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My Secret is this.... Stand up and be noticed be kind be wise and be engaging and be the best you can be in your niche create something that makes people listen and look and feel and react...and share and love and want to know this person.. if you was searching on line to buy something or a service what would make you purchase or inquire from that site? what has made you read more or buy in the past? and replicate that !! and have fun!!! what makes you different from the rest out there its your uniqueness your personality let it shine through online be a leader and build a community and be helpful and give give give and you will  receive.. Reseolve.com

Hi there. My thought is that it was just a coincidence. Usually, responsiveness doesn't affect rankings that dramatically, especially on desktop devices. There are many-many far more important ranking signals than being mobile-friendly. Make sure that your website is properly optimized, you got good backlink profile etc. Also I suggest to look at your competitors. If they have improved, or there were new companies, which are better optimized than yours, and, at the same time your website is underoptimized - your rankings will go down. Hope this helps.

Thank you all for your information.  It is very insightful and will help us move towards the correct decisions.

Ben, I doubt that crawlers are going to access the robots.txt file for each request, but they still have to validate any url they find against the list of the blocked ones. Glad to help, Don

Hi Jordan, I've sent you a private message. Thanks mate.

Hi Lewis! Did Matthew answer your question? If so, mind marking one or both of his replies as a "Good Answer?" It'll get him a couple bonus MozPoints, and it helps us keep track of things.

It sounds to me like you need to do a Content Audit with the goal of pruning out all pages with zero traffic and zero links from the index. See the following resources: How To Do a Content Audit - Step by Step (Moz) Classic Content Audit Articles (Linked-In) Content Audit Case Studies (Linked-In) Using URL Profiler for Content Audits ( URL Profiler) Here's the slide deck for a presentation I gave last year about them. Here's a recording of a webinar with the presentation above. Common Content Audit Strategies I think the site you described would be considered Extra Large with a Penalty "Risk" so this is what the tool recommends: "Focus: Prioritization of Pages for Content Optimization. Are you SURE there is no content-based penalty risk? Most sites with this many pages have major content issues, meaning this would be the wrong “situation” for them. In the rare case that they don’t, prioritize the pages based on rankings, traffic potential, revenue… and propose how many to improve each month with ongoing copywriting and on-page optimization."

A common post-Penguin misconception is to avoid using important keywords in anchor text at all. You should avoid using the same keyword-stuffed anchor text in a bunch of backlinks to your site, but it's still a best practice to include important keywords in anchor text. Just don't be spammy about it. Make it natural and vary the anchor text. It shouldn't be a problem on your own website as long as it isn't done in an unnatural way that isn't helpful to the reader at all.

The original poster's situation sounds like merging two sites rather than moving a site from one domain name to another. Matt Cutts specifically recommended against using the Change of Address tool for merging sites in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6pyAWJ5BRs

One way to deal with this is to have the main site not mention any particular locations. Then, in one section of the website you could create a directory or listings of dealers who offer your products. Each dealer who sells your products could get their own page, and be listed in the category or city page as well.

Hey Eric, Appreciate the positive attitude! This is definitely a good jumping off point for my team and I. I only say that because pharma is heavily regulated so things like link building and branded social media are almost always disapproved. And content updates go through a lengthy legal process before they can be published. We're already promoting the pages by using more internal links to Side A. But I still definitely like the attitude adjustment!

I see a ton of churn with small, boutique merchants, and even the large ones have been grumbling lately about not wanting to support certain types of websites. I think it really depends on how effectively you're able to leverage your publishers, but as with everything you get a lot of merchants who join up with no idea how to do that.

Thanks Erica. I appreciate your thought on this. But I think, my question is still unanswered. Because answer box should come up with such content that contains answer to the users question or information that can help user to get answer out of it. But here, it is showing up a product page which does not even answer the users query although it is promoting someone's product in answer box...:-) Can we consider this as technical bug?

Hi, I'm trying to read over your content and it just keeps loading more products. Very frustrating. You should consider pagination and having a default amount of products load on the page. Regarding your internal links, you have one the says "2000 gifts for men" and one that says "shop gifts for men". These links point to the page the exist on, with a hashed URL. Links should never point to the same URL on which they live, I see this a lot and its very frustrating, it looks spammy to search engines, and is confusing/frustrating/irritating for searchers. They click that link only to be taken to the top of this long page again? Not a good user experience. There's also a link for your homepage buried in "..." in the first paragraph, that also looks spammy/cloaky to me. I'm not saying these page load and internal linking issues are your whole problem, but they're definitely not helping your situation and the simplest things like this should be tackled first. There are no external links pointing to this page, if your competitors have similar pages with some recently acquired good quality external links to them, this is potentially the cause of your recent decline.

Aleyda,  this is super useful , thanks a lot for this excellent advice.  I will still need to do some research on how to best compile a comprehensive list of incoming links, as moz and search console data is still kind of limited for this purpose.

Awesome. Thanks so much for taking the time Laura! Our website is +1m URLs so I might just do that.

Hi Jeeyaul, As long as the links pointing at the 2nd and 3rd level pages (and the site in general) are good quality, then I wouldn't worry about this too much. I certainly don't think it's bad for rankings and is actually more likely to help those 2nd and 3rd level pages rank better. If, on the other hand, these links aren't great quality or could be seen as manipulative by Google, then that could be bad for rankings. You could take a look at this blog post that I wrote late last year which talks about what makes a good and bad link: https://moz.com/blog/the-anatomy-of-a-link I hope that helps! Paddy

Do people tend to search for "CF-19" in the Toshiba example, or do they tend to search for "CF-1956Y6XLM"? If it's CF-19 then I would add more value to the example pages, and not worry about the subpages as much. But, I'm guessing that it's the specific model numbers, in which case the ideal situation is to be able to index an exact page for that model number. If you take a look at the "CF-1956Y6XLM" example, PC World is ranking #1 pretty much on all spec content, meaning they're coasting on domain authority to rank those pages. Meanwhile I see you guys at #4. Typically I would suggest that it's a bad plan to go with really thin content, but if everyone else is doing it, you may not need 200-300 words to move up in the rankings. Try producing 50-75 custom words on 100 of these pages where you're ranking Top 5. Do it for models that are newer so you can monitor ranking improvement over time. If the ranking and traffic improvements happen, and they convert, then figure out if you can scale that process up for every new incoming product. Other SERP benefits can beat rankings here, too. If you can get legitimate product ratings and generate some rich snippets for the products, that will help maximize your CTR. Try to write better meta descriptions, too - right now they're all pretty drab on that SERP example. Martijn's suggestion of reviews is a good start but will probably only help on 10-20% of pages that you're able to get reviews on. Nevertheless, probably worth the effort. Some e-commerce platforms will allow you to save a single product with variations, which helps with this problem. If 10 models can share a page, and be selected with a product sub menu (like the t-shirt size or color selector on a fashion ecommerce site) then that is a good way to cut down on total URLs by 50-90%. But, I'd try the unique content route first and see if the numbers add up.

Hi Abdul! Are you able to share your site's URL and the search terms that are returning that result?

Hi Eric, I do know that those are competitive, but my coleague just keep telling me that its possible to rank them higher. With tool did you use for backlink checking?