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I have a client who has dropped from DA16 to DA1 and lost the few links he had he's NOT happy!!

Haven't just spent a few weeks impressing upon him the importance of building up his DA, it's been pretty hard trying to pacify him over this.

Great explanation from Rand, but c'mon MOZ when are you going to fix this?

And when are you going to enable tracking of DA? AuthorityLabs and others can do it for keyword ranking. I'm sure you can do it for DA and PA.

It appears their primary competitor has maintained their DA of 19. So can someone please explain this added twist?

I have a client who has reported a drop in Domain Authority from 16 to 1 in a matter of a few weeks. Also, MOZ was reporting links, but now none!

I know there were some issues with the recent MOZ index update. However, this sounds like something else. Anyone got ideas on where we should start looking?

Hey Miriam,

I'm currently doing an audit for a client and would like to include domain age in comparison to competitors. Can you recommend a reliable source?

I have used this site (http://checkpagerank.net/index.php), but I've noticed at lot of sites coming up blank for domain age recently, which I'm guessing is related to PageRank data no longer available?

Would also be interested in what other high level domain/link authority metrics you would recommend? I currently use:

• MOZ (DA and PA), as well as root domains and total links, plus
• ahrefs (DR and UR), as well as referring domains, backlinks, keywords and organic traffic.

thanks mate!

I'm doing some competitor analysis for a client. I'm looking at the client's title tags and meta descriptions for specific search results, in comparison to their main competitor. I'm trying to establish if the client is ranking higher due to better relevance, or just because they have higher PA and DA. It appears to be the latter.

Observations:

• For both the client and their competitor, their home pages appear in the results much more frequently than specific landing pages
• The meta description Google chooses to display in the search results for the home page does not always match the ACTUAL meta description for the page and appears to vary depending on the specific search query

Questions:

• Does Google create meta descriptions on the fly?
• Is this an example of Google using semantic search?
• And if so, why are we bothering to type customised meta descriptions for specific pages, if Google is just going to recreate them anyway?
• Is Google displaying results of the home pages simply because they cannot find pages more relevant (ie. if we produced landing pages more relevant to these specific search queries, would Google rank them higher)?

Sounds like solid and wise advice. Thank you!

Interesting.

So what is the value of the daily rankings? And at what point should we be worried?

Sorry, I should have been clearer...

• These are not Search Console average positions I'm talking about (I understand about the flux in that tool).
• These are the average rankings of 92 keywords tracked daily using the SE Ranking tool.

I have a client who has just seen his average page rank creep up from around 39 to 34 over about two months, then it appears to have dropped back to position 40+ in the space of a week.

I believe he's made a lot of changes to targeted keywords, so I'd like to think it's simply because his old targeted keywords are dropping and new keywords still have to build their rankings. But I'm also worried in case he has over-optimised and might get getting penalised.

Any advice on where to start digging?

I don't believe this is the answer. I have several other clients on Shopify who do not have goals for macro conversions, but we are seeing conversion data in GA.

Besides, I was always under the impression that if you have ecommerce enabled, it's better not to use goals for transactions as it might duplicate. Is this not the case?

I know how to check whether the code is there. But how do you check whether or not specific pages have been indexed by Google?

As far as I can see Google Search Console only reports on the number of pages indexed, not which pages have been indexed. Is there any way to get an actual list of indexed pages?

I know running a site: query will show up all the results, but I just want a list (eg CSV) of the URLs indexed.

Are you familiar with Shopify?

I have another issue where GA tracking code is not firing on the Thank_You page. I have double checked GA config with the GA implementation twice! But the problem seems to be with Shopify, since this page sites on their site (checkout.shopify.com) and they seem unable to fix it.

Thanks Dmitrii,

So will that one line of code fix the issue for ALL products and ALL collections?

Yes, I've seen the same thing. I've got a client with a small site of only 6 pages. The sitemaps report shows all 6 have been indexed.

Then I look at the Index Status report and find 46 pages indexed. 46 pages indexed on a site with only 6 pages!!

So this seems to confirm your comments Logan.

The question I have is: how can I get a list of all the indexed pages?

Anyone familiar with Shopify will understand the problems of their directory structure. Every time you add a product to a 'collection' it essentially creates a duplicate. For example...

• https://www.domain.com/products/product-slim-regular-bikini

may also appear as:

• https://www.domain.com/collections/all/products/product-slim-regular-bikini
• https://www.domain.com/collections/new-arrivals/products/product-slim-regular-bikini
• https://www.domain.com/collections/bikinis/products/product-slim-regular-bikini
• etc, etc

It's not uncommon to have up to six duplicates of each product.

So my question is twofold:

1. Firstly, should I worry about this from an SEO point of view? I understand the desire to minimise potential duplicate content issues and also in focussing the 'juice' on just one page per product. But I also planned on trying to build the authority of the collection pages. If I request Google not to index the product pages which link off the collections, does this not devalue these collections pages?
2. Secondly, I understand the correct way to fix these is using 'rel canonical' tags, but I'm not clear about HOW to actually do this. Shopify support has not been very helpful. They have provided two different instructions, so just added to the confusion (see below).

Shopify instruction #1: Add the following to the theme.liquid file...

<title><br />{{ page_title }}{% if current_tags %} – tagged "{{ current_tags | join: ', ' }}"{% endif %}{% if current_page != 1 %} – Page {{ current_page }}{% endif %}{% unless page_title contains shop.name %} – {{ shop.name }}{% endunless %}<br /></title>
{% if page_description %}

{% endif %}

Shopify instruction #2: Add the following to each individual product page...

So, can anyone help clarify:

1. The best strategic approach to this inherent SEO issue with Shopify (besides moving to another platform!)? and
2. If 'rel canonical' tags is the way to go, exactly where and how to apply them?

Regards,

Murray

If I'm about to submit a new sitemap for Google to crawl, is there any need to use the Fetch tool?

Just taken over a new client who recently moved from A.N. other platform to Shopify. I just found reference to their old website IP address and it appears to be not redirecting.

Can I simply use something like Traffic Control (Shopify app) to redirect to the new domain?

What do you say to a client who recently purchased an online business and says 'I don't really care if the phone number or address on a directory is old or incorrect'?I've tried to explain the value from an SEO point of view, but he's not really buying it.Anyone encountered this skepticism before and if so, how did you handle it?

Thanks Chris,

I agree with you on this one. However, the client feels (rightly or wrongly) that the Shopify blog looks 'ugly' which is why she is continuing with the Squarespace blog.

So my plan is to use data to try and highlight the shortcomings of this strategy (ie. that it isn't generating any traffic or SEO value or conversions), then hopefully persuade her to move to domain.com/blog as you suggested.

Appreciate the response. Any further suggestions welcome!

Regards,

Murray

A new client has the following domains:

• www.domain.com (on Shopify)
• www.blogdomain.com (on Squarespace)

It seems BOTH domains are using the same Google Analytics account ID. But they are essentially two different websites (as opposed to the blog being a subdomain or subfolder). I'm struggling to see what value this blog structure is adding to the ecommerce site.

Should these be set up as cross-domain tracking?

Hey Logan,

Thanks for clarification on the hreflang tags - sounds good.

Re the .eu TLD, the client is keen to go this route just to enable Euro currency in the checkout. But I agree it is sub-optimal. If there is sufficient business case (ie. traffic), then I will suggest .fr, .de, etc. I believe the Langify app in Shopify works well. Otherwise, I might suggest .com in US$ for all countries other than Aus and UK.

Also wondering on your thoughts re domainuk.com, versus domain.co.uk?

Furthermore, it appears that region targetting only works for specific countries ('eu' is not an option).

So it appears that the proposed solution isn't going to achieve the desired outcome after all:

1. because the hreflang tags are intended for different languages and all four of our sites will be in English
2. because 'eu' is not recognised by the tags

Anyone out there got a solution?

Hi Logan,

OK, there's a possible gotcha here. All four sites (.com, au, uk and eu) will be in English. So content will be identical. The purpose of the hreflang tags seems to be for multi-language versions of the same site. This is not the case here. The primary reason for country specific TLDs is just to allow customers to transact in their local currency, but also to be indexed in the local version of Google.

Make sense?

That's very helpful - many thanks Logan

Here's the scenario:

• I have a client currently running one Shopify site (AU)
• They want to launch three more country domains (US, UK and EU)
• They want each to be a standalone site, primarily so the customers can purchase in their local currency, which is not possible from a single Shopify site
• The inventory is all from the same source
• The product desscriptions will all be the same as well

Question: How do we avoid content duplication (ie. how will canonical tags work in this scenario)?

Thanks Sean,

It's a Shopify site, so I don't think the dev has access to server logs.

I think the alternative approach might work though. I'm not sure if they have a URL export, but if they do I'll suggest they use the list function.

Thx again.

Don't know. That's the problem. The dev doesn't actually know how many pages she might have missed. She's looking for a way to identify exactly how many there are and what they are.

I just had a developer friend call me in a panic, because they had gone live with a new site and found out (the hard way) that they had missed some pages on their 301 redirects. So the pages are appearing in Google but serving 404s. Ouch!

So their question was: other than running a report for 404 errors in something like Screaming Frog, is there a way to hunt down ONLY pages serving 404s, then export to CSV so they can be redirected?

Anyone got any tricks up their sleeve?

Just started a site audit and trying to determine the number of pages on a client site and whether there are more pages being indexed than actually exist. I've used four tools and got four very different answers...

• Google Search Console: 237 indexed pages
• Google search using site command: 468 results
• MOZ site crawl: 1013 unique URLs
• Screaming Frog: 183 page titles, 187 URIs (note this is a free licence, but should cut off at 500)

Can anyone shed any light on why they differ so much? And where lies the truth?