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The easiest way is as Patrick states below.  Use www.semrush.com.  They scrape the data from search analytics anyway and then put it in an easy format for us! You can get some free searches on Semrush before they close you out. So make sure you change the search to the right country before you press enter. I think semrush is gold. It should be the easy solution.

Hi there 1. Yes, they can come back if you create unique content to that page that takes on-site factors into consideration. The climb really depends on the industry and the queries you are trying to rank for. 2. No, just because you have never had a penalty before doesn't mean the climb out of a penalty would be easier than a site that has multiple. The best course of action is to get valuable and unique content up as quickly (but efficiently) as you can and avoid penalties at all costs. 3. I would honestly run through the content audit that Moz has - it's a step by step process that will help you distinguish what content needs to be removed, updated, or consolidated. Remember - Google provides resources and steps for you to take when you have duplicate content. 4. SEO Theory has a great post about this that covers multiple areas of your SEO - from meta tags, content, and penalty recovery. I suggest you read it as it's more comprehensive than anything anyone could write here. Marie Haynes also wrote a great post for traffic performance after a penalty if you want to read into that as well (not saying you have one! It's just useful information). Hope this helps! Good luck!

Hi there I would recommend checking your internal links and sitemap to make sure there are no links pointed to the subdomain. These can be quickly found doing a ScreamingFrog crawl. From there, I would conduct a quick backlink audit to see if there are any backlinks you may have that are pointed to the subdomain that can be removed or at the very least, disavowed. You may also find good, quality, and relevant links that you want to keep - feel free to reach out and update those to point to the domain, or whatever URL is relevant on your main site. If the subdomain is in fact done, over, and gone, you have the opportunity to noindex it, block it with robots.txt, and you can ask that Google removes it from their index as well. You can also look into a 410 status code, which tells crawlers this page is never coming back, ever. You'll need to discuss all of these options with your team of course and weigh the options! Hope this helps! Good luck!

Hi David, First of all as far as I know paid campaign doesn't helps in organic ranking. Google repeatedly said that paid campaign doesn't affect organic rankings. As far as I know Google says that showing one version to users and other version to boat is called cloaking and we must not use this but didn't say anything on paid & non paid visitors. If I assume that paid campaign helps in organic ranking then it is the only one thing that can affect ranking by paid campaign that is CTR. I do run AdWords campaign for my website over 8 years and CTR is minimum 10% but I never noticed that paid campaign helps in ranking. ** I wouldn't suggest you to do that*** Please also check this once @ https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/6020954?hl=en&rd=1#701 Hope this helps you. Thanks

Hi there I would recommend looking into your canonical tags to point to http://signup.directiq.com/, as well as the parameter opportunities in Google Webmaster Tools. You are also able to block paramaters in your robots.txt, but I would be extremely careful doing so. Hope this helps! Good luck!

Great, thanks Carson! You're insights have been very helpful. I think we'll try to make the on-page ajax solution work.

Hi Landon, Everyone else has some very good advice here. Moz also has some helpful resources on Local SEO that you might find useful since you are targeting a local search area: Local Search Rank Factors (2014) Local SEO Audit How to Have a Successful Local SEO Campaign (2015) Local SEO Articles Local Learning Center Definitely agree with the others though - it seems like you need to address some other important SEO elements like site speed, title tag & meta description optimization, h1 tag optimization, adding relevant schema markups, and improving the overall website content. Good luck!

Aaah - that's what I was afraid of! Thanks anyway!

I used to try different methods to increase the Domain Authority but i still didn't get the exact reason why the DA of a page will increase a decrease. So what i do now if keep building quality links and use the social signals as well. I have noticed that the DA of my page has increased gradually. But i do not really care about increasing the DA now.

Hi there! While there's technically nothing wrong with redirection 404s to the home page, you might want to consider pointing them toward a 404 page, instead. Otherwise, visitors won't know why the link they clicked took them to the home page rather than to the page they expected, which isn't a great experience. Just a thought, though.

Building on Patrick's answer using Robots.txt was the fastest way for things to take effect, but if implemented wrong can impact you pretty bad. In addition to adding the exclusions in the Robots.txt, I also put in a removal request to remove the pages with parameters from googles index using the Google Url Removal tool, this combined with the other options helped clean up my results in the google index. Hope this helps.

Hi there Matt Cutts actually made some suggestions depending on the size of your site as to what you can do with eCommerce 404 pages. You can learn more about that here. Here is a resource with some best practices for your 404 page, as well as some great examples that you can take advantage of to make the best user experience possible for 404 pages. Remember - at the end of the day what matters most is the user experience; if there is a place that they can be redirected to that's relevant to the product or category they were looking for previously, send them there. If there isn't, provide a valuable 404 page that allows them to search, navigate, see other products, coupons, etc. so that they can continue to move through your site instead of getting frustrated and leaving. Hope this helps! Good luck!

Hi, Private Blog Networks, PBNs, are generally groups of blogs or sites often controlled by one publisher, with the goal of building up links within the network as a way to help particular content rank better in Google. Here is a tutorial on this @ http://www.cloudincome.com/building-private-blog-network/ I wouldn't suggest you to use that because in past Google has reportedly taken action on sites participating in private blog networks. Hope this helps Thanks

Hi there Redirecting a site depends on a few things: Is this competing brand now gone and over with? Is the old site relevant to the site you wish to redirect it to? Does it compete for the same queries you have? Does the new site have a place for old content to redirect to? If yes to all of the above, redirect it, but make sure that you follow the steps in Moz's Website Migration Guide. It will help make sure that you move the website properly and take advantage of optimization opportunities, such as URL mapping. I would also look into the Change of Address tool in Google Search Console. Also, read through Google's resources on site moves. I would perform both a content audit and backlink audit as well on the old site - what content can be updated, removed, or consolidated from the old site? What backlinks currently pointed to the competitor's website should be updated to yours, and which links could be removed & disavowed because they are spammy or irrelevant? Remember, if you inherit a website and redirect it, you don't want to inherit their spammy or toxic links, you just want the good ones! If you redirect the site and migrate it properly, the old site will fall from the SERPs, but your site should capture the vast majority of that traffic and rankings. Especially if your on-site SEO and content is as good, or better, than the old site's. Hope this helps! Good luck!

Hi there It really depends on the type of site you have and the purpose(s) of the pages you are creating. For instance, duplication can come in many forms: Product listings Product descriptions Blog posts or rolls www and non www http or https Copied content from other websites International content And more. It really depends on your site. If I were you, I would make sure that I look at the following sources: Canonical tags (Google) URL Parameters (Google) Paginated Content (Google) Duplicate Content Best Practices (Moz) How to Defeat Duplicate Conten - Next Level (Moz) Also, if you are going to be utilizing international SEO, make sure you look into hreflang attributes and language tags. Hope this all helps! Good luck!

Hi FCRMedia, Of course it will help. Any links referring to your site will help. But make it according to google guidelines ( follow/ no follow ).

Hi there What I would do is take advantage of a backlink audit and assess which links are toxic enough for removal or disavow. I would not redirect spamming backlinks to your homepage - try to remove these and if you hear nothing back, disavow them. The way I assess spammy links: Does this link help my website? Is this link relevant to my website? Would I trust this site (that's linking to me) if I landed on it? Is the website or content in which I am being linked from topically relevant to my website? If you check metrics - does anything about the metrics (domain authority, page authority,Majestic, SEMRush traffic/ranking data, etc) make me feel uneasy? Are the links from directory templates? (example) Inspect URLs with blatant spam words Free Porn XXX Submit Directory Paid Links URL Sex etc. Check for multiple domains and URLs on the same IPs This can usually show link farms or spam Pull your backlinks from a few different sources like OSE, Majestic, Ahrefs, and most importantly, Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools), as different tools pull different data. If you see spammy links, redirecting will potentially hurt your ranking. Be safe and take the proper steps listed above. Hope this helps! Good luck!

You might want to check if you have spam in your reports, especially this referral free-social-buttons. This referral spam hits with direct visit along with the referral part. The problem of this spam over others is that even if you filter the referral you will keep getting the fake direct visits, but luckily there is a solution, if you check the hostname that these direct visits use you will see that is not set or it's fake as any Ghost Spam in Google Analytic, so they way to stop this type of spam in any form(referral, keyword or direct) is to create a valid hostname filter that will only allow valid traffic. You can check full details of this issue in this article: http://www.ohow.co/unusual-increase-in-direct-traffic-on-ga-spam/

I watch my traffic increases and decreases.   You can do that with google analytics.  I do it with clicky.  When I see an important page show traffic losses, I go looking. One of my retail sites suddenly was not selling a certain product category very well.  I looked into it and hundreds of "made in China" blogs had scraped my content. Then, I have images that are often grabbed.  I watch image search traffic and watch for them. I have tens of thousands of pages on the web.  Its hard to monitor all of them, but it is easy to monitor when you can download a traffic spreadsheet that has % up and % down, sort it and then investigate.  So, I am being responsive instead of proactive.  And, really, I don't look at it as ROI, it is loss prevention.

Issue 1: I think your intended ranking page is not indexed. https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=site:http:%2F%2Fwww.localsearch.com.au It's probably because, as Donna indicated, you have so many pages. This happens when you have what are essentially search pages that are indexed. Stuff happens like having a page for plumbing and plumbers in the same city, for example. In the short term, you can make sure that non-indexed pages are linked to across the site. Long-term you're going to want to think of a way to organize your site to make sure Google and users can find the most important pages. For example, add breadcrumbs back to the city page, and have the city page linking to your most important types of pages (even if they're still searches) for the city. Right now your city pages are just more search pages, which is a big wasted opportunity to layout which pages you most want people to find. Also make sure  you figure out what's going on between these two "types" of the exact same page. There should only be one for the same results where possible: http://www.localsearch.com.au/Gosford,NSW http://www.localsearch.com.au/Search?where=Gosford,NSW Issue 2: Look at the "linked from" and figure out where these bad pages are linked to on the site. Google wouldn't make up a URL if someone wasn't linking to them, and my guess is your site is causing them. With a highly-dynamic site like yours it's usually either a crawl trap or a combination of dynamic URLs through a particular path that the server wasn't expecting. Alternatively, and maybe more likely, Google has been trying to parse Javascript lately, and doing a rather poor job of it. I've seen Google try to find links in Javascript that were never intended to be links. You can either ignore these errors and wait for Google to get better, or you can dig into the JS with a dev and see what's causing Google to interpret something as a link. There's usually another way to put the code together where Google understands.