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Hi Kevin, I agree with Patrick that you're at Google's mercy.  The one correlation that we have noticed is that sites appearing in the answer box are typically in the first 5 SERP results for the question you are answering.  If your site isn't in the top 5 yet, I'd work on some internal & external link building to get it there. Good luck!  Adam

Completely agreed with Oleg.

Move charset="UTF-8"> immediately after the opening

Don't think there is anything special for web apps. Use regular title and meta description best practices.

Thank you a lot. Those are some superb ideas! We will be sure to implement.

Instead of adding a bunch of no value links to your home page, which might be seen as black hat by Google, could you no-index the extra pages? It's not as if the page has any authority to distribute.

If the drop was late January to early February most likely related to Google's PBN update (blog network). A lot of sites have been hit, some cases badly. It is most likely stopped counting the blog network links that were keeping the site at its original position, Google is probably now ignoring or even penalising some or all of these links. The caveat is, due to the nature of the update it is unlikely that disavowing the links will help, probably the best option is to build some new and better ones.

Hi, Yes it happens. Please check last reply in below link. https://moz.com/community/q/google-sets-brand-domain-name-at-the-end-of-serp-titles Hope this helps. Thanks

My idea was to either put a canonical to the categories for homepage (so the category 1 would have a canonical to homepage) or to move all of the category one ads to homepage (speed would suffer) and remove category 1 at all.

How many products and categories do they have? And will these change by season, year, etc.? Will the number of products grow fast or do you see them staying stable for the near future (18 months to 2 years). The reason I ask is that planning for future growth -- or no growth -- can help you determine the best solution. -- Jewel

Hi Beachflower, Did you ever get a resolution to this? I'm curious to see what the outcome and solution was. If this is a malicious attack then you'll need to consult someone who specializes in net sec, but I've dealt with a few different kinds of attacks before so I can make a couple of recommendations. 1. Change all of your logins. Make them unique and difficult for a bot to guess. Then set it to lock out users after five incorrect guesses. This prevents brute force hacks. 2. Add a honeypot to your login forms. A honeypot is a hidden field that bots will try to fill out on a form. Users can't see it, so they don't fill it out. If it gets filled out, the program knows it's a bot, and invalidates the attempt to login. 3. Use screaming frog to find all the js that was maliciously inserted on each URL and create a "cleanup" list. A developer should be able to write a simple "find and replace" program that just deletes it. 4. Consider migrating to https if you haven't already. This can prevent Man-in-the-Middle attacks (MIM) on your site, and also confers several SEO benefits such as improved user experience, a slight boost in ranking, and faster site speed (HTTP/2 integration). These are just a few first steps to take and a Net Sec professional will have much more to add. Hope that helps!

Any update on this Jac?

Hi , IMO you should use different keyword variation for each otherwise you will compete with yourself if you target same keywords for each website. I also suggest you to wait for reply from other community members to get more opinion. Thanks

Thanks!

Hi Laszlo, thanks for your question! Did you see James' response? He's asked some good clarifying questions!

Our main keyword is ranking at the moment as 15th for the homepage, (Keyword + region name). The keyword is not so hard in the country im ranking it. But the question is still the same. Should I link back to homepage using the exact match anchor im trying to rank, and what to do with this category 1 which is the same target keyword. I think it might compete with homepage in the future. **If im not linking back to homepage with the keyword, how can google rank me strong is my question? **

If by orphaned you mean that the pages are inaccessible from other parts of the website and Google is unable to see them, then technically no, it's not impacting your rankings. Or it could be technically yes, depending on how you look at it. If Google can't see the pages, hasn't indexed the pages, then it doesn't factor those pages into its algorithm. If those pages contain valuable content that users would like to see, then they should be accessible, and making them accessible to users and to Google can improve your rankings. I would ask why they're orphaned first before making changes though. If they're landing pages meant only to track SEM campaigns, or test pages to try new code, etc. it makes sense to keep those pages orphaned. Context is key. Don't open pandora's box by accident! But keeping them orphaned isn't actually impacting your rankings, because it's as though it doesn't exist to Google. So proceed cautiously, and may the odds be ever in your favor.

Thank you very much. And what do you think about the other questions?

It is not at all uncommon to have the category taxonomy run three levels deep like this. What page should I land on if I search for "Volunteer Firefighter Patches"? If it's /fire-patches/ you may have trouble targeting "Volunteer" while also targeting Ambulance, Hazmat... I think pages specifically targeting topics like "EMS Patches" are necessary for this site and would not recommend removing them. While you're rethinking the taxonomy though, I would change /fire-patches/ to /first-responders/ because at the moment the site has EMS and Ambulance under "Fire". Really, all of these professionals are "First Responders". Then /first-responders/fire-patches/ may even continue another level deep, such as /first-responders/fire-patches/volunteer/ .

Hi Adamjack, did you see Dmitrii's response to your question? We would love to help you, but need some clarification first.