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Hey -- a similar question to this was answered in the forum. Moz's metrics are updated almost daily, but its bot requires time to crawl and discover links pointing to your pages.
I also recommend reading their resource center article on Domain Authority.
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:
I'd instead encourage you to evaluate your link building performance by:
Google tends to ignore user-set canonicals if it thinks that it's found a better one. Nozzle found a good example where it looks like you need to update your canonicals. It might be time for a technical SEO audit: https://www.distilled.net/technical-seo-audit-checklist/
Try cleaning up your canonical tags and see if that does the trick. As you're identifying canonical sources, keep in mind the goal of canonical tags (to help crawlers identify the most authoritative version of a page), and make sure that any pages that don't reference themselves as the canonical are truly a version of another page: https://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization
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/
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.
Hey there! Meta descriptions support non-encoded characters, and search engines will display these characters correctly in SERPs; you don't need to use " to represent " in meta descriptions. You'll see an example of this for the w3 result in this SERP, where you see the " as well as " in its meta description.
Since you're writing meta descriptions for users, and not search engine crawlers, I would recommend you find + replace these characters with their reader-friendly version. Search engines will present the characters you've inserted into your meta descriptions, which may negatively impact users' abilities to read your meta descriptions (and be less likely to click on your results in search).
hope this helps
Hey there–a few thoughts/questions:
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.
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:
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.
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)
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.
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.
No matter what directives you (or your devs) insert on your pages and sitemaps, Google may still ignore them if it finds another resource it "thinks" is better targeted to a given user's region and language.
With hreflang, you don't have to specify a region if you target numerous countries that all speak the same language. Keep in mind, however, that there are likely localized variants (different dialects, preferred spellings, cultural differences) that may require you to create customized content even if it's the same language. For instance, English speakers in the UK are likelier to write "prioritise" whereas English speakers in North America are likelier to write "prioritize." If you're targeting both of these regions with specialized services, then I'd recommend you tweak your spellings.
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.
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! 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!
Hey there–I don't think you got hacked based on this URL alone. The gclid ID in your URL is a Google Click Identifier. It's a tracker that's used to pass information between Google Analytics and Google Ads: https://superuser.com/questions/1129999/what-does-gclid-in-some-urls-mean
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 SimpleSearch–yes, you'll need to indicate these alternate URLs in your sitemap. Google claims that you can use hreflang or sitemaps to indicate international content, but I typically find that being thorough is best (you can always test whether your updated sitemap has made a difference through log file analysis before and after you execute this change).
Here is Google's writeup on indicating alternate pages via sitemap: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en
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 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.
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:
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!
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.
Hi Dan-Louis – all depends on what content these modals are serving, and how your modals are being served.
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...
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.
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 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 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:
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!
Hey there–it's hard for me to know what you should report on, but just because you're not an e-commerce site doesn't mean that you don't have important user behavior metrics you can report on and learn from.
I like these "starter dashboards" from my friends at wholewhale.com. They're labeled "nonprofit" dashboards, but they can be applied to any GA profile. You might also have a better time producing visually engaging, customizable reports with Google's Data Studio (a how-to guide from WW here).
If you need more help, let us know what your site's main goals are (why did you build your site? what does it do? what promise is it supposed to deliver on for users? what questions/tools/products does it offer visitors?)–then the community and I can give you more specific recs!
+1 on James' response regarding the fact that positions 73 and 90 really don't make much of a difference (few-to-no people will go that far to look for results).
There are a few reasons the right page (or any page at all) won't rank for your keyword.
I've never used Autotrack, but that sounds really interesting! GTM has a similar "auto event tracking" function.
I second mememax's answer (from a DIY, "right-now" standpoint). However, you might want to consider implementing Google Tag Manager (GTM): GTM has a great interface that's easy to use to set up new events, so regardless of what you add to your site (new campaign, landing page, content, form, etc.), you can just log into your GTM to set this up without needing to code.
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:
Hey Trazo--yes, you'll need to add the different variations of your domains to GSC. You should create separate properties for these URLs, then make a set of them (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6338828?hl=en).
In order to indicate to Google the primary URLs (www vs non-www), you'll need each url to be set up as a property. As for your SSL question, are you serving both SSL and non-SSL URLs on your domain? If you're not, and all the URLs on your site are SSL, you should make sure any non-SSL url counterparts are forwarding to the correct SSL version.
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.
About three different homepages: This is my reasoning: Wordpress based website uses index.php as a home page if you use "latest posts" as your home page, Even index.php is not displayed in the url address bar. Does that mean WP sites always have 2 homepages? I have removed index.htm at the moment, but I see that as a problem as I am losing PA value for that page.
Zee: So it sounds like you should create a "dynamic" front page (this link should help you: https://codex.wordpress.org/Creating_a_Static_Front_Page). If for some reason you are unable to remove both duplicate homepages, I'd say deprecate one and 301 redirect it to your main homepage, and implement a rel=canonical tag from the duplicated homepage to your main one (e.g. example.com/index.php -301-> example.com)
I can see that this is a bit messy.. I did this as I wanted to preserve
original htm based site URL's. Are you saying that search engines see
www.example.com/dir1/dir2/page.htm and www.example.com/dir1/dir2/page as
identical URL's.
Zee: I can't say for sure, without seeing your site, but if they're indexed (discoverable by search engine crawlers), you could definitely be penalized. If your .htm pages have built up link equity, you'll need to 301 redirect them to their corresponding pages
With my old htm based website I had too many subdirectories. I have
removed some of the subs to make URLs shorter and used 301 redirects in
.htaccess file. I probably should have removed .htm appendixes as well
at this stage, but I did not.
Is there a point to do 301 redirects again? 90% of my pages have been 301 redirected as I have removed some of the old subdirectories. Are you saying that I should again 301 redirect my newly 301 redirected pages?
Zee: No, that'll result in a 301 redirect chain--you should ALWAYS 301 redirect to whatever the most appropriate, final destination is (think of 301 redirects as nonstop flights, never layovers). If I 301 redirect A --> B, but then B needs to be redirected as B --> C, you must update A's to reflect this as well, A --> C, to avoid a redirect chain.
I would like to use example.com as my home page only, I am just trying to transfer PA value of my index.htm page to example.com. Not sure how to do this.
Zee: You may want to canonical this one, in that case (especially if you can confirm that these pages present the same information)--you can implement a rel=canonical on your .htm homepage that points back to your main homepage.
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
Hey there! I took a look at this--it is definitely possible that search engines might have flagged this QR code & copy to your pages as being duplicative content, but it doesn't seem like a large enough issue to have caused a continuous downward trend to your traffic.
Are there any other things you've done to your website since December, or things you did around the same time as this QR code addition?
