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Hi Alick, thanks for your reply. That might be why we are seeing an improvement then as new visitors get attributed correctly, and only returning ones don't. I am just a bit concerned that this effectively means we have to wait 6 months to know for sure whether this fix is actually working 100%. But hopefully we'll see a gradual increase in the percentage of transactions getting attributed correctly, to give us an indication of whether or not it is working. Thanks!

Hi all,

We have been having a problem for a while now where most transactions are attributed to referrals from our payment gateway Sagepay. The issue started a couple of months ago, when we finally upgraded our website to https:// for logged in users and transactions. Before, when we were using http://, transactions were attributed to the correct channel. Even weirder, we upgraded 4 websites and only 2 of them have the issue now, the other two continue to attribute transactions correctly.

I added Sagepay to the referral exclusion list which made no difference. Over the weekend, we upgraded to the global site tag and it seems to have improved somewhat, but yesterday 50% of transactions were still attributed to referral/sagepay.

I am also seeing an odd issue, where for half of the transactions, the revenue and transaction are attributed to one channel, but the products (quantity) are attributed to another. One of the channels is always referral/sagepay and the other is the channel that the transaction should be attributed to.

Has anyone seen this issue before? I'd appreciate any tips that might help us fix this issue.

Thanks in advance!

For pages like T&C etc. I wouldn't use canonicals. It is perfectly normal that all websites have pages like T&C, privacy policy and so on, and even when the websites aren't owned by the same company, they are usually quite similar. I would simply leave them as they are. You will not be penalised for duplicate content, but Google may choose to show only one of the results in organic search results.

If someone was to google "website 1 terms and conditions", Google should still choose to show the T&C of website 1 as an organic result. If you used canonicals, where website 5 is used as the canonical, you would probably have website 5 shown no matter which T&C a person is trying to find.

For product pages, you should be using different content (product descriptions) to avoid this issue. However, we have the same situation, where we have some products sold across more than one website, but we actually only want one of them to rank, so we have used cross-domain canonicals for those products. It has worked really well for us.

I should add that not all of these websites are ours, but many are competitors'.

Hi. I track 32 websites and many of them saw a drop of 1-2 in DA this month. 7 dropped by 2, 7 dropped by 1, 15 stayed the same, one dropped by 3, one by 7 and one by 8. I didn't have a single one improve.

Assuming you are keeping your domain, what you should do is 301 redirect your old pages and your competitor's old pages to your new pages.

You can't rename their domain to yours but you need to redirect it to yours. You will also have to continue to keep ownership of the domain (renew it when necessary) to be able to benefit from the domain authority and "link juice".

I would suggest using apostrophes where/if grammatically correct. It depends on the individual sentence whether you would use an apostrophe.

Lawyers = plural of lawyer
Lawyer's = singular of lawyer, to show possession
Lawyers' = plural of lawyer, to show possession

Have you noticed any increases in other channels? I would suspect that traffic coming from https:// to your http:// website was previously counted as direct and is now being attributed to the correct channel (organic or referral).

I use both and I don't think either is a replacement for the other. If your website is under 500 pages, you can use the free version. If not, one license is not expensive at all and valid for a whole year.

The Google Search Console is probably the best and most reliable source for organic keyword data. It can be found in Search Traffic --> Search Analytics.

I use Screaming Frog for this. It'a s spider that does a crawl of your website and then (among others) provides a list of pages without (and pages with multiple) H1 tags. It's a fantastic tool, really useful for all sorts of stuff (like checking for missing / too long / too short page titles and meta descriptions etc etc) and fairly inexpensive (free for crawling up to 500 URLs) at £99 per year for one license. This is their website: https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/

I hope this helps.

Yes, this can happen but you can ask Google not to use the description from a directory such as DMOZ by using the "noodp" meta robot tag:

You could use a user-agent switcher plugin to see what Google (and other search engines) can see. If all they can see is the log-in page it wouldn't be worth it for SEO purposes, but it might still be beneficial if this is an active website with many members who may be more likely to visit your client's website because of this link.

Yep, the biggest drop we have seen is from 10 to 1 on a small website we haven't worked on in months. Mostly smaller drops but bigger than other months. I monitor some competitors as well and out of 24, 2 have stayed the same, 1 has improved, all others have dropped. Our websites have all dropped except for one (which has stayed the same).

Glad to know we're not the only ones!

As far as I am aware, there is nothing wrong with using both canonicals and pagination on the same page. Google says this as well here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663744?hl=en

We have pagination and canonicals set up as suggested in the Google article and also have some issues with Moz saying we have duplicate content, which the pagination should "fix" as far as I understand it.

From the article:

rel="next" and rel="prev" are orthogonal concepts to rel="canonical". You can include both declarations. For example, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=2&sessionid=123 may contain:

I would suggest prioritising the products and creating unique descriptions for the most important ones first.

Outsourcing them ... I would not generally say that's a bad idea as long as you ensure the work produced will be of high quality, meaning don't outsource them to India or something but maybe if the budget allows you could find a freelancer to help with the workload.

We have this issue too and some products from a previous mass upload still don't have good descriptions, but when it is a small update, we create them as required.

I'd suggest adding a noindex robots meta tag to the affected pages (see how to do this here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93710?hl=en) and until Google recrawls use the remove URLs tool (see how to use this here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663419?hl=en).

If you use the noindex robots meta tag, don't disallow the pages through your robots.txt or Google won't even see the tag. Disallowing Google from crawling a page doesn't mean it won't be indexed (or removed from the index), it just means Google won't crawl the page.

If you export your Keyword Rankings to Excel, you can sort them by the Ranking URL so all the keywords that one URL ranks for will be grouped together.

You can also use labels to organise keywords into different groups but this might have been easier to do when you first uploaded them.

I hope this helps!

Hi, someone posted about this on Moz Q&A the other day and somebody else suggested it was to do with YouTube videos embedded on the affected pages. See this link.

I saw a response from someone at Moz to someone with this same issue - they had a .cc domain. The response was that Moz currently don't support custom TLDs. Most likely .kitchen is also affected by this. See here for the discussion.