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The Panda filter is just that, a filter. It doesn't remove pages from the index, and you won't get a manual penalty because of it.

In the case of duplicate content, Google chooses the most relevant or original content and filters out the duplicates. On the other hand, when a website has multiple pages with the same content, that can affect the overall quality of the entire website. This can affect search performance as well.

Then there's the issue of doorway pages, which are duplicate pages created for the purpose of funneling visitors to the same destination. This goes against Google's guidelines, and they confirmed  a December 2017 algorithm update that affects sites using doorway pages.

Oops, I missed that part. Have you checked Google Search Console to see if someone set any URL parameters?

The first thing I would do is determine how many pages actually should be indexed to see if there's a large discrepancy between that and the number Google shows. A crawler like Screaming Frog can help with this. If you export the crawl to Excel, you can easily remove duplicates in the canonical URL column and filter out the noindexed pages.

If you find there's no real discrepancy, Google may have simply been cleaning house of some really old links in the index that hadn't been crawled in a while.

Beyond that, if you can pinpoint any specific URLs that have been deindexed, use the "Fetch as Google" tool to help diagnose or post it here so the community can take a look.

I suspect the canonical tag implementation is the culprit for the loss in indexed pages, but that's just a strong suspicion. When you implement a canonical tag, Google will fold together all of the pages pointing to the same canonical URL so that they are treated as one URL for the purposes of indexation. This will naturally cause a reduction in the overall number of pages indexed. You won't see 404 errors as a result of this either.

One important point to remember is that a decrease in indexed pages is not necessarily a bad thing that needs to be fixed. In fact, if you were having problems with duplicate content or crawl issues, canonicalizing those URLs should be beneficial if properly implemented.

As for the loss in traffic, it could be related or not. It may just be an adjustment period from the canonicalization, or it could a separate issue. Have you seen a corresponding loss in conversions?

You probably have quite a few issues going on that would account for the drop in rankings. One that jumps out at me is that the site does not appear to be optimized for international SEO.  For example, you have a subdirectory for Denmark with pages in Danish, but there's no hreflang tag to let Google know which country or language you are targeting. In fact, the tag for those pages includes lang="en-GB", indicating that the site is in English targeting the UK.

Here are some resources for International SEO that might help.

• https://moz.com/blog/the-international-seo-checklist
• https://moz.com/learn/seo/international-seo
• https://moz.com/blog/guide-to-international-seo
• https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

Do you want users to be able to access the blog category URLs that were inadvertently created?

If so, use canonical tags. Users will be able to access both URLs, but Google will fold them together in the search index.

If not, use 301-redirects. Users will be redirected to the custom archives.

Either way, Google will eventually remove the blog category URL from the index and any link equity from backlinks will flow to the correct URL.

I would be interested in seeing examples of where this has happened. Were the canonical tags added after the URLs were already indexed or were the canonicals in place when the site launched?

If I understand you correctly, you are referring to the following two URLs:

https://www.symectech.com/epos-systems/customer-displays/pole-mounting-kit-94591.html

https://www.symectech.com/pole-mounting-kit-94614.html

Both of these have the same canonical referenced, which is https://www.symectech.com/pole-mounting-kit-94614.html.

It doesn't matter what actually shows in the address box. For the purposes of indexation, what matters is what is referenced in the canonical tag.

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A reduction in the number of pages indexed does not necessarily mean something is wrong. In fact, it could mean that something is right, especially if your rankings are improving.

How are you determining that only 80% of pages are indexed? Can you provide a specific URL that is not being indexed?

If you made changes to your canonical tag, robots.txt , or meta robots tag, these could all cause a reduction in the number of pages being indexed.

The canonicals appear to be set up correctly, and I would not advise listing the product URLs as their canonicals in the category as suggested above. That will create duplicate URLs with the same content, which is exactly what canonical tags are designed to avoid.

Any chance you can share the URL? That would make it much easier for someone to help in this forum. Without the URL, I can offer a few diagnostic questions.

• Have the number of pages on the site remained the same and pages are being removed from the index? Or have you added more content, but the percentage in the index has decreased?
• Have you checked your robots.txt file or page-level meta robots tag to see if you are blocking or noindexing anything?
• Have you submitted an XML sitemap?  If so, check the XML sitemap to make sure what's being submitted should be indexed. It's possible to submit a sitemap that includes noindexed pages, especially with some automated tools.
• Is it a large site? If so, check for issues that may affect crawl budget.
• Have you changed any canonical tags?
• Have you used the Fetch as Google tool to diagnose a specific URL?

As with many SEO questions, the answer here is "It depends." What type of content is duplicated on the city pages? How much unique content is there in addition to the duplicated content?

Having the same content on unique city pages is not necessarily a problem. Google will serve up the page that is most relevant to the search query and will filter out the rest. However, if all of the content is the same across all of these pages, the overall site would be considered lower quality.  The key is to balance any duplicated content with additional unique content that provides value for the site visitor.

Are you filtering spam referrals in your Analytics data? A lot of SEOs noticed that spammy Analytics data declined significantly in the first quarter of 2016. (Unfortunately, the spam data has definitely come back over the last 2-3 months.) If you aren't filtering out spam and the site had a lot it in 2015, that might account for a 15% drop in overall traffic reported.

Your points are valid, but cover your bases to ensure there are no hidden issues. You should perform a technical audit and risk assessment of the site if you haven't done so already.  Check for crawl issues, page speed, content duplication, and risky backlinks (to name a few).

Ideally, you'll migrate the entire site to https, and Cyrus' guide is a good one. Google has some helpful info for an http to https migration at https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6073543?hl=en.

The canonical tag solution is for the situation where you can't or don't want to go ahead and switch the whole site over to https right away.  Either way, make sure Google knows, either through 301-redirects or canonical tags, that the http and https versions are the same page.

When you say you currently have self referencing canonicals, is the following happening?

The page http://example.com is canonicalized to http://example.com.

The page https://example.com is canonicalized to https://example.com.

If so, this is the bigger problem because Google sees these as 2 different URLs and may index both of them. Furthermore, you could be splitting backlinks between 2 URLs unnecessarily. This duplicate issue may be part of the reason you saw organic traffic drop when you launched your new site.

If the HTTPS URLs are already being indexed by Google, go ahead and canonicalize the http URLs to the https URLs. In other words, http://example.com will canonicalize to https://example.com.

By setting up the canonical this way, Google will fold the two URLs together and correctly treat them as the same page.

In your case, the best thing to do is set up canonical tags to let Google know which version of the URL should be indexed. That way, it doesn't matter if Google can access the https page, and you won't have the duplicate content problem that you have now.

I can't advise you on the best way to set this up with Drupal, but you'll need to be wary of any type of automatic canonical tags. You may end up with an "http" canonical link on the http page and an "https" canonical link on the https page. That doesn't solve the problem at all.

If you are not already familiar with canonical tags, you can learn more at the links below.

• https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en
• https://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization
• https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html

By the way, I would set it up so that Google indexes the https version of your pages rather than the http version.

By default, I think Yoast uses the post title as the Page Title with the sitename appended to the end. If you just want it to be the page title, you'll need to update the Yoast settings.

In the WP dashboard, go to SEO (Yoast settings) > Titles & Metas > Post Types tab.  Add %%title%% next to the Title template. Your page level settings will override these on any pages where you have added a custom page title.

Just because Google shows the sub URL in a "site:sub.example.com'" search does not necessarily mean it shows the sub URL for natural searches. Do you have evidence that Google shows the sub page for normal searches? You may be making an issue out of something that isn't much of an issue.

I suspect you had it right the first time with the 301-redirects from main to satellite pages.

There is no limit to the number of redirects that Google is willing to crawl within a site. However, there's a limit to the number of redirect chains that they'll crawl. A redirect chain is when one page redirects to a page that redirects to a page that redirects ... and so on.

There is no one specific radius for local results. It depends on the type of business and the query itself. For example, someone searching for a gas station probably needs the nearest one, but that's not necessarily true for someone searching for an attorney.  The result radius can also be affected by modifiers like "near me" or "in my area." The intent is slightly different than if you search for a query + city, state or even if you search for the query without a geo-modifier.  The device makes a difference as well. If you are on the go using your mobile phone, Google may assume you want the nearest location that's open now.

The best thing to do is search the specific queries in question with different modifiers and devices and see what kind of results you get.

Yes, this is a duplicate problem when it comes to SEO. This is an issue for two reasons:

1. Search engines see these as two different URLs even though they point to the same page. They probably understand that it's the same page but not necessarily. The correct way to handle this would be to 301-redirect http://www.wilkersoninsuranceagency.com/index.php to http://www.wilkersoninsuranceagency.com/. (If your designer doesn't know how to do this, you need a new web designer.)

2. This is also a problem because any backlinks may be split between the two URLs even though they are the same page. This will be fixed by the 301-redirect as well.

Have you reported the change using Google's change of address tool? Here's the intro from Google:

If you've moved your site to a new domain or subdomain, use the Change of address tool in Search Console. A change of address notification helps you manage the transition needed by Google to index your new URLs at the new address, while minimizing impact to your current ranking in Google Search results.

A change of address notifies Google about the new URLs for your existing content, so that we can update our index to reflect the new domain for your pages. This updated index status remains in effect for 180 days, by which time Googlebot will have crawled and indexed the pages at the new address.

The backlinks shouldn't hurt you as long as you aren't doing anything spammy. This can happen quite naturally with a lot of websites.

The important thing to know is that 1,000 links from a single domain won't help as much as 1,000 backlinks from 1,000 different domains.  Try to balance it out with backlinks from a variety of different websites. That way you'll have a more natural backlink profile.

Take heart. There are a lot of great SEO companies out there who will strive to work within your budget.  We try to offer options so that clients with smaller budgets can afford our services, but that usually means our work is stretched over a longer period of time. In such cases, it's important to understand that it will probably take longer to see results.  This can be a good option for business owners who understand the need to invest in SEO but can't afford a large retainer.

That's going to be tricky if these are service area businesses operating out of the same address. There was a recent discussion in the G+ Local Search Pros community about a similar issue. You run the risk of getting all of the listings suspended. If you have a brick and mortar location,  you could set them up as different departments, but triple check the GMB guidelines before going that route.

I'm chiming in to add a vote for Mike's strategy. I've used the same strategy with great success when rebranding a business and moving it from one site to another.

There are so many factors that could be causing one site to outrank another for a particular query. Without the URL in question, any advice from the this forum will be purely theoretical. Any chance you can provide that?

Ugh. I can't really speak to your precise issue without the URL, but it's possible they are sacrificing increased sales and UX to aesthetics.  If they won't budge, you'll have to work harder to improve local search performance in other areas like off-site business citations and reviews.

If you are targeting local customers, you probably want to put the contact information on every page for the sake of users regardless of whether or not you need it for the search engines. Why does your client not want to put it on every page, even if it's just in the footer?

Aside from usability concerns, having the address on the page is a strong signal to search engines that you are a "local" business, meaning that you serve local customers.

That's certainly debatable, and I'm interested to see what others say as well. For a long time, the best practice has been to put the most important keywords toward the beginning of the title tag. However, in a recent Google Webmaster Tools hangout (17:38), John Mueller said just shuffling keywords around probably doesn't affect rankings. He says that it should essentially be the same if it's still the same keywords.

Now, you have to take what John Mueller says with a grain of salt, and he certainly wasn't definitive in his answer. My understanding of his answer is that the order of keywords in the title tag only makes a difference if all other factors are equal, but I'd like to see someone test that theory.

The fact that Google frequently changes the title tag based on the query suggests that the order of keywords is less important than it once was.

Is this a brand new website? If so, you should continue to see rankings improve over the next 2-3 months as long as you don't have any serious issues. Work to earn good backlinks, which is a critical factor in search performance.

Your non-www URL is not redirecting to your www URL, but your canonical tags are set up correctly to tell search engines which URL should be indexed. On the other hand, if you redirect the non-www URL to the www URL, you'll improve crawl efficiency. Make sure your internal links are pointing to the www version as well if the links are absolute.

Double check that your XML sitemap has the right URLs. I noticed that your pages sitemap has the search results URL (https://www.newageawakeninggifts.com/pages/search-results-page), which shouldn't be there. It should really be set to noindex since there's no default content of value for search engines to crawl. See the pages sitemap at https://www.newageawakeninggifts.com/sitemap_pages_1.xml.

Personally, I would get rid of the ad at the top of the page. You'll make more money if someone stays on your site and buys your products than if someone clicks the ad and goes to another website.

You'll improve your chances of competing in search by adding more content to your product pages. It takes time, but it can make a big difference.

There are probably a dozen more ways to improve your site for SEO, so you may want to have someone do an SEO audit of your site.

All of the SEO tools out there are wonderful, including Moz Analytics, but no tool can take the place of a solid understanding of SEO concepts and best practices.  Furthermore, if you use tools, you need to understand their limitations.

Regarding backlinks, I don't think there is a tool out there that can tell you 100% of the backlinks to your site. Even Google Search Console won't tell you all of them. If the tool doesn't show the backlinks, that doesn't necessarily mean they aren't there.

As awesome as many SEO tools are, they can't tell you exactly what to do to improve your site's performance in organic search. For that, you have to put in the work and educate yourself about the underlying concepts that each tool is designed around. Or you need to hire someone with that expertise.

If you post your URL in the Moz Q & A with specific questions, you're likely to get some practical help.

I don't see a specific reason why this page should not rank, but I did notice that the sitemap referenced in your robots.txt file goes to a 404 page.  You should also look at crawl efficiency and see if that can be improved.  If you haven't done so already, you can use the "URL Parameters" tool to tell Google not to crawl all of the parameters associated with the filtering. Those URLs are canonicalized to the main category page, so there's no reason Google needs to crawl them.

Another issue I notice is that most of the unique content on the page is hidden to the user unless they click "read more." This is not necessarily a problem, but Google probably won't give the hidden content as much weight as the content visible when the page loads.

No, it isn't necessary to noindex the pages if you add canonical tags or when you redirect them. Once you point the old domain to the main domain and set up any manual redirects, the old pages are irrelevant. You can go ahead and remove the website files from the server and close the hosting account (if applicable). Just make sure you keep the domain renewed and pointed to the new site.

Eventually, Google will update their index based on your 301-redirects.

If you haven't done so already, perform an audit of the old site's backlink profile. You don't want to inherit any risky backlinks when you create the redirects. A backlink audit will also help you find any old URLs on the site that also need to be redirected to pass on the link equity to your site.

If you aren't ready to redirect the pages yet because you don't want customers to be blindsided by the switch, you can use canonical tags to canonicalize each page to the counterpart on the main website. That way, users will see the old page, but Google will begin to associate the old site with the new (and the old brand with the new brand). I've done this before when rebranding a business and moving it from one website to another, and it worked beautifully.

Once you are ready to redirect all the pages to their counterparts on the main website, you can point the old domain to the main domain so any URLs automatically redirect to your domain. Set up a custom 404 page with useful navigation and maybe a search feature to help visitors find what they need.  Keep an eye on your server logs and Google Search Console for any 404s so that you can redirect any pages that haven't already been redirected to the appropriate pages.

First of all, we are all rather impatiently awaiting the next Penguin update, which is long overdue and expected any day now (for the last few months). It's been a while since the last one.  If your website traffic did tank as a result of Penguin, you'll see the results of your clean-up efforts soon(ish???).

Secondly, your experiences with Google Plus/Google Local are probably related to the fact that Google separated the two over the last year. Read more at https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-kills-off-google-local-still-committed-local-search/146049/.

Thirdly, I disagree with your conclusion that building good backlinks to your site is "a problem for the future as far as I’m concerned, and not related to the penalty in any case."  If your site has not incurred a manual penalty, meaning that it's algorithmic in nature, you'll help offset any negative effects of the bad backlinks by increasing the number of great backlinks to your site.  If your site is set up with Google Search Console, you'll know if you have a manual penalty.

As much as I love the Yoast SEO plugin, I find that it oversimplifies on-page optimization with its SEO score. Getting a green light for your focus keyword will not automatically catapult your page to the #1 spot in Google search results. In fact, it can sometimes lead to over-optimization because you've focused all of your efforts on one keyword just to get the green light from Yoast.

It's fine to have "moringa" and "powder" separated in some places, especially since you have "moringa powder" together in the page title and several times elsewhere on the page. You also have lots of good content on the page. I would spend more time optimizing for long-tail keywords and earning good, quality backlinks.

The Austin district won't show up in search results unless it has a unique URL. Will search parameters show in the URL when the visitor submits a search? If so, you can create an XML sitemap with precise URLs (including search parameters) for each district and submit it to Google. Unfortunately, I can also see the potential for duplicate content if more than one URL (different parameters) could be created with the same page content, and I don't see how you could solve the problem with canonical tags if the pages are dynamically generated.  You may be able to use the URL Parameters tool in Google Search Console to exclude duplicates, but that could add even more complexity to the problem.

If you were my client (and we've worked with preschool franchises), I would make sure there was a dedicated landing page for each individual location, regardless of how many there are. A search function is fine for users, but a local landing page with a unique user-friendly URL that can easily be crawled is best for search engines.

Yes, you are right that Google has included this caveat about deceptive and manipulative practices that relate to duplicate content, but that is not a "duplicate content penalty."  Merely having the same description for product variations will not get you penalized. That's a common issue with ecommerce websites and isn't the sort of black hat tactic that will incur the wrath of Google.

You are correct in your suspicion. If you canonicalize all of your color pages to the single page, that single page will probably be the only one to show up in search.

The internal duplication isn't really your biggest problem. The bigger problem is external duplicate content. You have the same or very similar product descriptions as other websites.  You can't compete with established websites selling the same products with the same product descriptions unless you have an aggressive and well-rounded digital marketing plan. Start by adding unique content to the product pages, which will help with both the internal and external duplicate content.

I also want to address your concern that the website will be penalized for duplicate content. There is no duplicate content "penalty."  Rather, when evaluating pages with duplicate content for a given search query, Google will choose the top page(s) to display in SERPs and filter out the rest.

Only a tiny fraction of the pages on your site are actually appearing in Google search results. A search of "site:vinylabs.com" only shows 5 pages in the results. You may have technical issues affecting indexability in addition to duplicate content.

There may be other technical issues or algorithm updates in play here. If you haven't done so already, you should check your Analytics against the dates of any algorithm updates using one of the links below.

• https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change
• http://panguintool.barracuda.digital/

If you're confident that it's a Panda issue, one of the best guides I've seen is http://www.thesempost.com/understanding-google-panda-definitive-algo-guide-for-seos/.

Optimize the umbrella company as a brand for organic search but NOT for local SEO. Use the 3 local venues for local search optimization and it helps to use the local landing page for Google My Business and 3rd-party citations.  For the GMB pages, you really need a separate phone number for each venue even if they forward to the main line.  You can create a Google Plus page for the umbrella company but you should not create a Google My Business listing.

Yes, that is a bit of a mess.  There are a few different ways this can be approached, depending on your answers to the questions below:

• First of all, is there a business case for marketing the umbrella company instead of the individual event venues? Was the umbrella business created for legal or tax purposes rather than as a brand to be promoted?
• You mention that the 3 locations have different business names. Do they offer the same services?
• I'm not clear on whether the 3 locations are all on the same website or not. Are they?

If your marketing goals are to promote the branded event locations rather than the umbrella business, especially for Google's local business results, leave the umbrella business out of your digital marketing and relegate it to the legal disclaimers or "About Us" page.

If the 3 locations are different brands and they provide different services, it might make sense to have 3 different websites. Just treat them as separate businesses for marketing purposes. On the other hand, if the 3 locations are under the same brand with the same or similar business name and services, it might be more appropriate to have one website promoting the brand that includes a location-based landing page for each venue. The best way to do this really depends on your specific business case.

Finally, you definitely need 3 separate phone numbers for each venue if you want to optimize for local search.

First of all, backlinks from Adwords campaigns do not help you with organic search rankings at all.

Secondly, this kind of duplicate content issue may not be as big a problem as you think.  If Google detects two pages have the same or very similar content, it will choose the best one to display in search results and filter the other one out.  So, you may not need to do anything.

On the other hand, if you are particular about which website should appear in search results for that content, you'll want to use the rel="canonical" tag to let Google know which page you prefer. You'll find more info about the canonical tag at the two links below.

• https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en
• https://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization

I hope that helps!

Having the same phone number and address on two websites is not a duplicate content issue. It's very common because of business directories all over the web. If that's the only duplicate content you're worried about, then you're fine.

Most likely not. The links may have been created by a 3rd-party bot, a Fiverr project, or something similar that can't be easily traced. The only thing left to do is ask yourself who benefits from the negative SEO attack. Even so, that's likely a large pool of search competitors.

Is the blog on a separate domain or subdomain? Can you share the URLs?

Most likely you'll want to add rel="nofollow" to the links rather than disavow them, but it's hard to say definitively without understanding the site architecture as a whole and what you hope to accomplish. Regardless, you might want to dig deeper to find out why those links are being flagged.

You'll want to do a risk assessment of the domain before set up 301-redirects to your site.  Set it up in Google Search Console if you haven't already. Check for any manual actions or malware warnings associated with the site.  Then you'll want to audit the backlinks to check for any problems there.

If you can share the link with the community, someone else might find issues that you don't see.

I suspect the spam score would be lower if the site was more than one page. Right now, it probably seems like a doorway page since it's just one page that links to another site.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of business directories that require your street address. If she wants her home address to remain private (understandably), it will be tougher to rank locally but not impossible. You'll need to work harder on other local ranking signals to be competitive.

Fortunately, there are quite a few sites that allow you to hide your street address even if your city is still shown. Here's a great guide for this - https://www.brightlocal.com/2014/07/10/citation-sites-allow-hide-address/.   Some of the information may be out of date, so you'll have to double check with each site.

If she serves clients at their location rather than hers, her business is considered a service-area business (SAB). Joy Hawkins had some good advice for SABs in her Moz post at https://moz.com/blog/intro-local-seo-service-area-businesses.

If the canonical page disappears when it's out of stock, the user will get a 404 error when they try to access that URL. You'll need to canonicalize duplicates to a generic product or category page that won't disappear when the product is out of stock.  Furthermore, if a product goes out of stock and you'll have more in stock later, it's best (for SEO purposes) to leave the page with an "out of stock" notice rather than remove it completely from the website.

It's possible that you are being sabotaged. I've only looked at backlinks in Open Site Explorer, but I noticed a trend. Most of the questionable links appear to be pingbacks on the other websites.

Someone else may have insight as to why this is happening. It looks like pingback spam on the other websites. The question is why your site is part of that spam. I don't know how you would find out who's doing it.

Fortunately, they appear to be nofollow links, so they won't have a negative effect on your site. You may simply have to remain vigilant with your backlink analyses.