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From a purely SEO perspective, I don't think there will be any negative impact from using the acronym URL for your email addresses and the longer URL for your domain — the only concern I might have would be that people might try to link to the acronym domain after seeing your email, and those links would be passing through the redirect, but that would probably be an edge case.

I do think that 25 characters is a very lonnnngg domain name. If it's your brand, you're likely to rank #1 for it without having the exact new brand as the domain name, so you'll be capturing that high search volume anyway. You also have to think about this as a long-term play: there's a lot of search interest for the two brand names together now, because of the merger, but that's not the best reason to select a new brand name or a new domain name, both of which are things you'd want to persist for as long as possible, well after the merger is old news.

I know it might be too late for this, but I'd echo GrouchyKids' recommendation that you rethink how you want to brand the merger of these two brands. High search volume for one term isn't a great reason. If you do decide that you still want that to be your new brand name, you might still want to explore shorter versions of the new brand for your domain name. A 25-character URL is going to lose out on some direct traffic, as it will be difficult for repeat customers to remember and type in exactly (something your company must already be aware of, since they're looking for solutions not to have to type out the whole thing themselves every time they send an email!). Good luck with the rebrand in either case!

effectdigital is correct. If you're blocking pages via robots.txt and still seeing them in the index, it's likely that Google is encountering links to these pages, and is indexing them that way, without updating its crawl (since your robots.txt says not to). Your best bet is to:

• Add a meta robots noindex tag to each of the pages you want removed from the index;
• Remove the disallow directive from robots.txt;
• Wait for Google to re-crawl the pages (using "fetch as googlebot" in GSC may speed this process along
• Once the pages are no longer in Google's index, re-add the disallow directive to your robots.txt file.

How are your links to these images coded? Sometimes Google has trouble understanding that something is an image. For example, OBJECT tags can be rendered by Google's renderer, but won't be treated as images/show up in image search. The same is true for images in an img srcset set, unles that srcset also has a value for "src= ". Are these images showing up in image search? What format are the images (jpg, png, svg, etc)?

If the site is brand new, it could just be that Google is testing out different URLs for the SERP (pretty common with new sites) and will naturally filter out the less-useful ones over time. I can understand not wanting to just wait around on that, though.

It's going to be difficult for a single-page website to do much in the way of organic traffic. You're correct that optimizing 80 sites for the same keywords and phrases isn't going to be very effective; these sites will likely be seen as duplicates of each other, especially if they share the same design and much of the same content. Even if Google doesn't de-index some of their pages for being duplicates, you will still be creating 80 websites that are all competing with each other for the same phrases, which will make it harder for any of them to rank.

What makes these 80 companies different from each other? Why would someone choose one one over the other? If they're local businesses, I'd lean heavily into local SEO for this - using MozLocal to make sure each company's local citations are claimed, filled out, correct, and consistent; and making sure that each company's name, address, and phone number are prominent on the site itself.

Hi John,

As long as you've implemented rel=prev and rel=next markup on your paginated content, having duplicate title tags on these pages shouldn't be a problem at all. If you're really concerned about it, you could update the title tags on subsequent pages to say e.g. "Page 2" at the end, but if you've already marked it up as paginated content it should be fine. Hope that helps!

Hi Lindsay,

You'll want to apply a canonical tag to the PPC pages, pointing to the equivalent SEO page as the canonical version. You may also want to apply a self-referencing canonical tag to your SEO pages - this would be a canonical tag on the page that lists that same page as the canonical version, essentially saying "this page right here is the canonical page."

Tcope25 above is correct that, if you wanted to, you could noindex your PPC landing pages - and Gaston is correct that you would want to implement either a canonical tag or a noindex tag, but not both (there should be no impact on your PPC landing pages either way, it's very common for PPC landing pages to be noindexed). If you apply the canonical tag correctly, however, you shouldn't need to noindex the PPC landing pages. I hope that helps!

Hi Erik,

It's great you're thinking about this ahead of time! Using the Campaign URL Builder to establish UTM links is the best way to do this. You'll want to make sure that your Medium is set to email (not e-mail, or that will be counted as a different Medium). I recommend keeping a running tracking document of the Source, Campaign, Term, etc. you use for each campaign, so it's easy to keep track of which thing was named what. You may also want to sit down and figure out some naming conventions for how you'll determine these, so that multiple people can use the URL Builder the same way. I hope that helps!

Having one Organization tag and then marking up each location with LocalBusiness is how I would do it. It's hard to say what might be going on without knowing a bit more about your implementation. Is all this markup on one page (e.g. an "Our Locations" page), or is each tag firing on a separate location page? You mentioned that some of the markup is showing up in GSC and some isn't - do the entities/markup that are showing up in GSC have anything in common? Are you using static JSON-LD markup in Google Tag Manager, or using variables to generate it dynamically?

Hi David,

I've only seen this type of local sitelink for sites that are sending users to brick-and-mortar locations, so I think in part it would depend on what kind of reviews you're hosting. How different are the local/regional landing pages from each other? Do they feature local products or businesses?

I'd recommend continuing to try to build higher-quality links, rather than pursuing lower-quality directory listings. It's likely that a lot of these lower-quality citations aren't doing anything for your competitors, and the risk of a link penalty from such a strategy is pretty high. Are you reasonably sure that the citation links are the reason they're ranking higher (to the extent that anyone can be sure about why a page is ranking)? Like I said, I'd bet a lot of those citations aren't having much effect on your competitors' sites, as directory listings tend to be devalued by Google pretty quickly. Are there other areas you could try to outdo them - content quality, featured snippets, user experience - to make up some of that ground?

I know it's frustrating to rank lower than people who are being spammy, and high-quality link earning takes time, but that's what I'd advocate doing.

Hi! When you say citations, what kind of thing are you referring to? Mostly sites in your local area? Online directories like Manta?

I can't speak to why the other websites are using data-href; it could be for better tracking, or it might just be a function of their CMS that their links are coded that way. For affiliate links, I strongly recommend using rel="nofollow", as that is the best way to disclose, as it were, to Google that these links are paid for, and not editorial. Using data-href may functionally serve the same purpose, in that data-href links typically don't pass PageRank (to my knowledge), but they don't carry the same weight in terms of demonstrating to Google that you're not trying to hide the nature of the links. It may not matter much one way or the other but rel=nofollow is the best practice.

"Wine tasting" is a very broad topic. Do a Google search for "wine tasting" in an incognito or private window, and you will see that Google serves up local results for places to go wine tasting in your area, meaning that Google understands the term to have local intent - people who search "wine tasting" are looking for places nearby to go wine tasting.

For a term with local intent, you want to make sure that your Local SEO is strong - that your website clearly says your name, address, and phone number; and that your local listings are claimed using a tool like Moz Local. By targeting the term "wine tasting in Bordeaux," you are effectively targeting the term "wine tasting" for the people you care about. You wouldn't want to rank for "wine tasting Chicago" since people from Chicago won't come to you for wine tasting.

For a very broad term, it's always best to narrow it down to a related keyword. You can certainly look at "wine tasting bordeaux" in the keyword tool and see what comes up. The volume for the keywords will be smaller, but it will be much easier to rank for that term and you will know that people who search for it are the people you want to reach.

If you are targeting a more specific term like "wine tasting cellars," you will also be adding the term "wine tasting" to your page a lot - since you can't say "wine tasting cellars" without saying "wine tasting"! Focus less on using the exact keyword phrase every time, and more on using natural variations of the term. This will make your content look more natural to both users and search engines. If you were writing a page targeting "wine tasting in bordeaux" and "wine tasting cellars," and were just writing about the topic without thinking much about keyword use, you would find yourself using variations of the terms, like "bordeaux wine," "wine cellars, "wine tasting," "wine tasting in southern France," etc. That is an OK thing to do, and even a good thing to do! Google expects to see these types of related term on the page. You just want to make sure you're using your target keywords in prominent places on the page such as your title, heading tags, and in the first few paragraphs, and that you're creating great content on the topic you've chosen.

Think about people who are searching for those terms. What kind of information would they want to see? This might be things like: What time is the tasting room open? What sort of wines can they taste there? Is there a tasting fee? Where is the winery located? What is the best way to get there? Including this sort of information provides a complete answer to their query, which is what Google is looking for.

I hope that is helpful!

It's fairly common for Google to "test" ranking a brand-new page pretty high for a relevant query, and then after a little while, for that page to settle into where it will be ranking long-term. The good news is that Google is finding your new pages and understanding their targeted queries; the bad news is that they're not sending enough of the signals Google needs for them to rank that well long-term. Some things that will help:

• Work to boost your organic click-through rate through better calls to action in your title and description tags.
• Look at what happens when people click through to the page from organic search, during those first few days when the page ranks well. Are they spending a decent amount of time on the page? Are they moving deeper into the site? Or are they bouncing right away? It's likely that google is using user data such as click-through rate, pogo-sticking and dwell time to determine whether or not the page is a good result for that query.
• Make sure the pages you're creating are robust and provide a complete answer to the query, and, if possible, point users to a next step in their research or decision process.
• Brooks is correct that building up your domain authority over time will also help you rank better, so that should definitely be part of your long-term plans.

I meant the other way around - since the goal is to drive Google from the HTML file to the landing page, correct?

If you want to say to Google, "this HTML file is the same as this landing page," the canonical tag would be appropriate. If you're just trying to make sure that Google can crawl from the HTML file to the landing page, linking to it on the page should suffice. Either way, I don't think you'd incur any penalty.

I would say this is pretty risky. One barometer I have for penalty risk is "if a human quality reviewer looked at this, would they see something amiss?" and in this case, someone who knew what they were looking for would sniff this out as shady right away. I also think the combination of signals you're describing are easily machine-readable to an extent that a penalty trigger would definitely be possible.

I also don't understand the logic the vendor is using here. If Google can't crawl schema in an iframe, why include the schema at all? It's not like users are going to see it or get anything from it. There's no point in having schema if it's not machine-readable, so why do it at all?

James has a good point that reviews are actually more trustworthy when they include some negative ones. Users are smart enough, and used to reviews enough, at this point to be able to tell when they're only being shown the positive reviews - so including only 4- and 5-star reviews is probably hurting their credibility with customers, as well as with Google.

I don't have any data on how Google specifically treats markup within an iframe. I have heard that you are only at risk for a penalty if you're receiving the reviews rich snippet, so that's one thing I would look for - but again, if they're not trying to get reviews snippets, why do any of this in the first place? If they're a small enough business with low enough traffic, this is the kind of thing that could fly under Google's radar for a long time, but as you've already experienced, recovering from a penalty is a lot harder than never engaging in shady practices in the first place.

Hi Pashmina,

It looks to me like the problem is that Google doesn't yet understand that "Bar & Cocoa" is a brand in and of itself. Until they receive the signal that "Bar & cocoa" (or "bar and cocoa") is a different query intent than "bar cocoa", this will continue to be an issue. Focus on building your brand online; in particular, I recommend researching the Knowledge Graph to understand how Google catalogs entities. Some things to try:

• Roman's suggestion to implement Schema markup is a good one; I actually recommend implementing markup both inline and via JSON-LD in your header (you can also use Google Tag Manager to implement JSON-LD schema markup; check out this awesome post by Chris Goddard for more on how to do that: https://moz.com/blog/using-google-tag-manager-to-dynamically-generate-schema-org-json-ld-tags). Make sure you use Store markup on your home page to mark up your business name, logo, contact information, and other important details about your business, and mark up as much information about your products as you can.
• Spend some time doing some online-focused PR (that's public relations, not page rank); the goal should be to get mentions of your brand name alongside relevant words about your products (like "chocolate shop") in reputable news outlets. It would be ideal if this coverage resulted in links back to your site, but news coverage without a link will still provide something of a brand signal.
• Start planning your content calendar; think about what's unique about your products and create some content around it that you can then, hopefully, promote to earn links back to your site.
• Make sure you're behaving like a brand online in other ways. Build out your social media profiles, and start trying to build a following on e.g. Facebook and Twitter. With a highly visually-appealing product like chocolate, you might have success on Pinterest and Instagram. Make an effort to engage with your followers - don't just talk about yourself, but really start a conversation and respond when people talk to you. Having a robust, active social media presence sends search engines and users alike the signal that you are a real, reputable business. Claiming social media profiles under your brand name will also provide additional pages that use your brand name in conjunction with your business.

The good news is, all of these activities are worth doing to promote your business online anyway; the bad news is, they will probably take some time to really establish your brand. In the short term, it might be worth investing in some paid search ads to make sure your site shows up for your brand terms.

Do the reviews appear anywhere else on the web? Are people leaving reviews on the reviewer's site, and they're visible there, and then you're pulling them in via this widget? Or are they only visible on your site, through the widget?

If the reviews are elsewhere on the web (for example on a review site such as Yelp or Angie's List), Google is going to understand that that content belongs on that site. Pulling it in via this widget probably won't send much in the way of a unique content signal; it's unlikely that it would be seen as duplicate content, though, as long as the page it appears on also has its own unique content. Appearing through the widget also means you likely won't be able to mark up the reviews using schema.org.

If they appear somewhere else, and Google can easily associate those reviews with your product, you'd probably be better served having a function on your own website where people can review your products there. Then, let those reviews live on your site, and the third-party reviews stay on the third-party reviewer site.

Hi Lawrence,

I do think RickRoll's advice was good, and the first thing I would say is that you should leave those 301 redirects in place, on a page-to-page level, for a good long while - don't change them again. It looks like there are still some pages from boston.renthop.com in the index, which indicates that Google may not fully understand that these pages have all moved. There are only a few still in there, though, so I don't think that's the only issue.

One thing that can happen when pages 404 for a while is that even if you 301 them later, the link equity of the original pages can disappear (it doesn't always, but it can). So you probably want to spend some time building links to these pages/site sections, and where you can, I also recommend reaching out to sites that linked to the old subdomains and asking them to update the links. I'd recommend trying to get new links from local-specific sites (i.e. sites about Boston or Chicago, vs. nationwide/non-local sites about apartment hunting), and here's why:

In my experience, Google usually treats "{keyword} in {location name}" searches differently depending on whether or not you're actually in the location you're searching for. If you're not in the location, it treats {location name} as a keyword, but if you are in the location, it treats {location name} as a location. So for example, if you search "apartments in Boston" and you're not in Boston, it will show you pages that rank for the term "apartments in Boston" - but if you are in the Boston area, it will show you pages that rank for the term "apartments" and that have strong local indicators that they are in Boston, or more specifically, are near to you.

So since you rank nationally but not locally for this term, it sounds like the signals you need to focus on improving are local signals. You can do this by building links from local sites, by adding e.g. "Boston, MA" to title tags on individual apartment listings, and by building out some unique, locally-focused content like neighborhood guides to add value to searchers from that area.

I hope that helps!

Hi Garrett,

I agree with Dave - getting some inbound links and other press will help. Bing and Yahoo tend to rate keywords being present in the domain/URL more strongly than Google does, which may be why you're seeing it come up there. It looks like https://feello.com is now ranking on page 1 for "feello" - an incognito search I just did saw it at position 8, under the image carousel.

One thing you might want to do, if you haven't already, is use Organization markup in schema.org to try to improve Google's Knowledge Graph entry for the business. That will help Google understand that Feello is a branded term, and that that brand is associated with your website. You should also use the "sameAs" schema.org property to link to your LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook pages, since Google is currently ranking those higher than your domain - that will help Google understand the relationships between those pages. Good luck!

Hi Dan,

If the sites don't have many links, you probably won't get much SEO value from redirecting them to your site. However, if they're getting traffic right now from the users of the intellectual property, you'll want to signal to those users (and to search engines) that they need to come to your site now, instead of the old sites. So I would recommend shutting the sites down, and 301 redirecting the old sites to the new site for at least 6 months to a year, at least until the URLs for the old sites are no longer in Google's index and all of the old sites' users know where to go from now on. I hope that helps!

Hi Taylor,

I'm not totally familiar with SEOQuake as a tool, so your best bet would probably be to talk to their customer service people, but let's give it a shot!

It's fine for your /sitemap.xml page to display a message that it doesn't have any style associated with it - many XML sitemaps are just raw XML documents that don't look pretty on a browser but that search engines can crawl just fine. It looks like the Site Compliance function of SEOQuake just checks to see whether or not an XML sitemap is present. Do you have an XML sitemap at yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml? What does the SEOQuake tool say about your sitemap? Have you submitted your sitemap in Google Search Console, and is Google Search Console reporting any errors?

There are a few different things this could be, none of which are that much cause for concern, thankfully.

Some questions to ask:

• Where are you seeing the rankings fluctuate? In the Google interface? In a ranking tool? In multiple tools? Since Google is testing things all the time and results are more and more personalized, it's pretty common to see keyword fluctuations, especially in rank tracking tools. I would check the keyword in a second ranking tool, and also Google it in a private window, to see if you can duplicate the results - if not, it may be a quirk of the tool and not of the rankings.
• Along those same lines - do you see your organic traffic to that page fluctuate along with the fluctuations in ranking? Since you're on page 2, you may not be getting a ton of traffic from that specific term, but it's worth checking on.
• If that's not the case and the rankings really are fluctuating, what other changes can you note in the SERPs during the changes? One example from my own life: I had a client who was targeting a term that Google seemed to be trying to figure out whether or not it was appropriate to show local/localized results. The presence or absence of that local pack changed that SERP a lot.

Ranking fluctuations like this are pretty common, especially once you drop off the first page. If it's not seriously impacting your traffic or conversions, I wouldn't be too concerned about it. Your best defense here is a good offense - try to bolster that page's rankings and authority to get it on page 1. I know that's easier said than done, but it's a lot easier to deal with ranking fluctuations when they're between spot 4 and spot 7, instead of page 2 and page 5.

This is fine, as long as you don't want to exclude robots from crawling any part of your site.

Dmytro is correct - the risk you run isn't a penalty per se, it's that the piece of content will rank on a partner site rather than on your own site.

If what you really want is for both pieces of content to rank for the same phrase, or to ensure that your site continues to rank even without partners using rel=canonical, I would recommend making sure that the content on your site is substantially different from the other sites'. I empathize with your desire for a hard-and-fast rule on exactly how different, but whether or not two identical or very similar pages will both rank is really going to depend on the query and the other pages competing to rank for that term. Again, I would recommend making them substantially different - that is, more different than they are the same. Google is now sophisticated enough at detecting spun content that simply switching out some words for synonyms or adding or subtracting a sentence here or there likely won't be enough to keep it from being flagged as duplicate content for a more competitive query.

Adding a meta noindex tag can mean it takes a few weeks for a page to fall out of the index. These pages probably aren't doing you much harm, so if you wanted to just wait for them to fall out, that's probably fine (although I would update the tag content to "noindex, follow" to help Google crawl to the other noindexed pages). If you really want them out of the index faster, you could use the "Remove URLs" function under Google Index in Google Search Console, which will temporarily remove them from the index while Google is registering the noindex tags, or you can use the Fetch + Render tool and then Submit URLs in Google Search Console, which will cause Google to come back and crawl your pages and find the noindex tag.

It's unlikely that changing title tags would have an impact on traffic to pages whose title tags hadn't been changed; and adding a few characters to the end of a title tag isn't something I'd expect to have a negative impact on traffic, either. It's likely that they are unrelated.

I agree that it doesn't make a lot of sense for Google to require the image itemprop - it's not the only example of Google requiring an itemprop that doesn't really make sense (for example, OperatingSystem is required for the WebApplication property, which doesn't make sense since it's...you know...a web application).

For what it's worth, even though the documentation says it's required, BreadcrumbList code that doesn't include the image attribute validates just fine in the Structured Data Testing Tool, and pages without the image itemprop in place are still getting breadcrumb snippets in the SERPs. So it may not be as "required" as Google says it is.

The first thing that stands out to me on these pages is that you have all of the other products that the page links to under "Related Items" marked up as well. So there are multiple values for Product and for Offer on the page. The first thing I would test would be removing this markup for the Related items, so that all the Product markup on the page applies only to the product that page is about. I suspect that Google may have gotten stricter about requirements for this, or otherwise changed the way they generate price/review snippets. So that's what I would test first. It can work to have multiple Product schemas on a category page, but on a page that is specifically about one product I would try to have all of the Product markup on that page be about that product.

The other thing you may want to update is your height and width properties. It looks like you're currently using the type "Intangible" for these, when their expected types would be either QuantitativeValue or Distance, so I would update those too.

You may also find this blog post useful: https://moz.com/blog/search-marketers-guide-to-itemref-itemid

Good luck!

Hi! So my first question would be: Are other websites in the same SERP displaying rich product snippets? If not, it may be that Google has decided that other forms of rich content are a better fit for those queries.

One frustrating thing about the structured data testing tool is that it doesn't get updated nearly as often as the algorithm itself does, so occasionally something will validate just fine in the tool but be running up against stricter requirements in the algo itself. The tool was updated pretty recently so I don't know for sure that that's the case but it is a thing that can happen.

If you'd feel comfortable sharing a URL or two (or want to PM them to me), I can take a look.

I agree that it's probably not a huge problem, but still something to clean up if you can - it would be best if crawlers weren't trying to access these pages.

If Moz and Webmaster Tools are showing the 403 error, it means that they are able to crawl to the URLs that are returning the 403 - so somewhere on your site or on the web, pages that are accessible by bots and crawlers are linking to these pages that don't exist yet. Having a bunch of errors on your site can impact Google's ability to crawl it well, which can impact your rankings, so it's best to get those cleaned up. In Webmaster Tools you should be able to click on the pages and see which pages are linking to them, so you can remove those links; you can do the same using a tool like Screaming Frog if you'd prefer. Good luck!

This kind of thing definitely happens. It is often the result of a link injection malware that finds vulnerabilities in websites and then posts hundreds of links on them. Usually, link spam will not affect your rankings, but it can. Fortunately, Google provides a tool to help you tell Google that you weren't the one who built those links. Moz has a guide to using it here: https://moz.com/blog/guide-to-googles-disavow-tool.

It can take a while for links to get disavowed, so in the meantime, do whatever you can to build high-quality, relevant links to your site and make sure your site is optimized for search as best you can.

It looks like the pages that you're referencing in the Webmaster Forums post do have some indexed duplicate content on them. It may be that Google is trying to figure out which version of the page is the canonical version, and then reporting all the duplicates as links back to the page that they deem the "original" page. I don't know why they would report this as a "link" when it clearly isn't a link in the traditional sense, but link reports in Search Console often contain some weird stuff that isn't really links.

What's clear is that Google understands that these pages are related, which makes sense since it's the same content, on pages with very similar design - the two subdomains are even using the same Google Analytics account. My assumption would be that the "links" are a byproduct of Google trying to figure out which of these pages are the duplicates and which should be treated as the original.

It may be that this is nothing to worry about - if you're happy with the pages' performance, I doubt you will see these "links" coming through anywhere besides Google Search Console. If you do want to keep the client sites more separate, I would recommend separating them out into their own Google Analytics accounts at the very least.

Are you seeing this with any other link discovery tools, like AHREFs, Majestic, or Open Site Explorer? Or only in Google WMT?

Is this something that is happening between just two specific client sites? Or is it more widespread for all of your clients?

It's common for Screaming Frog and a Google search to return different numbers, but they should be much closer together than that. Which number is closer to your sense of how many URLs are actually on the site? When you look at the URLs that Screaming Frog returns, are there any that appear to be duplicate, or are otherwise not really there? Which URLs are appearing in a Screaming Frog crawl but not in the Google site: results? These will give you more information as to where Google is potentially having trouble indexing your site.

Hi Dan,

It's important to remember that Domain Authority is a Moz-specific metric, measuring the power that inbound links to a domain are passing to it. It's based on a lot of research and information about how Google measures links, but isn't necessarily a reflection of how Google is actually perceiving and rating the inbound links to your site (since no outside party knows for sure exactly how Google is measuring link signals at any given time). Since those links still point to the legacy domains, they are still coming up in the Moz tools as having high DA. It's probable that Google is interpreting those signals passing through your redirects correctly and passing that link value on to your main domain, but if those redirects go away, that may change.

URLs will often remain in the index when they have links pointing to them, because Google is indexing the presence of that link - but a URL showing up in a site: search doesn't necessarily mean that it's ever showing up for any query. Is your main domain still getting a lot/much/any traffic from your legacy domains through those redirects? How much traffic is still getting to those legacy domains (whether via organic search traffic to still-indexed pages or, more likely, from people clicking on inbound links to the old pages) will dictate whether or not you need to keep the redirects live.

One thing I would recommend doing, that I always recommend when a domain is moved, is reaching out to the sites that link to your old domain and seeing if you can get them to update the links to the new domain. You won't have anywhere close to a 100% success rate with this, but it can decrease the number of links that are passing value through redirects and increase the number that pass value directly.

If you do decide to decommission the server and not re-host the redirects elsewhere, I would recommend planning that move in conjunction with a link building and promotion campaign for the new site, to attract new links to make up for any link juice that is lost from the old domains' redirects. I hope that helps!

If you are changing the URL of your evergreen content each time you update it and then 301 redirecting the old URL to the new, that could definitely be impacting the organic traffic potential of that content. I would recommend keeping pages at the same URL even after updating them - so it may make sense, for your frequently-updated pages, to move them to a page without the date stamp in the URL so that you're not republishing and moving the page.

Hi Nick,

It's common to see a drop in traffic after a redesign, but you definitely should have recovered by now. The difference in your number of indexed pages is a red flag. When you run a Screaming Frog/DeepCrawl/Moz Crawl Test crawl of the site, what shows up? Are there any site sections that are missing? Does that 7,740 pages number sound close to the number of pages that are actually on the site, or are there still more like 30K?

Take a look at the pages that were getting organic traffic before the migration. Which of them aren't getting traffic now? Can you verify that they still exist and that redirects are working properly? Are there areas of the site that used to have a lot more internal links pointing to them then than they do now?

I doubt that your domain name and age have much to do with this, and it's common for 404s to pop up from time to time, so I don't think those are your culprits.

One thing you might try is reaching out to the domains that link to your old site and see if they would update their links to point to the same page on your new site. Start with the sites with whom you have the best relationship, and any who link to you multiple times. Make it easy by providing them a list of the pages that link to you and the updated links. You won't get a 100% response rate but it might mitigate some of the link loss.

I hope some of that helps!

It's possible that Google might give Data Highlighter information more credence when generating a rich snippet, but the success rate for that is far from 100%, as Andy and Bas have mentioned. It's just as likely that Google will be confused about which data is correct, and either not generate a rich snippet at all or generate one based on the schema markup. I haven't had much success adding markup via the data highlighter or via Google Tag Manager; hard-coding it always seems to work better. If your schema markup is incorrect, I would not recommend using Data Highlighter to try to fix it without changing the code - your best bet is just to change it, especially since Data Highlighter won't help you out on Bing/Yahoo.

Hi Adam,

My first question is - how does the client know that they had a drop in rankings/traffic? Where are they getting that information, to give to you? Are they inferring it from having had a loss in sales, or do they know some other way? If they are basing it solely on a drop in sales, it could be that the site has a conversion problem, rather than a traffic/rankings problem.

SEMRush is the tool I would use to identify where they had losses in rankings - have you used their historical data option to see what keywords the site used to rank for, that it doesn't anymore? Even if you don't know the exact date that things went wrong, if the client can give you a date that is definitely before the loss, that should help you compare. The next thing I would check is Search Console and Majestic/Open Site Explorer - are they, or have they been, under any kind of penalty? Is there a pattern of shady backlinks in their link profile?

I would also check for new competitors in the market. Who ranks for their target terms now, and did they rank for them before this change in traffic?

I know this isn't a great answer to your specific question, but if this drop in traffic/rankings happened a while ago (like a year+), I would try to get the client to focus less on "what happened" and more on "what can we do now." Even if you did figure out what happened, if it was long enough ago, putting things back how they were before might not help at all. Instead, I would approach the site as if it were any other SEO project - where are their weaknesses, what could they be doing better, etc. It may not satisfy their need to know what went wrong, but it will get them results.

Google is adding and removing URLs from its index fairly slowly right now, and it's not uncommon for changes to take several weeks to filter up into the index, especially for site: searches. This is very annoying (even more so for people who are trying to launch brand-new sites), but not a huge deal since, to Laura's point, these URLs are most likely not showing up for any searches, they just haven't filtered out of the index. I would give it another week or two and see what happens. You may also want to do a Fetch+Submit in Search Console for a few of the subdirectory URLs, to make sure that Google revisits them and registers that they are 410s now - if they've been redirecting for 2 years, Google may just not be crawling them that frequently.

The links to metro-manhattan may be losing a small amount of value as they pass through the redirects. Google has previously stated that this is not the case, but I think it's more accurate to say that it's not always the case, and I have certainly seen a measurable decrease in link value (usually around 15%) when passing through a redirect. I doubt that Google is confused about the two domains, though, since metro-manhattan has been redirecting to nyc-officespace-leader for 4 years and, unless I'm reading your question wrong, has never had content on it.

If metro-manhattan has more inbound links pointing to it than nyc-officespace-leader, AND is a better reflection of your current brand, it may indeed be worth moving the domain. I would not move the site from one domain to the other just based on the reasons you've outlined above, though. Moving your site from one domain to the other is likely to negatively impact your rankings and traffic in the short term as Google gets used to it being in the new spot. This is entirely possible to overcome through marketing the new site, but will not be a quick fix to the problems you've outlined. So if you want to move the site, and commit to marketing that site, go ahead, but don't do it just to capture link value pointing to metro-manhattan.

If you do decide to move the site, my advice is always to make a domain change separate from making other major site changes in layout, content, etc. So you would either want to:

• Move the site as-is, do some proactive link building to the new domain/reach out to people who link to the old domain to get them to update their links, get a marketing and promotion plan in place, and then once your rankings and traffic have stabilized from the move, start making improvements, or:
• Make the improvements to the site you want to make now, and revisit moving the domain after those changes have been in place for a while.

Your other option would be to reach out to sites that link to metro-manhattan and ask them to update their links to point to nyc-officespace-leader. That would allow you to get more value from those links, but I know it's not always possible to do. So like I said, unless you have additional compelling reasons to move the site beyond what you've said in your question, I would leave it where it is and focus on improving it.