Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I can't see that being an issue, not one that would affect it that badly any way. Have you checked that Google is crawling the site correctly? Site set up in Google Webmaster Tools with no error messages? Double checking that all pages can be indexed and aren't being blocked in the robots.txt file is the best place to start. How new is the site?

Thanks for the response! I dont think thin content is an issue. These guys wrote a lot of good stuff for their website. I did check OSE and I see one site with a spam score of 7 that im sure isnt doing any good.

Hi Bill, You are rightly worried about the change in category structure, the structure earlier looks better than new structure of category page URL (before it was website.com/product-category/product-sub-category will now be website.com/more generic category/product-category/new-subcategory/product-category ). The idea of right page URL structure should be to keep the length of URL in control and also give show the right directory structure to the search engines. It seems with the new structure you can get lengthy URLs and also repeat lot of keywords within the URL. Having said that, you should read these two articles for further help https://moz.com/blog/15-seo-best-practices-for-structuring-urls https://moz.com/learn/seo/url I hope this helps, feel free to respond and ask further. Regards, Vijay

Hi Matthew, Our job as SEOs is to try and get authority for a website on keywords relevant to their niche. We do that by using related topics on blog, on-page SEO with right title, Headers, content on the pages etc. We analyze the results on SERPs, organic keyword traffics in analytics etc., to understand whether our strategy is becoming successful and google is looking at us the way we are projecting ourselves. In your situation, it seems accidentally you have got traffic and ranks for not so relevant keywords, google will look at your website as an authority website for keywords related to this off-topic page (since other pages are not ranked). How to overcome this situation, you can find solution here : https://moz.com/blog/wrong-page-ranks-for-keywords-whiteboard-friday https://moz.com/blog/wrong-page-ranking-in-the-results-6-common-causes-5-solutions As Rand Fishkin has rightly suggested, you would have to let go of off-topic page ranks along with doing the right steps to ranks right topics. I hope this helps. Regards, Vijay

Well, I worked with the developer that contracts with this client and here's what he put in the .htaccess file (domain replaced with "domain"). It did the trick. RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^m.domain.com RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/sitemap.xml$ RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/robots.txt$ RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301]

All of the above are good answers, but ultimately my advice would be: make sure that the relationship between the two page versions is clear (using switchboard tags, as Sean mentioned above), and optimize the mobile version for mobile search, and the desktop version for desktop search. As others have noted already, Google has some flexibility in which signals it chooses to look at - the goal is to provide the best user experience by device.

It's gets everything from Google but it doesn't give you search volume - just different types of questions / searches. -Andy

Option 2 sounds like the logical option - I don't think a flat structure would make sense for what you have to work with. Interlink your content from other pages and don't try to be clever with structures here - it's whatever makes the most sense to what you are trying to do. Of course, it is ideal to try not to place any content too far down the tree but if you have no options in what you can and can't do with changing the structure itself, then I would work with what I have. -Andy

Hi Sean, Thanks for the response. The keyword we are looking at is "B2B Events Agency" and the domain we are tracking is be.uk.com. We are testing from two different physical locations in the UK; London and Exeter, both using Google.co.uk I've tried two different search profile on the Moz bar and that didn't reveal much. We've had a canned response from Rank Ranger about personalisation and location etc. but from what we can see it's a deeper problem than that. Many thanks

Thanks. As  mentioned, however, I'm really just looking for advice about a quick experiment i could perform (solid authority domain one may be possible, but would hope to try something else first).

No problem, hope it helps!

Thanks for your help. We reduced our markup considerably down to the review markup as you suggested.

That's a great article but although he breaks the goals into three nice little categories, the reality is that many businesses may want equal emphasis on all three goals (brand awareness, consideration & advocacy, conversion) so it still leaves things pretty 'gray' in my opinion. So let me give a specific example to focus this thread a bit more narrowly.  Let's say the business is brand new so there's no brand recognition and the website has just been launched.  And let's say its a photography business where the business' work portfolio is KEY in really all three areas at this point (branding, consideration, and conversion).  It seems the article is recommending that if you're new, and your video content is important for consideration & conversion, then you should FIRST privately embed it on your website (via Wistia).  After your site starts to rank well (which could take a LONG time), THEN create a Business YouTube Channel.  Although YouTube has such high domain authority, I would think you would still risk having your YouTube videos rank higher than your website.  But can you not embed lots of branding into your Youtube videos, right?  Like links to your website within the video.  So if your business is based around producing images (photography and video) maybe it would be the best strategy to do both approaches simultaneously and not delay the YouTube Channel building.

Hi Joseph It's usually totally fine to leave your company name in there by default. Then if a particular page title is too long, you can edit the title tag on an individual page basis and create a title without the business name.

I would try and be as on the ball as possible with disavowing links that need it, even if there has been no penalty. One of the first things I look to do when onboarding a new client is review the current disavow file (if there is one) or looking at their backlink portfolio to find potential spam. The spam tool on Moz is quite good at finding these links but make sure you cast your eye over them first as it's likely some good links will have got caught up in there. Just be careful - it's hard to come back from making a mistake with the disavow process!

It's pure speculation but my guess would be that the single page would be seen as one URL and that, the page would be seen indeed as slower to load everything. But in most cases the viewport/ what's in a users view would be loaded quite fast so because of that it could be seen as 'on average'.

Awesome! Sometimes you know the answer right after you ask the question

Good Answer received! Thank you very much, and good luck with the landing pages!

I think Google has documented this pretty clear on the page describing how to Use a sitemap to indicate alternate language pages. NOt only for languages, but also combinations of languages and regions i.e. Switzerland (de-ch), Ireland (en-ie) and so on. The downside on this is that must create a separate url element for each URL.

Yes, that's interesting.  I had wondered if it was something like that. The biggest change I made was only two or three days ago, it's only a small lower authority site so therefore likely wouldn't have been re-crawled yet.