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@hankhoffmeier Hi, bit of a late reply but try the following:

1. In analytics you can go to the behavior -> site content -> landing page report and the filter for your page not found url (or page title if it is common across 404s). This will give you external sites that are linking to one of your 404 pages.

2. If you think you have internal links to 404 pages try https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/ - it is a tool to crawl your site and you can filter for your 404s and then see which of your pages the links are on. It is a real timesaver! The free version has some restrictions but should be enough to get you started,

Hope it helps!

Hi,

This kind of link is pretty common, especially in the travel/tourism industry where lots of foreign language sites discussing holiday destinations etc give links out to relevant sites that are not necessarily in the language of the original article. If it is a freely given link from a somewhat relevant page then it certainly would not hurt, if it is a link that you are outreaching for then I would personally concentrate on other options that are in the same language as your website, Hope that makes sense

@graceflack-0
Hi!
Check out this article which runs down a lot of the common reasons for traffic being labeled direct when it is not really and details steps to take:

https://www.analyticsmania.com/post/how-to-reduce-direct-traffic-in-google-analytics/

Hope it helps!

@woddyisland Hi!

There is nothing inherently "wrong" with setting things up like this. It used to be done quite a bit a few years back when e-commerce sites (using an e-comm cms of some kind) wanted to add a blog. If the current cms you are running doesn't easily support adding blog functionality then installing wp in a sub directory can be a convenient way to easily get blog functionality added. Google does not really care how you set up your content management, using two cms is perfectly fine - just make sure that technical best practices are implemented (in both cms systems in your case!).

Hope that puts your mind at ease

Hi Gareth,

This is a pretty common issue.
Generally your homepage is always going to be your 'strongest' page for links etc so in most cases it makes sense to use it to target your highest level and most important keyword/phrases.

If you are ranking well with your homepage for this important phrase then you don't really want to be messing with it unless there is a good reason.

For the service page you could consider:

1. Leaving it as is since it serves its purpose for users and site navigation and conceivably supports the ranking of the homepage.

2. Consider slightly reworking to try target a relevant secondary phrase (ie bus rental instead of coach hire for example or private coach hire etc, etc) - assuming your homepage is not ranking as well for these type of searches and they are indeed relevant to your business.

The above assumes you ARE actually ranking well for "coach hire" with your homepage. If you are not ranking as well as you like then that might change your approach. Of course, if you did get the hire page to rank well then.... what phrase would you target with your homepage?

Hope it helps

Hi, have you tried setting the Minimum Percent Visible to 0?

Hi!

A bit late but perhaps the following links help. Generally it seems the People Also Ask feature is often closely connected to FAQ and faq schema markup content on pages (not necessarily FAQ only pages!). If the questions you are looking at are related to your own brand  then I would try implementing some FAQ type content and see how that goes, you should have a good chance of grabbing some more results.

https://moz.com/blog/new-schema-types-to-create-interactive-rich-results https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2020/02/20/how-to-make-most-of-googles-people-also-ask-results/

Hope it helps!

HI,

I don't know if it would make a huge difference in how google will understand the site but it is not a 'normal' setup as per documentation: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

If the site does not have different regional variation pages of english (UK vs USA for example) then there is no need to double up hreflang markup with regional notation. You just need the hreflang='en' and it is good for all english language searches regardless of location. Same goes for all the languages.

Personally I would remove the extra regional tags to avoid confusion and keep things as simple as possible.

Is it just me or is it getting a bit silly in here??

I had another thought

If you have linked your Google Ads with the Search Console then you could check the paid and organic report (in ads -> reports -> predefined -> basic -> paid & organic) - I think this "should" actually give you the numbers you want. This assumes that the search console data is measuring GMB clicks correctly with UTM tracking AND that data is being imported as is into Google Ads)

I am going to check it now since we have accounts where the search console is linked with ads, and accounts that use UTM tracking in their GMB listing - but none that have BOTH. If you find that it works and you can verify the above really does appear to give a clear indication of total Ads + Organic + GMB clicks then please do confirm

HI Dino,

Yes the links will still show in external link reports if they still exist. Assuming you have GWT access for the domain in question, you can go to the google disavow tool (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main), select the relevant domain and then click 'disavow links'. it will pop up a window where you can also download the last file that was uploaded to the disavow tool. You can then use this list to cross check against the links you are seeing in the reports to make sure nothing was missed.

Wordpress and Joomla are both just tools at the end of the day and can both be effective depending on how you are using them. I personally have had negative experiences trying to optimise existing joomla sites (complicated templates, weird plugin functionality, slow load times etc) but I am sure those more experienced with it would say these things can be overcome.

The real questions are why you want to switch systems and how much effort it would require to do so? It looks like you have quite a bit of content in your site, so migrating to wordpress would likely need a bit of technical experience and time to complete. I am sure there are scripts around that will help in that process, but migrating a db from one system to another usually has a few gotcha moments along the way! You would also need to account for any changes in url structures and 301ing the old urls to the new. All in all not a decision to be taken lightly.

If there is not a specific reason you want to switch (ie something you are trying to do in joomla that is proving impossible for some reason) I would think that switching platforms might be more hassle than it is worth. As for one or the other being more customisable and/or secure than the other, I don't think there is really any difference between them, both are fully customisable and are as secure (or not secure) as you make them if following best practices.

Hi,

If you can do as recommended above and get rid of the page completely then this would be the way to go. Since it is on a national newspaper site and a couple of years old I am guessing this might be tough to do (although worth a shot).

Otherwise you can try to boost your own rankings and grab more real estate by:

1. Making sure all your on page data is branded (page titles, company schema etc).

2. Use verified social channels and link to them from your site (especially google+ but fb, twitter, linkedin, youtube are all good).

3. Get a few more branded links into the site (I assuming you are in 2nd position, it is a bit unusual for a branded search to not return the brand as the first option - you might just need a few more (honest) links).

5. Short term solution: Adwords on your brand's search. You should get a 4 pack of site links + descriptions in it also so should give a fair amount of real estate above the newspaper article and should be inexpensive.

Hi,

At first glance it seems you have a rel canonical issue. All of your blog posts have a rel canonical pointing to: <link <span class="webkit-html-attribute-name">rel="canonical" href="http://www.hilden.co.uk/bed-linen.html" /></link <span>

Probably not what you had in mind!

Hi,

Sometimes FB seems to get a bit stuck on urls, I find running them through the fb url debug tool (https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/) usually seems to unstick them. I plugged that url into the tool, it returns ok, does it post properly now also?

Hi David,

Personally I feel the value is debatable. If you are syndicating your own blog content then you are running the risk of either duplicate content and/or what looks quite a bit like mechanical link building, both of which are low value options.

If you are planning on creating unique content for the other blogs then you need to balance the amount of effort it will need to create something decent with the amount of time you have. I have also found that you can be in danger of competing with yourself, and the last thing you want is your offsite blog competing with your main site/blog. In my experience blogspot etc have proven to be more hassle than they are worth in upkeep and I would prefer to focus on the main blog creating good content and building strong links.

My two cents!

HI,

There was a recent WBF about syndicated content which runs down the various technical ways you can attribute your listings as the original source - check it out here. It would probably also help to make sure your listings are the first ones into the index which can be done by internally linking to the new jobs (obviously), quickly adding them to your sitemap, sharing them through social channels (especially twitter) - all of which should help make sure your content is indexed quickly and ideally before it is replicated on other sites.

If the other sites have stronger authority than yours you would still really want to get one of the 3 options discussed in the video implemented. It sounds like you already have the link back to your site (option 3 in the video) so perhaps the link is not 'clean' ie a straight text link that leads to the exact job on your site and is not no-followed?

It might also depend on what kind of long tail you are looking at ranking for. Individual job ads might not pull a lot of organic traffic by themselves if they are not aggregated by type or location for example - at which point the higher authority domains are likely to show an advantage (just a thought).

Hi,

It i probably google deciding to rewrite the titles for you, Yoast himself makes a mention of it here: http://yoast.com/google-page-title/ In short, not much you can do about it.

HI Benoit,

If the site is very new and has no incoming links yet I would think that google is still trying to decide what it is all about and how best to present the data in the serps and that is why you are seeing the contact data in there (also the type of search you are doing - an exact match for the domain - could be influencing the type of data returned). Give it a bit of time and the description should change around and settle.

The date is mentioned in your source code (view source and search for 'vcard' and you will see a hidden div with author and date info in it). So google is likely thinking your site is a blog and adding date info to the serps. Getting this hidden code completely out of the template should help getting the date out of the description.

Hi Brandon,

Its probably that robots meta noindex tag you have in there!