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Thanks Rob!  I appreciate your response!

Thanks. That's what I assumed was the case.

Hi Sam Wilhoit, Sorry to hear you have lost out rankings to a competitor.  It is difficult to say with absolute certainty why they would outrank you all of the sudden without knowing who the competitor is and on what keywords this is occurring.  Feel free to message me and I can take a quick look for you. In the mean time, did you change anything on your website recently, or even in the past 3 months?  Sometimes a change, no matter how small, might have an adverse impact on your website and rankings. Has your competitor changed anything in at all on their site that you can tell in the last 1-3 months?  Have you been tracking them with any tool in order to determine this?

Hi Jenifer30, I just did a search for "fundindias blog" and it produced as your first result your blog's home page and it listed underneath it sitelinks to 6 of your blog's categories.  Not sure if are seeing this when you search or not. In terms of individual blog posts ranking, have you tried creating some links to individual posts?  Many times people put an amazing amount of effort to building the content for their blog but neglect to create links to them.  That usually helps quite a bit. Hope this helps. Let me know if you have any questions. Regards, Kevin

There's a lot of nuance to what is being said there. As others in the community have said, if you were going to test it out yourself on your own site and put your own income and business on the line, would you choose a 302 over a 301 without testing it? We saw what happened to Wired as they were going HTTPS and used 302s - https://www.wired.com/2016/09/wired-completely-encrypted/ Google has also said, and some people have been able to test for different reasons, that if a 302 is left in place long enough then Google may start treating them like 301s and start passing link equity through a 302. But, that's a lot of ifs and uncertainties, at least way too many for me.

Hi, I think adding Top 10 to your title tag will definitely help with your CTR since many users are looking for lists such as this.  You might get a temporary uplift in rankings, but if the user comes to your site and then doesn't find the word "Top 10" near the top of the page and just sees a list of 25 hotels, they will most likely get confused and just leave your site without staying for very long.  Especially if you just have a random list of hotels with no regards to rankings at all.   Thus your rankings might suffer since Google tracks dwell time on a page and user's intent.  So, if the user just leaves your site right away then that temporary uplift in your ranking might be lost. Hope this helps.  Let me know if you have any other questions.

Hi Navneet, Google changes meta tags because Google tries to show the result that is most specifically relevant to your search but  your case is different Google showing open directory projects title and description. In order to showing correct title use " Hope this helps. Thanks

Hi John, thanks for the answer, I really appreciate it, and it's given me some things to work on. I can't see any changes my competitors have made, and they also haven't moved in the rankings, all that happened was I added a couple of paragraphs of extra text to the top of our page, and then about a week later it dropped out of the top 100. I added that extra text around 10 November, and since then have only made very minor tweaks to try and get it to re-appear. I'll do as you suggested and in response to your specific points: Bulk up pages like https://www.hurtlegear.com.au/bmw/ as that should be able to rank for some head keywords - when you say "bulk up", would you consider it bulked up in it's current form? Or do you mean even more text than that? On this /s1000rr/ page, remove the links from the images and rely on the anchor text link. Reducing unnecessary internal links like this has been shown to help rankings - will do, thanks You could expose these model pages in your HTML sitemap. They're currently 3-4 clicks from the homepage, and bringing them up in your hierarchy could help get them crawled more - will do, thanks. Cheers, Graeme EDIT: Just after I posted this I've noticed we've reappeared at number 19. Will still implement those changes though, they sound sensible to me.

Appreciate the feedback blue corona, and thanks for confirming Chris's suggestion.  We are going to go with the advisement received.

I have to agree with Bernadette. If it's a small handful of content, you might be better removing the pages altogether and redirecting the group to your top level blog page or your homepage. But if it's a large number of blog posts, it might be better to do an analysis of these blog posts. Even if you don't offer the service anymore, you don't necessarily want to remove a blog post that is generating a ton of organic traffic (and possible conversions!) to your website. Use GA to track the organic traffic and conversions, and use this data to determine which pages you should keep and optimize to have more relevant information about the services you do currently offer. This can also help you see which blogs are not worth keeping, and in that case you can remove them and set up the proper redirects. Good luck with the project!

For SEO for ecommerce, you need to make sure each of your product pages is optimized well. Each page should have a unique meta description, title tag, and well written content. While this might be obvious, it's extremely important for ecommerce. You need to think about each webpage on your website as an opportunity to rank, so ensuring each page is unique with well crafted content is a great starting point. Be sure to do competitor research to see who is currently ranking for the important keywords you are targeting so you can come up with a strategic plan to outrank them.

I looked up IMDB, seems to be that movie/celebrity/TV website. It is well interlinked, but I don't know if that's it. I guess the more (with great relevance) the better. I like the never twice rule, why do you do that? Thanks.

So the issue is that you have sub-pages which contain a lot of the same information about cushioning, Gore-Tex etc? If the content is reasonably unique, then it's a case of optimising each sub page for 'trainer model name cushioning' or 'trainer model name Gore-Tex' as appropriate. Alternatively, you could create one high level glossary page for all the terms used for all the trainers, and then canonicalise each sub page to that one - then you won't risk the duplicate content filter, and provide a useful resource for people who might be looking for Gore Tex Trainers, rather than Nike Model One With Gore-Tex Trainers...

Hey Joseph, Great question. Typically, the only two options I recommend are either YouTube or Wistia. The short answer is either of these platforms are great, but depending on your goals one might be better than the other. If your goal is to increase traffic to your website, Wistia is typically the better option. This is because your videos are optimized to rank with Wistia, and your pages will actually rank with the videos. YouTube is great for brand awareness and pushing a specific video strategy out to the world. This is because it's already a great platform and many people use it. The good news? You can totally use both. I've seen many brands upload a video on their site using Wistia and then upload that same video to YouTube 2 weeks later in order to grab the best of both worlds. I personally don't think this is necessary (it might also be confusing to users having similar content in two completely seperate places), but it's totally doable and legitimate. Hope that helps!

Like EGOL mentioned it is considered spammy if a website hides and text or images for that matter. Cloaking text can result in a manual penalty from Google which can be terrible for a site. I would suggest putting in an h1 tag that mentions your brand and a keyword you hope to rank for. If you just have the brand name you want to rank for (and no keywords, which I can't imagine anyone would want to do) you can provide an h1 tag that mentions what the product or service is. Overall, no, don't hide text. Chris Hickman Adficient.com

Hi Clara, Good question. I have had the same issue. I made the decision to go for your option 1. So Home Accessories and than make category landing pages for the categories Bathroom, Kitchen etc... Reasons: 1. Volume is not necessarily the key factor: lower volume can be more valuable because of better quality traffic) 2. As Home decorations really describes what you do it is the honest truth about what your site is about. And you dont wanna be lying to Google now would you? ;). 3. And if one would look for kitchen accessoires and would also see Bathroom, bedroom etc it could be confusing. You want them to be landing on your Kitchen page and not your homepage. Hope it helps! Regards, Tymen

Hi, No it is not penalised. It doesn't add value either though. Unless the video makes your visitors stay on the page longer, then it is a good reason to use them. I use a lot of 3rd party video's on "how to make...." and these are very good for the "Average Time on page" of my visitors so that could be a good reason to put them on. Who made the video? If you are allowed to use them you can also republish them on your own Youtube/Vimeo account and change the video's name etc... and it will be regarded a "new" video. Good luck! Regards, Tymen

Yes, building enough backlinks with the correct anchor text will get the page ranked high but there are 100s of similar pages to that on our website. I can't have backlinks to every one of those pages.

You're right on target, it's not a good idea to index search results. Google doesn't want to crawl or index other search results in its own search results. There are some exceptions for gigantico sites like Yelp or TripAdvisor when showing their search results pages are actually the best option, but if you're not at that level and especially if you're an ecommerce site, it's not recommended. You wouldn't be harming anything by excluding search from your robots.txt file. In fact, many top sites exclude search results to preserve crawl capacity and for indexation reasons. You'll also want to look at parameter handling in Search Console, this article from Google will get you started.