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Very good, I'll go with the redirect map. Thank you.

Great, thanks for help

Hi Chris, You have 2 issues here: 1. It doesn't make sense to put the us version on http://www.camilla.com.au/us/ - .com.au is an Australian domain extension and therefore geo targeted by default to Australia. If you want to have a us version you'll have to put it on a generic domain extension (.com / .net / .org / etc geo targeted in search console to the us) or use the .us extension 2. Hreflang is on page level - not on domain level - on all pages of your site you put the hreflang pointing to the "us homepage". What you should do is for each page on your site (both us & au version) you will have to put at least two hreflang tags: Example http://www.camilla.com.au/collection/my-wandering-heart-resort-15  & http://www.camilla.com.au/us/collection/my-wandering-heart-resort-15 On both pages put: <link rel="alternate" href="http: www.camilla.com.au="" collection="" my-wandering-heart-resort-15" hreflang="en-au"></link rel="alternate" href="http:> If you want to have one version as default - then also add (if it's the us version you want as default - check http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.be/2013/04/x-default-hreflang-for-international-pages.html) The message "reciprocal not found" indicates that you only put the hreflang to the us version - and that on the us version there is no hreflang link to the au version. You can scan all the content on Moz on hreflang - but useful links are: https://moz.com/blog/hreflang-behaviour-insights http://www.aleydasolis.com/en/international-seo-tools/hreflang-tags-generator/ https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en Dirk

Considering the similarity in search intent, I think it would be a bad idea to produce multiple pages each targeting one of your keywords. I'd try and get them all on that one page, using different variants of the keywords on the single page and structure it into sections with headings that would be helpful for the user. If that one page is already ranking well for all three terms, it can easily just be improved. Rather than creating more pages and have them all competing against each other for the same keywords - and effectively sabotaging themselves.

Read Jennifer Slegg's article on the Google Search Quality Raters Guidelines.  Very important. https://moz.com/blog/google-search-quality-raters-guidelines

Haha, I love how Matt explained this. I agree, steering Wheel is not the car in itself you still have to look in to other areas.

This was example with GA. I believe that they use dwell time and next or subsequent searches for this. Because they can't fight against shopping cart abandonment's and other issues. So they have some as benchmark against other sites. If your metrics are above average in your industry then it's great. If your metrics are weak - you're in trouble. You can see benchmarking in Google Analytics. So whatever you do just try to make better metrics than them. Example - i just have seen that some of mine sites have pages/session 1.40 vs 2.99 in benchmark. Also mine session duration is 1:32 vs. 2:19 in benchmark. Similar metrics are in PPC too - you need to be above the average for better positions, prices and conversions. I know that all this explanation can sound little bit messy... but this is question all SEO specialists think about these days. If you know the answers you can become millionaire and retire quick.

Thanks for the link via PM. You have 20,000 links from Chinese spam. Your main anchor text is like 56%. Your main homepage is a country selector page. Meta titles are almost all related to the same 3 keyphrases. I'll PM you - but yes, I see more than a couple problems.

Hi, Thank you for your response. I did make some slight changes, and that may have been enough to trigger a drop. For tracking I use Moz, AHREFs, SEMRush, and also Google Incognito using a VPN (I'm overly thorough). I like your idea about maximizing the areas I'm ranking well for. In fact, that's what I started doing this past weekend. Really focused on getting every interior page on the first page. Thank you again for your detailed response. I really appreciate it.

Hi Bryan, Thank you very much for your feedback. We are actually already doing (or plan to do) each of the 4 points you suggested in your post. So good to see we are on the right track! However my question was more about how we should technically place the charts/graphs on our website from an SEO perspective. For example one option would be just to post an image of a graph on the website and add: alt = Graph showing Economic Growth in Dubai over the past 10 years Title = Graph showing Economic Growth in Dubai over the past 10 years But I'm wondering if there are some more tricks to effectively tell Google that the image we have posted contains actual information? For example are their some appropriate rich snippets we can add to the page to tell Google what type of content we are displaying? I know there are snippets for displaying addresses and cotnact details, for example. Thanks again Lou

If you want a tool that's more comprehensive & tracks a large group of your target keywords and competitors why not pay for it? Companies that put out good tools like that need to pay for server space and development time (which isn't cheap), so most will only give you a small taste of the program when you're on a free plan. Several thousand keywords means you're asking for a pretty large chunk of space to be dedicated to your project, so you'll have to pay to have meaningful data. I just looked a Rank Tracker from Link Assistant, and that looks like a pretty good tool; you're not going to get much out of the free plan though. Sure you can run ranking checks, but you won't be able to save the results to compare over time and you won't be able to export. If that's $125 for a lifetime license, I'd say that's a pretty good deal. You could also check out SERPwoo for some affordable keyword tracking plans.

You might consider doing a disavow to be on the safe side.

Hi Dirk, thanks for your detailed response. Marc

If marketing/branding feels like they want all of them to be consolidated under the brand, I would go ahead and move forward, and just be sure to cover my typical site merger bases. From my experience, it ends up happening at some point, so you might as well take advantage of the extra press, etc. that is likely happening from the merger to get it right as soon as possible.

Disavowing the shopify site would not do anything, as disavow is used to indicate that you do not wish to receive credit for a backlink from a domain, and that you have made sufficient effort to have any links removed. I understand the question to be more along the lines of ... "How do we leverage the social integrations of Shopify without creating duplicate content problems with our existing ecommerce site?" If you will be maintaining a mirrored database of products, etc.. the "easiest" way would be to map all of your pages on the shopify site to corresponding pages on your current ecom site, and utilize the rel=canonical link on the shopify site pointing to your current ecom site.  This essentially tells Google that the page and all its value/credit/etc.. should be directed to your current ecommerce site. E.g.   The page:  shopifysite.com/product/a  would have a canonical tag: If you find that you do not actually need the shopify pages to be accessible to use the tools to display within the social storefronts... meaning that someone clicks on the link in your pinterest store and does not need to go directly to shopify, you could consider set-up 301 redirects vs. using the canonical tag for each of the product pages, etc.. Hope this helps!

Yeah, when my predecessor did a redesign, they left off the links to that section. So it is actually an island right now with no direct link from the homepage.

Hi, To answer your questions briefly: 1. Redirects should be made on the basis of relevancy. 301's should be made from Home Page to Home Page, Category Page to Category Page, Product Page to Product Page, and so on. You can push your page authority to your Home Page if you really want to, but you will likely see a loss in rankings for the keywords you are targeting. Better to retain that authority for your cabinet keywords and continue ranking with the new site structure while building up the other areas, products and categories. Redirecting to the Home Page will spread your current Authority thin across all aspects of your website, which will limit your rankings across the board. 2. Multiple sub domains will divide the authority of your website. If you can avoid this, do so. It is better to create multiple categories for different products on a single domain, and create relevant link profiles to each category than to create sub domains for each category or product you are providing. If needed, you can create sub domains for each category, but it is a very inefficient and problematic scenario for SEO. Set up your new site to have multiple categories in your Menu, create links to each category page, and only conduct 301 redirects to each category from a relevant category on the old website. Hope this helps - let me know if you have further questions. All the best, Rob

TL;DR - This can be all or nothing. You must make account in SearchConsole and verify your site. Then you must look pages one-by-one for 90 days period for keywords. If all pages are suddenly drop in one specific date - this can be hit from algo penalty. If they're drop in different times this can be some technical issue. But this also can be due your new site. New sites often get temporary boost in SERP and then they're drop. This is caused from your linking profile and domain/site age. You need little bit patience then to get somewhere in 2x or 1x or even 0x positions in SERP. Just don't rush things with linking. Just little bit patience. That's why - this can be all or nothing. If you're hit from algo penalty then sudden drop everywhere. If you're drop due on different dates can be some technical issue. If you're mixed can be fresh domain, but also check linking profile just to be sure.

Hello Lawrence, I think this is a question best asked of the Cloudflare support team, but don't be surprised if they blame it on your host. Here are some folks having similar issues. Let us know if you find something out that could help others in your situation in the future. Good luck!

This is what so frustrating, ridiculous and weird is - Google doesn't really know what exactly going on in their system. Thanks to multi-layered project management, machine learning etc.