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Thanks, I'm not concerned about the crawl depth of the search engine bots, there is nothing in your fix that would affect that, I'm curious of the decrease in crawl depth of the site with the Moz as we use that to spot issues with the site.

One of the clients I implemented the fix on went from 4.6K crawled pages to 3.4K and the fix would have removed an expected 1.2K pages.

The other client went from 5K to 3.7K and the fix would have removed an expected 1.3K pages.

TL;DR - Good News everybody, the robots.txt fix didn't reduce the crawl depth of the moz crawler!

Thanks for the solution! We have been coming across a similar issue with some of our sites and I although I'm not a big fan of this type of workaround, I don't see any other options and we want to focus on the real issues. You don't want to ignore the rule in case other pages that should be indexed are marked noindex by mistake.

Logan, are you still getting the depth of crawls after making this type of fix? Have any other issues arisen from this approach?

Let us know

Hi Bernadette, I completely agree with that translation being human. Your are correct it wasn't google translate messing with the crawl, but it was a great argument to get removed

Where in screaming frog are you able to crawl slower? I have dug around the program and can't find the option.

We have a site currently in development that is using the Google Translate API and I am having a massive issue getting screaming frog to crawl and all of our non-native English speaking employees have read through the translated copy in their native language and the general consensus is it reads at a 5th grade level at best. My questions to the community is, has anyone implemented this API on a site and has it a) helped with gaining traffic from other languages/countires and b) has it hurt there site from an SEO standpoint.

Google is penalizing for spammy schema markup, (see: http://searchengineland.com/spammy-structured-markup-penalty-recovery-use-schema-markup-caution-223289) So if it's an error because of incomplete information, I would keep it as a product.

I'm not sure about the 3rd request but for the first one I would suggest you implement the schema via a json script on the pages that has the information about what is showing. The json for each movie would look something like:

from: https://schema.org/MovieTheater

I would also suggest using this testing tool to check if what you implemented is working: https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool

Although we always recommend against onload pop-ups for clients, (we feel the effect the user experience) we do have a few clients that insist on them. I was reading this article the other day https://searchenginewatch.com/2016/05/17/how-do-i-make-sure-my-site-is-mobile-friendly/ which lead me to https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6101188 and I'm happy to see that Google is going to consider these types of content a downgrade when it comes to rank. My question is 2 fold:

1. Has anyone experienced a drop in organic traffic on mobile due to this update?
2. and do you think this will include user triggered content like photo galleries, bookings, email sign ups?

We haven't noticed any drops yet but it is something we will be keeping a close eye on in the next little while.

Let's hear what the community has to say

Makes sense, and we will be exploring this approach with our clients. I'm curious if they would take a similar approach to restaurants, either focus on photos of the interior or maybe even the food.

I wouldn't say this is overkill and setting up the like-for-like redirects from both domains is the ideal approach. Your approach makes the most sense for maintaining rank and as much authority as possible.

That being said I have never had to migrate two domains to one brand new domain. We have handle straight one to one domain migrations with decent success, although we did see a slight dip initially. Please let the community know how the migration goes and any lessons you learn along the way.

Good luck!

We agree with Eric, I would also explore setting Href Lang tags. Check out https://moz.com/blog/hreflang-behaviour-insights and use Search Console to trouble-shoot the effort.

Hi Alex,

"artificial grass" looks to be the biggest Seach volume term for you folks on the first page. I see you folks in 15th position with a search volume of 18,000. But this type of search is dominated by the Local 3-Pack, and your headquarters listing is pretty bare, see: https://www.google.ca/search?q=Easigrass+HQ+London&oq=Easigrass+HQ+London&aqs=chrome..69i57.774j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 my first step would be to optimize that for the term and ask clients if they like your services to give you a review on Google,.

Beyond that I would explore all of your listings for the over regional locations and get them optimized. You might want explore a full on local campaign, Moz Local is pretty hand for that and available in the UK

I hope that helps.

Hopefully we will see you in there, Good luck!

I am at a lost, I can't find the issue. Let us know what Moz says.

Are you able to provide a link to site (DM me if you don't want it posted on the forum)

Hi Michael,

We like all in one SEO, but have also used Yoast and lots of people swear by that plugin. I see you have yoast set up are you having issues with the it not including URL's?

If you are finding your site is too big for either, look into pro sitemaps. It's a paid service, but crawls pretty deep and is automatic so it will keep your sitemap up to date. The initial setup is a bit involved but once set up and providing an decent indexation rate very little tweaking is involved.

Hi Bhomes,

Try clearing you robots.txt of any content, a robots.txt with:

User-agent: *

Disallow:/

Is blocking everything from crawling your site. See: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6062598?hl=en for testing and more details on robots.txt

Here is the actual job description https://verbinteractive.workable.com/jobs/115252 If we were to fill the role with a junior it would have to be a local person for training purposes (Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada). And since we are in Canada we would lean towards someone who can legally work here. Might not work for hiring, but my offer still stands for bounce ideas off.

Good luck with the research!

https://verbinteractive.workable.com/jobs/115252

The Moz forum is a great place to ask questions. But if you have more specific questions, DM us and maybe we can help you out. If anything we can offer you a "Rubber Ducky" to bounce ideas off. We have also found explaining our theories and experience to others helps us understand our info better, so we would be helping each other.

I have also found the community at http://onlinegeniuses.com/ very handy for asking questions/bounce ideas around.

BTW, are you located in eastern North America? We have explored hiring local junior folks to train up in SEO.

We have found adding Schema via JSON-LD pretty straight forward and easier than inline, see: https://developers.google.com/schemas/formats/json-ld

Normally we would put this type of schema in via GTM but Squarespace has issue adding custom code in the body tags. That being said you should be able to add your JSON-LD script of schema directly in the head with no issue.

Good Luck

You could try using built with see: http://builtwith.com/?https%3A%2F%2Fwww.searchenginejournal.com%2F if you explore the widgets area it will give you an idea what they are using.

Have these URLs been blocked by your robots.txt? Can you post some examples?

Sounds like you will do fine. But as Deacyde and EGOL mention, be wary of over-doing things and getting penalized.

Hi Matthew,

It is totally possible, especially if the top spot is held by a site with such a low Domain authority. Do you know what kind of Search volume this keyword has? No point in ranking in the top position for a term no one ever searches, it will never convert. Have you explored any additional similar keywords? I wouldn't focus on just one, but explore 10-20 with high intent and a decent search volume and try to get in the top 3 for as many of those as possible. How are you tracking keywords?

Hi Snowflake,

I think you need to find a keyword tracking tool that lets you know search volume, Moz's keyword tracking does not. For example "french course morzine" has no search volume in the states or the UK. So it doesn't matter where you rank for it since no one searches for it and there is no chance of click through.

You need to determine the search volume of your tracked keywords so you can cull the herd and put your efforts into battles you that are actually worth winning. You could look for a keyword tracking software that offers search volume (my current tools are at the enterprise level, so will not be cost efficient for just one site, a tools I used a few years back was SEOprofiler, and it worked rather well) or you could use the built in AdWords keyword planner tool and look up individual keywords and record the monthly search volume and competition level for each term. The first option will have a monthly cost + time, the second will have a monthly time cost.

In short, your organic traffic is up YOY so you are doing things along the right path. The only issue is the what you are tracking.

I hope that helps, good luck!

Hi Snowflake, although we do use Moz for some tracking, we don't pay particular attention to the keyword ranking aspect of the tool. If I remember correctly it is based on inputted keywords, if rank has dropped but traffic is steady it tells me that the keyword list might be need of updating.

What region is your key market? When I run your site through looking at Google US I don't see any keywords in the converting 1-3 position, although I do see a 67% increase in first page rankings, mostly lower on the page. When running the site through Google UK I do see 2 keywords in the 1-3 position, (french summer school, french summer camp) combined monthly searches of 80. Historically these didn't rank at all before this month, so that is a plus. Plus there is some pretty good intent with those terms.

How does your organic traffic look in Google Analytics? Or you seeing the same dip?

Hi Snowflake,

I'm not familiar with this outputted graph, so I'm going to assume the colors in the stack columns are various ranges of ranks (if you can clarify which color means what that might help for those of us that use a different product for tracking keyword rank). Assuming the line is measuring organic traffic it looks good, a slight dip in the shortest month of the year doesn't set off any red flags for me. Can you provide the URL of the site, I'd be curious to run it through my research tools to see if I can't spot a pattern.

I think Alick300 makes a great point. Unless you wish to expand your international market, then the .co.uk might be the best option. You could have your cake and eat it too by setting up both and using Hreflang to serve up the co.uk to your searches in the UK and your .com for the everyone outside the UK.

Check out: https://moz.com/learn/seo/hreflang-tag for more details.

Hi Becky,

If only it was that simple Open Graph, although is picked up by other platforms, is mainly for providing structured data to social platforms (mainly facebook). Plus, when you view source the open Graph tags do not reference the paragraph that Google uses for the "answer" it uses the intro paragraph which doesn't answer the question. The title is the question, so that is a step in the right direction. The answer is the second paragraph which is not referenced in any structured data that I could see.

Like many things in the search landscape we do not have direct control on how Google interprets the data and display results. What we can do is place our site in the most optimized position to be interpreted properly and provide results, things like descriptive titles and meta descriptions, Schema, etc. will help position your site for interpretation. But in the end the Google Bot analysis of all of the info on your site is what determines what results are displayed. for me more details check out: http://searchengineland.com/optimizing-google-quick-answers-box-215037 it's a year old, but most of the facts stand true.

A follow-up, https://twitter.com/GoogleSmallBiz saw this conversation and reached out to our company twitter account (my original request came from my personal account, I think our company twitter has a bit more weight) and they were very quick at resolving the issue. I don't want to abuse the account, but I'm tempted to put all of my odd/weird request through them since, as mentioned, anything out of the normal seems to confuse the call center. And that is the only time I need to reach out to them.

One thing to note, they requested I DM them.

Good morning,

Although you haven't changed anything, it's very likely google has changed how they interpret your info. How else could they keep the ever-changing landscape of SEO interesting and sometimes frustrating,

There looks to have been a google algorithm update in January and Yoast is saying they are seeing "a high correlation between the keyword(s) being the first word(s) of the slug (the URL) and the ranking" see: https://yoast.com/google-core-algorithm-update/. Google might be playing with results based on the more descriptive slug to see if leads to a higher CTR. When I look at the first 2 positions in the SERPS I see that pegasuslighting.com/led-step-lights.html ranks for 6 terms as of Jan 16th and pegasuslighting.com ranking for 497 terms, so although you might see some fluctuation over the next little bit I think your home will continue to dominate results.

Is anyone else noticing drops in organic traffic or weirdness in Analytics and have some theories?

pegasuslighting.com/led-step-lights.html

Morning Miriam,

24 hours since I tweeted, no response yet. I'm still leaning towards getting the calls back. Although I dealt with the call center twice yesterday and the first person was awesome (pin not showing to a client in Dominican Republic so pretty standard request), the second person never did get what I was asking and kept repeating the same answer over and over.

I'm going to continue to monitor and will report back when if I hear more.

Any idea if GMB will take a representative model for legitimate agencies that offer local services? I would love to have one contact to call when I bring a client on board and deal with firming up their GMB visibility. I have brought it up with a few people at the call center, one guy hinted at it, but wouldn't say anything official.

Hi Miriam,

Thanks for the heads up about this account. I was unaware of this and am in the process of trying it out myself. We had the previous name of the hotel resurface as one and are trying to get it marked closed again. The only issue I can see is explaining a complicated issue a tweet (although it might help trim out the "fat" of the request)

I have had varying success requesting a call back for support, although with any complicated issue, there is a lot more back and forth then I would like.

I will report back when I heard more.

Although there might not be any issue, it's not the ideal approach.

I would suggest siloing each location to separate pages and use the geo modifier for the URL (so the location in new york would be mydomain.com/new-york). Include the info that John recommended and, if feasible, markup that info with schema markup. The regionally specific URL now has more of a potential of ranking in the normal search results, as well as the 3-pack (generated from GMB listings).

Not only will it increase your index count, but also give you a specific URL for each locations GMB listing which makes measuring success easier. I would also recommend setting up a UTM parameter for the GMB profiles so you can segment out the traffic and prove value to the client.

Hi Ric,

That makes sense, so do these pages result in a non-404 from a search, but direct traffic would result in a 404? Or are these 404's only appearing in GSC?

Did the robots.txt blocking work out? Are any of these URL's mentioned in the sitemap.xml? Have you tried crawling the site with a crawler like screaming frog to see if they surface in that? If they do you might need to approach your search results a different way.

Hi RIc,

I believe your first step would be blocking via robots.txt something along the lines of:

Disallow: domain/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/TopCategoriesDisplay?*

But I think you are mistaken that you can make this change within GSC, you can test in GSC, but this doesn't change anything on your site. You will still have to reach out to a dev to get this change complete.

Out of curiosity are these 404's being marked as soft 404's?

Hi Danny,

Are you using a tool to measure your rank/search volume or are you relying on Google search result to determine where you are ranking? As I'm sure you are aware your results are skewed by various factors, geographical location, search history, etc. When I look up that page, I see you ranking on the first page for 3 terms:

• custom macbook pro case
• mac book covers
• personalised macbook case

Each with a search volume of 90. The term "personalised macbook cover" only has a search volume of 10. If I were you I would explore higher search volume terms that you current rank on the second page for, like:

• macbook case (SV=2,400)
• macbook cases (SV=1,300)
• macbook covers (SV=880)
• macbook cover (SV=590)
• macbook pro covers (SV=390)
• custom cases (SV=260)
• mac book cases (SV=210)

I only really dug around the UK search results. But a similar approach could be applied to the other languages.

Thanks Dirk, I stand corrected.

I have used the custom filters to search for other things (videos on page, tracking pixels, etc. ) I second your approach.

Weird, I am looking at it right now during a call and can see it fine.

In SF pro in the right-hand bar under overview close to the bottom is a folder called Analytics.

Screaming frog (http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/) is a great crawler and will check for Analytics installed by default, as well as a bunch of additional info. I believe the free version will search up to 500 pages.

http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/

Hi Michelle,

If you are replacing the bottom flag navigation with a drop down, I don't think you will have any issues. One thing I would explore is using hreflang tags (see: https://moz.com/learn/seo/hreflang-tag) they will help deal with the various language versions and international targeting.

https://moz.com/learn/seo/hreflang-tag

I would have to agree, using your example if example1.html is blocked via robots.txt and when you visit it, it 301's to example2.html then it's not blocked by robots. as long as example2.html is discoverable via other indexed pages linking to it.

Does anyone else in the community have some insight they would like to share?

Hi NancyH, I wouldn't use ebay.com as a comparison, with a DA of 95 any page speed issues are trumped by the backlink portfolio. I'm not seeing anything else that sticks out as an issue, I did notice that the peak of first page results was in Mar 2014, during the summer of 2014 there seems to have been the biggest dip and you have rebounded a bit since this summer of this year, sitting at about 769 first page results. Do you remember if anything changed with the site in the spring/summer of 2014? Have you dug into your analytics to see if any of those metrics changed around the same time? That is about all of the insight I can give without doing a full audit of the site. Maybe someone else in the forums can offer additional insight.

Hi Nancy,

Have you explored your page speed on mobile devices? I noticed a big drop in the spring of this year (although it does look like you are slowly regaining a lot of first page results). This would have been right around google's algorithm change to favor mobile ready sites.  If you look at https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thecpapshop.com%2F&tab=mobile you will see that although the user experience score is pretty good the speed score is pretty low. See what opportunities there you can fix.

Good luck,

No, all of these 404's are from links within your site. You need to explore which pages have the 404 because they now have broken links, redirect all to the home page is a really messy way to deal with these. Do you use a crawler? If not I suggest screaming frog, the paid version is great, but the free version will give you an idea how useful the tool is there is just a limit to how many pages you can crawl.

7 Backlinks isn't really a lot, but I'm sure they are all high quality, keep at it, backlink building is a long game.

The first red flag that your site sets off for us is that in your robots.txt (see: http://www.wattsandco.com/robots.txt) you reference a sitemap that is not your domain http://www.wallpapered.com/sitemap/sitemap.xml. Update that to reference the proper sitemap http://www.wattsandco.com/sitemap/sitemap.xml.

Also we would suggest dealing with your 404's we started crawling your site, 35% done and already seeing 91 404ing links.

You might want to consider exploring using Moz Local, although we have found the majority of converting traffic come from Bing Places, Apple Maps, Google My Business and Facebook business listings, the rest of the listings in Moz Local serve as great backlinks.

I hope that helps, good luck

http://www.wattsandco.com/robots.txt