Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi,

The first thing to remember, Google rankings do not use MOZ DA or PA to decide where a website should be ranked in the results.

The best way to use DA and PA are as an arbitrary measurement that allows you to compare against other sites, so you can see how you are doing against your competitors.

Now without knowing the URLs involved, I cannot check the websites to give any real insights. However, there is any number of reasons why the other sites may be ranking higher than your clients.

They may have better content for the keyword. They may have more backlinks pointing to the domain, they may be answering questions regarding that keyword in more detail.

Without actually being able to compare the sites it is hard to say.

I would analyse the sites that are higher than yours, check the backlink profiles, compare the number of pages and compare the quality of the content then you should have a plan to move forward and improve your rankings.

I hope this helps,

Steve

Hi Niaokun,

First, of Disavow the spammy links will help with how Google sees your website.

But to reduce your spam score on MOZ etc... you will need to contact the sites that have links you want removing and ask them to remove them. This can be time-consuming and doesn't always have a high success rate.

No MOZ and Google do not share data.

I hope this helps

Steve

Hi Luke,

Moz Pro has a good backlinks tool.  https://moz.com/products/pro

Also, Ahrefs has a pretty substantial backlinks tools https://ahrefs.com/backlink-checker

As does Majestic https://majestic.com

For free tools you can use SEO Powersuite which you can run locally on your PC. I would make sure you check the settings on this though and read the user guide. It is a pretty powerful suite of tools. https://www.uk.link-assistant.com/features-and-editions.html

The hoth also lets you check your backlinks for free, this is powered by Ahrefs I think. https://www.thehoth.com/backlinks-checker/

I hope this helps.

Hi hangnga,

The algorithm that MOZ uses to calculate the domain authority was updated on the 5th March.

This means that potentially all websites have new DA scores.

Here are some links that may be useful

https://moz.com/community/q/a-new-and-improved-domain-authority-is-on-the-way

https://moz.com/domain-authority-2.0

Also it is worth remembering that DA is an arbitrary measure, that is it makes sense to use it to compare against your competitors, but not against sites in different categories necessarily.

It can also be used to track your progress over time as a score given to you by MOZ.

It does not affect your Google SERPs

I hope this helps.

Hi,

It depends, if the links are topical and flow naturally in the content then they should help.

If they are spammy and not related at all to the content, then I would think they will be ignored at best.

Internal links help show Google etc. which pages you believe to be the most important on your site, that doesn't mean you should include lots of spammy links on your pages though.

More internal links pointing to a page that is topical and relevant to the content is the best way.

Steve

There could be any number of reasons for this.

The domains linking to you are clearing up old content and removing it from their site if they no longer see it as valid or valuable.

The domain linking to you is clearing out links that point to your content as they feel there is better content to link to now.

Old domains disappearing off the web completely

For a more specific answer you  will need to provide us with more info, such as how old are the links, are they all from one type of websites such as directories or blog sites

Steve

You are more than welcome.

I know I really enjoy answering questions on here and I suspect that EffectDigital does as well.

Please do let us know how you get on either directly or by replying to this post, that is one thing that is lacking when we respond to questions on any forum. People don't always let us know the results of our answers.

I wish you all the best working with what sounds to be a good client and hope to see more of you on the forums.

Steve

Hi Ben,

Have you tried increasing the font size? It may sound daft but normally the obvious is the simple answer.

Most CMS have an easy option to change the font size across the whole website and you can test it to make sure it does not have an adverse effect on larger screens.

The other point that springs to mind is to make sure you don't have any really small text on the page, check your footer for one, but also if the domain has spammy text hidden with really small text size that won't help.

It might help if you could share the text size you are using if none o the above help.

Steve

I'm not aware of a way to remove keywords in MOZ directly, but you could always export to csv and filter it there.

Or it may be that all or the majority of these keywords have a low difficulty if they are based on a brand or product name and you can filter them out that way. Just keep in mind that you may loose some good ideas by doing that.

Thanks EffectDigital,

Again your answer takes it to a new level though and provides great insights.

Hi,

We might need some more info to answer this correctly.

However, I will do my best to answer.

First, let me explain what I think you are asking.

You have launched a new domain let say www.example-new.com and you have redirected your pages with a 301 from www.example-old.com to the www.example-new.com.

If this is the case, then all of the traffic that would have gone to the old domain will now be redirected to the new domain, so you can do whatever you want with the old content as no one will see it.

I would suggest making a backup of the old domain before you do anything else. I would also suggest testing the old URLs to ensure that all are being redirected correctly. You can do this with numerous tools if you have a lot of URLs. Screaming frog spider will do it for up to 500 URLs for free.

Also, don't forget that for the link juice to be passed from the old domain to the new domain you need to be redirecting to a page that is considered the same, similar or better on the same topic.

I hope this helps.

Steve

Hi Luke,

Redirect from both.

so have a 301 from

https://theguardian.com/uk

https://www.theguardian.com/uk

both pointing to https://newsite.com/uk

By doing this you avoid redirect chains and still point all the links to the new relevant link.

I hope this helps

Steve

Hi Matthew,

No problem,

Great, I would backup the site and monitor for a few weeks to a month just to be sure. Then you can delete the old content. Make sure you verify the backup first.

You can do this by setting up a local web server on your laptop/pc and restoring the backup there.  If you need guidance on taking the backup let me know which CMS you are using and I will see what I can do to help.

Once you have verified the backup and removed the old domain, keep an eye on google analytics to make sure everything looks ok. (on both sites) and that no 404 errors are starting to show up.

As for how long to keep the 301 in place, indefinitely. That is until you stop seeing any backlinks and traffic coming through them.

Make sure you keep an eye on traffic volumes through this process and rankings in the search engines. You will likely see a small drop off in rankings and traffic due to the rebrand but that should recover. If not then make sure that the pages you are redirecting from are close enough to the ones you are redirecting to.

Its been a long day and I feel like I am rambling so I will leave it there.

If you have any questions let me know

Steve

Hi Matt16,

We will probably need more information to figure this out, but lets get started and see if I can help.

First thing that pops to mind, when you did the new website and uploaded it did you use the same URL's as you were previously? If not did you redirect the old URL's to the new UR's? using a 301 redirect (dont worry if you dont know what this is we can get to it).

it seems strange that you maintained the traffic in Google but not in Bing. Did you make any other changes apart from the site design. Did you rewrite the content? anything else?

Have you got the same number of pages now as before?

When you say some days you show up in google and others you don't, I assume this is for the same search term?

Have you tried searching in private browser mode, do you see the same results?

Are you searching from the same location when you see different results?

Cheers,

Steve

Hi Matthew,

No problem, apologise for not replying yesterday. I was spending time with the family.

Your redirect code looks good to me, that should redirect all the old URLs to a replica new URL.

so www.example-old.com/content will go to www.example-new.com/content

everything after the domain name will stay the same.

I suspect you only see 1 URL on your old domain in screamingfrog due to the redirect. That makes sense and is fine.

Keep an eye out for 404's in Google analytics and search console and also keep an eye on search console for crawl errors.

From the information you have posted, it looks like you have done everything correctly. It is now just a case of monitoring for any little niggles that may pop up.

Steve

Hi Matt,

We will get to the bottom of this.

It sounds like you have lost some link juice potentially through the URL changes and also with the Bing issues.

I will carry out some further checks today.

Hi Steven,

Where are you seeing these errors?

Is it in google analytics? on MOZ? Different Software?

Have you tried navigating to the pages? Be careful about doing this.

have you looked at your site via FTP to see if you can see any strange files in there?

If you can answer these questions we may be able to help

No Problem,

Apologies I ended up having a really busy day yesterday.

So I have run a backlink check and cant actually find that many broken backlinks with the tools i have.

I have also compared the indexed pages on Bing against your sitemap and they match so all your pages are in there.

Do you still have a copy of the old site?

I have run a site crawl and that looks to be reasonable. no crawl issues. there are a few meta issues which we can look at afterwards, if you like.

We may need to get on and have a look at your Analytics to see if we can see anything there.

Just as a side thought i have just run a speed test

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.coastlinetvinstalls.com%2F

and the results are pretty slow, that may/will be having a level of impact i would think.

If you want to do have a chat/remote session to look at things my email is in my profile and one of us can keep this thread up to date so others can see where we are up to.

Have you done an analysis to see if there is any difference in mobile and desktop? I ask as the main reason for shorter URLs is to make them mobile friendly as far as i am aware.

I think as long as you are consistent across all of your URL structures and the information and pages are in an organised manner then you will be OK.

I am not totally convinced that removing the lawyer from the URL would have much of a negative or positive impact on the results you are seeing. Unfortunately without testing fully there is no way to know. And I wouldn't want to test something like this on a production site that is starting to see traffic.

Side note: it is good practice having the keyword in the URL where it naturally makes sense

Also another consideration is do you plan on adding a lot more pages in the future? if you do then you need to consider the benefits of organising the site now before you add those pages against leaving as is.

I am not that familiar with Umbraco unfortunately.

I have done some more digging and found some more pages that may help.

https://www.hobo-web.co.uk/search-engine-friendly-urls/

https://www.searchlaboratory.com/2016/02/do-keywords-in-urls-still-have-an-impact-on-rankings-experiment/

https://moz.com/blog/15-seo-best-practices-for-structuring-urls

https://moz.com/learn/seo/url

I know i seem to be sitting on the fence here, I am not really sure which is the best way to move forward.

If you are planning on adding lots more pages or categories then i would seriously consider tidying the URLs up with 301 redirects to save on work in the future.(again this needs considering against the potential affects on SERPS and traffic)

If you are not planning on adding lots more pages then I would leave as is.

Without seeing the data it is hard to say.

If you have a few years of data take a look back and see what fluctuations you have had previously.

Also, check the pages that the links were pointing to on your site make sure they haven't been removed.

If its a small number of links compared to your overall backlink profile then I wouldn't worry to much if its a big percentage of your overall backlink profile then I would be digging into it to see if you can stop it.

Is there any pattern to the links as I asked in my first response? are they all from one type of site? do they all link to old content?

Hi Steven,

I assume in the coverage part of search console?

If that is the case then Google can find them on your site. You may have a more serious issues Everett suggested. You need to be investigating this pretty quickly.

Let us know what you find and I am sure we will be able to help.

Hey did you get anywhere with this or did you want to set up a call?

Hi Caroline,

it would really help us to help you if you could share more information, such as the topic of the site(s), URLs if you can (we understand this is not always possible) but if you could give us an idea as to the topic this will really help us.

Otherwise, we can only provide generic information and guestimates.

Some things to check

1. Did you make any significant changes to the site - implementing HTTPS for instance
2. Has someone changed your sitemap, robots.txt or htaccess files
3. Are you having redirect issues?
4. Are you getting more 4xx errors in Google analytics

Steve

Hi JabeKay,

Is there a reason the blog is on a different domain?

It seems to me like you are working to build the strength of two separate domains when you could put all your efforts into one.

I would seriously consider moving the blog to the e-commerce site domain and 301 redirecting the old blog domain to the e-commerce domain.

This way new content is in the right place and building traffic for the place you want it.

If this is not an option let me know.

Steve

Hi Leadforms,

Interesting question.

Having lots of redirects will slow down your site.

There are different ways to implement your redirects other than .htaccess but I believe this would be the best method for you.

Is there any way you can group some of the redirects? maybe part of the URL is the same for all the pages you want to send to a certain folder then the match may work?

If not then I think you have a massive job on to redirect 5k pages and manage the redirects afterwards as well.

I would look at the pages and judge the value of a redirect on that page. If the page has no external links pointing to it and it has a low PA then do you need to redirect it?

You also need to keep in mind a few other things:

1. You need to make sure that the page you are redirecting to and from are similar in a boolean context - that is that a machine will see them as the same content and not just a person

2. you need to avoid redirect chains - that is a redirect to a redirect and so on

3. If you have redirects in place at the moment from HTTP to https you need to redirect these separately otherwise you will generate a chain

4. I would amend all your internal links rather than relying on the redirect otherwise again you will create a chain

Once you have implemented the redirects you will need to monitor them to see how much traffic they are generating, if after a few months a redirect is generating no traffic and all the traffic is going to the new URL then you will need to consider the benefit of keeping that redirect in place or removing it to improve site load times.

I hope this helps,

Steve

Hi Caroline,

Recommendations would be to do as you have suggested review keywords, & pages.

Make sure you have a robust About us section that proves you are experts, look to introduce new high quality and relevant content.

Start actively searching for relevant and quality backlinks.

Steve

I haven't tried it but I am pretty sure you can run Shopify and WordPress on the same domain. You may have to use subfolders but that would be better than a separate domain.

If you can't run the two together, running it on a subdomain is ok, but it will probably be treated as two different domains by Google. When you say mapping I assume you mean via DNS so that the subdomain for the blog is pointing straight to the host server and you are not redirecting?

If you have done this have you redirected the old domain for the blog to the new subdomain with 301? if not you need to do this to preserve what you can of the link juice.

See my responses here for more on large redirects https://moz.com/community/q/301-redirects-large-htaccess-file-question

I haven't really looked at UTMs on internal pages, however, subdomains are normally considered separate domains as far as I am aware.

These links may help

https://moz.com/community/q/subdomains-or-separate-domains-for-dealers

https://chrisberkley.com/blog/subdomains-for-seo/

https://www.analyticsmania.com/post/transfer-utm-parameters-google-tag-manager/

https://www.bounteous.com/insights/2016/08/11/two-steps-correctly-tracking-subdomains-google-analytics/

https://penguinwp.com/common-utm-campaign-url-tracking-mistakes-to-avoid/

Hi,

Google released a core update in March.

Your site is about CBD oils and vapours, it could be that you have been hit due to YMYL (Your Money Your Life).

I dont currently work on any CBD sites, but feel it would make sense that Google considers them to be medical.

I would suggest taking a look at your EAT(Experitse, Authority, Trust) and finding ways you can start to increase these attributes on your site. Such as citing medial research that reflects any claims you have on your website about your product. Also building the authority of the site again by showing your expertise so any medical qualifications you can show that backs up what you site says your product does.

Here is a couple of links regarding the March update

https://blog.searchmetrics.com/us/google-core-algorithm-update-march-2019/

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-update-rollback/298647/#close

And here are some on YMYL and EAT

https://www.mariehaynes.com/the-august-1-2018-google-update-strongly-affected-ymyl-sites/

https://www.semrush.com/blog/eat-and-ymyl-new-google-search-guidelines-acronyms-of-quality-content/

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/improve-google-eat-score/270711/

I hope this helps.

Steve

Hi ResultfirstGA,

You are correct thepeoppeople.com is not registered on google.

Also, peopeople.com is only showing 2 pages on a site search as well.

The redirect is working correctly for the root domain.

I took a look at your robots.txt and sitemap.xml and they look ok. Have you checked your .htaccess to make sure it isn't blocking any traffic?

Also, check you are not meta noindexing on the page.

Have you checked Search Console for any errors?

Is search console showing any errors?

Here are some links that may help

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/definitive-list-reasons-google-isnt-indexing-site/118245/#close

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7474347?hl=en

Let me know how you get on

Steve

https://neilpatel.com/blog/google-index/

Hi Bhaskaran,

Someone with more knowledge than me may be around soon to give you a more in depth answer, but this should get you going.

Google has a limited amount of resources to crawl each webpage, so to be efficient it schedules pages to be crawled based on a few different things. The one i suspect is affecting your crawl times is how often your content is updated. If google does not believe that your site will be updated frequently it sees no reason to crawl it that often.

If you want google to crawl more often you need to give it a reason to do so, that means ensure your site is easily crawled by bots, good internal linking and make sure your content is fresh and up to date.

On a side note, as you are carrying out a domain migration it might be easier to redirect the pages to the new page on the new domain (301 redirect) and ensure your new domain has the points i raised above.

I hope this helps?

Hi,

When I use the keyword tool, as you can see in the image attached the search results for both the keywords you have mentioned have a monthly volume that is very low.

Either 11 - 50 keywords for recruitment agency north-west or 51 - 100 for recruitment agencies north-west.

The results for the keyword you enter are directly under the keyword with the graphs.

I would revisit your keyword research and see if you might be better of targeting different keywords.

The MOZ tool you are using is excellent. You also have the below tools you can try

https://app.neilpatel.com/en/ubersuggest/keyword_ideas

https://www.wordtracker.com/

These are just a couple, but I find them an excellent place to start.

Steve

6CMvK6I

Sorry I meant to add some links that might be useful.

here they are

https://moz.com/community/q/will-301-redirects-slow-page-speed

https://moz.com/blog/heres-how-to-keep-301-redirects-from-ruining-your-seo

https://moz.com/community/q/massive-301-permanant-redirects This is an older question on here but may have some useful insights.

https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/113246/does-too-many-301-redirects-harm-serp-rankings

http://www.thesempost.com/best-practices-for-301s-in-large-htaccess-file/

https://www.impactbnd.com/blog/301-redirect-lessons

Yes you will, you can just add a redirect in your .htaccess if your on Apache hosting.

https://serverguy.com/servers/redirect-http-to-https/

shows how to do it if you are not sure.

its also good practice as anyone following external links will get 404 error unless you redirect.

Hi Schoellerallibert,

My first reaction is that this is a way for you to play the system.

Can you share an example of the content that you are going to change?

Also, keep in mind that Google searches from one place and will therefore only see one version of the content.

Steve

Hi Luke,

Disclaimer first: I have not carried out any testing on this, so this is just a theory.

After reading your question, my initial thought process is that by having more subcategories or content in one category you are suggesting to the search engines that this is your primary area of focus.

Think about it from Google or Bings point of view, if you have 50 subcategories with 10 posts each for blue widgets and only have 10 subcategories with 5 posts each for red widgets what would you think?

I would look at a site like that and think oh these guys do blue widgets, and maybe a few red widgets.

It is an interesting concept though and might be worth testing.

Steve

Great response from EffectDigital.

I agree with what Alex has said below if you can use a regex that would be great.

Also, see this answer I gave on a similar question

https://moz.com/community/q/301-redirects-large-htaccess-file-question