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Has the main site been online for as long as the affiliates? Are you driving traffic to the main site in similar channels and volumes to what the affiliates are driving to their sites? If the content and on-page optimization is roughly the same, and if the sites have been up for the same amount of time, it's likely off-page optimization that's making the difference. The affiliates may be doing paid advertising, mentioning their sites on social media, and otherwise building a lot of links to their content that you're not doing on the main site. I would give it time and try to search for longer-tail keywords - more specific ones, so if you sell widgets, try to optimize some pages for "red curly widgets" and "blue titanium widgets" rather than competing for the more basic "widget" type keywords. The more specific you can be, while still choosing language that your visitors are searching for, the more you will see traffic rise to the main site and the better they will convert because they're looking for exactly what you're offering.

Hi there I would mind Open Graph for users, definitely. I would mind Schema.org from the search engine aspect as all major search engines recognize it. When it comes to Dublin Core, I don't know much about it and don't read too much about it either - which tells me something. For my money, you should stick with Schema and Open Graph, again because of their wide acceptance. Hope this helps! Good luck!

Hi there I would take a look at the best practices for title tags. Your title tag should be a mix of what users are actually searching for and editorial language for click throughs. Personally, I would just include the title, category (only if it adds value), and brand. You can include the date in the article itself. Just be mindful of length. Can you give examples of the categories? Let me know. Hope this helps a bit! Good luck!

Yes, the links should come from your own website. If you have a powerful site, creating sitewide links to several logical category pages within your product pages can be adequate. If your site is new or not very strong yet then it may be best to grow the number of product pages in steps as your site is able to get them in the index and hold them in the index.  A weak site will probably not be able to get 5,000,000 pages indexed.  If your site is not powerful, attempting to do it usually results in a ranking decline on the original part of the site.

Hello, I'm not able to read the content, but just looking at it side-by-side, the content appears to be very similar. You may want to consider re-writing a bit to make the pages a little more specific to their topics. I understand that the topics are closely related, and we encounter issues like this on our site as well - there are only so many ways you can write about a rail pass! But, by changing the copy up a bit, you'll garner better SEO results. It has been my experience that search engines scan from top to bottom, so especially your intro paragraphs on each page should be different copy, just looking at these two pages, they seem VERY similar including the headline: Een vaste rentevoet, dus geen verrassingen is there an easy way to change this copy up a bit? You may want to consult with a copywriter who should be able to assist you with this. Good luck! Amiee

Hey there Patrick, Thanks a ton for responding to my question. I too indeed have the hreflang tags within my site but still use a redirection. I will try changing that as soon as possible then. Also what kind of redirection should i use if someone chooses another language in my site? Right now the redirection is set as a 301. I have heard a lot of chatter talking about a 302 redirection. Any opinions?

Hi Nikola It certainly won't be the case that, if you have a big rankings drop, that might have a ripple effect on other rankings.  There's no way the two will be directly related and Google won't adjust your other rankings because of one falling. However, the reason behind the ranking drop might well have contributed to other keywords falling, particularly if they are related keywords.  So, if a competitor has had a successful link building campaign and risen above you, you yourself have lost links, made onsite changes etc etc.  Those ranking factors can all increase or decrease your keyword positioning - and if all of your keywords are related and possibly ranking for the same page, that might explain why other keywords have fallen as well.

Hi All, Thanks for the updates. We solved the issue by only add # to the url when changing from color. So initial load of the product is the clean url. Guess that is all we need to do to don't get penaltilized by Google.

try visiting the site now, It seems Godaddyhas fixed the issue

Yes and anything to do with WordPress link cloaking and redirects the must have plug-in is 'Pretty Link Pro'. It provides super easy link management and handy analytics on every outbound link you create. I've been using it for years and it's great.

Magento will generally canonicalize correctly by default. What I'm guessing you're seeing are category pages that have variables for faceted navigation - again, a pretty common issue in Magento. I've seen and even "fixed" this issue for past clients with no noticeable results. If you ARE having problems getting your pages into Google's index (check indexation status in Webmaster tools and look for exact product/category URLs to check) there is a plugin that will remove the variables for faceted navigation on category pages. The main downside is that someone who emials/shares a link will not share it with the filters/sorting attached. Generally I recommend leaving it alone. If you're not having indexation problems, though, it should be fine to leave alone and let Google figure it out.

Thanks for your suggestions! Our blog content is more informational than anything. I think we are pretty solid as far as kw selections for each of our services. Digging deeper into the analytics is a good suggestions so we can understand where people are falling from the funnel. The truth is that we have some GA implementation issues lately so hopefully asap we will have access to this kind of data. Our site is entirely mobile friendly My coworker is a CRO specialist and is working on user testing but essentially focusing on testing the service scheduler. Are you suggesting that we need to also use A/B testing for service pages and blog as well? Also do you know any tools or any methods to find "buzz" topics around carpet cleaning industry besides kw research, link analysis...?

I do now see where he did also claim visa versa that using originals wont help either. why would matt or rand mention it? they don't work for google they will not know everything. But he also said to the best of his knowledge, at that time, and that in the future that may change and it was 2 years ago. So I would still try to get original images if you can.

To be honest, it's a huge question that likely doesn't actually have a definitive answer. There could be something going on with each of those sites that's leading them to outrank you. One thing that might give you some insight is the Keyword Difficulty, which is part of Moz Pro. It can run a Full SERP Report that'll give you an analysis of the signals that are _most likely _helping the sites on page rank. Cyrus Shepard make a pretty great video on it here.

Thanks for the response. I prefer the consistency as well but keep hitting walls. 1. I am using Wordpress HTTPS. I think it redirects all http to https. So a sitemap generator only sees the http. My sitemap is correct besides that. 2. I do not believe I have a redirect file setup, just the http to https plugin mentioned above. 3. Robots.txt and meta tags are all good.

If I link to your website with the link text "SEO Moz" you can then rank for the term "SEO Moz" without having it on your site.

Hi Bob, You seem to know what you're talking about and have some pretty decent rankings. I think you need to start with conducting a comprehensive competitor analysis looking at both on-site factors and off-site factors (ie, backlinks). This will help you to identify opportunities where you can really get the edge on your competitors. Aleyda Solis did a great infographic and post about this very topic which I highly recommend - https://moz.com/blog/illustrated-seo-competitive-analysis-workflow. With Vista Print being a huge company, you might be hard-pushed to rank first but I would definitely spend some time to look at their link profile as well as the other top competitors to see how they're approaching their link building strategies.

Hi Shahar, Thanks for the question. As the other guys have said, it's hard to predict how the search engines will react to hidden content. In this case though, I highly doubt that this form would cause a penalty. You're not hiding this content with the intent of manipulation or anything like that and if a Googler were to look at this, they'd see that you're not to hide anything bad. I hope that helps! Paddy

Hi there My first question is are you sure removing these pages were your only option? Did you check to see if these pages you removed had decent traffic and rankings? You may have just needed to update your links! If these pages didn't matter in that regard and you can go on without them, I would take a look at your internal links, sitemap, and backlinks to make sure they are updated and don't contain a link to the pages removed. Google also offers resources on how to remove pages from their index if you don't want them to appear anymore. But again, I would run through your Analytics, Search Console, SEMRush data, and Moz analytics (if you have it) to see if those pages you removed had value! You may have removed some great opportunities! Hope this helps! Good luck!

Hi Matt, Many thanks . Glad, it's set up correctly. I will check out the video to. thanks Pete