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...if yes, how?  Can you share resources / blogs / etc...  I want to reverse my site's rankings. Here's the gist of it: I recently purchased a website that has 600+ pieces of aged content on it. Domain was ranking great about 10 years ago  (1M uniques a year) It apparently got hit by a G algo update in 2012/2013 (Penguin and Panda?), because the rankings have tanked (10 hits a day) In the past two years, the previosu owner published about 100+ off-topic blog posts and it appears been using the site as a PBN. The UX sucks and there's a ton of 404s. (NOTE: I am in the process of removing that content and have cleaned up the 404s). Domain stats: 20+ years old (1998) and DA 32, linking domains 850+, inbound links of 16k+ What I've done: disavow (550 domains), fix all the 404s What I'm doing / about to do: remove spammy content write new/fresh on-topic content update the site UX start a backlink building campaign My questions: is it common to bounce back from a G algo update? is it hard / am I over my head / am I a sucker trying to get the site back alive? are there articles about bouncing back that you can share so I can learn more about this process? Or agencies / consultants, etc that you recommend? what other recommendations / suggestions do you have that would help reverse this 8-year-old penalty?

Hi, I have some confusion about how our blog subdomain is handled in our sitemap.  We have our main website, example.com, and our blog, blog.example.com. Should we list the blog subdomain URL in our main sitemap?  In other words, is listing a subdomain allowed in the root sitemap? What does the final structure look like in terms of the sitemap and robots file?  Specifically: **example.com/sitemap.xml ** would I include a link to our blog subdomain (blog.example.com)? example.com/robots.xml would I include a link to BOTH our main sitemap and blog sitemap? blog.example.com/sitemap.xml would I include a link to our main website URL (even though it's not a subdomain)? blog.example.com/robots.xml does a subdomain need its own robots file? I'm a technical SEO and understand the mechanics of much of on-page SEO.... but for some reason I never found an answer to this specific question and I am wondering how the pros do it.  I appreciate your help with this.

Hi I learned from a very senior SEO that I must link my images if I want Google to read my alt tag for my images. I don't believe this though... is it true? If the answer is not true (which I suppose it is), then maybe you can help me answer this: 1. was he confused or why would he tell me this? 2. i didn't know what i should do so now, whenever i embed an image on my blog posts, i just link them to the blog post in which the image shows... in essence, by clicking the image, the page gets refreshed. does this sound like a good strategy for images? thanks in advance!!!