Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hello there,

Of course, you can, there are many businesses that add their branches into GMB.

First I would try to figure out what is causing the loss of traffic, try to spend some time at your Google analytics and compare period before and after the change and see if you are able to identify where is the source of the lost traffic.

Since you said organic traffic drop it should be some ranking drop or CTR drop, I would start by checking with my Analytics and Search Console to see if my impressions and CTR have big changes before and after changes.

You should start tracking your keyword ranking, especially keyword that gives you conversion, hopefully, you've been tracking your conversion as well, then optimize it time by time.

Hello Ross,

I have a similar experience with Google+ but I believe the reason is that there are simply too few people from our specific industry and country using Google+, to be honest, you don't need to be active on all social media platform, just on the platform where your audience is there.

For me, I just simply share written blog post on my Google+ without creating any unique content for our Google+, we spend more of our time on LinkedIn and Facebook instead.

So again, you don't need to be everywhere, just where your audience at.

Hope this helps,
Joseph Yap

Hello Rajnish,

There are so many reasons that might be causing the organic traffic lost, here are some thoughts that come to my mind:

• Since you say organic traffic lost I suppose this has something to do with your ranking on Google and CTR
• Do you currently tracking some keywords and do you see a considerable ranking drop?
• Since you rebrand the product do you also made a lot of content changes?
• Did you make a lot of changes on your Meta tags that could hurt the CTR?
• It takes time for 301 Redirect to fully pass the link value.
• You migrate to a different CMS, it has different structure although the surface looks the same, so maybe you need to take a look into onpage/technical SEO as well. Maybe remove the video background, which is known to hurt onpage SEO.

Hope this helps
Joseph Yap

Hello there,

To answer your questions,

1. Google will still crawl your pages even if it's not from the sitemap unless you specify disallow from your robots.txt

2. If they are similar content with the main difference at "quantities" couldn't you consolidate them into one single page that lists all the quantities your company sell in and then 301 redirect the other pages to the consolidated one?

3. It doesn't seem like going to be causing any problem nor hurting your SEO performance, but you could always change these link to the canonical link.

Hope this helps,
Joseph Yap

Hello there,

It's usual to rankings fluctuation if you made a huge change to your site content, Google needs some time to understand your content, learn how your visitors interact with your content (bounce rate, dwell time, etc.) and then decide if you're better than your competitor's page.

So to answer your question, you might be able to get back to the top spot if Google believes your content is much more valuable to the users.

I just take a look at your website and I had, to be honest, it looks like a page designed for Google bot more than the user, the large chunks of texts, over text styling and colors, section alignments make it uneasy to read and it reminds people spammy website/blogs.

It is recommended to design your website for the users, then optimize for SEO. After all, you want to increase your ranking but also your conversion rate as well.

Hope this helps,
Joseph Yap

Hello there,

I'm guessing you're talking about example.com/our-partners-in-uk vs. example.com/our-partner-in-united-kingdom

If that's the case I'd say there won't be too much difference for going with either one, Google is smart at understanding your page content, so if your URL is not too long (>75) for using united-kingdom, then go with it, otherwise go with the shorter UK.

If what you're talking about is the subdirectory for multinational targeting, I would suggest you to take a look at this: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en

Hope this helps,
Joseph Yap

Hello there,

What do you mean your backlinks are not indexing? If you mean you wanted to see your backlinks I would suggest using Moz link explorer and Ahref site explorer.

If you mean some of your backlinks that isn't being indexed by Google, that's nothing much you can do than wait for it to be indexed. Unless you're able to contact the webmaster which he can request for an index in his search console.

Of course if your backlinks have other backlinks it will increase the chance of being indexed as well, finally, I do not recommend using any link indexing tools because they're simply not useful at all, such as linklicious.

And no your ranking will not drop because of the backlinks not being index, unless you mean you lost the backlinks, or the backlinks being de-index, which they have to be indexed at the first place.

Hope this helps,
Joseph Yap

Hello there,

Unfortunately, I don't think there's any other way to have the review extensions.

Hello there,

You can use .htaccess URL rewrite to remove all the .html from your URL, here's the rewrite rules.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^index.html$ / [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^(.*)/index.html$ /$1/ [R=301,L]

Once you added this rules you should also fix all your internal links make sure they link to the URL without .html

Hope this helps,

Joseph Yap

Hello there,

A domain that has been used before and dropped doesn't necessarily provide any advantage on ranking. There are even people saying that domain that is dropped for more than a few months will be "reset" by Google.

Furthermore, the links profile from an expired domain, the relevancy of those backlinked websites to your business should be highly related to providing real value.

Upon checking the domain has been on 301 for a whole year to rayflexgroup.co.uk from 2016. The backlinks profile of the domain is not strong either, most of the links are directories and looks like it's from the same provider (centralindex.com?).

Suggestions: Try to acquire more quality backlinks from relevant authority sites, learn where your competitors acquire backlinks and try to snatch quality ones, give more time to see improvements in ranking (2 months is still very new, Moz took 9 months to get out of "sandbox").

Hello there,

Actually, I think this article could really help you! https://www.danielmorell.com/guides/htaccess-seo/https-www-and-trailing-slash

Alternatively, if you want to get the rules right away, just copy below, change the "example.com" to your domain then it should be working.

Force HTTPS

Force WWW

Remove trailing / from file

Turn on rewrite engine

RewriteEngine on

Check if not directory and ends in /

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} (.+)/$

If not a directory skip next RewriteRule

RewriteRule ^ - [S=2]

Check if HTTPS and WWW

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.(.*)$ [OR,NC]
RewriteCond %{https} off

This RewriteRule skipped if URI was a directory

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

This RewriteRule used if URI was a directory

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteRule ^ - [S=1]
RewriteRule ^(.*)/$ https://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Do note, this 301 redirect your URL to the version with trailing slash, and because Google sees the trailing slash and non-trailing slash version of your pages as a different page, you should be doing a 301 to the right one. Read more about it here: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-trailing-slashes-url-24943.html

Of course, you can choose to remove the trailing slash 301 redirecting, Moz doesn't redirect to either version, and they rank well. But sites like Neilpatel (they have unnecessary redirects) and Backlinko does redirect, and they rank well too. So it's up to you if you want Google to help you identify which version you prefer or you tell Google yourself.

Finally, you can use this tool to check if your redirects are working as you expected: https://httpstatus.io/ (When you test, use a blog page or a specific page to test all the 8 variations because trailing slash doesn't matter at the homepage, take a look at screenshots below)

uPeMS8X.jpg ugDMJZ9.jpg 0wtlmAX.jpg HV2Byd5.jpg

Hello Howard,

Just make sure your 301 redirects setup properly then you'll have no issue with SEO.

All variations http/https + www/non-www + trailing-slash/no-slash (homepage doesn't matter) of url make sure they redirect to a final version of your site.

You can use Screamingfrog and https://httpstatus.io to make sure everything is setup right.

I just have a site upgrade to HTTPS and it doesn't have any problems.

Hope this helps,

Joseph Yap

Hello Yael,

That sounds like the viewport and breakpoint settings with your website, when you design a responsive website with your own screen you might want to use the chrome dev tools to check if the viewport cut off at the right size.

This guidelines from Google might help: https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/design-and-ux/responsive/

This post might give you some idea what is the best screen size to use: https://www.hobo-web.co.uk/best-screen-size/

If it wasn't above mentioned issue maybe you can share your website address so we can better tell what's happening.

Hope this helps,

Joseph Yap

Glad it helped, maybe you can mark this as answered?

The search visibility you saw in your Moz Pro means the CTR of the keywords you're tracking, that means you can have more organic visit from more impression but have a constant CTR.

Hope this helps.

So Jon have you found the solution to the problem? If yes maybe you can mark this as answered? Thnks

Glad it help

Hello there,

Google will truncate your URL when it exceeds a pixel length. I usually keep it as short as possible, make sure it let people understand what they might expect from that page, but not too long to look annoying. Here are some tips:

• Keep it as short as possible
• Don't use stop words
• Avoid using special characters (dash is fine and can be used as spaces)

I couldn't list all of the tips but this few guides will help you whenever you creating a new page and URL.

https://moz.com/blog/15-seo-best-practices-for-structuring-urls

https://moz.com/learn/seo/url

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/seo-friendly-url-structure-2/202790/

Hope this helps,
Joseph Yap

Hello there,

Actually if used correctly, content syndication can be an effective way to help your site ranking, I'm assuming you have a main blog that you want to syndicate the content on it's to other blogs with different groups of visitors, so ultimately they might visit your main blog from that syndicated blog post.

There are some things you can do on syndicated posts such as canonical, noindex, etc. You can read on this 2 post which explains each method in details:

https://searchengineland.com/syndicated-content-189097

https://neilpatel.com/blog/the-step-by-step-guide-to-syndicating-content-without-screwing-up-your-seo/

Hope this helps
Joseph Yap

I'm also using the same approach as Nicholas, and we definitely should not stuff keyword everywhere just because we can.

Hello there,

There's a few tools I use to check my backlinks profile,

1. Google Search Console > Search Traffic > Links to your site

2. Moz Link Explorer

3. Ahref

I think these 3 are the best tools available, hope this helps.

Joseph Yap

Hello there,

What is the constant rate you're talking about? I'm not sure what's the issue you're facing.

Hello there,

Depends on the image, I always have an text and dark layer on my image when I use it as a background, if you use it within post it's really up to you which one to use. But make sure you also have the alt text set for the image. Personally, I would just make sure it is good for the user experience.

Hope this helps.

Hmm that could be, but you should confirm with AIO and WPML support

Hello there,

Since you already got replies telling you that things can take some time, I would just provide you with something that you could do to expedite the process.

• Press release
• Setup relevant social profiles, GMB, and link to your own website make sure you have a consistent NAP
• Get citations from the local website
• Build some quality backlinks

Upon checking the keyword "residentie bosrand", I found that it wasn't a keyword with much competition either, and you have an exact match domain. So I believe the above tips can easily get you rank for your own brand name in a matter of days.

BTW, considering giving a more descriptive file name for your PDF, Google might think they're spammy. Or just simply hide them from search results. (https://moz.com/community/q/no-index-pdfs)

Hope this helps,
Joseph Yap

Hello there,

You should do both, update your current content to make it more insightful, as well as creating more page with content targeting more keywords or other longer tail keywords.

I'm guessing you are worried about "keyword cannibalization," there's some excellent article about this on Moz's blog which can help you to learn how to avoid and identify them if they happen.

https://moz.com/ugc/how-to-keep-keyword-cannibalism-from-robbing-your-sites-performance

https://moz.com/blog/how-to-solve-keyword-cannibalization

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/keyword-cannibalization-and-how-to-handle-it/8084/

https://ahrefs.com/blog/keyword-cannibalization/

To be honest, I wouldn't worry too much about this.

Hope this helps,

Joseph Yap

Hello there,

I am using Yoast and there's the option to have translated version of metas with Yoast, I have never use AIO, but I did find this document from WPML maybe you can check it out and see if it answered your question?

https://wpml.org/documentation/plugins-compatibility/translating-all-in-one-seo/

Regards,
Joseph Yap

Hello there,

Actually, there's no answer from Google that explicitly says you can't do that, although most of the time we would prefer to create a customized landing page for each area of users. Not that only a safer SEO approach, it's also more personalized and might help stuff like CRO more than just SEO.

Here's an article that shows how to use multiple "localbusiness" markup for a page, although he did not use GeoShape, the logic applies: https://www.chrisains.com/seo/local-business-schema-mark-via-json-ld/

Here's another: https://intuitivedigital.com/2016/10/json-ld-for-multiple-locations/

Hope this helps,

Joseph Yap

Hello there,

I have a bit more different opinion than others I would choose to include the city as part of your keyword, the reason is simple, do a Google search with and without city from the keyword, which one do you think it's more relevant?

Don't forget your longer tail keyword (/w city name) also included your general keyword as well (/wo city name), so there's basically no harm I can think of to include your city name.

But of course, make sure you also use the properly structured data as well.

Some would also suggest that your homepage shouldn't be optimized for keywords, but I don't think there's one-rule-for-all in SEO, especially if you aren't a big brand and just starting out in SEO, your homepage is generally your most linked page with the highest ranking chance. So I would not waste the opportunity to rank keywords with my homepage.

Here's the quote from schema.org,

(Actually, a LocalBusiness is a more specific type of Place and a more specific type of Organization, so it inherits properties from both parent types.)

You can read that here at section 2a https://schema.org/docs/gs.html

Hope this answered your questions.

Hello there,

1. I would avoid using AggregateRating on the homepage because Google simply doesn't show them and it can sometimes see it as spam, instead, it's recommended to use it on your specific page that sells the product or service.

2. There's some script that helps you to do that, which helps you to embed Google Review into your website, here's a guide with details to do that.

https://www.launch2success.com/guide/display-google-reviews-website-2017/

If you're using WordPress, there's some plugin can achieve that, such as https://wordpress.org/plugins/widget-google-reviews/

Hope this helps,

Joseph Yap

Hello there,

Both of this error can be caused by either a corrupted file, which you can download a new one from WordPress and see if this fix the problem.

If not I would suggest you start by turning off all your plugin one by one and see if there's some plugin that caused the conflict.

Hope this helps.

Joseph Yap

Glad it helped

Hello there,

If you're talking about the name of image files such as jpg and png where hyphens are used as space (just like you did on page url), there's really no limit given by Google, so my advice would be not to over optimize those image files by stuffing your keywords in it (ie, keyword1-keyword2-keyword3-keyword4.jpg), just make it natural (puppy-food.jpg) instead.

As for Page Titles like Gaston suggested to use it as a separator (personally I prefer | or : ), and again there's no actual limit given by Google, but the key here is to make sure these are optimized for your visitor then only Google. Just make sure they're natural then you should be fine.

Hope this helps,

Joseph Yap

Hello there,

I would always check with more than my own browser to make sure it wasn’t only happen for myself. You can try to use the curl tools from keycdn, or ultimately you can also check with google itself by using the “fetch with google” tool in your Search Console.

If the problem presist you should check if there is any script on your site could potentially cause the issue.

Hope this helps,

Joseph Yap

Hello there,

I think it depends on what kind of searchers you're looking for, is there anyone search for " <your brand="">careers" and if there are no people searching for terms like that there's no point to rank for it. Plus I think if your site is set up properly you should be easily ranking for your brand without much efforts, unless your brand are made up from some general keywords.</your>

Hope this helps,

Joseph Yap

Hello there,

You should be setting up a 301 redirect from your old domain to your new domain, and as Nigel said, make sure to 301 the corresponding page from the previous site to the new site.

site1.com/content-A  --> site2.com/content-A

Here's a detailed guide on how you can set up the redirect record in your DNS:

https://woorkup.com/301-redirect-domain-registrar/

Once you did that you can check with https://tools.keycdn.com/curl

You should be able to see if your 301 redirects work properly. (From what I just tested with your domain www.gofortmyersbeach.com it says 302 but not 301)

** Also, make sure you inform Google by using the Google Search Console > Change of Address**

(https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/83106?hl=en)

Hope this helps.

Hello there,

Some people believe that Google doesn't penalize you for being linked from some spammy site, it simply just devalue those link. Whether it's true or not only Google knows, but for your situation there's 2 option:

• Disavow those spammy links
• Prevent hotlinking, which disables people linking to your images directly
  https://www.hongkiat.com/blog/smarter-way-to-prevent-image-hotlinking-with-htaccess/

Hope this answered your question.

The missing of the Google cached version of your website shouldn't be the causation of ranking loss.

If you have lost in ranking that is more likely going to be other factors causing that drop in ranking, did you recently made any big changes to your website?

Is there any error when you fetch with Google?

Oh, I didn't notice that the second results didn't have that markup. It has been bugging me for awhile, and I tried going through the code of their website and did not find anything that passes that data.

As far as I know, Google has been getting smarter in "guessing" they might be able to understand the location has been mentioned multiple times within the site content, especially in header and footer which most people put their business address.

BUT, I don't think Google just simply read it from the page content, so I went ahead a check the page backlink profile, and here is what I think it makes Google believe the business is in Decatur.

It has 158+ backlinks from local business directories indicate their business in Decatur (screenshot in attachment), besides they also have GMB set up, and have a consistent NAP.

This is what I think Google was able to conclude this particular business is located in Decatur, what do you think?

zj5M6VP.jpg

Hello there,

That seems to be happening for the website that's recently moved or updated, here's a post from SER:

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-cache-404-mobile-first-index-25803.html

It doesn't have any negative impact as John said, and it can be their internal issue with the caching server.

Anyway, you can try using the "Fetch as Google" tool from Google Search Console and hopefully, it will expedite the process they recache your site.

Hope this answered your question.

• Joseph Yap

Hey Dmitrii,

You can always use this tool from Google to learn about the structured data of a website:

https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/u/0/

For the website, you asked it's the addressLocality markup which you can learn more at https://schema.org/addressLocality

Hope this answered your question.

• Joseph Yap

Hello there,

Simply delete the page and redirect to your homepage shouldn't harm your site, but here is what I'll do:

If these pages are having quality backlinks pointing to it, I would recommend rewriting a relevant article in a better quality, especially if these pages are having traffic or ranking for some keyword that is relevant to your website.

Hope this answered your question.

• Joseph Yap

Hello there,

I've never run a site with Magento before but by part numbers do you mean pages on your site?

The Moz on-page grader is only going to show you how well your page is optimized for a keyword.

The factors are mainly on-page and technical optimization, and it doesn't say anything about the keyword difficulty or the backlinks profile.

You should also learn about the keyword competitiveness, i.e., how many people are trying to rank for the keyword and how well their page and their backlink profile is optimized.

You check how many of your page is being indexed on Google by searching with this query "site:yourdomain.com" to see how many results are there, and you may also check in your Google Search Console to see if there are any crawling issues, lastly you can fetch as Google to see if the response code is normal.

Hope this answered your question.

• Joseph Yap

Hey Derek,

I would stick with the recommendation from Google to have desktop version rel alternate point to the mobile version and mobile version point to the desktop version using the canonical tag. Also, take a look at this documentation from Google:

https://developers.google.com/search/mobile-sites/mobile-first-indexing#best-practices

The last line says "Make sure you have the correct rel=canonical and rel=alternate link elements between your mobile and desktop versions." Which mean they suggest you follow their guidelines which you can find on:

https://developers.google.com/search/mobile-sites/mobile-seo/separate-urls

I don't really think it's a good idea to risk the site by doing something opposite to the guidelines.

Personally, I would consider updating to a responsive website because it's easier to manage, cost less in long run, less prone to error, able to get the most out of your SEO effort and Responsive design is Google’s recommended design pattern:

https://developers.google.com/search/mobile-sites/mobile-seo/#choose_your_mobile_configuration

I hope this answered your question.

Cheers,
Joseph Yap

Hello,

For example, the venue owners might search for something like "Restroom Trailers for event organizer" or "Portable toilet for event organizer".

Of course, this is just an example maybe people search differently or they don't even search like this, that is why I still think you can just offer a special offer or partnership for venue owners in your page.

Here's an example as a CRM software company HubSpot is offer partnership program for agencies, https://www.hubspot.com/partners

Hope this helps.
Joseph Yap

Hello KylieM,

Personally, I would always use a subdirectory when I want to target different locations. Google usually see your subdomain as a different website, that means using subdirectory you can make sure all the SEO effort, especially link juice is focused on the same website.

Hope this answered your question.

Regards,
Joseph Yap

Hello Simon,

I'm guessing these pages are the landing pages for your PPC campaign because you don't care if they are being indexed. If that's the case I would:

• Add noindex meta tag to all the other similar page.
• Have all these other pages canonical to your prime landing page.

I think it doesn't matter anymore for the alt tag or other elements.

Hope this answered your question.

Regards,
Joseph Yap

Hello,

As you said if it's not too crazy, for example slightly longer I wouldn't purposely change it for that sole reason. However, this might be a good opportunity to find what organic keywords that particular page is ranking for in the 5~10 position, then maybe you can refine your keyword, page content as well as URL to achieve a better ranking for the keyword with potential.

Hope this helps.

Regards,
Joseph Yap