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Hi,

I'd recommend using a sitemap index. It allows you to address multiple sitemaps in GSC so you could have one for 'static pages' and another which generates for blog content.

Hi Luca,

Content for e-commerce sites should be focused on conversion; if it is strictly an e-commerce site (no blog etc) then ensure your content helps people get the product they need, rather than providing a guide on a subject - you don't need to inform people how to use a knife, rather why they need a knife and how it can improve how they perform a certain activity.

I've experimented with a number of different content combinations in e-commerce and the two that have performed the most positively are 1) dedicated landing pages (400 - 600 words) with 3 or 6 items included below the text, and 2) item listing pages with 12 items visible but less written content than in example 1.

It can depend on what your niche is; there can be much more content written about certain items than others, but targeting your audience is a must.

Disavow is a powerful tool and using it is something you should be certain of, but it sounds like it would be the right choice in your case.

The disavow file is something you should always keep on top of; it's better to add 2 or 3 domains so that you can attribute results to changes made than adding 700 domains at once as it may be more difficult to pin point exactly which domains affected you negatively.

Would it not be easier to have something on the individual page to say that the house was sold (and not 404), "but here are some similar properties in your price range/preferences"? This would allow Google to crawl through to these suggested pages and help them get indexed.

In your list of 4 items, 2 are more dev focused (though the UX designs can be done without devs initially). So I'd take a look at bringing someone in who can at least put some wireframes together for you for the UX side of things.

Quality content and backlinks _could_be done by you, though it depends entirely on your needs with regards to content; are you looking at implementing product specific landing pages, for example, or just improving product descriptions? Is there a reason you would add a blog to your website; does it have any potential reader base?

• On your Irish domain, why do you have French in the page title? And why are there so many issues with how things are displayed? Example: http://www.keyonline.ie/en/kie/castors---wheels

Yoast will be able to handle it, though you might need to upgrade to premium for the plugin.

There are many other capable redirect plugins for WP which should do the trick too.

It's caused by having embedded YouTube videos. These YT ad scripts being blocked will also lead to a partial fetch.

If you have access to the old live WordPress site then you can set up redirects in there from old posts to new, relevant posts on the new site.

What content was actually duped? I barely see any content at all on goglupe.

Hi,

Have you checked the health of your backlinks, specifically to those pages? A client of mine disavowed a large number of domains and lost some PA, however this should return once the low value of the disavowed backlinks is recognised.

On a related note, have you seen a large increase in backlinks and analysed the "spam score" of those domains?

Hi,

One of the reasons we add the brand name at the end of a title is to allow for users to recognise the brand, whether they are new users and have heard of the brand and thus are more likely to trust it, or returning users who have used our website before and weren't aware that another service was offered, but are more willing to return to a website where they have had a good experience.

It also ensures your brand SEO is as strong as possible, so if someone were to search your brand name they wouldn't be presented with a competitor who happened to mention your website a few times, rather than your website.

Hi Alan,

Firstly, do you have different variations of the site targeting different languages? Or by European do you mean English speaking nations, such as the UK and Germany (surprisingly most Germans browse in English). If the former, are you targeting them properly with href lang? From my initial scan it doesn't look like that is the case.

With regards to backlinks, it might be worth researching as to whether or not you could reach out to websites targeting Irish living abroad. For example, here in Australia we have IrishAroundOz, so an awareness in such a community could have positive effects (especially if they have a good reader base). I'm friends with a large number of Irish people and they'd all be more than willing to help out a fellow Irish person if they asked. Try and avoid paying any kind of fee for now, outreach to the right people should increase revenue without cost.

Social is worth pursuing and doesn't have to cost much/anything. Make sure you are targeting all platforms, but Instagram is a must these days and you'd be surprised at how quickly you can build a following and start converting.

Rena,

As mentioned above, this is due to the only difference in pages being the HTML for the feature image. A way of fixing this (and potentially improving conversion/enquiries too) would be to detail the item; what kind of paper stock does it come on, what colours can be provided, are there set types of font, and so on?

Do you have clients who are willing to provide a few words on their opinion of the item which could be used as unique content on an invite's page?

A lot of the time it's all about what you can do for them too; writing an article for a website on a subject and linking back to your own site as a form of payment (though you may actually ask for $$ too), especially early on in your 'outreach' campaign. Building a reputation is important.

Over time you may be asked for articles etc, or be able to show off your work in order to gain more exposure.

Have you tried updating your robots.txt file to use this;

User-agent: rogerbot

Disallow:

User-agent: dotbot

Disallow:

It's best practise to Disalow: none, rather than Allow: /

I've tried crawling your site with SEO Spider and ran in to no issues.

Sure.

In a broad sense, you get what you pay for. If you buy 10,000 links from fiver then expect it to be picked up almost instantly by Google and watch your rankings fall.

I know of people who commission articles for $300-500 and ask for a link back to a certain product or page as part of the deal, usually around 800-1000 words and on a reputable website, rather than some MIT personal student blog.

When it comes to link quality, it is usually the case that less links from high quality sources, over many links from low quality sources is best practise. However, building links naturally is a true recognition of quality.

I'd agree with Oleg above; marking up as a product is likely your only option with regards to appearing in SERPs.

One thing that you may want to look further in to is the schema for service, you can store data such as provider and rating, which may suit your needs further down the line.

I'd suggest doing the work yourself with the assistance of programs such as BuzzSumo.

Doing the work yourself will help keep you in touch with how your brand/business is being talked about in both social platforms and blogs, as well as everything in between.

Listing it in the sitemap helps Google etc crawl the page if there are any issues with the website itself, it's sort of a fail safe. Linking in the sitemap will help it get indexed, but not necessarily faster (it depends on how often Google crawls your page). One thing you should do is "Fetch as Google" on high value pages, this will ensure they are crawled and indexed immediately.

You should be able to change this in your .htaccess file.

RewriteEngineOn

RewriteCond%{SERVER_PORT}80

RewriteRule^(.*)$https://yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

No problem.

It's important to ensure that your client doesn't see this as an opportunity to build a PBN (personal blog network) and build backlinks between all of the websites, this is caught very easily by Google etc.

I'd question that timing. I recently uploaded a disavow file containing a few hundred domains and saw an uplift within a week.

Definitely go for Option 1: redirecting to the relevant pages on the singular domain.

I would also recommend using subfolders to contain content on individual locations, something similar to rapturecamps.com/bali for Bali information. This would allow you to gain authority for that specific niche and add articles to that niche, rather than having them all under one central holder (the root domain).

When using the canonical ensure you use the full URL. There are multiple protocols that can be addressed at a domain, for example, ftp, so including the http:// would be best practise.

A side note about canonicals, if in the future you are planning on moving to https then ensure you update your canonicals. Depending on how you currently deploy your website; WordPress etc, you could use a simple php script to store a variable of protocol which will change globally if the file is updated.

If you change your domain then expect your rankings and traffic to drop significantly for at least a short period of time (a few months is likely). You'll need to set up 301 redirects from the old domain to the new, pointing to relevant replacement URLs on the new domain; .us/how-to-redirect => .com/how-to-redirect

The .us domain will help focus on a US market, though a .com will also do the same. The differences is a .com is also international, so users from the UK, France, etc may still feel comfortable dealing with a .com domain, but may not with a .us one.

The most important thing in terms of SEO is the users' experience in finding the answer to their query; too many people focus on using '-' in their URL in order to get the perfect, keyword rich domain, but Google actually looks for the speed and efficiency in which you can answer a query for "easier routes from IL to KY".

.com, .net, .org. They're all pretty much the same in terms of value; they're all TLDs. The key difference in them is how your users react to them; a charity/public service website may see better results by using a .org for example, but a multinational corporation would likely only settle for .com or .net.

It's picking up exactly what you have as the description... You should change your meta description if you want something else to display.

uLnSD39

So, they're copying your content but providing a link back to your website? Sounds like it could be recognised as providing credit for the content.

It shouldn't take "6 months" to recover from bad links as backlink analysis is now part of Google's "live" algorithm, any changes should see results within a few days/weeks at most.

Use the "latest links" and "most links" tools in GSC to download a .csv file and analyse the amount of links you are getting from "spammy" domains, disavow those and benchmark so that you can check results.

Do infographic directories request a link from users of the infographic to the original site? If people are uploading your infographic (the .jpg/.png version) then they should be providing a link to show acknowledgement to the author.

A client of mine has stars in the SERP result by implementing their trustedreviews score in to their page. CTR has improved since adding the rating.

Sidebars etc shouldn't be on AMP pages, as they are designed to present the user with the content on their mobile device. They are usually on a separate page, for example, url.com/page/amp, and shouldn't impact the desktop version of the website with regards to different content, sidebars etc.

AMP isn't currently a huge focus for many websites which are mobile friendly as AMP pages will not be shown preference in SERPs over mobile friendly ones simply for using AMP. If you have the option to add it then, of course, go ahead and do so. But if you are confident that you are mobile friendly and load quickly then I wouldn't panic too much over it.

Why would you redirect? You could simply make the homepage focused on weddings, improve the on page content etc.

Of course, your client could also have a separate website for wedding photography, ensuring all content on the website was focused on that niche.

The interstitial update only affected mobile browsing, from what I can remember. This popup doesn't appear on their mobile site and thus, I would assume it shouldn't have any impact. However, I would recommend increasing the wait time to pop the message up,  so that it acts as a form of help to a user, rather than blocking their browsing immediately.

Another vote for redirecting it to a relevant page on a new website.

Google started clamping down on PBNs a long time ago...

http://searchengineland.com/google-targets-sites-using-private-blog-networks-manual-action-ranking-penalties-204000

Google is more interesting in the information you present users with and whether or not you can answer their query. Highlighting keywords may, to those not in the know, show that a website is more likely to answer a query, but in reality it may not be the case.

It's falls under the same method of Google attributing actual meaning, for example "wood floor" could be perceived as "wooden floor" or "wood flooring" and so on, where those websites might help the user more so than the one which contains the exact keyword in the URL.

Are you installing WordPress on the subfolder of '/blog'? Or hoping to feed the posts from WordPress > the /blog page?

There are a number of tools out there and OSE is just one of them. Using GSC's "Links to Your Site" can provide good insights on both who links the most and your most recently attained links.

ahrefs shows additional data and, in my opinion, the more data you can gather the better informed you will be. What I'm saying is, don't rely too much on the accuracy of one individual tool, when there are plenty more out there which may have a more focused approach on a certain aspect of SEO than other, more general tools.

It depends on how the first link is treated; links from profiles are often set as 'nofollow' and so pass no value to the target page.

Quickly checking on Quora, for example, they use a 'nofollow' tag on their links from answer contributor names.