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Hi, would you guys recommend using a backlink service like this?

https://www.peopleperhour.com/hourlie/gain-30-links-from-30-top-newspaper-sites-in-the-uk/396519Or is this the kind of thing that leads to being penalised?Over the years, I've always been told this is black hat and dodgy. Is that always the case?

Hi Martijn,

Thanks for the reply. Am I going about this completely the wrong way? Would you recommend using local storage instead?

All the best,

Michael

Thanks!

I've defined it in Google Search Console and asked it to not be crawled.

It isn't actually for tracking, simply to auto-fill a form for the customer, hopefully to enhance conversions (we sell quite wordy and complex products, some people visit the form, get in a muddle and prefer to ring us than complete the form).

If I was to 301 it back to the original URL, wouldn't that immediately move the user to a URL without the query string?

I've recently put some query string parameters into links leading to a 'request a quote' form which auto-fill the 'product' field with the name of the product that is on the referring product page.

E.g.

Red Bicycle product page >>> Link to RFQ form contains '?productname=Red-Bicycle' >>>> form's product field's default value becomes 'Red-Bicycle'

I know url parameters can lead to keyword cannibalisation and duplicate content, we use sub-domains for our language changer. BUT for something like this, am I potentially damaging our SEO?

Appreciate I've not explained this very well. We're using Kentico by the way, so K# macros are a possibility (I use a simple one to fill the form's Default Field).

Hi Cristian

1. I really don't. I've tried to narrow down which pages are losing traffic from search but it seems fairly even. If anything, the pages which have lost the most traffic have been receiving lots of on-page optimisation since the launch.

2. We had a lot of meta-descriptions that were too long, a lot of duplicate titles, a lot of irrelevant information and also had a need to change a lot of meta-data (and other data, e.g. document text) – this is because I found keywords relevant to our products which had the most monthly searches (via Moz Keyword Exporer) and then used the On-Page Grader to optimise for these keywords. To that end, I haven't an exact figure of visits I'd like to see per keyword, but I have distinguished between good and bad keywords.

3. I used Search Console to crawl for 404s and went through the list one by one.

4. We have improved this a lot but are still working on things. This is the most obvious issue I can see which may cause issues. But could this really reduce sessions dramatically? I didn't think load speed affected search engine ranking? I didn't think it'd affect sessions as visitors would have to access the website to realise it's too slow and leave?

Thanks for your questions,

Michael

Why don't you try and do some kind of work with universities? This might be out of date now, please correct me if it is, but I think .edu and .ac.uk links tend to have a nice domain authority. Links from these sites could help your site's trust ranking increase.

Maybe donate blog posts about how to build a career in fashion to universities/colleges providing fashion courses. If they publish it online you get link juice. Where I work, we recently ran a workshop with some college students (in a lab, we're a scientific manufacturer) and they wrote a blog post about it. Good PR and we now have a link leading to our website from a .ac.uk domain – I actually saw our domain authority rise by 1 point after that link went live.

Anything you can do with education will always help. So internship competitions (have lots of different uni's/colleges publish a post advertising work experience with you) or any other collaboration.

Cheers

Mike

Hi all,

We launched an updated website around mid-April and have seen a long-term drop in unique page views and sessions since then. Between 25-35%. Page views returned to normal within a month, however. In terms of acquisition, we've not lost referrals or direct traffic, just organic sessions. I haven't seen any significant Google updates except for 'Fred' but that was in March (pre-website update).

We did have to do some 301s and fix up an HTML and XML sitemap, etc, post launch – but that's been in place for a while now so shouldn't still have such an effect? We are also struggling with load speed at the moment, working on this at the moment. Didn't think this had a such a significant impact on ranking however. We've lost mostly non-UK traffic, especially USA.

We're actually climbing rankings for a lot of new keywords I'm targeting, so I can't see how our SEO has been hampered. Frustratingly, I wasn't using Search Console or Moz Pro before this update, so can't compare much in the way of keyword traffic (I know I feel very silly now).

I don't know if it's a reporting issue (I wish it was). I mean we had both GTM and GA tags on the website (I didn't know this until I looked into it) but these were present post website-launch. And I haven't found enough double firing sessions or page views to suggest we used to be getting double figures anyway.

Before this, we were ranking brilliantly and getting more organic traffic than ever.

All the best,

Why don't you try and do some kind of work with universities? This might be out of date now, please correct me if it is, but I think .edu and .ac.uk links tend to have a nice domain authority. Links from these sites could help your site's trust ranking increase.

Maybe donate blog posts about how to build a career in fashion to universities/colleges providing fashion courses. If they publish it online you get link juice. Where I work, we recently ran a workshop with some college students (in a lab, we're a scientific manufacturer) and they wrote a blog post about it. Good PR and we now have a link leading to our website from a .ac.uk domain – I actually saw our domain authority rise by 1 point after that link went live.

Anything you can do with education will always help. So internship competitions (have lots of different uni's/colleges publish a post advertising work experience with you) or any other collaboration.

Cheers

Mike