Hi there,

For what it's worth, pagination is a source of contention for many SEOs, so you're not alone here

I think part of the reason for this is that there isn't a perfect answer and I'm yet to see consistent, definitive proof of any one answer being right, particularly when it comes to different types of websites. As you say, for a blog, it may not be that useful anyway. Whereas for an ecommerce website, it's probably more important but even then, users are not likely to click through to hundreds of paginated pages, but search engines may need to crawl them.

Anyway, the timing of your question is funny because earlier I came across this tweet thread from Patrick Stox which does a great job of laying out the options. I'd recommend taking a read:

https://twitter.com/patrickstox/status/1370218363440537601

Ultimately, keep in mind what your goals are - I imagine driving more traffic to key pages on your website. I'd also look at how things are performing at the moment and make decisions based on that. If your paginated pages are getting lots of traffic, you may not want to tinker too much with that. If they aren't, then you can make changes far more easily because you're not risking too much.

I hope that helps a bit!

Paddy

Hi there,

You can check the Domain Authority and Page Authority if any domain by using the Moz Link Explorer or the MozBar.

You can read more about how Domain Authority works here.

Hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi there,

Thanks for the question.

It is totally fine to update page titles and meta descriptions over time. I'd recommend to prioritise your most important pages first or where you see the biggest opportunities and start there. Then you can focus on the most important pages first and go through the rest when you have time. I would recommend trying not to change them too much unless you have a really good reason to though.

I'd also mention that you should try to write page titles and meta descriptions which are good for the user, focus on a keyword and read well - try to avoid just stuffing them with keywords if you can.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi there,

In short, it won't matter too much as long as the links that you're getting are good quality and as relevant as possible to what you do. It's natural to get links from a wide range of domain extensions and there are perfectly legitimate reasons for this. For example, you may get a link from a .com website which may actually be for a UK based website who have decided to use this domain extension instead of a .co.uk.

Overall, if they look like good quality and relevant, don't worry

With that said, there is a concept around getting "local" links meaning more if you're serving a particular region or market. So it may make a small difference but it's not something that I'd worry loads about.

Hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi there,

Thanks for the question.

The first thing to say is that DA/PA are Moz metrics and aren't connected directly to Google and how they rank your website. So the actual answer to your question is that having your DA/PA increase will not directly effect rankings because Google doesn't use DA or PA.

Having said that, Moz have designed DA and PA to try to predict how well a domain or page could rank in search results, so generally speaking, the higher the numbers, the more chance you have of competing.

Overall, the focus when it comes to authority should be for you to generate relevant, quality links from other domains to yours which will mean that Google pass authority to your website and give it a better chance of ranking. Alongside this, DA and PA may also go up which gives you a rough measurement of your own authority.

Hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi there,

Sometimes it can take Google some time to crawl and index changes to a page, including the page title. It looks like Google last cached your homepage on 14th September according to this cache date. So it looks like Google hasn't recached the page yet.

Usually, I'd recommend using Google Search Console to ask Google to recrawl the page but this feature has been temporarily disabled but should come back soon. When it does, you can submit the URL to Google for a recrawl which may nudge them along.

It's still possible for Google to crawl and index your new title in the meantime though so it may happen before that point. If your site is new, it can take longer.

Cheers.

Paddy

Hi Stephen,

Thanks for the question.

When you use the disavow tool, it's still possible for the disavowed links to appear in Google Search Console and never be removed. The disavow tool just means that Google may choose to disregard the links from their link graph for ranking purposes. There isn't really any sure-fire way to know if the disavowed links are actually ignored or not, unfortunately.

The time it takes to process the file is also a bit of an unknown but generally speaking, it may be whenever Google recrawl those links and then they can decide whether to ignore them or not. Either way, when the file is processed, the links may remain in your Search Console reports.

I hope that helps a bit!

Paddy

Hi there,

Your focus should be on removing pages which are not adding value to the website and for your users. For example, if you have pages which contain old and inaccurate content which is no longer useful, then you may want to consider either updating the page with better content or removing the page completely.

Adding a noindex tag may make Google drop it from their index, but users may still be able to find the page on your website, so consider whether you want to remove the page completely using a 404 or redirect it to another relevant page with a 301.

In terms of metrics, it really comes down to what you want your users to do when they visit your website. If you want them to spend time reading your content and then clicking through to other pages, then these are important metrics to measure. Then if your pages aren't doing this, then you either need to improve them or consider removing them if they aren't good quality.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi Jeroen,

PageRank still exists, it's just not public. DA/PA etc are 3rd party metrics which are designed to replicate PageRank for the benefit of marketers who want a rough idea of how strong a given page or domain is.

I agree about the importance of relevant links and good content though and I wrote about this extensively in this chapter of The Link Building Book if you'd like to read more.

Cheers.

Paddy

Hi Sean,

I'm afraid that isn't correct. There are many, many sources out there confirming that PageRank scores are no longer publicly available. Google Chrome, other browsers and 3rd party tools all pulled the data from the same source. I'm not sure where that tool pulls numbers from.

Here are some sources to confirm this:

1) https://searchengineland.com/google-has-confirmed-they-are-removing-toolbar-pagerank-244230 - confirms that this is tools, not just browsers where PageRank will no longer be available.

2) https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-pagerank/ - mentions commentary from Gary Illyes that PageRank still exists but not outside of Google.

3) http://www.thesempost.com/google-removing-pagerank-from-toolbar/

4) https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-pagerank/159112/

5) https://searchengineland.com/rip-google-pagerank-retrospective-244286

Cheers.

Paddy

Hi Sean,

Just a note on your PageRank comment - the public version of PageRank, often referred to as Toolbar PageRank and used by tools such as the one you've referenced, stopped being updated by Google a few years ago. This was confirmed in 2016 and you can read about that here.

PageRank is still very much a thing that Google uses, but we no longer have a way to know what the PageRank score for a given URL is.

Cheers.

Paddy

Hi there,

There are a few reasons why your Domain Authority may still be the same, despite more backlinks being built to your website:

• Moz may not have discovered all of the new backlinks to your website yet, so they may not have been factored into the DA score
• If they have discovered them, then there is a chance that some backlinks may not improve your DA score quickly and it may take more links in order for your DA to go up. This is particularly true the higher your DA is because the algorithm that DA uses is logarithmic which means that the higher you go, the harder it becomes to increase it
• The DA of other websites may have changed and could be skewing the DA of the websites that are now linking to you

You can read a bit more information and watch the videos here for more information on DA

I'd also just mention that you should remember that whilst DA/PA are designed to give some direction on how well you can rank in Google, they are not connected to the Google algorithm, so definitely keep an eye on DA, but don't forget about other metrics too.

I hope that helps!

No problem, glad it was helpful.

Having a country specific IP isn't a deal breaker when it comes to ranking in specific countries. I've heard that it can have some effect i.e. if your website is hosted in the UK and your primary audience is the UK, then it may help a little. But I haven't seen this first hand.

I think the primary focus should be on getting solid hosting and uptime, regardless of where it's located. If I have a UK focused domain, I'd rather have a solid hosting company where my website is fast and based in the US, than a UK based IP address that is slow

Hi there,

There are a bunch of ways to answer this question and things will change depending on your situation, but I'll give you an overview which will hopefully help your situation!

The first thing to say is that a ccTLD is only designed to help you target a location - not a language. For example, example.co.uk would naturally default to target users who are in the UK. Within this, you may target the English language or other languages, but it will generally only show to users in that location.

If you are looking to target multiple locations and want to use the ccTLD approach, then you will need a ccTLD for each location that you want to target. There can be advantages to this such as users being familiar with their "own" ccTLD and you can focus 100% on one domain and keep all of the content focused just on one location. There are disadvantages which include the maintenance, upkeep and marketing for several domains rather than one. Which leads into the subfolder question...

Subfolders are generally easier from a maintenance perspective because it's a single domain, often running off a single CMS and any equity or authority that you build up in one domain will help all subfolders for each country/language. Subfolders also make it easier to target variations of location + language.

For me, my advice is usually to go with a single domain + subfolders if you do not have the resources to build, maintain and promote several domains at once. If you have a team and expertise for each location and language who can each "own" a different domain, then ccTLDs or gTLDs make more sense.

It's also worth a read of this Moz post for more detail:

https://moz.com/blog/guide-to-international-seo

Hope that helps!

Paddy

YoastSEO should do the job for Wordpress - it allows you to define the canonical page URL on each of your pages/posts:

https://yoast.com/help/canonical-urls-in-wordpress-seo/

Another option which I usually find effective which I initially skipped over is the URL parameters section in Google Search Console. You'll find it in the legacy tools section and you can set these parameters to "No: Doesn't affect page content:" which is the option for tracking code parameters:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6080548?hl=en

Hi there,

This is quite a common issue and happens because technically, the addition of those parameters at the end of the URL mean that it's a new URL from Google's perspective. These kinds of parameters are very common and Google often figure it out and drop these URLs from their index and focus on the correct version. However, they don't always do this and may not do it as quickly as you'd like.

One way to deal with this is to add a rel=canonical tag to any duplicate versions of the URL and have that tag point back to the correct URL. Based on your question, this would mean that the canonical tag would look like this:

This would go into the section of this URL (and any other duplicates):

https://techplusgame.com/hideo-kojima-not-interested-in-new-silent-hills-revival-insider-claims/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=hideo-kojima-not-interested-in-new-silent-hills-revival-insider-claims

Hope that helps!

Paddy

That's a good question and I'd agree - I imagine that references to your website in published books online could be treated similarly to mentions across the web. Whether Google gives it any extra weight or not is unclear, but I'd agree that the implication is that a mention in a published book could carry some weight.

Hi there,

I'd suggest a few things:

1. If you have old analytics data or log file data to show you which content performed best when the site was last live, take a look at that and prioritise restoring and updating the content which worked well previously.

2. Go through the content and update with fresh information, data, images, links etc to give everything a freshen up. Don't worry if content is still relevant and evergreen, but just do some checks to make sure.

3. Once you've updated the content and you're happy with it, generate some new XML sitemaps and submit to Google Search Console to prompt Google to crawl the pages again and get them into the index.

4. In addition, perhaps submit the homepage and a few key pages to Google Search Console for crawling and indexing.

5. Once the pages are indexed, keep an eye on Search Console to see how pages are performing and use this data to update the most popular pages.

6. In terms of links, if you can restore any valuable lost ones by reaching back out to the websites, letting them know that the site has relaunched and seeing if they can restore the links, that may give it a nudge too.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi there,

I'd agree with the other replies in the thread in that these links are likely to be risky. They may well work, but they're not the kind of links that Google necessarily value, so the amount of time they work for could be pretty limited.

Reading the description of the ad, it sounds like they are submitting to the business directory section of UK newspapers which is actually not a bad tactic. But paying someone to do it for you without knowing fully what you'll get in return is where the risk lies really.

More broadly, I think that buying links is always going to be risky and therefore moves it into the grey hat area of tactics. It can still work and in some niches, it's almost necessary, but I still wouldn't advise it for most people.

Hope that helps!

Paddy