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?

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:

• 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.

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.

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!

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...

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:

• 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.

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