Welcome to the Q&A Forum

To cut a long story short, our old web developers who built us a bespoke site decided that they could no longer offer us support so we decided to move our back end to the latest Magento 2 software and move over to https with a new company. The new setup has been live for 3 weeks, I have checked in webmaster tools and it says we have 4 pages indexed, if I type in site:https://www.mydomain.com/ we have 6560 pages indexed, our robots.txt  file looks like this:Sitemap: https://www.mydomain.com/sitemap.xml Sitemap: https://www.mydomain.com/sitemaps/sitemap_default.xml I use Website Auditor and Screaming Frog, Website Auditor returns a 302 for my domain and Screaming Frog returns a 403 which means I cannot scan any of these. If I check my domain using an https checking tool some  sites return an error but some return a 200.
I have spoken to my new developer and he says everything is fine, in Webmaster tools I can see some redirects from his domain to mine when the site was in testing mode. I am concerned that something is not right as I always check my pages on a regular basis. Can anyone shed any light on this, is it right or am I right to be concerned. Thank you in advance

When employing an SEO company what should I be looking for? When I go to a companies website I look for how many keywords they have ranked on Semrush. Most of the companies that I have looked at do not rank very many. Saying most I am talking about 10-12 companies. There was one company that had a lot more than anyone else but their reviews were awful. Then I look at their clients websites to see how many keywords they have ranked and this is where I am baffled. Quite a lot of them especially retail sites with lots of products have very few keywords ranked and my belief is that the more related keywords that you have ranked the better you will do. I also look at how the thier organic traffic is doing over a number of months. what surprises me most is that companies are advertising clients websites where it looks like traffic is climbing and then all of a sudden there is a big drop. Am I missing something in order to find a company that will do what we are paying them for? Thank you in advance.

We are a UK company but we would like to get listed on some USA business directories. If say we enter our company name, the first and second line of our UK business address but put a USA state and a zip code would this help us for SEO or is this classed as black hat trying to deceive Google. Thank you in advance for any help.

We have a conflict of information between our web developers and our SEO company. We are an on-line retail company hence we have a fair number of different categories. Our site is set up with the rel=next and rel=prev tags. Our SEO company have asked us to implement canonical links on our category pages and leave the rel=next and rel=prev tags as they are. Our web developers are saying by doing this we are asking Google to ignore all of our products on all of the pages except page 1 which would mean Google would not index a lot of our products. I have looked at a few articles but I am struggling to understand which way to go. Any advice would be appreciated. Thank you in advance.

I have a backlink on a very popular sports news site PR5 this is a sitewide link. The link is near the top on righthand side. As you scroll down, the page keeps loading more and more information. According to my Google webmaster tools the link is on the site over 21,400 pages. As the stories being submitted are new most of the pages have no PR however there are around 30-40 categories that have PR ranging from 0-4. According to my AHREFS account on a daily basis it picks up between 100-200 new links with on average around 10-20 being lost as the stories are being removed. Would anyone advise I just ask for my link to be on the category pages only or should I leave it as it is? Many Thanks in Advance for any Feedback.

On our panel for Google webmaster tools we had a problem where there was an error when we did some testing of our products. Missing prices seemed to be the problem. This has now been fixed but on checking when testing it returns the prices in US Dollars. We are a UK company with a number of currency options. Should we be worried about this or should the system return the prices in UK Pounds as this is our main currency? Thank you in advance.

We have an ecommerce site. If we have a product that is not going to be available again and the url of the product is not in the Google index should we re-direct it to a category page or do a 410? Thank you as always in advance.

Hi All We are trying to go through all of our backlinks to see which links are good and which are bad. We are using two paid for tools to find our backlinks and sort them out, either good or bad. I have found that both tools have returned links as being good even though the links are not indexed by Google and have no page rank. Also we have found that both tools returns some links as good even though the links are pointing to a 404 page. Any advice on how to proceed would be appreciated.

During today and yesterday we are getting a lot of visits (Over 400) from http://news.google.com the visits are all at the same time and to different pages, the visits are very brief so much so that it pushes our bounce rate up to 69% in GA. Is there anything we can do to stop this? Thank you in advance?

Two years ago we were not doing very well so we employed a consultant from the USA who drilled right down into our site and advised us on many things which would improve our website. We worked with this lady for 18 months. One of the main changes that we made was to change how our url looked. For example instead of the following usrls: www.change.com/catergory/subcatergory/product.html we changed to: www.change.com/1234   the 1234 being the product With all of the advice this lady gave us which included content, keyword research, social media, back links. In the last year we have seen our keywords indexed in Semrush for the UK rise from 200 to 1,000 as of today. Our sales are well up and I am very pleased. We at the time of employing this lady started another site in a slightly different field but stopped working on it to make sure our main site would get the attention it deserved. We now have time to work on our new site which has had work done to it. The problem I have is that I asked our web developers to change the structure so that the urls would look the same as our exisiting site www.newsite.com/5678 for products. (it does not have to be a number we could have the name of a product) They have informed me that this is anti SEO which is hard for me to understand as we have done so well with our current site. Can anyone advise as to which is the best route to go down? Thank you in advance.

In wordpress on some of our blogs when we have gone to publish them wordpress has shortened the url. In Google webmaster tools the orignal url is coming up as a 404 error. This url is not indexed in Google. Is this something to worry about and can this be avoided? Thank you in advance.

In my Google webmaster tools for backlinks to my site there is this website. rcourier.com which shows 97,000 backlinks. When I dig deeper it in GWT it shows urls lick this http://www.ebrandtopmall.com/?from=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.rcourier.com%2Fus%2Fhgsoccerbox926.asp%3F35401&q=Borussia+Dortmund+Training+Jersey+2014–2015+(Black)+|+Soccer+Box I cannot find any backlinks to my site if I view the source code. I cannot understand why Google should link this to my website. Should I be worried and what should i do about it? Thank you in advance.

I have just paid a lot of money to have spam back links removed from directories owned by the same person, the links were on pages that were set up for me without me knowing, at the end of each url is my domain name, the links have been removed on the page leaving a directory page with no other links on however the url is still there with my domain name at the end of the url and in each search box is my domain name, I have asked for the pages to be removed altogether as I did say before I paid the money I did not want my domain name on any of his directories, he has come back and said leaving my domain name in the urls is not a problem as far as Google is concerned, can anyone please advise, I can ask for a refund from PayPal, there are over 768 links on different sections of a number of directories. Thank you inadvance.

Hello Since the latest Google update our main keyword has been dropping. We employed a SEO company about 6 weeks ago and since then the keyword has dropped a couple of pages further on Google. We have been using the Remove'em site to check our backlinks and a blog this SEO company have done has appeared on the list. The DA is good but the PA is low. In the blog they have linked the exact keyword to our site homepage. Do you think the blogs the SEO company are doing will be causing us more problems? Any help is very much appreciated. Thanks

We have never had a warning from WMT but our main keyword has dropped quite a lot over the two years, we made the mistake of using this in our anchor text, we have signed up to removeem.com, rather than ask other websites to remove the links would it be wiser just to ask if they will change the anchor text maybe to our domain name, a lot of the links appear in directories and some are on non revelant sites?

Hi all We have recently employed a SEO company. They have written some blogs and promoted the blogs on up to 20 bookmark sites. On each bookmark site the text is the same. Will Google class this as duplicate content? Is this a good idea? Any advise would be appreciated, thanks.

Over the last size eight weeks we have been doing all of our own SEO with the help of reading this forum and asking questions, prior to this we had an SEO company from India who were only doing articles and promoting them. We have been using various keywords by writing them into our own blogs, to check how we have been doing I have monitored two main keywords, when we started, our choice keyword was on page three, on Monday it had moved up to number one on page two, today it is now back on page three, have we been hit by the Penquin update, if so would I have received a warning in WMT, a lot of my other keywords across the site have moved down although some have moved up, we are retailers not SEO experts so it is a big blow to move down when everyone has worked hard, looking at some pages I do have some pages that look as though they have been keyword stuffed, I have altered some of them to see if anything changes, I have also look at some of the links but how do I know if I am doing the right thing?

2 Questions any help appreciated: I have had a spam url in my Disavow file with Google since last September but it still shows up as linked to my site, is this correct? If a url has say 100 pages all with your anchor text and it is a spam website do you Disavow the domain url or do you have enter all the pages in the Disavow spreadsheet?

We have worked as closely as possible to the guidelines and advice on this forum, if we compare our on page Analsis with other companies in the same field as ours we have a far better site as far as SEO is concerned, our DA authority is higher and most of our page authority is higher but we just cannot seem to get up to their level in the search engines, one site that is in competiton with us do not use Facebook and also they do not use Twitter very much, I looked at some of their backlinks and their top one which was a blog had not been updated since 2011, over the years we have amassed far more what I would call worthless links as this was the done thing then, how can I get on the right track, are there any companies who could assess our site for a reasonable cost to point us in the right direction, we are doing our own blog, Facebook, Twitter, Onlywire?

On my site I have a dropdown menu going across the page at the top to all of my categories on each page, I also have a similar structure going down the side going to the same categories, is this acceptable or would Google count this as double the internal links?

We have registered an additional site selling items that are different to what we sell now, as an example we have registered a site call www.apple-pears.uk, another company has registered the name applesandpears.co.uk with the view to trying to sell the domain name, would we be OK to call our site Apple and Pears as a title even though our website is www.apple-pears.co.uk.

Last Year I re-named a catergory on my site because it had bad backlinks, the new catergory is coming up the search engines nicely, in webmaster tools it shows the old catergory as a 404, would it be wise to put a 301 re-direct on to my new catergory, if not what is the best way to deal with it?

Please forgive me if this is a silly question but I am an online retailer not an SEO man, If I was to upload a file with all the links I thought were spam links on and some weeks later I thought some of them were good links, if I uploaded another file with all of what I thought were good links removed would Google start taking these into account?