Welcome to the Q&A Forum

@Anjana9638 A tool like Xenu, Site Sucker or Screaming Frog to name a few and then have the tool only focus on reporting external links to minimize crawl overhead.

@mitty27 Your iFrame at the top of the page is hard set to 1200px width which could cause problems. Please provide some specific URLs that GSC has identified with the viewport issue for specific answers to those. Thanks and good luck!

@imeuokou Run a Google search of the other sites' domain in quotes without their own site results, i.e.: "whatever.com" -site:whatever.com

You'll likely see many pages of places that link to them.

@chrisjordan0i1 The classic answer, "It depends!" Followed by a second classic, "Both!"

If the website in India is legitimate and a true presence in India for your Indian users with the same intent as your users in Canada then the alignment is there. Further, Canada is one of the top destinations for Indian expats, so you will have a measurable amount of traction from the post.

As for 'both', if you can localize your article so that it serves your Canadian audience as readily as your Indian audience you'll have content that is unique enough to perform in both places.

Ultimately you're looking to get some amount of referral visits from these posts otherwise the sites where they are being posted have thin value to begin with.

Sidebar: be sure to check out SparkToro's audience location tool as this type of cross-platform demographic mapping is their core feature (although it's still building up data on non-English audiences).

Unpaid plug: WPMU DEV is a good service for Wordpress as well. With their backup, optimization, CDN, and compression tech their annual fee is still below what you'd pay trying to piece together all those services somewhere else. Plus GREAT support.  There used to be a coupon code here in Moz's partner section as well. They might still have a special deal if you ask.

For your situation, you'll want to check to see that your database is still referencing the same URL structure as well (look for things like switching from www to non-www as default or HTTP vs. HTTPS.)

As Sean says, focus on URL structures. If old URLs are working just the same as the ones on the new server, things should be fine.

Do you see any crawl errors in Google Search Console?  That will give you some of the best insights.

There are a lot of factors that could be contributing to this, for example, the tracking isn't implemented properly or implemented differently than on the previous platform. Or on the non-technical side maybe the search volume is down overall for that time period that affects that particular page, or your rankings decreased due to competition strengthening even if your site stayed completely the same...  It's hard to say exactly without more precise details from Search Console, Analytics and so on.

If the dip isn't major, you know for a fact that your code is implemented properly, and the site loads much faster for your user base, you should likely go ahead and finish the complete transition.  A low site speed is a conversion killer and a major factor that should be addressed.

You can submit sitemaps as often as you like to Google Search Console. Many large scale sites would even be doing so multiple times a day as they publish new articles, add or remove new products, and so on. For example, News Sites have a high touch need for fast crawling (hence AMP and specialized sitemap methodologies) Here's Google's help article on this: https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/40392

Here's the more generalized version of Sitemap recommendations: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/75712

Hi all. Any local events or networking opportunities you can recommend in Bangkok? I've relocated here for 2017 and would enjoy meeting up with any fellow Digital Marketers.

Nice update Kevin!  And a good use-case of sites that could really benefit from AMP: heavy mobile traffic / users, content heavy pages, ability to mitigate technical constraints.

Call-in based service businesses in competitive markets would also be prime candidates for AMP as well.

Great! Glad that worked for you.

Great follow up!  Thanks for that. :^)

Sorry, but there are too many variables at play that could be causing this.  Since they're brand new views though there isn't much to lose in deleting them and starting with new copies of the original view. I'd go through, duplicate from the original, and then modify them one setting at a time to see what triggers what.

I'd double check things like whether "exclude" or "include" was selected when applying these filters.  It's going to be something that's hitting all traffic universally.

Great!  Glad I could help.

If that's what you're seeing it looks like someone used a relative href link instead of a mailto link for emails on the about us page.

Hello. You can check the Submitted vs Indexed count within Search Console to see whether or not your regenerated sitemap is being picked up already, but resubmitting a sitemap isn't an issue, and fairly easy to do, per Google:

Resubmit your sitemap

1. Open the Sitemaps report
2. Select the sitemap(s) you want to resubmit from the table
3. Click the Resubmit sitemap button.

You can also resubmit a sitemap by sending an HTTP GET request to the following URL, specifying your own sitemap URL: http://google.com/ping?sitemap=http://www.example.com/my_sitemap.xml

Via: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/183669  Also from a FAQ in the Webmasters blog they state that, "Google does not penalize you for submitting a Sitemap."

Hi Ian. You can go to Google Search Console, register your ownership of both domains, then go into the gear settings for .co.uk and select "Change of Address" and supply the .com domain. That's one step in the process that can help speed up the change.

Another is changing from the old address to the new in as many locations as practical where you were linked from the old one. As Google constantly crawls the web it will also notice these changes and add them to the list that says your .co.uk site is now on the .com.  Places include social profiles, business listings, reviews--pretty much any place online where your site interacts.

I'm likewise not concerned with AMP.

If your site is already responsive, speedy, and showing up as "mobile-friendly" in search you have an advantage over many sites out there. You'll get much more value by making sure your site is as fast as possible for your users (especially in ecommerce).

Matthew makes great points. I'd add to this that having conversions tied to membership data makes it all the more person specific. This is why you'll here numbers like 74% conversion rate for Amazon Prime members (see: https://www.internetretailer.com/2015/06/25/amazon-prime-members-convert-74-time). Aside from better tracking you can begin to see the value for Amazon in having members...

1. Similar to Facebook they're collecting user data per person and building a massive user base aside from just sales.
2. Better tracking.
3. Higher conversion rates.
4. Top of mind branding.
5. Upselling
6. And so on...

You get the idea. That's why when you go to Amazon.com the only pop-up or animated prompt you'll see on the home page is to "sign-in".  Obviously, this could be something out of scope for your project currently, but food for thought down the road.

Here's my take.  Some footer bests aren't necessarily links.

**What is the good, bad and ugly of backlinks in the footer: **

1. Good: Links are like a mini sitemap. Footer is a very useful addition to the page above it. Features heavily used features of the site that benefit the page by being available in the footer as well.  NAP. Anti-Spam. If links are external, they're to parent or partner companies within the same overall company.
2. Bad: Spammy. Tries to link to every page on the site with keyword heavy text. Broken links. Obvious paid links to external sites.
3. **Ugly: **Low utility. Never updated. Service provider links.

Here's Moz' own list to help get you started: https://moz.com/rand/recommended-list-seo-consultants/ If you'd like I can also run your site through a check list that I give to clients as a starting point. Just DM if interested.  Cheers!

It's a best practice to make sure your whatever software your site is using is patched and up to the latest addition. A high risk warning from that page, "Patch SUPEE-6285 fixes a leak where hackers can take over customer's sessions and download lists of your shop's order details through the RSS feature. Released July 7th, 2015." Would certainly be worth fixing.

From an search perspective, Google has stated that security is a ranking signal: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/08/https-as-ranking-signal.html

Security is a top priority for Google. We invest a lot in making sure that our services use industry-leading security, like strong HTTPS encryption by default. That means that people using Search, Gmail and Google Drive, for example, automatically have a secure connection to Google.

Beyond our own stuff, we’re also working to make the Internet safer more broadly. A big part of that is making sure that websites people access from Google are secure. For instance, we have created resources to help webmasters prevent and fix security breaches on their sites.

We want to go even further. At Google I/O a few months ago, we called for “HTTPS everywhere” on the web.

So making sure your site is secure can have multiple benefits.

Hi Rhonda. Google has a nice article on this very subject here: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2010/04/to-slash-or-not-to-slash.html The main point is that it's a best practice to choose one or the other format for your locations.  From the article:

You can do a quick check on your site to see if the URLs:
http://<your-domain-here>/<some-directory-here>/
(with trailing slash)
http://<your-domain-here>/ <some-directory-here>(no trailing slash)
don’t both return a 200 response code, but that one version redirects to the other.</some-directory-here></your-domain-here></some-directory-here></your-domain-here>

If only one version can be returned (i.e., the other redirects to it), that’s great! This behavior is beneficial because it reduces duplicate content. In the particular case of redirects to trailing slash URLs, our search results will likely show the version of the URL with the 200 response code (most often the trailing slash URL) -- regardless of whether the redirect was a 301 or 302.

A 301 redirect is best as it should be the permanent structure of your site moving forward.  Cheers!

Hi Rena. Yes, if both sites are separate domains that you want to use in different ways, then you should place a different robots.txt file in each domain root so that they're accessible at xyz.com/robots.txt and abc.com/robots.txt.  Cheers!

Hi Bob. Are these sites duplicating themselves in the same niche? It sounds like you have one main site, and two that are secondary to that. Is that the case?

There's a lot that goes into a decision like this, but it may be that the multi-site approach is diluting your brand.  If all three sites have their own distinct voice, social media interactions, branding, design, and so on, then keeping all three as separate entities and addressing the issues within each would be fine. On the other hand, if the other two sites serve as doorway and paid link portals pointing towards the main site, you should really consider making the one main site the best resource and store within the niche.

Broadly, the traffic increase options are standard: paid advertising where applicable or ROI appropriate, funnel improvements which pay dividends when traffic increases, improved rankings, link garnering content, and so on. A classic blog post by Oli Gardner on the subject is here: https://moz.com/blog/the-noob-guide-to-online-marketing-with-giant-infographic-11928

Cheers!

In addition to EGOL and Robert's insights, we also see Google behavior like this in a couple of other areas.

In search changes around News results when real-time feeds based appear in parallel with search query volume and page changes across the web we see news items gaining a boost.  If a new brand is gaining similar traction on both sides of search (both press and searcher interest) it's not a small leap to think that Google will respond with providing users more results around that brand.

Another good parallel comes from the Google patent for "Using concepts as contexts for query term substitutions" ( https://www.google.com/patents/US9104750 ). Being a patent around context and similar terminology, its Claim #1 is broken down as First Term + Second Term + Third Term = something different than any one of those terms used alone. Their example further on in the patent is especially telling...

During state (I), the substitution engine 206 analyzes the aggregated query term substitution data, and determines whether one or more substitution rules may be generated from the analysis. For one example, the substitution engine 206 may determine from the query term substitution data 231 that the term “Crossword” is frequently a substitute term for the term “Puzzle” in the context of the concept “New York Times,” as indicated by a positive indication 237. In some implementations, the indication 237 may be a quantitative score assigned to the query term substitution data 231 in the query log 209, and the quantitative score can be analyzed by one or more criteria in the substitution engine's evaluation of a potential substitute term. For another example, the substitution engine 206 may determine from the query term substitution data 233 that the term “Subscription” is not frequently a substitute term for the term “Puzzle” in the context of the concept “New York Times,” as indicated by a negative indication 238. Here, the substitution engine 206 determines that the term “Crossword” is frequently a substitute term for the term “Puzzle” in the context of “New York Times”, and sends an indication 239 to the collection 210 of substitution rules to add the substitution rule “Puzzle→Crossword (New York Times :)” to the collection 210. For subsequent user queries that contain original query terms “New York Times Puzzles”, the substitution engine 206 may then apply the substitution rule “Puzzle→Crossword (New York Times :)” and communicate with the query reviser engine 205 to include the substitute term “Crossword” in the revised query.

While the example above goes into the similarities between the terms "Puzzle" and "Crossword" the same machine learning can recognize and attribute values to the brand itself, "New York Times".

Haha, you wrote this as I was writing my reply to you both below. Yup! That earlier Q&A is a great resource. Screaming Frog should give you insight into where the links might have gone bad. 301 redirection is always an option as well for the few links that may be causing issues.  Cheers!

Have you tried running something like Screaming Frog to see if you can duplicate the 404s? http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/broken-link-checker/  That might give you greater visibility into this. Beyond that I'd do Google searches on the various plugins you have running to see if they do something similar to that Yoast example regarding partially publishing draft content. It's likely that you'll find someone with a similar issue at some point in the past.

If you want greater insight from the community, post the URLs here and people will be able to investigate directly. Best of luck!

Without looking at the specific site in question my guess is that the draft is publishing some amount of its content to either a sitemap or other area of your site that is then prompting a crawl from Google. This is sometimes an issue with various plugins, for example Yoast was doing this with the attachment-sitemap.xml a while ago, see: https://wordpress.org/support/topic/sitemap-probelm (last comment).

Aside from files such as these, you could run a crawler like Screaming Frog or Xenu to help track down which locations might be pointing to the 404 pages. Cheers!

As Kyle says below, CPC isn't Facebook's preferred method, but it is doable.  I think you're confusing the language you reference as meaning payment to be viewed instead of minimum CPC for your ad over a competitors. In other words it sounds like they're saying, "If you set your bid at $10 per click while your next closest competitor is at $1.31 per click, we'll only charge you $1.32 per click, not $10."  Make sense?

Kyle outlines well how to set up a CPC campaign. You might want to split test between CPC and CPM though depending on your content, sales, and marketing needs. Cheers!

Well 200 is what you want to see... I'd cross check some of those 'no data' pages with another tool to make sure it's not an issue with the site, but the interaction between the Moz tool and your site.  Cheers!

Hi James! This type of URL rewriting is a best practice when it comes to presenting visitors with easy to read page descriptions so whatever capacity you can apply it would be great. Here's Moz's guide to URLs which goes over your question as well as further details into URL structures: https://moz.com/learn/seo/url

Also note from that page:

In addition to the issues of brevity and clarity, it's also important to keep URLs limited to as few dynamic parameters as possible. A dynamic parameter is a part of the URL that provides data to a database so the proper records can be retrieved, i.e. n=3031001, v=glance, categoryid=145, etc.

Note that in both the Amazon and Canon URLs, the dynamic parameters number three or more. In an ideal site, there should never be more than two. Search engineer representatives have confirmed on numerous occasions that URLs with more than two dynamic parameters may not be spidered unless they are perceived as significantly important (i.e., have many, many other links pointing to them).

Cheers!

Hi Rosemary. CPC campaigns should only be counting clicks sent from Facebook to your target website.  See: https://www.facebook.com/help/659185130844708  and https://www.facebook.com/help/336724533157327

If they're not you'd be able to report the non-visit charges as fraudulent and likely have them removed from your billing.

You're welcome Jeannie. Can you provide a sample of the errors you've been experiencing? It maybe something like status code 500 from your server getting overloaded during a crawl. Another thing you can check is Google's PageSpeed tool to see if there are any slow load time issues present. If you're in the red with Google's tool that could be an issue: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

Also check Google Search Console for any history of errors.  Cheers!

Hi Kelly. Temporary redirects for things like adding items to a cart, changing languages, and the like are acceptable and shouldn't be viewed as an error per se. You could possibly put your cart in its own directory and then have that directory be ignored by Moz to clean them up, but in your use case it's not an issue.  Cheers!

I see. But you'll be redirecting to your Amazon page regardless with your current setup as described, so the opportunity for leakage is present at that stage as well.

Again, creating a site and populating it with products that you control is a much better method to both ranking and presenting the products you want to display to visitors.  Cheers!

Yes. Google wants to rank the destination content, not the redirect URL. You could create a static site that links to your individual products and beings to rank, but trying to get a redirect URL to rank will in all likelihood be wasted effort.  Cheers!

Hi Jeannie. You'll want to check the links being reported in a tool that specifically displays HTTP status such as: http://httpstatus.io  This will tell you if those pages are having specific problems or if it's an error within the Moz tool.  The result you should be getting will be 200 OK.  Cheers!

Hello Lora. Yes, it is certainly possible although the SERPs are going to vary based on current news, personalization, localization, and so on. Each type of site is going to have it's own strengths and weaknesses and the search engines are going to try and match their results to search intent as much as possible. The less you try to shoehorn into phrases that have a clear intent of looking for the celebrity / pop-culture item and instead play to the strengths of the global company, the better.

Hello Tanveer. That's a fine format for breadcrumb linking and can help users navigate your site easier. Here's an article that discusses what you're asking: https://moz.com/ugc/guide-to-ecommerce-facets-filters-and-categories specifically mentioning:

When building or rebuilding your categories you need to think in a hierarchical way as if you are building a pyramid; starting from your homepage, and mapping out to your various products. Often, I use breadcrumb navigation links to see how my structuring will be represented (a large white board is also a useful tool). This allows me to ensure that the structure makes sense going from a broad or main category to more specific ones. Narrowing down while adding value can be hard, but doing so will provide a better user browsing experience. If you're seeing a lot of duplicate categories you might not need as many total categories.

Rand has also done a great WBF on this topic (information architecture) so feel free to learn from that as well: https://moz.com/blog/information-architecture-for-seo-whiteboard-friday

Regarding breadcrumbs he says:

By the way, for SEO purposes it does help if I link back and forth one level in each case. So for my hedgehog page, I do want to link down to my hedgehogs in military uniforms page, and I also want to link up to my adorable animals page.

You don't have to do it with exactly these keyword anchor text phrases, that kind of stuff. Just make sure that you are linking. If you want, you can use breadcrumbs. Breadcrumbs are very kind of old-fashioned, been around since the late '90s, sort of style system for showing off links, and that can work really well for some websites. It doesn't have to be the only way things can work though.

Hope this helps give you some clarity on internal linking!  Cheers!

It looks like duplicate content could definitely be the issue and is often not a warning inducing item in WMT.  I'd recommend getting the .com site fully redirected and charting out PR around the move along with a healthy content schedule leading into the high season.  Glad to hear the affects haven't hit you hard in Analytics yet and that your season will allow for the changes to go smoothly. Cheers!

I agree with Andy. Using the brand name is especially applicable if they have established themselves as a brand, and many of the search terms sending visits to the site are also brand tagged.

It looks like the added portion is going to prevent recognition for the overall meta description tag. Is this a custom tag being used to identify products / pages internally to the CMS? For meta description, you'll want to use the syntax:

Hi Jason. While it is a best practice to use the keyword in the URL, I think you did overdo it and are running into something that would be considered keyword cannibalization within your own site. While an old blog post, the core principles remain the same here: https://moz.com/blog/how-to-solve-keyword-cannibalization.  To get around using 'physical therapy' excessively, you can break down the different types of PT into: treatments, exercises, stretches, and so on.  This semantic use of similarly related keywords is a positive signal versus the negative of keyword stuffing.  Cheers!

You might consider adding to your total link count with some other sources: Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, Majestic, Ahrefs, etc. to get a larger look into what's going on around links.  Moz's link data has gone through several changes in the past couple of months. See: http://moz.com/community/q/what-s-the-story-on-mozscape-updates and: https://moz.com/products/api/updates

The ranking drop is more concerning and, as Tim suggests below, could be due to duplicate content issues if you're still running both domains in a similar fashion.  Are there any warnings within your GSC?  What has analytics been showing you? Best of luck!

Hi Taysir. It sounds like you're making good headway so far. I'd eliminate duplicate content from each domain so that you're not importing any into the finalized site.  Let's say you have Page1A, Page1B, Page1C, and Page 1D.  Page1A exists on the main site and has had all its duplicates on that domain redirected into it. Page1B through D should likewise be sent to Page1A on the main site along with any of their duplicates.  The good news is you should be able to do all of this within the step you're currently working. Cheers!

I think so in terms of whether or not it helps people engage with your site or spend more time on your site. If a difficult to navigate site is what first greets a user trying to find something specific based on the search result, the bounce back to the search results is going to drive down ranking. It will also lower the likelihood of sharing.

From a technical perspective, if a site's navigation prevents a crawler from adequately indexing a site, that could cause indexation issues which would in turn make fewer pages available for ranking. So yes, it is an element in ranking and site performance overall.  Cheers!