Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey – great questions, also good to hear that your PA is improving (as a result of your link building efforts, I assume?).

If you're tracking this site as a "campaign" in Moz, then it reports on DA and PA on a month over month basis. It's also not uncommon for a DA to remain stagnant. That said, I have a few caveats in regards to reporting on DA/PA over time:

• "domain authority" and "page authority" are scores developed by Moz and while they're useful for getting a gauge of the quality and quantity of a site's internal link profile, these aren't necessarily ranking factors nor scores that search engine use to rank your site. Moz states on the above link "Domain Authority is not a metric used by Google in determining search rankings and has no effect on the SERPs."
• given that Moz's own calculation of/algorithm for DA and PA change, reporting on DA and PA over time are not reliable metrics for performance.

I'd instead encourage you to evaluate your link building performance by:

• reputation / trust of a given linking domain. Are you earning links from reputable sources with high editorial control, like Business Insider, Time, Forbes, etc?
• referrals from acquired links. Are you actually gaining referral traffic from these links?
• UX metrics of referral traffic. Once referred users land on your site, are they doing/converting/purchasing/etc. the actions you want them to?

Both good answers above. Chiming in here to echo what's been said, and point out that it's unhelpful to track your domain's DA from Moz month over month because Moz's DA:

• is to Moz
• is not used by Google
• is subject to change, pending updates Moz makes to its own DA algorithm

I would, instead, focus on figuring out how to make your domain stronger with and without links. You may very well need to focus on building links to your site to increase authority and exposure, but you may not be able to accomplish that unless you create content that is "easy" to promote, and compels other websites to link to you.

Hope this helps.

Nikki–if you feel comfortable sharing one of the sites, that would be helpful for further investigation!

It seems like there's a lot you're blocking in your robots.txt that you might need (though that's hard to suss out without knowing your site):

• Disallow: /blogs/+, Disallow: /blogs/%2B, Disallow: /blogs/%2b

• assuming /blogs is the primary page path for any other blog content (e.g. /blogs/blog-title-goes-here)

• Disallow: /design_theme_id

• assuming this is one of your stylesheets, you should probably remove this.

• Disallow: /gift_cards/*

• no idea what comes after /gift_cards/[here], but this may be unnecessary

There may be other reasons Google doesn't reliably see your site as mobile friendly–if you can provide an example site, then we can dig deeper

Hey vtmoz–I'd recommend you resolve the issue _at the source. _Meaning, fix the broken links at their link location (where they're being linked to). You could 301 these 404s to another location on your site, but then you'll just have a bunch of expired, internal links that 301. If these 404 links don't have backlinks, as you say, then there's no page authority to keep.

You can find this in GSC (webmaster tools). LMK if you have any questions.

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Hey Vikrant–setting up a segment will be your friend here, and it's really simple to do. See screenshot.

Create a segment for each country you're analyzing, and then (with that segment enabled, per country) add Time as the secondary dimension for the reports you want. Example could be What time of the day do US users come to my site?

Segment: USA users

Acquisition --> Source/Medium --> Secondary Dimension: Hour

LMK how it turns out!

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Hey gozmoz--I might need a little more information from you in order to help here. It sounds like you've got potentially THREE different homepages (see below). First of all, is that right?

1. example.com
2. example.com/index.htm
3. example.com/index.php

Big red flag to me is the Wordpress plugin you're using that automatically appends .htm to the end of every URL you've transferred to your new WP CMS--why were you unable to keep the URLs as-is, without the .htm? My rec here would be to undo that, and keep the original URLs (without .htm).

**Question 1: **As far as this question goes, I do think you'll need to clarify the above before I can make a solid rec for you. Again, my preference would be for you to use your original URLs as the main ones and deprecate these .htm versions if possible. That _may _require you to 301 redirect the .htm versions to the non-htm counterparts.

Question 2: what do you mean, example.com/index.htm no longer exists? Have you deleted this page entirely? If so, you may not need to do anything here. I do however, think you need to establish a singular URL to be your homepage, and see no reason you shouldn't use example.com (on its own) as your home, instead of appending /index.htm or /index.php

Hi Dan-Louis – all depends on what content these modals are serving, and how your modals are being served.

1. Have you checked to make sure that some resource your modals rely on isn't blocked in /robots.txt (you can also plug a URL with a modal into Search Console's robots.txt checker)? What about meta robots noindex?
2. On mobile, do you have pop ups that are obscuring content on the page?
3. Have you checked any pages with these pop ups/modals in Search Console's fetch and render tool? What resources, if any, are blocked?

TBH I don't like relying on SEMRush (or any singular SEO tool for that matter) for ID'ing technical SEO problems. When was the last time you performed a tech audit?

Keep me posted on what you uncover...

Are these non-relevant links spammy? What are their DAs? Did someone buy these links? (Hope not!) If you do have a large number of backlinks from suspicious sources pointing to a page, this could negatively impact that page and the rest of your domain.

Hey Alex–building from David's note. Without more information (like your site), it's hard to see exactly what's going on, but a few things come to mind:

• Are you using hreflang tags? If you're not, the 302 redirects may be a workaround that a content editor or dev put in place to get users to their appropriate location on your site. In addition to resolving these redirects, I highly recommend you implement hreflang tags in the of your site's pages so that crawlers know that these different international TLDs are all related.
• You should definitely remove these redirects, especially if there are versions of these URLs that exist with 200 status codes. There may be a rule in your site's htaccess file (you'll need to talk to your developer and/or server manager to update this), or within meta directives in the tags of your pages.

To echo what's been said:

• no clear SEO downside of you using the TLD .on.ca

• there may be benefit to procuring other TLDs for your domain name, particularly if:

• .com is available,

• you serve other provinces or other countries (and not just Ontario), and

• your search competitors tend to use non-provincial TLDs (e.g. .com, .ca, .org, etc)

It's actually for this reason that SEOs will consistently tell you not to buy links–link farms are still considered malicious, and won't pass any valuable authority to your site, and can in fact negatively impact your domain.

Your site might be fine. If I were in your shoes however, I would review the trust and authority scores of these linking domains. Here are some articles I recommend you read:

• https://moz.com/blog/bad-backlink-analysis-using-moz-link-explorer
• https://ahrefs.com/blog/bad-links/
• https://moz.com/blog/after-penalty-removed-will-traffic-increase (already shared above)

Hey KentH – it's such a pain to deal with linking penalties, and I'm sorry you're facing that now.

Onto your problem: Google definitely prefers that you make the request of the linking website's webmaster to remove the link to your site, or at least add a "nofollow" attribute to their link (pointing to your site). That said, they understand that it's not always possible to accomplish that. Here's what I recommend:

1. First, reach out to the webmaster/host of the website (you can find this by looking up their domain on WhoIs)
2. Then, if they respond and have "resolved" the linking issue (either by removing the link, or adding a nofollow attribute) you can consider that link/linking root domain addressed
3. If you don't get a response, or the webmaster refuses to alter their link to your site, you can go ahead and add their domain to your disavow file.

It requires a bit of patience–don't wait too long to hear back from the webmasters (I'd personally give it no longer than a week). I hope this helps!

Wish we were able to give instant 24/7 support, but alas we're just volunteers ¯_(ツ)_/¯

If you have time, would you mind explaining how this issue was resolved?

Hey Jonathan! Definitely don't recommend blocking your US site in robots.txt--you want to preserve any authority and pass on equity from your US site to your CA site if possible, so let's leave that out of robots.

Are you fully deprecating your US site, or will it continue to exist alongside your CA site? If you're deprecating it, I'd recommend 301 redirecting the domain to the new CA one. If not, you should preserve the US site, as-is, set up your CA domain, and implement hreflang tags (information here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en). That'll tell Google that these sites are linked, but that they serve different regions.

I do recommend also having a link in your nav or somewhere in your header (like flag icons) that can let users choose which site to navigate to. This will allow for internal linking between both domains.

Hey JuanWork–_it depends, _but if the subpage is a more appropriate new location for the old domain (e.g. old domain's company was acquired by a new company, and is now a _service _on new company's website, it'd be more fitting for old domain to be 301 redirected to the service page on new company's site).

You mentioned that it's a "good old expired domain"–is the domain actually expired, or do you still have ownership of the domain name? If the former, TRY TO BUY IT BACK! If the latter, no worries

Hey there! To be honest, I haven't tried adding schema markup through GTM. I always recommend developers hard code their schema markup into their pages.

As far as placement of the markup is concerned, it depends: if you're adding Organization or _Website _markup (or even LocalBusiness), I'd recommend you add this markup to the tags of your page, so that crawlers see it right away. However, if you have an e-commerce site and want to add Product markup to the items you're selling, that markup should appear where your product (or its reviews) appears (usually in the tags).

Hope this makes sense. Here to help if you have follow up questions!

Using relative URLs (e.g. /page_a) as opposed to absolute URLs (e.g. https://www.mysite.com/page_a) should **not **be the reason Moz isn't detecting your internal links. There may be other reasons Moz isn't able to crawl and ID internal links on your site: are you using rel=nofollow, or blocking certain parts of your site in your robots.txt file?

While I think Moz is great, I personally do not use Moz for crawling or diagnosing technical problems on my sites (including internal linking). For that, I use Screaming Frog, Sitebulb or DeepCrawl. I hope this helps.

I don't immediately see an issue with presenting slightly different navs to satisfy these different user types–in fact, what it sounds like you're doing is presenting a better localized experience based on what's most popular in those countries.

As long as your hreflang tags have the correct alternate links for corresponding international pages, you should be okay. For instance:

In the head tags on this page https://www.website.com/nl/category-B/ make sure you have  <link rel="alternate" href="https: www.website.com="" de="" category-a="" category-b="" "hreflang="de-de">as the alternate German link for that page. Conversely, on the German version https://www.website.com/de/category-A/category-B/ make sure you have  <link rel="alternate" href="https: www.website.com="" nl="" category-b="" " hreflang="nl-nl">as the alternate Netherlands version of that page.</link rel="alternate" href="https:></link rel="alternate" href="https:>

You'll need to ensure that you have the correct corresponding URLs for each of your other targeted countries. If we were to use the above example for https://www.website.com/nl/category-B/ and only had the German equivalent of the page as the alternate link (<link < span="">rel="alternate" href="https://www.website.com/de/category-A/category-B/ "hreflang="de-de">), we'd be missing the other countries we target (Spain and Belgium). So make sure you include them as well!</link <>

Hey Poppy–sorry you're dealing with this!

Your spam score likely has nothing to do with your .com site. I checked, and you have your .com URL 301 redirecting to your .co.uk site (which is likely a good thing, if you want all your traffic to be served through your .co.uk). It sounds like your site might be due for a backlinks audit (to rid your site of suspicious or spammy links pointing to your site) and a technical audit (to clean up any places where you might have linked to the .com version of your site internally).

Hope this all makes sense. Here to help if you have follow up questions!

Hey there–a few thoughts/questions:

• have you correctly implemented hreflang tags (tags that display the alternate language & country versions in the section of every page of your site)?
• why did you choose to create a separate sitemap that lives under the /ja page path? you could, instead, add alternate URLs to the JP version of your content in your existing sitemap
• I doubt this is why you're seeing issues, but is there a particular reason you chose JA as the page path as opposed to the HTML ISO country code for Japan, JP?

To specifically answer your Q about Kanji, I have not found anything that states Bing does not support Kanji. After some preliminary searching, it also looks like Bing does present URLs with Kanji characters in its results (example). As a result, I don't think Kanji is the reason you're having trouble getting your JP sitemap read by Bing.

Hey Becky–here's a primer on the hreflang tag that I recommend reading: https://moz.com/learn/seo/hreflang-tag

Essentially, if you have an international website with localized or translated versions (mexico.website.com, or website.com.mx, or website.com/mexico), you need to use rel="alternate" hreflang="es-mx" (using my Mexico example above) in the head tags of your site's pages.

Hey there–assuming you've correctly implemented your hreflang tags (as alternate inks in your head codes, see example below) then Googlebot should not see these as duplicates of each other.

It's hard for me to weigh in on the other element of your question, "my blog structure is not standardized," without examples. How are you differentiating your international content in your URL structures?

Another question: are these blog articles actually localized? Meaning, is there custom content (e.g. events in X location) or differences (e.g. spelling conventions) for these regions? If not, you may not even need these international versions of your blog content if it's not being translated.

Both an image title and alt text are good SEO opportunities to target KWs (not in a spammy way). It's a missed opportunity for you to have an image without a title or alt text. In my book, alt text is more important and should be used as it's intended: to describe an image in the event a user cannot see that image.

Just because you don't see other wedding photogs put image titles on their photos doesn't mean you shouldn't: as long as your titles and alt text aren't spammy (don't do this, for instance: "wedding photo of wedding in progress, marriage and matrimony"), you likely will be at an advantage over your wedding photog competition.

All great points, Andreas, and thanks for sharing that resource with Ty1986.

I just want to call out user expectation (and ultimately user experience): our expectation is that faceted navigation narrows or alters content on a page. Users _expect _to see this in an easy-to-find place, such as above or to the left of the content the facets will alter. Unless you're proposing a sticky footer-style faceted nav (one that follows the user as they scroll), I encourage you not to use your footer for facets.

Sitemaps cannot (should not) contain more than 50,000 URLs: https://www.sitemaps.org/faq.html#faq_sitemap_size

I'd recommend you instead create a sitemap index to house multiple sitemap files. Keep in mind you will need to separate the URLs in them in order to represent all 60K URLs you have in your existing sitemap.

Separately, EGOL makes excellent points: sitemaps aren't the only way to get pages indexed. It's entirely possible that you do not have sufficient internal links that aid crawlers' discovery of your content: https://moz.com/learn/seo/internal-link

You may also have directives (e.g. noindex) on certain pages or in your robots.txt that prevents crawlers from crawling and indexing certain parts of your site. It may be time for a technical audit: https://www.distilled.net/technical-seo-audit-checklist/