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Hi,

How do I "force" Google to change the Parent Organization in the Knowledge Graph box? I've gone about & suggested changes a few times by the Parent Organisation value is still being displayed.

That's good to know! Thanks!

Hi everyone,

We are changing a website's domain name. The site architecture will stay the same, but we are renaming some pages. How do we treat redirects? I read this on Search Engine Land:

The ideal way to set up your redirects is with a regex expression in the .htaccess file of your old site. The regex expression should simply swap out your domain name, or swap out HTTP for HTTPS if you are doing an SSL migration.

For any pages where this isn’t possible, you will need to set up an individual redirect. Make sure this doesn’t create any conflicts with your regex and that it doesn’t produce any redirect chains.

Does the above mean we are able to set up a domain redirect on the regex for pages that we are not renaming and then have individual 1:1 redirects for renamed pages in the same .htaccess file? So have both? This will not conflict with the regex rule?

Thanks so much for taking the time to respond. Our website still has a small amount of SEO authority and I think too much internal links is spreading our equity thin. Having a look at our pages, the blog and product categories are inflating our internal links. I'll see if I can remove these.

Hi Miriam,

Yes, these are very helpful! Thanks for the advice on doing a competitive audit. I will certainly do this for both clients!

Hi everyone,

Too much of anything is not good. In terms of internal linking, how many are too many? I read that the recommended internal links are about 100 links per page otherwise it dilutes the page's link equity. I have a concern about one of our websites - according to search console, the homepage has 923 internal links. All the pages have a corresponding /feed page added to the page URL, which is really weird (is this caused by a plugin?). The site also has an e-com feature, but it is not used as the site is essentially a brochure and customers are encouraged to visit the shop. I assume the e-com feature also increases this number.

On the other hand, one of the competitors we are tracking has 1 internal link site-wide. Ours is at 45,000 site-wide. How is it possible to only have 1 internal link? Is this a Moz bug?

I know we also need to reduce our internal links badly, however, I'm not sure where to start. I don't know how these internal links are linked together - some aren't in the copy or navigation menu. When I scan the homepage links using 'check my links', the total links identified for the homepage is only 170.

kAeYlTM

Hi Miriam,

Thank you for your response and sorry for the delay in responding!

1 - No, there are no other businesses in the same category located at this address. I have seen instances where Google filtered out same category businesses in the same building - one of our clients is actually experiencing this! They are lawyers that share the same office as 3 other lawyers and our advice was to try and have the best ranking power out of the listings they're competing against.

2 - Camp Hill is a suburb in the city of Brisbane. Customers usually use the term "pool builders brisbane" or "pool renovations brisbane" when looking for local pool service providers. We want to rank highly for these terms and also appear in the local maps for these terms, but we are getting filtered out for some reason. I understand that results vary also on proximity of the searcher, however, where I'm searching from (Brisbane's central business district), the business doesn't appear readily on maps. The business is only about 4km away from where I'm searching from, but competitors that are as far as 19km away appear on maps with no issues.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks Miriam!

Hi everyone,

We are having an issue with this local business. The Google listing isn't immediately appearing on the map. You have to move the map or zoom in and out for the listing to appear. I find this really odd as our competitors - with no reviews and way further in proximity - are appearing with no issues.

The listing is only about 4km where I'm doing the search, while competitors with no reviews are about 20km away. We are ranking in the top 5 organically for the search term I used (pool renovations brisbane), but nowhere in local unless the map is moved. When the listing appears, sometimes the pin also looks grey instead of red, while others are red (if that makes sense).

On top of this, their organic rankings have also been on a downward trend since June. I'm currently doing a backlink audit to see if it's contributing to the issue. If anyone also has other ideas, could you please let me know? Thanks.

Yes, thank you very much!

Great article, thanks for sharing!

When Google rolled out Panda and Penguin, I assume these links have been discounted and any site punishment has already happened. The website is performing well, however, just recently these comment backlinks have started popping up again as "new" backlinks on Ahrefs. Being "newly-found", will this have a negative impact on the website? Should we be worried about these and start disavowing or is it OK to ignore them? Thanks.

Thanks! We probably should have combined JS with CSS and not built a site fully reliant on JS. This looks like what our competitors have done.

Thanks so much for the very helpful insights and for running our website through tests, I appreciate it. I'll try running the site on lighthouse. I agree we do have speed issues that we need to solve. Our page is also not showing up at all with GSC fetch and render.

Also, I tried Googling our brand + content within the expanding tabs and some did not show up on the SERPs. All other content not in expanding tabs showed up. I know Google still reads and indexes tabbed content but treats it with less importance. But I guess, not all of it will get indexed.

Thanks again!

Hi Brett, thanks for your response, I've read a couple recently published articles, but this was the one that stood out - https://www.elephate.com/blog/ultimate-guide-javascript-seo/ and kinda alarmed me.

There is a part there that says: there is virtually no real life case of a client rendered JS website/brand/store ranking high. So I can’t guarantee that your JavaScript-rich website will rank as high as its HTML equivalent.

Our site was built on WordPress, but predominantly JavaScript. We have been really working a lot on on page content and link building the past 6 months, but we could not beat our competitors in the top 3 for the keyword 'seo brisbane'. The closest we've gotten was #6. We've been monitoring their sites as well and it looks like only 1 is doing active link building. The others seemed to be just cemented there.

We're looking at other reasons why we're not moving up and Javascript is one of them.

We have other sites we manage that are also experiencing slow progress. So you are right, my question is centered on how Javascript sites affect SEO and how to know if it's the culprit and how to fix.

Thanks!

I've done a bit of reading and I'm having difficulty grasping it. Can someone explain it to me in simple language?

What I've gotten so far:

• Javascript can block search engine bots from fully rendering your website.

• If bots are unable to render your website, it may not be able to see important content and discount these content from their index.

• To know if bots could render your site, check the following:

• Google Search Console Fetch and Render

• Turn off Javascript on your browser and see if there are any site elements shown or did some disappear

• Use an online tool Technical SEO Fetch and Render

• Screaming Frog's Rendered Page

• GTMetrix results: if it has a Defer parsing of Javascript as a recommendation, that means there are elements being blocked from rendering (???)

Using our own site as an example, I ran our site through all the tests listed above. Results:

• Google Search Console: Rendered only the header image and text. Anything below wasn't rendered. The resources googlebot couldn't reach include Google Ad Services, Facebook, Twitter, Our Call Tracker and Sumo. All "Low" or blank severity.
• Turn off Javascript: Shows only the logo and navigation menu. Anything below didn't render/appear.
• Technical SEO Fetch and Render: Our page rendered fully on Googlebot and Googlebot Mobile.
• Screaming Frog: The Rendered Page tab is blank. It says 'No Data'.
• GTMetrix Results: Defer parsing of JavaScript was recommended.

From all these results and across all the tools I used, how do I know what needs fixing? Some tests didn't render our site fully while some did. With varying results, I'm not sure where to from here.

One of our shopify sites suffered an extreme rankings drop. Recent Google algorithm updates include mobile first so I tested the site and our team got different mobile-friendly test results. However, search console is also flagging pages as not mobile friendly. So, while us end-users see the site as OK on mobile, this may not be the case for Google?

I researched more about inconsistent mobile test results and found answers that say it may be due to robots.txt blocking stylesheets.

Do you recognise any directory blocked that might be affecting Google's rendering? We can't edit shopify robots.txt unfortunately. Our dev said the only thing that stands out to him is Disallow: /design_theme_id and the rest shouldn't be hindering Google bots.

Here are some of the files blocked:

Disallow: /admin
Disallow: /cart
Disallow: /orders
Disallow: /checkout
Disallow: /9103034/checkouts
Disallow: /9103034/orders
Disallow: /carts
Disallow: /account
Disallow: /collections/+
Disallow: /collections/%2B
Disallow: /collections/%2b
Disallow: /blogs/+
Disallow: /blogs/%2B
Disallow: /blogs/%2b
Disallow: /design_theme_id
Disallow: /preview_theme_id
Disallow: /preview_script_id
Disallow: /discount/*
Disallow: /gift_cards/*
Disallow: /apple-app-site-association

Check the websites of the competitors that outranked you. What's their on page like? Do they have a local presence in the US? Who are linking back to them? Do their sites have a better link profile than yours? Check their estimated traffic per month. Is it higher than yours? You can get the link and traffic data from AHREFS.

Try adding the areas you serve in your copy. Plus, on the footer and/or contact page - add your business name, suburb and postcode, hours and phone number. Even if you don't have your full street address on your website, Google should be able to tell the areas you are serving based on your website content and rank you for local searches accordingly.

Yes, if your meta descriptions are duplicates, Google won't use these and instead get a snippet of content on the page. If you want Google to use your assigned meta description, write original and quality descriptions. If there's absolutely no way for you to assign individual descriptions on pages (I've seen some page structures built to share 1 metatitle & description - it's ridiculous), make sure the first few sentences of the page are acceptable as your description as Google would likely pull that info.

Using a canonical depends on how much duplicate content you'll have on the page. If it's a sentence or two, an attribution at the end of the article should be enough. If more than that, you may have to add a canonical tag on the section of the page in order to avoid the duplication issue. If a page has a canonical, Google would likely not index the page and index the original source instead.

That plugin is great, it shows search volumes even on predictive search. I figured how to add a list to SEMRush too - thank you!!

We use Keyword Planner to get a rough idea if a keyword has search volumes and worth tracking. But recently, it's showing zeroes (all locations) for very broad search terms such as "corn seed" "sorghum seed" "canola seed" and all variations of these three with "seed" in the phrase.

We checked trends and there are searches for it. Has keyword planner gone bonkers? There were search volumes for corn, canola and sorghum variations, just not words with "seed", which is very odd. "corn grain" has 9,900 searches and "canola plant" has 5,400 searches, for example. "canola seed" has 201-500 searches on Moz, so keyword planner, I think really filtered out seed words.

Is there another tool where we could just copy/paste or import a list and it'll show us the search volumes? I uploaded words on Moz, but we can only get search vol ranges and mostly don't have data yet for Australian searches.

Does SEMRush have this capability too? I couldn't seem to find where to upload a list.

If Google just filtered out these words, is there a way to get around it?

From what I read here, the use of multiple H1 tags depends on what HTML version you are using. If it's HTML4 or XHTML, only use one H1 per page, but if you are using HTML5 you can have one per section. HTML5 uses the new semantic elements like

<header>and

<footer>to work out the hierarchy, with headings only affecting hierarchy within one of those tags.

Source: https://moz.com/community/q/how-will-it-effect-seo-to-have-multiple-h1-tags-on-a-page

</footer>

</header>

It obviously depends on budget and needs. When you're a customer, you want options so you can make an informed decision.

Here's a comparison article for pitchbox, ninja outreach, buzzstream and mailshake - https://www.pointvisible.com/blog/outreach-tools-spotlight-pitchbox-vs-ninja-outreach-vs-buzzstream-vs-mailshake/

Just to echo Andrew's answer above, making the heading, URL etc say what the page is about is also more user-friendly. If they're looking for more information about you, they may not know that this page contains the info they want.

You can change the URL back to about and request google to crawl and index the page (use the fetch tool). If they've indexed /storytelling, it's going to come up in the broken links section of Google Search Console. If so, yes, do a 301 redirect.

Thanks, Paul! We'll try disabling RocketLoader.

The website is https://ashleydouglas.com.au/

• I tried using http://www.seo-browser.com/ to see if bots could see the content on the site, but the tool was unable to retrieve the page.
• I used mobile-friendly test and it just rendered some menu links - no content and images.
• I also used Fetch and Render on Search Console. The result for 'how google sees the page' and 'how a visitor sees the page' are the same and only showing the main header image. Anything below isn't shown.

Does this mean that bots can't actually read all content on the page past the header image?

I'm not well versed with what's going on with the code. Why are the elements below the header not rendering? Is it the theme? Plugins?

Thank you.

Hello there, I asked the same question here and we've followed this advice:

"This is a common issue and if you do a Google search about this issue, you will find a lot of discussion about this with many kind of opinions. Sitewide footer links are generally not a safe idea. Many people recommend making those links nofollow.

One solution could be to make the sitewide links nofollow, except the link in your customers frontpage footer. Then you'll get the link juice from the front page, but no penalty from sitewide links."

Hi Jack, try to copy-paste your keyword list directly into the ad group list on the right hand panel. From there, download your list and it should show the search volumes of all keywords on the list even if they've been grouped originally on the 'keyword ideas' table. You would also find that grouped keywords have the same search volume individually. Hope this helps, let me know how you go.

If your current backlinks also average DA 20-30, that may be preventing your site to go any higher. Try obtaining links that are in the DA 40-50 range or higher. Having those quality sites consistently linking back to you should move the needle up.

Hi Alan, I don't think the extra 3 spaces would affect your SEO / rankings tremendously. Bots would still crawl and recognise the keywords in the URL. If you're after visibility on SERPs, you can optimise your meta title and description in a way that your brand & keywords are visible and clickable. As the meta title font is heaps bigger than the URL and description, that would be the first thing searchers see. Also, I doubt your URL will get truncated in SERPs with the extra 3 characters. Hope this helps!

Hello there, according to this guide there is no SEO benefit with choosing one over the other - it all depends on preference. Whatever you choose, let Google know your preference through Google Search Console. With regards to technical differences, adding www acts as a hostname that helps with DNS flexibility, restricting cookies etc. non-www doesn't have the same technical advantage according to the guide.

Both help in SEO. Internal links for ensuring that bots crawl and connect your pages together. Backlinks for improving your site's authority. The latter has more weight in terms of outranking competitors.

Hello, just some guidelines:

• Write simple and straightforward headlines. Add compelling content that explains what your product is and how it solves customers' problems. Your content should provide readers all the value that they'll get from buying your product.

-Avoid super long paragraphs. Try to write your content in a way that it's easy to read and understand. Break them apart into lists, add subheadings or Question and Answers.

• Use calls to action that entice users to click. Try to instill a sense of urgency in your CTA buttons. Depending on how long your content / page is, you should have a couple of CTAs.

• Add images and videos. Make sure the images are in sync with your content. Layout matters - it needs to guide your customers to the end goal, which is to convert. It needs to be easy on the eyes.

• To help improve web page speed, make sure that your images are optimised for web page use.

Hello there, from what I've read, so long as you write unique, interesting natural content, you don't need to worry about keyword stuffing. If content flows naturally and gives a lot of value to users, it should be fine. Unnatural keyword usage looks like this: "Bob's cheap Seattle plumber is the best cheap Seattle plumber for all your plumbing needs. Contact a cheap Seattle plumber before it's too late."

If you are worried, maybe try spreading the keywords around, using synonyms or adding more valuable content to thin out the keyword mentions. Hope this helps.

Perfect, thanks for sharing the link!

Thanks for this! We won't be worrying about the T&Cs and such and will try to rewrite the product pages as we work on SEO on these individual brands and are trying to rank them all in their respective locations.

I think it's best to respond as a company rather than as an individual. Company responses seem more legitimate and help to build trust especially when responding to a negative review. Personally, when I see these responses, I don't really think it's the actual owner but are representatives of the company.

Hi everyone,

We are working on 5 websites that offer the same products but are of different brands and locations. They are owned by the same company, but each run independently. On the sites, they have content such as privacy policies, terms and conditions and guides that are the same across all brands. Will publishing these be flagged as duplicate content by Google? If yes, is it recommended to add rel=canonical to all duplicate pages across all sites pointing to one of the five?

We are just concerned that the 4 sites with duplicate content would be valued less than the canonical as a result of passed link equity. We are doing SEO optimisations for all and are trying to rank them well in SERPs.

If a canonical is not the best solution here, what would be the best to do apart from completely rewriting content? Is it noindex tag or turning the texts into images and adding to PDFs?

Thank you.

Hi there, if it's not on htaccess and you're on WordPress, check if you have redirect plugins? If not on those two, the redirect was probably done via code. I found this article, which may hopefully help you - https://www.webconfs.com/154/301-redirects-how-to-redirect-your-website/

Hi, adding a canonical tag to your main site should allow Google to tell which one to index, especially if your 301s aren't working. More info about it here: https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2288690/how-and-when-to-use-301-redirects-vs-canonical

There is also the option of adding a noindex tag to a page: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93710?hl=en

Hope this helps.

Hello there, according to this article by Rand - https://moz.com/blog/what-if-my-competitors-point-spammy-links-to-my-site Google is pretty good at determining spammy links and if you have such pointing to your site, they should be able to discount these links. However, your site is clearly being affected by this as shown by your rankings drop.

Have you checked that your site isn't hacked? http://www.isithacked.com/

Have you checked that you don't have any manual actions on your search console?

Have you checked whether you have some traffic coming from weird locations? I ask because there was a time when a site we're working on published a harmless blog on children and the use of snapchat and there was a spike of visitors searching for explicit materials landing on that page. As a result, we suddenly had a ton of backlinks with explicit anchors that go to that page. Their rankings went down. The page was deleted though and all went back to normal.

This article might also help you: https://moz.com/blog/preparing-for-negative-seo

The author, however, said that for an attack with the same scale as yours, it is a good idea to audit your links regularly and submit a disavow file. Hope this helps.

Hello, the canonical should be enough in this case as it helps Google determine which page is the original out of the many duplicates. 301 is used if you want the duplicate pages gone and its link authority transferred to the original page.

From Search Engine Watch:

301 – Hey, Search Engines: My page is no longer here, and has permanently moved to a new page. Please remove it from your index and pass credit to the new page.

Canonical – Hey, (most) Search Engines: I have multiple versions of this page (or content), please only index this version. I’ll keep the others available for people to see, but don’t include them in your index and please pass credit to my preferred page.

https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2288690/how-and-when-to-use-301-redirects-vs-canonical

Hi everyone,

We have a fully optimised client site with Moz optimisation scores of 95% and above. Each month we also create 1-2 backlinks. However, for the keywords we track, our client's site is stuck and no longer moving up at the bottom of page 1 and further down to page 2 and 3.

The keywords ranking on first page are also getting very low click through rates - between 1% and 3%.

The sites that outrank us are a mix of:

• Top X Places to visit...
• X Best Places to see...
• Trip advisor
• Things to do in...
• A guide to the best...

Is there a chance for us to outrank the type of sites above? Will persevering in link building do the trick? I understand this may take a while because we have a fixed time and budget for each of our clients. If we can't outrank these lifestyle and list sites, will beating just direct competitors be enough? However, this won't change the low CTR issue...

Another solution we're looking at is to change our keywords, which may be a bit tough because the current ones we track, even though they are a little broad, are exactly what the client offer and already have low search volumes. Going more specific will surely have lesser search volumes.

Thanks in advance.

Hi there, I found an answer to my question. Indeed, GMB and G+ are now two different entities and we no longer could create G+ from GMB. I found the following resources:

Use this link to start your G+ Brand page https://plus.google.com/brand

Manage G+ brand pages by switching from your avatar up on the right to "All your brand pages" or bookmark this link
https://myaccount.google.com/brandaccounts

Create and manage Collections for your brand. Here is a help article: https://plus.google.com/u/0/+NinaTrankova/posts/EYY9iu2JZFx

Source: https://plus.google.com/+NinaTrankova/posts/S4Ca7QHHHRJ

Hi everyone,

I tried to create a Google+ account from a client's Google My Business, but found that 'Enable Google+' is no longer available on the sidebar of the GMB dashboard. I used this tutorial to do that before  - http://onlineownership.com/create-google-page-connected-google-business-page/

An update on that article:

Update: 31st October 2017
Google My Business has confirmed that enabling a G+ business page will no longer be available. Users will need to now create a G+ Brand page for their business on G+.

My question is: If we create a separate G+ Brand page, are we still able to tie it up with GMB or are they going to be completely different platforms? On the dashboard for our older clients we have a list that goes like:

Your Business is Live on Google

• View on Search
• View on Maps
• View on Google+

In light of this new change. Do we still really have to bother creating G+ brand pages? It seems like the newly launched Google Posts is more user-friendly and easier to update. The posts could be created on GMB and it's going to appear on searches within the local knowledge graph. Thoughts?

Thank you, I think that having only 1 backlink on the homepage footer is the best approach.

Hi everyone,

I'm just doing a backlink audit of our newly relaunched site and saw that we have about 9,000 backlinks. Unfortunately, we have neglected our own link building. About 8,000+ of these links are from the websites we have built - sitewide footer links. These are also exact match anchor texts i.e. website by Bambrick Media. Because of that, our referring domain is only at 200+.

Is this bad practice? Should we keep these backlinks / keep doing this for future sites we build?

We feel like our backlink profile, the above in particular, is affecting our rankings and traffic. We're not ranking very well for our keywords. Compared to our competitors who have a quarter or less of the backlinks we have, they're ranking better, have more organic keywords, and are getting more organic traffic.

Thanks in advance.

Thanks, everyone! We'll consider adding these canonical tags in the future, but won't flag it as urgent at the moment