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Hi Eddie,
Are you viewing the domain property version by any chance?
To access the the old search console I found I had to visit the individual versions e.g https://www to see all the options. In some cases, I actually manually readded the properties just in order get the old version.
Hope it's as simple as this for you!
Nick
Hi there,
Stefans answers are a great starting point.
In terms of auditing and additional suggestions, hopefully this link works for you: https://gtmetrix.com/reports/madrasatelquran.com/TT6BpNfi
I'd also strongly advise you run the site through Google's official PageSpeed Insights here: https://madrasatelquran.com/
The biggest things which stand out for me as being low hanging fruit is images and image optimisation.
e.g https://madrasatelquran.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Madrsat-El-Quran-Banner-2.jpg Google says you could save 219 KB by reducing this with a next gen format. Tiny PNG reduces it by 70%, run it yourself here https://tinypng.com/
Overall your homepage size of 2.80 MB stands out to me. 1.3 MB of this is images, so if we take the above example and extrapolate....we should be able to decrease this under 2MB which could be fantastic for desktop and especially mobile.
Either optimise the images manually or use an image optimisation Plugin for Wordpress. Here https://www.wpbeginner.com/plugins/best-wordpress-image-compression-plugins-compared/
Hope this helps!
Nick
Hi there,
Are you using the popular WPML plugin by any chance?
If so, I wouldn't overthink it too much; the necessary hreflang implementation will be automatically added to each variation of the page providing you "link them together".
If you are a smallish operation and don't have a staging side to play around with, then you can prep all of these posts ahead of time and simply save them as drafts 
My only recommendation would be to make sure nothing is published prematurely; it's better to wait and translate rather than adding placeholder /lanuage/ versions with little or zero content.
I'd also look to set up different language version folders within Google Search Console to ensure everything is indexed properly, geotargetting is enabled and that your foreign language ones ARE receiving traffic and clicks from Google.
Here's some further reading:
Google Search Console setup for href lang - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en
Official WPML guide with good visuals - https://wpml.org/documentation/getting-started-guide/
Moz Href lang/international guide - https://moz.com/learn/seo/hreflang-tag
Good luck with the implementation, if you've made it this far with WordPress you should definitely be able to make the plugin work
I think I also asked this within the comments section of the Moz Blog, but could you expand on some of the technical challenges of permitting "historical" DA?
Now that it has been updated/reset, surely now is the perfect time to start "when records began".
I'm assuming there's lots of us out that that have no record of old DA anywhere as we never really exported it but nevertheless would like to know or reminisce about the growth of our sites
Hi Rod,
From reading the title, are you saying you have tried to do this and it has caused redirect chain issues?
I don't suppose you're using Wordpress and/or a CDN? It's a common error I have seen with that CMS due to how Wordpress natively redirects some parts of the URL.
Anyway, here are a few stackoverflows with suitable code snippets:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13977851/htaccess-redirect-to-https-www
Note: You will need a wildcard SSL certificate or to generate two which cover non-www and www to ensure the directs work properly.
Good luck,
Nick
It's sort of a legacy quirk of the internet, how HTTP works and files are accessed on the internet I suppose. Basically "computers" do make a distinction between different file paths, even if they ultimately point to the same resource.
You need to choose a canonical version i.e a main version and then redirect the others to that.
Either choose which version you prefer www or non www, or quickly see which one has more backlinks and then go with that one.
I can see you're on Joomla, so this guide should help: https://joomlaseo.com/checklist/choose-www-or-non-www
With regards to why you need HTTPs, the biggest justification is that Google now treats it as a ranking factor and a quality signal: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/08/https-as-ranking-signal.html
Technically your checkout is secure as you said but as per the above, it's still advisable your traffic is encrypted.
Hope this helps,
Nick
P.S
Please give my comments a thumbs up if they are useful or mark as helpful
Hi Bek,
The short answer is that updating meta descriptions will have zero impact directly on how well these pages rank, however a more compelling meta description combined with a pretty URL and a decent title tag will help boost click-thru-rate (CTR).
CTR as a ranking factor is the latest Google Conspiracy theories amongst SEOs. Google denies they use SERP data however a lot of professional (including I believe Rand Fishkin, founder of Moz) disagree with this assertion based on their experiences...
So basically updating metas could have an indirect benefit for ranking, but mostly there will be zero impact and thus wouldn't be worth prioritizing over high-impact SEO activities.
If you had to update some, I'f urge that you evaluate which pages already rank on the first page and prioritize them for the best chance of a direct impact.
Or again if you have limited time, just focus on the title tags themselves. These will have the biggest impact!
More Info: https://moz.com/learn/seo/title-tag
I hope this sort of helps and puts you on the right path,
Nick
I know Moz is transparent so this would have been documented somewhere but I totally didn't know this/forgot!
Hi,
Are you referring to PHP functions there? If so, content will be rendered server side and thus Google will have no problems crawling it, unlike some websites with JavaScript dependencies (not all).
Regarding duplicate content issues, Donald Silvernail is absolute correct in that using a cross domain canonical is undoubtedly best practice:
Rand has done an excellent White Board Friday on it, which explains it here: https://moz.com/blog/cross-domain-rel-canonical-seo-value-cross-posted-content
Hope this helps!
Nick
Hi Simon,
Quick question which I think I can guess the answer, does the current canonical page rank for anything at all?
Can't the developers make the canonical a static page (which currently redirects) default to the most popular and or a vanilla combination of product attributes?
That would of course be the best option, failing that you would have to just canonicalise to the most popular product variation and do so in a way that doesn't create a redirect chain.
I literally just referenced SiteBulb in another post, and I don't want to come across like a shill but there's a great explanation of it your issue here: https://sitebulb.com/hints/indexability/canonical-hints/canonical-points-to-a-redirecting-url/
Easier said than done for sure with some CMS and E-Commerce sites, but as the aforementioned link says...it's generally dealt with on a case by case basis.
Appreciate this is isn't a definitive answer but I hope it helps!
Nick
Hi there,
First question, which versions of the website have you verified within Search Console? I assume we're talking about the www and https version as per your link?
Second question, what is the URL of your sitemap and is it in .xml format? Do you use Yoast?
Kind regards,
Nick
Hi Katherine,
Looks like you've covered most obvious areas of investigation but I'd be happy to take a glance if I get a can.
Please could you share with me some example articles and ones of your competitors which feature in top stories?
Cheers,
Nick
Hi there,
Great question!
I must admit that some of the wording for this confused me as well...
I've pasted below some snippets from Google's official guidelines on managing multilingual websites and added my own thoughts here and there: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en/
"If you choose to try to guess at the user’s language preference when they enter your site, you can use the browser’s language setting or the IP address and ask the user to confirm the choice." Let the user switch the page language If you have multiple versions of a page:
Using JavaScript to do this will ensure that Googlebot does not get confused.
"If you prefer to dynamically change content or reroute the user based on language settings, be aware that Google might not find and crawl all your variations. This is because the Googlebot crawler usually originates from the USA. In addition, the crawler sends HTTP requests without setting Accept-Language in the request header."
Pair this with a good XML sitemap and the user can have a great interaction. Plus, the search engines will be able to crawl and index all of your translated content.
No specific answer or single quote to copy but this covers on-page annotation and XML sitemaps: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077
- Hope this helps as a starter!
Nick
Also just to add the new search console won't necessarily solve anything just because it's new, however it will allow you to delete old sitemaps and to resubmit!
Great answer Alex!
I'm not too familiar with ASP and the CMS which powers your website but if it is a case of hardcoded reference, it's definitely worth asking a developer if they can run "a bulk find and replace."
As Alex says, using relative links is preferred these days but a quick but if your developer doesn't feel up to it or doesn't want to dabble in too much regex, what I said should be a quick and dirty solution.
Good luck!
Nick
Also just to add:
""If you choose to try to guess at the user’s language preference when they enter your site, you can use the browser’s language setting or the IP address and ask the user to confirm the choice. Using JavaScript to do this will ensure that Googlebot does not get confused." It's about giving the user choice and not force redirecting them aka it's ok to query the language and suggest it, but not force it.
For example, GoogleBot is mostly from USA, so it would be auto-forced to US content options which theoretically means it could miss other versions.
If you are redirected to a particularly language version, you need to give the user the option to switch...
Hi there,
Personally I would simple remove the sites from the server first before even considering disavowing; depending on how many links Google has crawled disavowing could be a massive time sink which doesn't actually yield any benefits...
There's some decent discussion around Disavow here in the era of Penguin 4.0 algorithm update: https://moz.com/blog/do-we-still-need-to-disavow-penguin
I can't verify this but by Google logic those dodgy links shouldn't be having any impact.
As per EGOL, I would definitely get to the bottom of how these are being created, you need to know where the server is or how they are being added.
If you can't do this and don't need any of the main wildcard redirects then simply find where the domain is hosting and remove the DNS entries which point to the server...
Good luck!
Nick
Hey OP,
Please could you potentially reword your question to make it a bit simplier to answer?
You = BetterRX.com (an app)
Brand Competitor = BetterRxCard.com (Prescription card)
Where does Good RX come into it, sorry?
Cheers,
Nick
P.S
Do BetterRX.com and BetterRXcard.com compete in the same industry? I think this is the case from Googling but just wanted to be sure!
Hi there,
This is a tremendously complicated question to answer I'm afraid 
The best thing I could advise you to do is to use Google Search Console and do some fetch and renders as Google.
Here are my thoughts:
Correct me if I'm wrong, but you basically mean, create additional page? If that's the case, then creating "static" pages would have make a lot of sense if you want to rank for these keywords.
I'd suspect your best bet would be a combination of fetch and render from Search Console and checking your server logs; I don't personally think the "open new tab" behaviour is relevant here as a robot crawls the site after all.
Hopefully this starts the discussion so someone else can give you a better answer.
Nick
Interesting development which may be of interest to you Ernst:
Google admitted just the other day that they "haven't supported rel=next/prev for years." https://searchengineland.com/google-apologizes-for-relnext-prev-mixup-314494
"Should you remove the markup? Probably not. Google has communicated this morning in a video hangout that while it may not use rel=next/prev for search, it can still be used by other search engines and by browsers, among other reasons. So while Google may not use it for search indexing, rel=prev/next can still be useful for users. Specifically some browsers might use those annotations for things like prefetching and accessibility purposes."
