Welcome to the Q&A Forum
Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.
Hi Jeff,
I think you'll be fine with a local service providers' page, even if they link back to you within the same capacity. Google's aim is to root out spam and links that don't make sense. In this case, its perfectly fine. A good question to ask yourself when placing the link is "Does this link make sense to be here? Does it help the reader?" If it does, then go ahead.
The internet is full of examples of websites linking to each others' resources and guides.
Hope that clears it up!
Hi Tara,
Since you already placed a 301 redirect from the old post to the new one, then you're all set and there is no need to delete the old posts because as soon as you, or a crawler, access the old page,s you'll be redirected to the new ones without "seeing" the old content.
If you are referring to deleting the content from your CMS, then you can go ahead and do so as they are not accessible anymore. Just make sure that the 301 redirects are still in place.
There are a few very good ones. I can share the ones I know and used:
RankMath is relatively new and offers a lot of features for free that are found in the premium version of the others.
The spam score is based on a lot of factors that MOZ's crawler takes into account. You can learn more about the how the spam score works here and see what's affecting your site.
Having a high spam score doesn't automatically mean the site is spammy, but its worth looking into what's happening.
Where are you starting your crawl or check from?
If you are staring from http://www.example-link and you have SSL configured, then naturally you will be redirected to https://www.example-link - if that's the case, you can reconfigure your tools to start from the https version of your website and see what's happening then.
You should also check all your internal links and see if any of them are pointing to the http version and then update them all to the https version. This should sort out your http to https chains.
That's highly dependent on the query itself. For example, for research-based searches, you'll see authoritative websites like Wikipedia dominate the search results as those kinds of searches are not relevant to any location. Think of a medical term, or a name of a movie, or a type of flower for example.
However, for navigation-based searches, and local services based searches, you'll see very localized results. If you search for "plumber in CityName" - you'll see different results every time you use a different city name.
It comes down to the search intent as Google always aims to serve that intent to the best of its ability & understanding.
Hi Carrie,
Your CMS should be able to handle the trailing "/" on your website and provide consistency across all pages. If not, I would advise you to check with your developers on handling this.
You can also do the following since both pages are treated "differently"
Identify which version of the page you want to have as your main one. The one with a hight PA would probably be better.
Have all your internal & menu links point the page you identified as being the main one.
Once you've chosen your primary version, configure the Canonical element of the other page to point to this page.
Hope that helps!
Implementing the FAQ Schema doesn't guarantee that it will show in the search results. It's up to Google to decide on whether to do so or not keeping in mind that there are probably other elements that Google checks for on the site in addition to the Schema.
Hi Ken,
Running a quick "site:" query on both URLs, I can see that they are indexed.
You can use the robots.txt tester from the Old Search Console interface and comment out the lines that could be contributing to the block.
In all cases, the pages are sitting in the index as of this writing.
Yes, you can link them to each other with a regular link, no need to place a No Follow.
Since this is the same website in different languages and targeting different countries, you should look into implementing hreflang on both websites.
You can check MOZ's guide to hreflang here: https://moz.com/learn/seo/hreflang-tag
Hi JC,
I can see that the pages are indexed and showing up when running a "site:" search . So you're good on that front. The fact that its not ranking high enough is probably due to a number of factors. I would suggest running a query for what you think each page should show up for, and seeing what's actually ranking in the first page. Check the content of the ranking pages, the main website, and run a high-level backlink analysis to give you an idea of what you're up against.
Once you identify the gaps, you'll get a good idea of what needs to be done to rank higher.
Is this a brand new domain or did you buy a previous domain name and built a new website on top of it? If the domain had previously existed, look into the backlink profile and what kind of sites are pointing to your website.
Another possibility is the theme you've used for the website. Have you scanned/checked the theme before implementation?
This could possibly be because of the different filters and combinations you have you your category and sub-category pages. I would recommend doing the following :
Block access to unwanted pages through robots.txt
Setup the canonicals properly so that all different types of filtering combinations will always point to the main category/sub-category pages
Make sure your Pagination is properly setup with each page having its canonical pointing to itself and the "rel=next/prev" included (although Google has mentioned that it has stopped supporting those, I would still recommend implementing them)
Here's a good guide on Magento SEO:
https://paulnrogers.com/magento-technical-seo-issues-to-look-out-for/
Hope that helps!
The links don't necessarily have to be from the same websites that are linking to the top results. They'll need to be from relevant websites or relevant pages & articles to your website.
Hi,
A spam score of 20%-40% doesn't necessarily mean that the backlink is bad/spammy. It's only an indication - you can read more about MOZ's spam score calculation here.
I would strongly advise implementing 301 redirects because the old URL can have more valuable backlinks that you still can't see. As good as MOZ's crawler is, it won't pick up everything Google does.
If you're worried about a certain link being spammy, I would go visit it and see what kind of website/page it's sitting on and if it does turn out to be pure spam, you can Disavow that link from Google Search Console. Otherwise, I'd keep the link.
Hope that helps!
There could be many reasons for this happening.
Did the website go through a recent update? Have you changed the site's content? Did something change on the robots.txt file? I'd also check if the pages suddenly changed to "noindex" or "nofollow".
I'd recommend you run an audit and check all technical issues first
To answer your last question, yes - you don't need to implement hreflang if you only have an English page.
However, if you have an English and a Spanish page for the same content, then you'll need to implement hreflang on both and have the canonical of each page point to itself. This is an important element of the hreflang implementation and where we see a lot of implementation errors. Having the canonical for both pages point to the English version is wrong.
You can read more about hreflang in MOZ's documentation here.
This probably isn't the last time you'll see some odd linking behavior to your site. You're doing the right thing by keeping an eye out on your backlink profile.
For hreflang to be implemented properly, both English and Spanish pages have to reference each other AND each page's canonical has to point to itself.
Having one of the pages point its canonical somewhere else will break the implementation.
On ScreamingFrog, you can go to Bulk Export then All Outlinks and export all the outgoing links from all pages on your site into a CSV file. You can open the file and look under the "Follow" column for False entries.
The All Inlinks report would also show you the same information from the perspective of links coming into pages.
I would also recommend setting up all versions under Search Console (http, https, www, non-www, and domain property) as this gives you good insight into each version and how it's performing in SERPs, what pages are indexed, in addition to what domains are linking to each version.
You can use the domain property to see how the website is performing as a whole, or you can drill down to each version to see how (and if) it's ranking and/or indexed.
Running a quick "site:" search on your website, I can see that there are a handful of pages that are indexed. I can also see that you only have 2 posts up and they were published very recently. Additionally, a few elements on the menu are not linked to any pages. So I'm wondering if the site is relatively new or has been redesigned recently?
I agree with what effectdigital said. It looks like everything is in place and your non-www and you http versions of the website are redirecting to the https-www version of the site.
If the GA tracking code is on the website, then it will capture the traffic regardless of whether GA is setup with the http or https version of the site.
You might also find this MOZ Question and its answers useful: