, that means that this isn't because of problems with Google's crawler not finding your content, and it's not that you are ranking for keywords that just fluctuate all the time anyway. My next guess would be that this is a poorly applied penalty of some sort. A couple of questions to see if it is:

• During the times where you're not ranking for most keywords, does your homepage rank for your brand name?
• Have you gotten any other messages in Google Webmaster Tools / Search Console since the original "Improved search visibility" that you mentioned in your original question?

Best,

Kristina

Hi Emanuele,

To clarify:

• When you say you've verified it with a site: search, do you mean that you verified that the pages that were no longer ranking were still indexed? Or, do you mean that you verified that the site itself was still indexed? I'm wondering if you're only losing certain pages.
• I'm not sure what you meant by your response about your competition. Are you saying that the competition doesn't fluctuate for the keywords that your site is fluctuating for?

Thanks,

Kristina

Hi Emanuele,

Wow, that's really weird! A few questions:

• On the days where your site stops ranking for keywords, have you done a site: search on those pages to see if Google has them in its index?
• What is your competition for these keywords? Have they been changing around a lot too, or is everything else staying about the same rank, with your site just jumping in and out of the list?
• Have you been making any changes to the site during this time? Even if you didn't change the specific page in question, it's possible that changing the link structure of the site is drastically changing their ability to rank.

Best,

Kristina

Hello Edward!

I work for a site that has a lot of physical locations, so Moz asked me to step in.

Let me start with this: you don't have to call out locations if Google can establish you as an online service. When I was working for Distilled I had multiple clients with online ecommerce sites, and they ranked well in most locations in the US without specifically calling out any city or state. The key, I think, was that Google saw the "buy now" and "shipping" buttons and understood that this was accessible to anyone in America.

Your site is similar. You have "get started" or "call now" buttons that show that the whole of the transaction can be done wherever you are in the US, Australia, or NZ. You have different CCTLDs, so Google knows which countries you're relevant in.

My question for you is - why do you want to optimize for local? Do you have clients who can't find you because they're searching for local terms? Did you find a lot of local keyword volume? Because my gut response is, you probably don't need to worry about this.

Best,

Kristina

That's a bummer, that Google didn't give more feedback.

My question about meta keywords is related to this: https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/68297?hl=en

Other than that and what I've listed, I can't think of anything else that you'd need to keep an eye on. Let us know how things go when Google reevaluates!

Best,

Kristina

Hi Christy,

I think my biggest piece of advice other than "hang tight" is, what did they change other than the domain name?

• Did they change the look and feel of the site?
• Did they change the URL structure (this is especially important, since Google looks at the URL for dates)?
• Did they update their Google News sitemap?
• Are they still properly using Google News meta tags, specifically news_keywords?
• Did they remove Authorship? (I have no proof of this, but I've heard rumors that people think Google still uses Authorship, even though they've removed it. It's possible that's just a mean rumor from bitter SEOs after their rich snippet loss, though.)

Also, did Google give any feedback when they rejected their first application?

Best,

Kristina

If this is all going to the blog, which is new, this sounds like good news! Chances are, you've written a post that targets a common search term with relatively little competition out there writing about it. You can probably figure out what this topic is by looking at landing pages, or by using Google Webmaster Tools to see the keywords people are using to find your site.

Google Webmaster Tools is a great tool to double check that your traffic fluctuation is real and not a fluke, too, if you're seeing most traffic come from organic. GWT should show the same increase and, like I said, provide keyword data as well.

Let us know how your investigation goes!

Kristina

Hi Rose,

Hopefully Donna answered your question already, but I want to jump in with some SEO prioritization advice.

Alt text like this can add to the relevance of the page, but minimally. It can also help your image rank correctly in image search, but that doesn't bring much traffic now that Google pulls images into its results page.

I had similar conversations with our compliance team when I worked for a university, and they had a similar perspective, that alt text should be determined by the flow of the reader rather than for small SEO boosts. The nice thing is, though, when images are important to the flow of the page, and are more likely for the alt text to support the keywords you're trying to target on a page.

In short: if I were you, I'd let this argument go, and just push for alt text on images that tell a story. There's no SEO penalty for not using alt text, and I doubt you're worried about ranking for "father and young son."

Best,

Kristina

Hi there,

Unfortunately, this isn't something that anyone can tell you without at least a few hours of research - Google has a pretty complicated algorithm!

I can tell you some more things to take into account, in addition to Bob's list:

• **Keyword relevance: **For the search queries that you want to rank for, does Sea Dwellers look the most relevant? Do you use the phrase that you want to rank for in your page title, the h1 of the page, and on the page itself? Be careful not to sound like you're writing for robots rather than humans, but using the exact same phrase as you want to rank for definitely helps with rankings.
• **Inbound link relevance: **Where did you get the links to your site? More links from relevant sites (for example, unsponsored posts about the best company to dive with) are going to help with local queries like "dive Key Largo."
• **Potential spam / paid links: **If you've paid for links or have spammy links coming to your site, Moz may have an inflated version of your PA or DA metrics, since it isn't as good at recognizing that as Google is (though they're working on it with their spam score).

Good luck! If you're feeling especially frustrated about this, I'd recommend hiring an SEO to give you some definite answers.

Best,

Kristina

Hi Ashley,

To clarify, this is just a section of the page, right? The page will still have essentially the same information for both mobile and desktop users, but tailored to their devices? It's fine to remove or change up inconsequential elements of the page. Webmasters have had to do this from the start, for ads, complicated navigation, and other page elements that are helpful on a desktop page but cluttered on a phone screen.

If this content is the majority of the page, though, and sends a different message, you should probably create a separate page for mobile visitors. If this is the case, let me know and I can follow up with more specific recommendations.

Good luck!

Kristina

As most people here have said, the best way is to just do this work outside of GA. Custom variables have to track current site performance, so I don't believe there's a way to build a custom variable that looks at data as it's been recorded in GA in the past.

There are a lot of ways you can put the data together, but when I usually do is use Google's Compare option as you select the time period you're looking at. When you export the data to Excel, Google will create a separate row for every time period, like this:

Source / Medium   |     Date Range                              |     Sessions     .....

google / organic      |     Jan 13, 2015 - Feb 22, 2015     |     278,834   ...

google / organic      |     Jan 13, 2014 - Feb 22, 2014     |     247,424   ...

You can combine those into one row fairly easily with VLookup, as Ray suggested, or by creating a Pivot Table, where Source / Medium is the Row Label, Date Range is the Column Label, and Sessions (or whatever metric(s) you're interested in) is the Values.

If you've created a Pivot Table, copy those values over to a new sheet, and calculate the percent change in each row, just like Ray said.

Hope this helps!

Kristina