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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 Ali,
Yeah, I would agree that it is a spammy site. When I tried visiting it, I went through a lot of redirects and ended up on some random page. I would disavow the domain and still implement 301 redirects.
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!
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 Daniele,
I think your homepage should have some text that describes what the website is about and what services/products do you offer. A great place to get ideas would be for you to see the top ranking websites for the keywords you want to rank for. Take a look at their homepages, what kind of content they've put up and how they broke down their homepage. That should give you a few solid ideas to build on.
Hope that helps!
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?
Based on Google's Help Center: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en - it can take a few weeks for them to process the information in the file.
Based on the few times we've used the tool, I can say that the effect roles out across 2-4 weeks. But that's based on a small number of cases and it might be very different for other sites.
Hope that helps!
I'd recommend you install it and try it out. We've been using it for a few sites and its great
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.
Doing a "site:" search for your website shows that there are over 90k pages sitting in the index. I'm not sure how accurate that is, but at least the site is properly indexed.
I'm not sure what you mean by "how can i change my content" - this is a WordPress site, so I'm assuming adding/changing content isn't a difficult task since you have what appears to be a well-built site.
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.
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
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?
As Effect Digital mentioned, this happens when Google is trying to figure out which page best satisfies the intent behind the search. I would advise checking the rest of the pages that are ranking for the term and see what kind of content these pages have and what intent are they satisfying. You can then see which of the pages on your website are in line with that intent and adjust your on-page SEO elements accordingly.
I would also recommend looking into the backlinks pointing to these pages and see which one has the most links in place and take that into consideration when you decide to make any changes.
What do you mean by Landing Page? Do you mean the page that is ranking the highest for a Google Search? And does this also mean that all the pages you mentioned exist at the same time on your website or are you creating and deleting different pages?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hi there,
There are many options to figure this out:
Depending on how much time you to want or can spend, there's a lot of insights that can be gained from the above.
I would recommend having 2 sitemaps - one for the US store and the other for the EU store. However, technically one sitemap will be fine. The reason I would recommend 2 different ones is for you to be able to see how many URLs from each sitemap are being indexed vs how many are being ignored - this will allow you to further investigate any possible issues.
That being said, it sounds like you have a different issue since Google is choosing different canonicals than the ones you are declaring. This would probably be because the US and EU pages are almost identical and Google doesn't see a need to index both. Have you implemented HREFLANG across your website to target the different regions? I would also look into the on-page elements & content for each page to make them more relevant to their targeted regions. Things like Titles, Headers, descriptive text, etc should be different in both sets of pages depending on the target region of each page.
Hope that helps.
Have you tried looking at the nature of some of these links? What do the pages with the links look like? its not uncommon to see things like this... there could be many explanations - spam, scraping bots, remnants of staging environments amongst a few.
If you have disavowed the whole domain, then there is nothing to worry about.
Hi Ryan,
I'd recommend focusing on the intent of the search and whether your conversion page satisfies that intent or not. If it does, then go for it. However, if the conversion page doesn't satisfy the intent, you'll see the new page drop in rankings.
An alternative would be to leave the current page as it is and add a call to action and internal links to your conversion page for the segment of readers who are interested in the service.
I would advise rendering the page under both circumstances to see what is actually happening. There could be differences in the page's Content, Titles, Headers, Internal links, etc... between the Desktop vs Mobile version even if its a responsive design.
Also the Google Mobile tests only evaluate the pages from a technical & mobile friendliness perspective. It doesn't check the content.
Agreed with what Gaston explained and would also add that you should check all elements on your website when it comes to what GSC is reporting. For example, it could be that you have an image ranking for that keyword in position 15 on the Image SERPs and a page from your website is actually ranking on position 50.
You can run a "site:yourwebsite.com" search on google and see what is returned. Based on the results you can run further "site:" searches along with more parameters to see more URLs in the index.
A general "site:yourwebsite.com" idea about how many pages are in the index, but it's not 100% accurate.
I think that highly depends on the keywords and their nature (research-based, transactional, navigational, etc...)
You can check Ahrefs and SEMRush as they can provide an "estimated" value for organic traffic. But its only that, an estimate based on their data.
Hope that helps.
Can you please provide more details as running a test on that page shows no errors, only a few warnings.
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.
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:
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.
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.
Hi Carrie,
For your 301 redirects on the root level, it sounds like the .htaccess file has changed on the server. Can you try validating those other http and non-www versions of the website through other tools like ScreamingFrog? If you're still getting 200 response codes, I would advise raising the issue with Bluehost as this is something they can fix.
As for the XML sitemap, do you mean that you're unable to upload a file to that location? Have you tried sFTP?
For a proper hreflang implementation, the canonical of each page has to point to itself in addition to referencing the other pages that have the same content in a different language. Otherwise, the implementation would be wrong
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.
So if I understand this properly, you have a page on your site and has its canonical pointing to a page on another site and you want to create hreflang for both pages? Or only for the page on your website?
Hi,
If its only a few days until the Arabic pages are published, I would wait until then to push out the hreflang implementation.
Although hreflnag is not a ranking signal, having it implemented with pages that are not published yet would generate internal 404 pages, which can cause a few issues for the site.
Hi William,
I think it mainly depends on whether there is enough search demand to create specialized "living room furniture" pages. If there is, then go ahead and create those pages and aim for them to rank on their own. If not, placing the canonical to point to the main page is enough. I wouldn't place a "noindex" there.
There's a great article that was posted about Shopify SEO on the MOZ Blog last week and can be found here. It could be worth checking out if you haven't read it yet.
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.
Have you tried outlining your Google Analytics data with Google's algorithm updates? You might have been affected by a Google update that happened over the past few weeks?
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!
I fully agree with all that was mentioned here. Index and DoFollow are the defaults if you haven't specified anything different.
Great! Happy to hear that all worked out!
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.
Happy to be of help! If the question is answered, do you mind marking it as such?
Looks like there could be some spammy domains in the backlink profile, however, most of the linking domains are fine. The next step is for you to go through all these domains and see what kind of domains they are, and what is the nature of the backlink coming to your website. If it turns out to be a spammy domain, then you can disavow the whole domain through Search Console.
The fact that the domain is on spammy lists (I'm assuming email lists here) does not mean that the domain itself is in a bad shape. You can check the following:
See if the domain has any Manual Actions on Google Search Console
Check the MOZ Spam score
Check the backlink profile of the domain to see if any spammy domains are linking to your domain - this matters much more than the domain being on email lists. If you find the domain to be on some spammy websites, you can disavow them.
Also, keeping the domain does imply that there will be an upkeep effort/cost.
As for whether to keep it or not, it really comes down to if you can benefit from keeping or redirecting it. If so, then it's worth it.
Well with the recent updates from Google, we're seeing a shift from exact-match search results to satisfying searcher intent. So based on the query "Quality and compliance in a work-at-home environment" and the search results page, it seems Google is trying to satisfy the intent behind the search by providing different types of results - when I checked the top resulting pages, I can see that they are very different in what they offer and the information they hold.
In the case of the pages you shared, there are probably more factors that need to be considered besides optimizing the page to match the exact query. These include the internal & external links to these pages and the content/topics of the pages that are linking to these pages.
Sounds like the site is in decent shape. I'm pretty sure that if you let it go, it will be picked up very quickly by someone else.
I think you have a couple of options:
1- You can keep it and continue to maintain it on a minimal basis. This will allow you to link out to your new domain where appropriate.
2- Redirect it to a new site, or a section of a new site, provided it's in the same space. This would require you to keep the domain name without the hosting & maintenance expenses.