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Recently my company started consulting for a SaaS company.

They're clearly the best known, most trusted company on their area of work and they have the strongest brand, best product and therefore more users than any of their competitors by a big margin. Still, 99% of their traffic comes from branded, despite having 3x more domains, better performance scores and more content.

Even using tools such as SimilarWeb for comparing user satisfaction metrics, they seem to have lower bounce rates and more visits per session.

Still, they rank for almost nothing that is non branded on Google (they rank extremely well for almost everything on bing and DuckDuckGo).

They don't have any obvious issues with crawling or indexation - we've gone to great depths to tick off any issues that could be affecting this.

My conclusion is that it's either a penalty or a bug, but GSC is not flagging any manual actions.

These are the things we've identified:

1. All the content was moved from domain1.com to domain2.com at the end of 2017. 301s were put in place, migration was confirmed on GSC. Everything was done with great care and we couldn't identify any issues with it.

2. Some subdomains of the site, especially support, rank extremely well for all sorts of keywords, even very competitive ones but the www subdomain ranks for almost nothing on Google. The www subdomain has 1,000s of domains pointing to it while the support has only a few 100s.

3. Google is performing delayed rendering attempts on old pages, JS and CSS particularly versions of assets that were live before the migration in 2017, including the old homepage. Again, the redirects have been in place for 3 years.

4. Search Console frequently showing old HTML (at least a year old) in cache despite a recent crawl date and a current 301.

5. Search Console frequently processing old HTML (at least a year old) when reporting on schema.

6. Search Console is sometimes selecting pages from the old domain as the canonical of a URL of an existing page of the current domain, despite a long-standing 301 and the canonicals being well configured for 3 years now.

Has anyone experienced anything similar in the past? We've been doing an analysis of old SEO practices, link profile, disavow... nothing points to black hat practices and at this point we're wondering if it's just Google doing a terrible job with this particular domain.

http://cyberweek.com/submit/

I've got 3 sites (same name) located in Australia, US and UK. Currently these sites are all pulling images (I own) from 1 location.

I'd like to create image XML sitemaps for each of these sites.

As I see it, my options are:

1. Keeping the images hosted in the 1 place and creating image XML sitemaps for each of the 3 sites (which seems to be technically ok because https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/178636?hl=en&ref_topic=20986 states that if the image URL isn't on the same domain, both domains need to be verified in Webmaster Tools). However, is there a risk here that the sitemaps will conflict because they are pulling from images on the same host?

2. Hosting the images locally (ie. the same images will be hosted in 3 locations) and applying hreflang in the sitemap.

Does anyone know which of these options are best (obviously #1 would be more convenient), or whether there are any other options for attacking this issue?

Thanks!

Bulk paid directory submission is not the answer you are looking for. Not to say that you won't necessarily receive a boost from this, in some cases paid directory submissions do help. However, the boost may be temporary, especially if you are playing in a competitive market.

I agree with Lavellester - start reviewing your competitor's link profile, and look for quality link opportunities on a regular basis (link velocity) rather than one-off hits.

I would stay well away from doing the above in terms of SEO. If you were going to do anything with the 50 domains, you would have been in a much better situation if they were on separate c-class IPs with private registration.

Interlinking these sites or creating a link pyramid are likely to (at best) have little or no SEO effect. However, you could link together if the different sites provide different value propositions for the visitor.

It may be a good time to consolidate some of these sites, more than 50 quality sites would be fairly difficult and costly to maintain.

Stefano,

Firstly, it depends on what you mean by your links not being picked up or indexed. How are you checking this? Remember that Google only reveals a small fraction of it's data.

Also, when it comes to indexing, it really depends on the types of links you've built.

Depending on the type of links, you may need to "encourage" indexing via a number of strategies (RSS, pinging, secondary link building, social bookmarking, etc).

Hi Bob,

Happy to share a little gem with you for finding local citations, called WhiteSpark.

The paid version even has a fuctionality allowing you to compare your citations to those of your top competitors for the keyword/s you're most interested in ranking for.

We get a lot of use out of this tool, so hope this helps you.

Hi Daniel,

When dealing with those type of networks, you will find that the work involved is both laborious, unrelenting, and in most cases fruitless.

You will achieve a much higher ROI by contributing quality content to both your site as well as other sites around the web.

The key is to generate content worthy of being shared by others.

I hope this helps to steer you in the right direction.

Hi there,

Regarding each of the ranking factors you have mentioned:

• Age of Domain - The age of the domain is not a ranking factor per se. However, age is correlated to a build up of links over time, and quality links are a ranking factor.
• H1 Tag - Data suggests that the headline is a ranking actor in Google, whether or not it is in an H1 Tag.
• Social Signals should certainly be a part of your ongoing link building campaign. There are numerous blog posts on SEOMoz with data showing the power of social SEO.

I hope this helps.

Hi Dante,

When it comes to choice of keywords to focus on, the best place to start is to run a pilot Adwords campaign. Your primary concern should be finding the highest converting keywords, and understanding the real value of a keyword.

Additionally, Google's external keyword tool has many innacuracies, so a pilot Adwords campaign will help you get more precise data on actual impressions, especially for longer tail keywords.

Remember that an SEO campaign takes time, and you want to make sure you're targeting keywords that are going to achieve your target objectives (sales, signups, enquiries, etc).

Once you get a better understanding of conversion rates and actual impressions, you can then start to allocate a budget towards keywords.

I hope this helps.

cheers,

David

Hi Paulina.

I agree with Ruslan in terms of whether it is OK from a ranking perspective.

However, it is critical to remember that your meta data has another important objective - to entice searchers to click through to your page.

A well written meta description makes a considerable difference to click-through rates.

Consider spending as long on your page meta data as you would when trying to write an effective Adwords Ad.

In consideration of this objective (maximising click through rates), you may find that the first sentence or two of your body copy would not suffice as an effective meta description.

cheers, David.