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Thanx Dirk For Help

Hi there Immediately, I would check your Webmaster Tools and see if you have a Manual Action of any kind. If you do have a manual action - read through the Ultimate Guide to Google Penalty Removal. It seems like you are taking care of your On-Site SEO pretty well. I would also make sure you are using canonical tags on product and category pages properly. I would also start benchmarking your sites as they currently stand and tracking progress as you go through implementations and changes to your site. Take a look at this competitive analysis resource from Moz, not to copycat, but to instead utilize for your own unique website and audience. Make sure your mobile SEO is the best it can be. Also, make sure you are taking advantage of Schema.org as it can potentially help your website improve in rankings - here is Google's Testing Tool to see if your web development team implemented it correctly. Take a look at Enhanced Ecommerce to see what products are giving you the best traffic and conversion rates. From there, you can structure your site in ways based on audience behavior and implement that behavior into your marketing strategy. And lastly - start tracking your keywords in Moz and Webmaster Tools so you can see where you have opportunities and where you can improve. Hope this all helps! Let me know if you have any more questions or comments! Good luck!

If I was in your shoes, even though your canonicals are working (great step #1), I'd be inclined to clean up the URLs are much as possible and 301 any duplicate pages that you can get approval for. You'll always want to have your canonicals coded in regardless. But having less actually pages will save you in other areas - content audits, Google bot and other bots crawl time, space on your server, confusion for customers, etc. Less can be more in this case.

Jochen, I can't say I've seen this particular issue, but you are right that it is odd. It sounds like you have everything set up technically correct, but Google WMT is crossing some wires. I wish I could provide you with more, but I wouldn't know any potential issues without being able to look at your whole setup in GoogleWMT. I recommend having a consultant take a look. Typically, I hate recommending that (because I'm a consultant and that looks shady), but there really is no other way to know if everything is set up right and Google is just on crack, but I think that's it.

Hi Tarek, Thanks for the question. Where does your client currently rank for the franchise keyphrase? If you rank well on page 1, it shouldn't be too difficult to push yourself a bit further up once the established website has gone. However, it really depends on what happens to the domain of the franchise. It may be closed down by there still be some form of holding page / parked page which means it stays in the rankings for a while. Do you know what is going to happen to it? On a related note, is there any chance you could acquire the domain? In terms of what you can do. Here are a few suggestions: Make sure the brand name features prominently in your on-page SEO elements and internal links See if you can realign links that are pointing to the franchise site and see if they will point the links to you instead - if the franchise site is closing down, this could work very well and if you can make the anchor text the name of the brand, it should help your rankings Make sure your company name and citations / local links are all using the company name correctly I hope that helps! Paddy

Jamie, You should update your sitelinks with Google at least once a month. They know when you've re updated it. A date inside the document shouldn't make a difference. Thanks, - Mike Bean

Hi Kenneth, I am sure somebody maybe to do a full analysis but just quickly stopping by the page here are a few things I picked up on right away. A ton of links on your page (300+) Your unique content is below all the links (moving unique content to be read first is a good idea) Competing content if you search Fightstore + boxing gloves your home page is actually Google's preferred result (fight gloves vs boxing gloves also competing) You're competing against huge retailers You have duplicate content. Using Siteliner I did a quick scan for you.. here are the results they are reporting: http://www.siteliner.com/www.fightstorepro.com?siteliner=site-dashboard&siteliner-sort=scan_time&siteliner-from=1&siteliner-message= Hope it helps you in the right direction, Don

Looks good Jonathan! You can make the sidebar more specific with the category if you want to really target your audience Add in some breadcrumbs/schema, shorten your meta description a bit as the result in google is cut off for me. Besides those, it looks great!

I agree with Moosa here. When we went through this we used Link Detox to help identify the links we wanted to remove/disavow and RMOOV to send an automated email campaign. The response rate was less than 5%as I recall and usually took multiple emails if there was to be a response. This is the nice thing about the tools as they track success for you. It's also a really good idea to use a "throw away"email address,as many of these may be reported by the recipients as spam and get your email account added to spam filters. I think the personal touch thing is more for outreach. Not worth the effort here. Best!

Thank you for your answer. The idea is to help my customers to find the content they need more easily. There is enough content in my page and like that they don't need to go to the "big FAQ page" and search to the answer of their questions. Regards, Jonathan

Hi there A lot of this sounds extremely odd to me - I have never heard of anyone being able to expedite a disavow file and you shouldn't automate link removal requests, too much can go wrong if people reach out to you. Instead, try this: Collect your backlinks Google Webmaster Tools Majestic Ahrefs Assess your data Good links These links help your business These links are relevant to your site These links are relevant to the content they link to These links don't have spammy or low metrics Bad links These links aren't relevant to your site or content These links are part of template directories (example) These links do supply traffic to your site These links tend to have low metrics These links come from sites that look untrustworthy Neutral links Nofollow links Disavowed links Not active Prioritize your bad links What ones are you removing? Reach out to those webmasters 3 times with 4 days between each message I outlined a Create your disavow file (yes - they work) Links removed - in case they come back or webmaster misses a link Links you couldn't remove Links that requested payment Links previously in disavow file I have never used LinkDetox, but from what you described, I'm skeptical. I have used LinkRisk and I liked it a lot, you can learn more about it here. Try this manually one time through - you could learn a lot about how this all works and what to look for. I included other links in my answer to your other question as well that will help you. Hope all of this helps! Good luck! Let me know if you have anymore questions or comments - would love to help!

Hi Moosa: Thanks for your response. Yes, LinkDetox seems to be the best solution for toxic link removal. I purchased the basic package today and ran a report (See enclosed)  As a novice I have a few questions for you regarding this package: -We scored a domain wide detox risk of 1,723. The site has referring root domains with 7113 links to our site. 121 links were classified as high audit priority. 56 as medium audit priority. 221 links were previously disavowed and we uploaded a spreadsheet containing the names of the previously disavowed links. We had LinkDetox include an analysis of no-follow links as they recommend this. Is our score really bad? If we remove the questionable links should we see some benefit in ranking? -Some of the links we disavowed last year are still linking to our site. Is it worthwhile to include those links again in our new disavow file? -Prior to filing a disavow we will request that Webmaster remove offending links. LinkDetox offers a package called Superhero for $469.00 that automates the process. Does this package effectively help with the entire process of writing and tracking the removal requests? Do you know of any other good alternatives? -A feature called "Boost" is included in the LinkDetox Super Hero package. It is suppose to expedite Google's processing of the disavow file. I was told by the staff at Link Detox that with Boost Google will process the disavow within a week. Do you have any idea if this claim is valid??? It would be great if it were true. Thanks for your feedback, I really appreciate it!!! Alan p2S6H7l

Issue found: http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/80935/google-caching-subdomain-as-root-domain?noredirect=1

Not to muddy up the conversation too much, but I wouldn't try to keep the category paths in product URLs as the canonical. What happens when you have one product in multiple categories? I would make .com/products/product-name as the canonical URL in the rel canonical tag. What you choose to show in the URL bar for the purpose of user experience and breadcrumb consistency is a different story. I hope I am understanding your situation correctly.

Hello, If the article is sponsored by you and is all about you, I would request no-follow. If it was not sponsored by you (but still by someone) and there is only a brief mention of you and a link I would keep that as a follow. At the bottom of this article from woorank it explains similar circumstances. Thanks, - Mike Bean

Patrick, Thank you very much for all the pointers. This is an exhaustive list. We will take a deeper look at your response and get our hands on this this month. We did some of the things you mentioned already but we will try one by one again and share which worked and not worked. Thank you

I am concerned that this 80% of my traffic that does not often convert and leaves the site quickly, is costing me in rankings on the pages that do perform well. I would not worry about this.  That blog is pulling in the traffic and Google knows that some types of pages satisfy a visitor and result in a short visit.  So, if visitors are staying long enough to read, then you are doing great. I am therefore considering taking the blog OFF our site and moving it elsewhere, linking back to the e-commerce site and allowing it to stand on its own two feet. Is this a bad idea? I would do the opposite.  I would move it into a folder on your main domain.   Like maindomain.com/blog/  (I would not name it blog because that makes it a target of hackers, give it a more relevant name) If that blog is attracting traffic, earning likes, links, mentions, etc. having it on your own domain will be better than having it in a subdomain or an outhouse.  If it is on your domain then your domain gets credit for the popularity.  The only reason that I would not put it on my main domain is if it was susceptible to Panda or Penguin problems. Thoughts? I would be showing Adsense to those 2 million visitors.   Will probably earn a five digit number annually and the first digit will not be a "1"..

Hi again Harry Here's what I would do. I would take a look at the following resources: On-Page Factors (Moz) The Ultimate Guide to SEO for E-commerce Websites (KISSmetrics) 17 Essential SEO Strategies for E-Commerce Sites (Inc) Technical Site Audit Checklist: 2015 Edition (Moz) There are probably opportunities beyond your URL structure that you are missing - your URL structure and depth (you're not going that deep at all) alone won't hurt your PA and DA the way you think it will. Do a quick honest assessment of the layout and content of your website and see where you can enhance areas. Let me know if you have any questions! Good luck!

Hi Harry, I changed the status to "Discussion", because - as a moderator - I consider that the answers summed up substantially offer you a solution, but - as it is quite common in SEO - there is space for further discussion. Moreover, the "discussion" status may attract more people into offering valuable opinions.

But it's the date that makes them different! As in if I was specifically looking for info on 2013 I wouldn't WANT the 2014 page to be served and vice versa. I would leave them both indexed - assuming the data is entirely different in each.