Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi vcj and the rest of you guys

I would be very interested in learning what strategy you actually went ahead with, and the results.   I have a similar issue as a result of pruning, and removing noindex pages from the sitemap makes perfect sense to me.  We set a noindexed follow on several thousand pages without product descriptions/thin content and we have set things up so when we add new descriptions and updated onpage elements, the noindex is automatically reversed; which sounds perfect, however hardly any of the pages to date (3000-4000) are indexed, so looking for a feasible solution for exactly the same reasons as you.

We have better and comparable metrics and optimization than a lot of the competition, yet rankings are mediocre, so looking to improve on this.

It would be good to hear your views

Cheers

Funny enough our site dropped by 4 positions also, and we got the exact word for word answer as Kristina used there?

Hi Guys

Based on the attached SERP analysis provided by Keyword Explorer, the term 'silver jewelry' appears to have a lot of potential; it has good search volume, high opportunity and potential scores; however when you look at the metrics associated with the top 3 competing sites, and the fact page 1 is dominated by major brands with equally good metrics, then a difficulty score of 26, meaning easy; seems a bit unrealistic.

I would like to hear what others have to say, or am I missing something here.

Regards

Peter

H96KVmH

Hello,

I have a question in regard to international SEO and the hreflang meta tag. We are currently a B2B business in the UK. Our major market is England with some exceptions of sales internationally.

We are wanting to increase our ranking into other english speaking countries and regions such as Ireland and the Channel Islands.

My research has found regional google search engines for Ireland (google.ie), Jersey (google.je) and Guernsey (google.gg).

Now, all the regions have English as one their main language and here is my questions.

Because I use hreflang=“en-gb” as my site language, am I regional excluding these countries and islands? If I used hreflang=“en” would it include these english speaking regions and possible increase the ranking on these the regional search engines?

Thank you,

Hello Dr. Peter J. Meyers,

Thank you for all your suggestions in this matter. We would like to update you and let you know that with the recent update to a google algorithm, our keyword 'Silver Jewellery' is back! We believe this was due to an error because our competitors now have the keyword too.

Unfortunately we believe we've lost some sales over the past 14 months due to this error but we're happy we are back.

Thank you,

Hello Dr. Peter J. Meyers,

Thank you for taking an interest into our problem. Unfortunately, we don’t believe that article is the problem. The sponsored link was added a few weeks ago but the phrase specific targeted action happened a year ago in January 2015. Before then, all our anchor text were branded names.

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-update-maybe-19760.html

We previously believed it was due to Panda and we waited for the update. However, the update in July 2015 had no effect on our issue.

We’ve inspected our search console and we’ve found no manual actions or issues.

We’re still ranking number one on all other major keywords such as ‘Wholesale Silver Earrings’, ‘Wholesale Silver Ear Studs’ and ‘Wholesale Jewellery Silver’. The issue is only when silver becomes before jewellery but not the other way around.

Possible Thoughts

We previously went under a different URL (www.jewellery-collection.co.uk). When we moved to our current url (www.mainlysilver.co.uk) we preformed a ‘meta refresh’ on the old url in 2014. As soon as we realised something went wrong with this phrase penalty, we removed the ‘meta refresh’ and added a landing page on the old URL.

Before we joined, the previous SEO guys resourced the link building work to India and as a result, has created us a massive directory link profile to old URL (www.jewellery-collection.co.uk) but they weren’t spamming. The anchor text were all brand names too.

When we did a "meta refresh" redirected from old URL to new, Google forwarded all the inbound links of the Old URL to New URL in the Google Search Console.

This issue has also affected one of our competitors www.925jewellery.co.uk with the specific phrase penalty (silver + jewellery).

I still don't understand why only "silver + jewellery".

We really appreciate your help in this matter.

Hello,

In January 2015, google changed its European Algorithm. The change decreased the ranking of some of our keywords but not all. See article for more evidence in google changing its algorithm.

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-update-maybe-19760.html

The biggest change was the keyword phrase ‘Wholesale Silver Jewellery’ which we ranked 1 in SERP, but now we’re nowhere to be seen. However, the change didn’t affect our keyword phrase ‘Wholesale Jewellery Silver’, ’Wholesale Silver’ and ‘Wholesale Jewellery.

We’ve been through our data and see that all of our ’Silver Jewellery’ keyword phrases are no longer showing in the SERP. Further research has shown that our competitors were also dropped down the rankings for the same keyword phrase.

Our question is: Why has this update affected certain keyword phrases, such as ‘silver jewellery’ but not ‘jewellery silver’ and how should we over come this?

Additional Information
If you type in our company name ‘Mainly Silver’ or ‘mainlysilver’ were still showing in SERP, however if you type ‘mainlysilver jewellery’ we’re no where to be found.

We’ve even checked ‘site:mainlysilver.co.uk silver jewellery’ in google search and it returns with ‘no results found’. If you switch the keyword phrase, all our web pages are showing up

Our website is - www.mainlysilver.co.uk

No, I just want get rid of million useless links from both menus and make clean pyramid structure with plain link flow:
(product have only 1 link to subcategory, subcategory have 1 link to category and few links to products and so on).

Alright, I got it, lets forget about noindex, left nofollow only.

Now to have pyramid scheme my plan should look like this, right?

Product page: nofollow all links except 1 from breadcrumbs to nearest category (plain shirts).

SubCategory page (plain shirts): nofollow all links except 1 link from breadcrumbs to nearest category (shirts) and all products belonging to current subcategory.

Category page (shirts): nofollow all links except 1 link from breadcrumbs to front page (site.com) and links to own subcategories.

Front page: nofollow all links except 12 links to main categories (shirts, pants etc.)

I just want to follow "pyramid" scheme (see pic in article). If not use noindex, how to do this pyramide?

Oh, sorry, I mean product page have lot of links from top, left menu, from "recommended" products. My offer is left only 1 "way out" - to parent category (in this case it Plain shirts).

But if I will noindex "recommended" products, are they will disappear from G. search?..

I'm talking about this article: https://moz.com/learn/seo/internal-link

Take this sample: HOME --> Shirts --> Plain shirt --> shirt#1

Product page: noindex, follow all links except 1 from breadcrumbs to nearest category (plain shirts).

SubCategory page (plain shirts): noindex, follow all links except 1 link from breadcrumbs to nearest category (shirts) and all products belonging to current subcategory.

Category page (shirts): noindex, follow all links except 1 link from breadcrumbs to front page (site.com) and links to own subcategories.

Front page: noindex, follow all links except 12 links to main categories (shirts, pants etc.)

Is it correct? If I noindex some parts of website, will it be harmful?

So, top graph is "free" visits from search engines + referrals by keywords
and second its only direct mention of domain name in search?