Welcome to the Q&A Forum

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.

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?

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 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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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 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 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?

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.

Hi everyone, One of our websites was changed to non-www to www. The non-www pages were then redirected to avoid duplicate issue. Moz and Screaming Frog flagged a number of these redirected pages as missing canonical tags. Is the canonical tag still required for pages already redirecting? Or is it detecting another possible duplicate page that we haven't redirected yet? Also, the rankings for this website isn't improving despite having us optimising these pages as best as we could. I'm wondering if this canonical tag issue may be affecting it. Thank you.

We have a new client and they don't have meta descriptions yet. However, Google has assigned descriptions for them now appearing on the SERPs. The problem is that Google added a phone number that's totally not the client's and goes to a different unrelated business. Our plan is to update the meta to reflect the correct information, however, we're just perplexed as to how Google came up with the incorrect phone number. Where does it get its information from? The page currently has all the correct phone number, hours, and content. I've read that Google sometimes also doesn't recognise our meta descriptions if it thinks they could serve up a better one. My next question is, what if Google insists on showing the incorrect phone number. Is there a way we can fix this? Thanks!

Hi everyone, we noticed while doing last month's reports that even the best performing campaigns have a few keywords that slipped - some up to 10 positions down. We know keywords fluctuate every month, but May was just a weird month for rankings. While looking at possible issues that caused this, we noticed that these campaigns' clicks have gone up. So while keywords have gone down, their visitors seemed to be on the rise. Is there a correlation? Maybe Google saw an increase in visitors and decided something's up and lowered the rankings (this sounds ridiculous - sorry! May just be pure luck, but thought I'd ask anyway). Has anyone seen a drop in their rankings for May also? I checked everywhere, and I don't think there has been a major update going on. Thanks!

Hi everyone, could anyone please help me understand what to do next with the xml sitemap after making on page changes? For example, a website has an already existing xml sitemap and it's submitted to Google search console. We make changes to the website - URL structure, content, added new pages, 301 redirected broken links etc. for optimisation. Is there anything that we should do to change/update their current xml sitemap? Does it automatically update itself? Do we have to resubmit their xml sitemap to search console? Thanks!

I created and verified a new Google My Business page for a client and found that there won't be any more Google+ created automatically. I spoke to Google Support and they confirmed this is the case because apparently, the two Google products confuse people. Now, if we want a G+ page created for our client, we have to go and 'Apply' for one here - https://plus.google.com/create We're not sure how to go moving forward with new clients. Has anyone tried to apply for a G+ account successfully using the above link? If we create a new Gmail account, don't we get a G+ account anyway (or is that not the case as well)?

Hi everyone, I work for a digital marketing agency in Australia. Our team noticed some businesses similar to ours use a free SEO Audit tool on their homepages. We are considering having one as well but, but want to know how it would benefit us. Will adding this tool on our home page help us rank better in Google? If yes, can you please tell us how? Thank you.