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Hi Stoffel,

Thanks for the answer. As you asked, I would like to give more info on this for better understanding of the scenario.

> Did traffic to the homepage drop or the rankings you are tracking? If rankings, is this just for a single head term or a grouping of related keywords? Also, how long ago did this change happen?

Ranking and organic traffic, both dropped, especially for one keyword we tried to rank by adding content. It's just a 3 letter word. We added the content on our homepage exactly a week back and we dropped immediately the same day after getting indexed by Google. It was confirmed as per search console data too.

I believe it's due to keyword stuffing even though it was really unexpected. The reason I believe this is, as we have this keyword in page title and H1 also.

I am planning to change some of the header tags by removing this keyword from them rather than removing this recently content. Any suggestions?

Thank you

Hi all,

One of our partners have embedded our webpage in their website using iframe such a way that anybody can browse to any page of our website from their website. It's said that content in iframes will not get indexed. But when I Google for h1 tag of our embedded webpage, I can see their website in SERP but not ours which is original. How it's been indexed? Is this hurting us in rankings?

Thanks

Hi all,

Our website homepage doesn't contain much content associated with our primary keyword or product, it's mostly explaining our features. So we tried adding a section at bottom of the homepage which explains the about our services like "what is seo" and "how seo helps business". We are trying to rank for this primary keyword like "seo" with generic content and we dropped immediately after this deployment. Any suggestions on this why and how to proceed?

Thanks

Hi Ende,

I have an extended question for this. If the acquired website is good with authority and backlinks, what is the best way to redirect? Auto redirect or manual redirect (by set up page with our website link)? If it's an auto redirect, which is best? DNS or 301 redirect? I posted new question here.

https://moz.com/community/q/redirecting-acquired-website-dns-or-301

Thanks

Hi all,

We have taken down some infringing websites and acquired them, so far we made around 40 websites. We are using DNS to land on our website from the acquired. But I've see that recently that DNS is not a redirect and we must 301 redirect from the old site to the new site. Also there is a potential harm in employing DNS method due to the duplicate content that will harm SERP performance severely. Which is the best way? DNS or 301 redirect?

Thanks

Actually our sub domains are ranking for brand related queries like "nike shoes" or "nike sports wear" (brand + keyword) and they are generating good traffic. I just wonder if we employ same landing pages on our main website (branded site); will it help my main website to rank for related keywords? And this traffic on sub domains generated from organic traffic is helping my main website or not?

Hi all,

We been facing this ranking fluctuation issue for over an year. Every time we made some changes for better optimisation. We improve rank but eventually drop after few days. Most of the changes we employed are On-page like page loading, fixing broken links & redirects, page titles optimisation, etc. When can see the ranking improvement for our main keywords and related keywords for a while and we drop with in a week eventually. I wonder if someone face the same issue and any thoughts on this scenario?

Thanks

Hi all,

I want to put this question straight with an example rather than confusing with a scenario.

If there is company called "vertigo", a tiles manufacturer. There are many search queries with thousands of searches like "vertigo tiles life", "vertigo tiles for garden", "vertigo tiles dealers", "vertigo tiles for kitchen", etc....These kind of pages will eventually have tendency to rank for non-branded keywords like "tiles for garden", "tiles for kitchen", etc. So where to employ these kind of help/info pages? Main website or sub-domain? Is it Okay to have these pages on sub-domain and traffic getting diverted to sub domain? What if the same pages are on main website? Will main website have ranking improvement for non branded keywords because of employing the landing pages with related topics?

Thanks

Hi all,

I need clarification on this. Not every time website main pages rank, some times even pages from sub directories or sub domains like blogs or guides; especially for branded keywords. I just wonder what happens when so much traffic is generating in sub directories and sub domains just because of limited landing pages in main website.

1. Will this traffic be counted as traffic in main website as per Google?

2. Traffic increase in main website really an ranking factor?

3. Will the "brand + topic" related keywords' traffic is more for a website; will it ranking improves even for "topic keywords"?

Thanks

Hi Ende,

I need your valuable suggestion on this. We have recently taken 4 infringement domains. One of these have high spam score as per Moz. I can see their website in past and employed some low quality content. So, I wonder how to proceed on this? Can we still auto-redirect this or show a message with our website or completely ignore?

I have one more serious question: What will be the difference between auto-redirecting and redirecting them with our website link? Technically will it makes a difference to Google? I am curious to know if there will be any difference for Google when we auto redirect or let visitors click on our website?

Thanks

Hi Igor,

Thanks for the response. I have a confusion with your answer. Could you please clarify?

> How can they affect your rankings if you don't have pages optimized for these queries on your main domain?

• As Google considers sub domains as different websites, related traffic is getting taken away from main website. It it don't hurt, at least main website get benefited with receiving this traffic IMO.

> Is your goal here getting relevant traffic to your website or ranking for more keywords with your main domain?

• Both. I think these are vice-versa. If we rank main website for more keywords, relevant traffic n will be increased automatically right?.

All I would like to know is, if our website traffic increased by 30% for branded & relevant keywords, will it benefit our website in rankings?, especially for non-branded organic search.

Hi all,

We have some of the landing pages on our sub domains which are getting ranked for our brand related queries and taking away the traffic as we don't have pages to rank for those search queries. I would like to know if this scenario hurts or helps our main website ranking as the traffic to the main website is getting diverted to sub domain.

Thanks

Hi all,

We are going to create new landing pages and optimise existing pages. We have a confusion on how to employ content on these pages....whether these will be filled with content to rank for "topics" and "keywords" or direclty jump into the features are are providing. If we go with first, users may feel boring about teaching them about that topic, if we go with latter...it's hard to rank being no related content to rank for that topic. I have seen some of the websites are employing multiple landing pages where they fill with topic related content and then link to features pages. I need suggestions here.

Thank you

Hi all,

One of our sub-domains is forums. Our users will be discussing about our product and many related things. But some of the users in forum are adding a lot of spammy content everyday. I just wonder whether this scenario is ruining our ranking efforts of main website? A sub domain with spammy content really kills the ranking of main website?

Thanks

Thanks for the response. Do you think employing these kind of related pages will impact the website ranking for main keyword?

Thanks

Hi all,

We are in the process of creating new landing pages and noticed something what our competitors been following with landing pages. They have created multiple landing pages targeting the related keywords of a main topic / main keyword. Like "seo defined", "seo history", "seo benefits", "seo strategies", "types of seo", etc being "SEO" as main keyword or main topic. Will this works?

Thanks

I can say the website got affected in between not benefited and suffered.

Main website pages are around 130 where new sub directory have almost 1000 pages. But we do have other sub domains and sub directories. Especially, we have blog as sub directory which have hundreds of pages.

Eventually new sub directory pages gained the ranking improvement, but not main site pages. I can say that the fall hasn't happened overnight. I actually expected to be performing better but main website didn't pick up as per the estimation. This is what concerns me more. And competitors have almost stable rankings over the period.

One confident answer I been expecting from you is, if the sub domain has been migrated to sub directory, Google will consider it as a pert of the website. So the traffic of the sub directory will fall into website. Then the visits of the new sub directory will benefit the website or not?

Hi all,

As per the traditional or standard SEO rules, we have this link juice and dilution concept. Many websites have changed their linking structure with this with the beleif "the more number of pages, the PR will get diluted". Then many websites avoided more number of pages from homepage to avoid link juice dilution. Even we followed same. But I just wonder it's still the same way Google handles websites and rankings as per the links. And many websites even avoid more number of 2nd tier/hierarchy pages to avoid link dilution. I have gone through our competitors where they been employing lot of top level pages like 2nd tier/hierarchy pages but still doing good at rankings. Please share your views and suggestions on this.

Thanks

Hi James,

Thanks for such response. You made it almost clear. But the migration to new sub directory happened months back and we don't see any other reason for our main website drop or not improving as expected. Most of the keywords people land on new sub directory are brand related searched as it's all about help guides of our product. I just wonder why main site hasn't benefited when new sub directory even after months. So, do you agree with my expectation that more number of visitors from different IP addressed to our website or sub directory will benefit in rankings? And you mentioned that you need more detail to answer this question. Please let me know the exact details you need for better understanding of the scenario.

Thanks

Satish

Hi all,

We have a sub directory like website.com/help/. This is a differently hosted and served content. So I wonder how Google treats pages from this sub directory. Will the same priority will be given for these pages compared to main website pages? Will there be any ranking difference when same page is from main website or sub directory. I mean like below page.

1. Page from main website: www.website.com/page1/

2. Page from sub-directory: www.website.com/help/page1/

So which page will have more importance in search results?

Hi,

One of the most disgusting experiences while browsing web pages is the auto playing anonymous and highly non relevant ad videos at some corner of the page which buffer mostly and automatically plays. There are familiar websites which been following this activity. I don't think Google has ever rolled out an update to penalise these. Any idea why?

Thanks

Hi all,

Recently we have over taken one of the websites (with Trademark Infringement )who been using our domain name in their domain. That website got no traffic or backlinks. Is there any risk involved in redirecting that website to our website?

Thanks

Hi,

Thanks for the replies. All the file names and alt texts are almost same. No other changes have been made around the dates. Drop is definitely post the image replacement and directly associated. I am not sure if reverting back to old images will improve rankings anyway. And that's a lengthy job.

Hi all,

Links disavowing is such a advanced tasks in SEO with decent amount of risk involved. I thought many wouldn't follow use this method as Google been saying that they try to ignore bad links and there will be no penalty for such bad links and negative SEO is really a rare case. But I wondered to see only 38% SEOs never used this method and other 62% are disavowing links monthly, quarterly or yearly. I just wonder do we need to disavow links now? It's very easy to say to disavow a link which is not good but difficult to conclude them whether they are hurting already or we will get hurt once they been disavowed.

Thanks

Screenshot_3.jpg

Hi all,

Just checked my website in Google pagespeed insights and most of our website pages were required to reduce the images file size for better page loading. So I have compressed the images using https://compressor.io/ and https://tinypng.com/ and replaced the images. Then surprisingly ranking dropped even score improved for all pages with image optimisation. What would be the reason?

Thanks

Hi all,

We always avoid internal redirects. Just wonder what if many of the out going links are redirecting to new links. I presume there is nothing wrong to host such links. Any ideas?

Thanks

Hi Becker,

Thanks for the response. As I told, sub directory pages are ranking good. That's because they are now part of our main website and root domain is influencing them. But I thought this migration will help as the visitors of new sub directory counts as visitors of website and that's how we gonna benefited from Google. But seems like it didn't workout as expected. I think main reason is because of more internal links increased, PR got diluted.

Hi all,

Generally we care a lot about keywords at headings, title tags, URL, etc. always. But I wonder how much impact they have being in paragraphs. How much do they matter at paragraphs?

Thanks

Hi all,

The images in our sub directory are hosted from a sub domain. This sub domain is blocked to robots. So, I can see all these images are shown as "Blocked Resources" in webmasters. Is anything wrong with this? If so, we also usually block robots to image files location in our website. What's the difference?

Thanks

Hi Lure,

Thanks for the answer. We are going to de index these profile pages. Just wondering about "nofollow" as nofollowing internal links is not always correct. What's your call on this?

Hi,

As per Google analytics, we are loosing around 15% of new sessions every year comparing to the previous. But the sessions are increasing. Good that sessions increased; but new sessions are getting reduced. What exactly we can understand from this scenario?

Thanks

Hi all,

We had our help articles on sub-domain help.website.com. Then we moved it to sub directory website.com/help/. We expected ranking improvement of website.com as there is a wide saying of benefiting from sub domain to sub directory migration. We have noticed that ranking improvement of new sub directory pages (website.com/help/) but not for any main website pages (website.com). I presume that link juice from main website has benefited new sub directory pages but main website lost ranking due to the page rank dilution. Do you agree? Any ideas?

Thanks

Hi,

We have a forum where users create different threads like any other community...ex..Moz. Thousands of pages are getting created. New threads and comments are Okay as they have relevant content. We are planning to "Disallow" all profile pages as they do not help with content relevancy and may dilute the link juice with thousands of such profile pages. Is this right way to proceed?

Thanks

Hi Lure,

I have deleted it as the thread is about recent Hollywood movie torrent and sound spammy with downloadable links with movie name twisted and written for multiple times. So, I deleted it. Thanks for the clarification. To understand better and learn from the scenario, I really wonder how come our discussions page got top ranked where there are number of websites which employ movie related and torrent stuff where our site is no where related to the industry. What is the takeaway from this scenario? Just a spammy thread from non relevant site dominated all other related websites with reputation? Any ideas?

Thanks

Hi,

We have 6 sub domains which are forums, guides, etc. They have their own visitors for the related queries. We are planning to divert some of them to the website to promote our product with latest content. We are planning to add a link from every page of sub domain to our website homepage. This makes additional thousands of internal links flowing to website homepage. Will this kind of internal linking structure hurts? Any risks involved?

Thanks

Hi all,

So we have a sub-domain which has user generated content like forums. Mostly the content is all about our product. Few times some spammy threads get posted and we delete them regularly. I have noticed that a non-relevant thread has been posted which about a movie. But this page got hundreds of clicks. I just wonder will this hurts being off topic and movie torrent thread or helps being receiving hundreds of visitors?

Thanks

Thanks Nigel,

Still I didn't get answer for my actual question. What if we don't have landing pages for our brand related queries or third party websites are ranking above us?

Hi Alick,

Thanks for the response. Our website is not generalised website but we have a brand name and reputation; but unfortunately some of the brand related search terms doesn't have landing pages nor ranking top of the results. Does this scenario impact us? When I asked about creating landing pages for all our brand related queries, someone said that may sounds like spam to Google. Is it?

Thanks

Hi all,

We know many factors contribute to make a page rank at (top) position like somewhere in top 5 results. I have seen some of our pages suddenly spike to that positions and locked there. They been receiving clicks too. Will they be dropped if they don't get estimated clicks? I think many factors contribute to make a page rank higher but clicks are the one factor which makes the page consistently rank at its best position. What do you say?

Thanks

Hi all,

Usually websites rank for their branded keywords. Some times third party websites takeover the websites for branded keywords. If there are more number of such queries where website is not ranking (top) for branded keywords, Google push down website in overall rankings? Any correlation?

Thanks

Hi all,

So the keywords which appear while typing some keywords and suggested keywords at the bottom of the search results page are refereed as LSI keywords. I been noticing some of the LSI keywords for years related to our industry and Google now suddenly changed them. I wonder why it would be. I can see competitors are started using those LSI keywords widely, is that the reason Google changed them?

Thanks

Hi all,

We are planning to add a widget at our website homepage which displays recent blog-posts with dates. Google favours new and latest content. So will these consistent new posts help in improving website ranking?

Thanks

Hi all,

We have almost 1000 pages or posts from our blog which are indexed in Google. Few of them are years old, but they have some relevant and credible content which appears in search results. I am just worried about other hundreds of non-relevant posts which are years old. Being hosting hundreds of them, our website is holding lots of these useless indexing pages which might be giving us little negative impact of keeping non-ranking pages. What's the best way to handle them? Are these pages Okay? Or must be non-indexed or deleted?

Thanks

Hi all,

We have 3 different editions of our product we are selling with 20 features. 1st edition & 2nd edition comes with 15 features in which 10 are common in each edition. 3rd edition comes with all 20 features. Now what's the best way to interlink and show the navigational menu to highlight 3 editions and features as well?

Much appreciated if some one refer me a website with such structure.

Thanks

Hi Moz community,

I am curious to know this. Let's say there is a brand value for a company. It has it's own popularity that it's been mentioned across the internet and social media directly with brand name without their service or industry keyword. Now if the company started promoting themselves like keyword along with their brand name, will it help them to rank for that keyword. For example, Moz is already famous, now they want to rank for "SEO" and related keywords, so they started calling themselves on internet "Moz SEO"; will this fetch them in ranking for keyword SEO? My ultimate question is, using primary keyword along with brand name will work out in ranking for that primary keyword or not?

Thanks

Hi all,

Let's say there is a website with 100 pages ad 95 pages are not ranking for any keywords; but the other 5 pages including homepage are ranking for some keywords. In this scenario, the 95% non-ranking pages does impact the other 5% pages rankings? Or every page holds their credibility in ranking irrespective of other pages in website?

Thanks

Hi all,

So the default and ultimate suggestion about how to rank a page high is to get favoured by users, so by the Google. But if write content in favour of users, it may miss out the keywords or will not have much keyword density and variety of keywords to get in to Google's eyes. Then we may appear around 3rd page; then how do we get into top slots? I can see some top results without even a single mention of the keyword they are ranking for. How that would be possible?

Thanks

Thanks for the response Micheal. These 2 websites have very less traffic compared to the other websites which are trying to rank for the keyword. I have noticed that 10% of the traffic to these websites comes with search of that keyword. So, is that the only factor influencing a boost in rankings? Usually there is a lot of content about this keyword on many other websites; even though these 2 websites which are just got the keyword as their company name. Do u think the keyword in their domain name is major reason?

Hi all,

While searching for our primary keyword, I can see 2 websites on second page results which are non-related to the keyword or industry but their company name is this keyword. Like if I want to rank and searching for "SEO",  there are 2 websites which called "seo trucks" and "seo paints". I wonder how Google is ranking these websites for high competition keyword with 1 million searches per month. So the keyword in URL and this keyword mentioned across the website being their brand name taking over the other potential ranking factors like backlinks, relevant content, user clicks, etc.....

Thanks