Welcome to the Q&A Forum

First off, am I correct in thinking that a 'child' sitemap is a sitemap of a subfolder and everything that sits under it, i.e.

www.example.com/example

If so, can someone give me a good recommendation for generation a free child sitemap please?

Many thanks,

Rhys

What a brilliant response. Thanks, Roman!

Hey all,

Bit of a novice here, so bare with me. We have a page that has a lot of content in a tabular format that struggles to rank. I created a similar page, without the tabular format, which vastly outranks it, despite having a miniscule backlink profile in comparison.

Now, I've always been under the impression that anything interactive on a website, like tabs, are the result of JS. However, I can't see any JS in the code (but as mentioned, I'm far from an expert). Code below.

Description

insert copy here, click on [insert anchor text](/media/MODULES AVAILABLE 2017-18.xlsx)
more copy here.

Anyone able to shed any light?

Cheers,

Rhys

Thanks, Dan. Yeah I'm hoping to attend BrightonSEO this year, and I did attend one course about advanced OnPage SEO but found the very technical stuff (like log analysis and JS) a bit too complicated. I feel like my knowledge extends as far as 'I know what you should/shouldn't do, but I don't necessarily know why'.

Any book recommendations?

Hi all,

I'm looking to learn more about technical SEO. My background was digital marketing/PR where I learned the importance of links, of anchor text, of page speed, of improving UX signals, of SSL, utilising things like Google My Business etc.

However, I find I am chasing my tail when it comes to things like understanding JS/CSS/log file analysis etc. I've tried reading so many articles on the subjects and I just find it so damn confusing. AnugalarJS/BackboneJS. Fetching & rendering, URL parameters...etc. I know from my own experiments that JS pages struggle to rank and I've created two very similar pages, one without JS, one with JS (which had far more links) and the non-JS page ranked far higher.

So, I suppose I'm asking for some help with how to begin learning this stuff. I find the articles on Moz, Search Engine Land etc to be a bit confusing...maybe I'm not technically minded enough!

Cheers,

Rhys

Hey Michael,

Thanks for your response. The question is, I suppose, why does it not rank as well? Does Google not value it as highly? Or does it struggle to fetch and render it because it's tabbed? It does seem to be the biggest factor, in my opinion, in the difference between the two pages.

Cheers,

Rhys

Hey folks,

So, I got two pages. Page A has a lot more content but in a tabular format which uses javascript and a Title Tag which is a synonym for our keyword, but not the actual keyword.  Page B has less content, and the title tag is the exact keyword phrase we want to rank for. Page A has a bigger backlink profile (though not enormous by any extent).

Page A ranks in 30th. Page B ranks in 7th.

Importance of Title tag? Importance of JS? Both?

Discuss!

Cheers,

Rhys

Hi Nicholas,

Thanks for such a detailed response, very helpful!

One question, regarding file size, what would be the largest that you would recommend?

Cheers,

Rhys

Hi everyone,

One of my pages has an optimisation score of 93, but ranks in 50+ place. What on earth can I do to address this? It's a course page so I've added the 'course' schema. I've added all the alt tags to say the keyword, UX signals aren't bad. Keyword is in the title tag. It has a meta description. Added an extra 7 internal, anchor-rich links pointing at the page this week. Nothing seems to address it. Any ideas?

Cheers,

Rhys

Thanks, Kristen!

Thanks, both!

Once this has been added, would you submit the page to Google to ensure the schema gets picked up?

Cheers,

Rhys

Hey all,

I'm looking to use some schema to publicise an upcoming event. I can't make any sense of the Schema website for this section (http://schema.org/event). Can anyone help with drafting some schema? Or point me to an illustration of an example?

Cheers,

Rhys

Hey all,

We have two different websites, one is a Chinese version of the site with a different URL (.com.cn). The language is all Chinese however, I've noticed there's nohreflang tag on the html. Is this an issue? Presumably, if they type in our Chinese website URL then it should be fine, but if they just search our company name, will the lack of hreflang cause issues?

Cheers,

Rhys

Thanks, all. Regarding trying to guess what our customers are looking for, I've found from previous jobs that attempting to surmise a searcher's language can be tricky. I used to do digital marketing for a cookware company and we'd have a word for a saucepan, for example, whereas we found that searchers were using different language and terms.

Google Trends I like but doesn't it just give you an idea for the search volume over a defined period, and allow you to filter down geographically etc? I want to make sure that there is significant call/traffic to justify the pages that I'll be creating.

Cheers,

Rhys

Buzzsumo charge and not sure it's worth it. didn't find Quora helpful. Any others?

Hi both,

Cheers for your responses. Links do seem to be the route of the problem, but it's a hard area to link build for. I know people discuss Google 'devaluing' links, but this does seem to show that they are still central to algorithm.

No I mean the Moz Page Optimisation score

So, one of my pages has an optimisation score of 93. The DA of the website is 74 and is lower than many of our competitors, but to rank 12th?

Anyway, does anyone have any suggestions? All the images are under 100kb, but the page speed isn't great (not something I'm currently able to change). All alt tags are using variations of our keywords.

Thanks, both!

Hi Alick,

I tried that but I only have the free version so we're capped at 500 URLs. Also, the site:search provided 50,000 results, but I know we don't have that many pages. Are there any other tools?

Cheers,

Rhys

I think our website is too big, far too many indexed pages. I'd like to do some research on how big our competitors' websites are (how many indexed pages). Is there a way to do this?

Cheers,

Rhys

You know the big Google update in February, well our DA dropped 2 points there. Well, on the Mozbar today, our DA has dropped another 2 points. I don't understand it?

Oh, literally, as I write this it's gone back up. A glitch perhaps? Anyway, thanks for your reply!

Domain Authority has gone down again today (after initially dropping on the 7th February). Anyone else noticed anything?

Cheers,

Rhys

Thanks, Logan! Did you have any issues with it being removed as a short term measure then? It does mention that it should only be used as a temporary fix.

Cheers,

Rhys

I've deleted a bunch of pages, but they're still indexed by Google and showing up 404s. All links to these pages have been removed. Because they're showing a 404, our web dev team are saying that they can't implement a noindex tag, so I came across this -

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals

Anyone tried this? Or got a better idea?

We've also added all the pages to robots.txt but they still haven't been de-indexed.

Cheers,

Rhys

Thanks, Logan!

Hi all,

Sorry to jump in here but I've been told the opposite by our web dev team. We're removing indexed 404s at the moment, and our web dev team said we simply need to add robots.txt to the pages and they'll be de-indexed. If this incorrect? I thought I'd need to add a noindex tag but was argued down...

Cheers,

Rhys

Thanks, Stevie. Apparently, there's been a 'phantom' update which I suspect is the culprit...

Hi all,

Don't know whether this is new, or whether I'm very unobservant and just noticed, but certain results in the SERPs have started listing site links, more akin to Ads.

So, if you google 'Department Stores London', you'll see the top listing 'Visit London' has four sitelinks underneath for Selfridges, Debenhams, Harrods and Fenwick. Is this markup?

My website has sitelinks if you search for us, but if we appear in a generic list (like this search), then they disappear. Any ideas?

Cheers,

Rhys

Thank you!

As the question suggests...

Hi Stevie,

This is the course page in question, but this is only one of a number of pages that have dropped.

It's not great in mobile, but speed isn't an issue, but more to do with how it reacts to mobile.

http://www.swansea.ac.uk/undergraduate/courses/medicine/bscbiochemistry/

But this is the page which has an optimisation score of 96. Not really sure what else I can do.

Our domain did drop by 2 in the latest update a fortnight ago, but then again, so did many of our competitors.

Cheers,

Rhys

Hi Stevie,

Thanks for the link; I don't think it's that because we don't have any pop-ups or ads. Individual pages have just plummeted, one dropped 81% in a week. Any other ideas? There's not much left for me to optimise, so I don't see how I can regain my first-page positions.

Cheers,

Rhys

Hi all,

Several of my pages have absolutely tanked in the past fortnight, and I've no idea why. One of them, according to Moz, has a Page Optimisation Score of 96, and it's dropped from 10th to 20th. Our DA is lower than our competitors, but still, that's a substantial drop. Sadly, this has been replicated across the site.

Any suggestions?

Cheers,

Rhys

Thanks, Frank!

Thanks, Gaston!

Hi all,

Building a new page for a fairly competitive keyword. Need to make sure the on-page SEO is pretty top notch, because link building (including internal links) will be difficult.

I've optimised the meta description, the alt tags and image names, and included the keyword in the Title Tags. Not a great deal I can do with regards to optimising for mobile or considering migrating to the AMP project because this is handled externally. What else would you suggest?

Cheers in advance,

Rhys

Thanks, John!

Thanks, John!

Basically, before I started, two pages were created for a directory page. This is now splitting the traffic, but the page we'd like to re-direct has, for some reason, had a number of pages built under it. So, we need to 301 the page without damaging the URL structure of the sub-pages, but I wasn't sure if that was possible!

Hope that makes sense?

Thanks for your help!

Cheers,

Rhys

Hi John,

Thank you for the very detailed response, that's exactly what I meant. So, the URL for the children of /page/ should stay exactly the same? /page/1/ and /page/2/ aren't controlled by me, but /page/ is, and is outdated so I'm looking to apply a 301 to a new page which we've developed for it.

Assuming I've understood your answer, this should be fine...

Thanks again for your response - very helpful!

Best wishes,

Rhys

Hi all,

I'd like to re-direct page A to page B. The problem is, under page A, I have a number of other pages. So, for example -

www.website.co.uk/A/fake/website

If I re-direct www.website.co.uk/A/ to www.website.co.uk/B/, would the sub-pages then become unusable as a URL? Or would they stay intact because I'm not changing the location of the pages, merely applying a re-direct to the folder that it's in.

Cheers,

Rhys

Oh, that's a shame!

Thanks, Andy.

Hi all,

Under many title tags, you see a list of sub-pages that Google suggests. So, if you search for Amazon, for example, it'll show you 6 options:

Full Shop Directory - Try Prime

Books - CDs & Vinyl

Your account - Today's deals

Can you dictate these choices with markup?

Cheers,

Rhys

Hi Sean,

You're right! Although, on mine, it was on page 2. Seems very unusual that with all the cookies and filters on, I was invisible on rankings?

Anyway, thank you for your help!

Best wishes,

Rhys

Hi Sean,

Thanks for getting back to me. I doesn't rank, at all, for 'Biochemistry degree', which I don't understand. Granted, there is some big competition, but not showing at all? Seems a bit strange.

Thanks for your advice.

Cheers,

Rhys

Hi Sean,

Thanks for your reply.

Content hasn't been duplicated, and, from what I can see from the html, there is no 'noindex' tag on the page. However, I'm not sure about the robots.txt file.

URL is attached - http://www.swansea.ac.uk/undergraduate/courses/medicine/bscbiochemistry/

Appreciate your help!

Cheers,

Rhys

Our page has been indexed (I just checked) but literally doesn't exist in the first 300 results despite having a respectable DA & PA.

Is there something I can do? There's no reason why this specific page doesn't rank, as far as I can see. It's not a new page.

Cheers,

Rhys

Thank you, Everett!

Hi both,

This is the markup I've used -

I've put it into a markup checker, and it seems to be fine. Could it be a case that I simply need to highlight it to Google as  kindly suggested by Everett?

Thank you all; very helpful. Not sure whether it is what Dr Meyers said, and we merely lack authority etc (this has mostly been done in the past 3 months), because I've also implemented a markup for our courses.

In answer to Gianluca, yes that is the correct business. Have I implemented the wrong markup? Have I used person not organisation? Thank you for the links, very thoughtful!

Thanks Everett, I have tried the feedback but I find they don't pay much attention to it - similarly, I've tried emailing google a number of times and don't get a response. Less than helpful!

thank you all for your kind response!