Category: Intermediate & Advanced SEO
Looking to level up your SEO techniques? Chat through more advanced approaches.
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Enquiries stopped after site move
Always avoid knee-jerk reactions to these kinds of things. It's possible that rather than the new location being the issue, the method of migration was more of a problem instead. If that's the case then moving back wouldn't help anyway (as you'd have to go through the migration again, assumedly)! I'm not saying that is or is not the case, just trying to highlight that you don't know what the problem is (and thus any hasty action is extremely unwise). You need to understand what an enquiry is or what it used to mean on your old site. Does that mean a phone call, an email, a contact form submission (maybe all of these things)? Was one of these things far and away the most popular method of contact? If so - which one was it? That gives you a place to start your detective work It may be that your contact forms are still coded to send mail to an inbox on your old domain which can no longer receive the comms and thus no enquiries are being process. Maybe due to the change of domain, the event-tracking code needs to be adapted (this could be the case if you changed your UA property / number in GA when you moved) If it's calls that are down, what call tracking solution are you using? There are loads. Usually they run a script on your site to swap out a phone number and thus attribute calls from visitors to your site who were ascertained via different channels (PPC, SEO, email, display, affiliates etc) If you left that all in place, maybe you need to log in to the back-end of the call tracking system and update it there to listen for calls from a new domain! Maybe it's just something small and silly like that Because you didn't give loads of detail I can't help huge amounts (unless you share more) - but I hope that, what I have written here will help you to track down the culprit of your problem. To me it sounds like a tracking issue, rather than a performance issue (but I could be wrong) Always remember that the web has thousands of ways to trip you up if you aren't paying attention. Often developers will push for a 'logical', one size fits all solution. It's only afterwards that people realise, they needed an expert!
| effectdigital0 -
What IP Address does Googlebot use to read your site when coming from an external backlink?
There's a few things you need to marry up if you want to do this. You need the referring page or domain / hostname (to validate that the session came from a backlink you know about). Once you filter the data down like that, you just need to filter by user-agent ("googlebot" - or any user-agent string which contains "googlebot"). Then you just want to look at the IP address field in the tabular data and you have your answers! Here's the problem, most IP-level data is contained within basic server-side analysis packages (like AWStats which is installed on most sites, within the cPanel) or alternatively you can go to the log files for much of the same data. Most referrer-level data (stuff that deals with attribution) is contained within Analytics suites like Adobe Omniture or Google Analytics. In GA, you can't usually get to 'individual' IP-level data. There used to be a URL hack to force it to render, but it was killed off (and many people who used it were banned by Google). The reason for that is, Google don't want too much PID (Personally Identifiable Data) harvested by their tool. It creates too many legal issues for Google (and also, whomever is leveraging that data for potentially nefarious marketing purposes) Since you won't get enough IP-level data from GA, you're going to have to go to log files and log analysis tools instead. Hopefully they will contain at least some referral level data... The issue is, getting all the pieces you want to align in a legally compliant way Obviously you have your reasons for looking. I'd check if you can find anything on your CPanel in AWStats (if that's installed) or get the log files and analyse them with something like Screaming Frog Log File Analyser I can't promise this will return the data you want, but it's probably your only hope
| effectdigital0 -
Same site serving multiple countries and duplicated content
Thanks Kristina, this is in place now!
| GhillC0 -
Iframe
Thank you for the links and detailed reply. Looking at this template do you think it can have iframe issues ? https://goo.gl/7DhYsv
| seoanalytics0 -
AMP for WordPress: To Do Or Not To Do
Hmmn, well, it is always risky to try something like AMP. But, if you are seeing that all of your competitors that are now outranking you are using AMP, I feel like it's at least worth a test. I would suggest using AMP on a portion of these pages experiencing this and see if they get a rankings boost.
| lydiagilbertson1 -
Onpage optimising for multiple sites
No matter the model, the verdict is the same - gotta be fairly unique content on each of websites. P.S. Look at any well established franchises - they have 1 website, where the products are shown, and you can choose your closest store/office and go get the product there. Then the locations itself have their own little subpages, which are unique to them - maybe their story, their staff etc.
| DmitriiK0 -
Highly ranked pages to new domain?
Well, since the platforms are both woocommerce, you woudln't have to "copy it twice". That would be applicable if you were changing the environments. Just make sure that you create exact copy of pages - URLs, meta tags, images, alt tags, all text etc etc.
| DmitriiK0 -
Moved brand's shop to a new domain. will our organic traffic recuperate?
Here we go again. The problems with technicalities... Ok, here it is - 301 does NOT lose any link equity passed through it. It's known and that's what the linked post and tweets are talking about. What me and @effectdigital are talking about is "downtime" after 301-redirecting from one domain to another. The value of domain IS affected. If you would redirect a page from your own domain to another, on your own domain, sure, there wouldn't be any loss in link equity, but there would be loss in page authority for the new page. Think about it like this - google ranks a page, because it "knows and trusts" it. All of the sudden, that page is not there, and just sends google to another page. Google needs time to make sure that it's the same page, about the same stuff, with the same quality. It never takes away the link equity, but the "trust factor" is not there for a bit. When it happens within the same domain, Google understands that it could be simple content move or URL change. When it's cross-domain, the reasons could be much different. From hacking to selling the website etc. So that's why the rankings and usually traffic goes down, but, after Google realizes that it's all the same, and all good, they recover. Hope this helps, and sorry for the confusion earlier.
| DmitriiK0 -
Swiss based, USA links only
Thank you for your reply it is good to hear. Concerning the links doesn't google now devaluates the bad links instead of penalising you (meaning you don't need to worry about removing those from your profil do you ? Cheers,
| seoanalytics0 -
New Domain, No 301 Possible - Any Advice
Hi there. Unfortunately, there is no way to do what you are asking.. Sorry. You already did what you should have - change all links to website in GMB, social sites etc, copied the content over. Other than that - there is nothing you can do really. The only thing which could be possibly remotely helpful is GSC address moving tool, of course, you'd still have to have access to old domain GSC - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/83106?hl=en Hope this helps.
| DmitriiK0 -
My product category pages are not being indexed on google can someone help?
This is probably more of a ranking authority problem, rather than an indexation problem. If you can force Google to render one of your category URLs within its search results, then it's highly likely the page is indeed indexed (it's just not ranking very well for associated keywords) Follow this link: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Askirtinguk.com%2Fproduct-category%2Fmdf-skirting-board%2F As you can see, the category URL which you referenced is indexed. Google can render it within their search results! Although Google know the page exists and it is in their index, they don't bother to keep a cache of the URL: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https%3A%2F%2Fwww.skirtinguk.com%2Fproduct-category%2Fmdf-skirting-board%2F This probably means that they don't think many people use the page or that it is of low value. What you have to keep in mind is, lower value long-tail terms (like product keywords or part number keywords) are much easier to achieve. Category terms are worth more in terms of search volume, so competition for them is higher. If your site ranks for product terms but not for category terms, it probably means your authority and / or trust metrics (as well as UX metrics) may be lower. Remember: Google don't consider their ranking results to be a space to advertise lots of companies. They want to render the best results possible for the end-user (that way people keep 'Googling' and Google continue to leverage revenue from Google AdWords etc) Let's look at your site's domain-level metrics and see if they paint a picture of an 'authoritative' site which should be ranking for such terms... Domain Level Metrics from Moz Domain Authority: 24 (low) Total Inbound Links: 1,200+ Total Referring Domains (much more important than total link count!): 123 - This is too many links from too few domains IMO Ranking keywords: 38 Domain Level Metrics from Ahrefs Homepage URL Rating: 11 (very low) Domain Rating: 11 (very low) Total Inbound Links: 2,110+ Referring Domains: 149 - Again, the disparity here could be causing problems! Not a diverse backlink profile Ranking Keywords: 374 (Ahrefs usually finds more, go with this figure) SEO Traffic Insights: Between 250 and 380 visits (from SEO) a day on average, not much traffic at all from SEO before November 2016 when things improved significantly SEMRush Traffic Insights (to compare against Ahrefs): Estimates between 100 and 150 visits from SEO per day. This is narrowed to UK only though. Seems to tally with what Ahrefs is saying, the Ahrefs data is probably more accurate Domain Level Metrics from Majestic SEO Trust Flow: 5 - This is extremely low and really bad! Basically Majestic track the number of clicks from a seed set of trusted sites, to your site. A low number (it's on a scale of 0 to 100 I think) indicates that trustworthy seed sites aren't linking to you, or that where you are linked - people avoid clicking a link to your site (or visiting it) Citation Flow: 24 - low but now awful What do I get from all of this info? I don't think your site is doing enough digital PR, or making 'enough of a difference to the web' to rank highly for category related terms. Certainly the site looks very drab and 'cookie-cutter' in terms of the template. It doesn't instil a sense of pride in the business behind the website. That can put people off linking to you, which can cause your SEO authority to fall flat on its face leaving you with no ranking power. A lot of the product images look as if they are fake which probably isn't helping. They actually look at lot like ads which often look a bit cartoony or CGI-generated, with a balance between blue and white (colour deployment). Maybe they're being misinterpreted as spam due to Google PLA (Page Layout Algorithm). Design is not helping you out at all I am afraid! So who is ranking for MDF skirting board? The top non-PPC (ad-based) result on Google.co.uk is this one: https://skirtingboardsdirect.com/products/category/mdf-skirting-boards/ Ok so their content is better and deeper than yours (bullet-pointed specs or stats often imply 'granular' content to Google, which Google really likes - your content is just one solid paragraph). Overall though, I'd actually say their design is awful! It's worse than the design of your site (so maybe design isn't such a big factor here after all). Let's compare some top-line SEO authority metrics on your site against those earned by this competitor skirtinguk.com Domain Authority from Moz: 24 Referring Domains from Moz: 123 Ahrefs Homepage URL Rating: 11 Ahrefs Domain Rating: 11 Ahrefs Referring Domains: 149 Majestic SEO Trust Flow: 5 Majestic SEO Citation Flow: 24 Now the other site... skirtingboardsdirect.com Domain Authority from Moz: 33 (+9) Referring Domains from Moz: 464 (+341) Ahrefs Homepage URL Rating: 31 (+20) Ahrefs Domain Rating: 65 (+54) Ahrefs Referring Domains: 265 (+116) Majestic SEO Trust Flow: 29 (+24) Majestic SEO Citation Flow: 30 (+6) They beat you in all the important areas! That's not good. Your category-level URLs aren't Meta no indexed, or blocked in the robots.txt file. Since we have found evidence that Google are in fact indexing your category level URLs, it's actually a ranking / authority problem, cleverly disguised as an indexation issue (I can see why you assumed that). These pages aren't **good enough **to be frequently indexed by Google, for keywords which they know hold lucrative financial value. Only the better sites (or the more authoritative ones) will rank there A main competitor has similar design standards but has slightly deeper content and much more SEO authority than you do. The same is probably true for other competing sites. In SEO, you have to fight to maintain your positions. Sitting back is equivalent to begging your competitors to steal all of your traffic... Hope this analysis helps!
| effectdigital0 -
Google Only Indexing Canonical Root URL Instead of Specified URL Parameters
You're right, didn't notice that this was being added by Yoast. Removing that fixed everything. Thanks, Gaston!
| Nitruc0 -
Having problem with multiple ccTLD sites, SERP showing different sites on different region
There is no best practice. Although I've read that google does not takes into account that much signals in sitemap. So: hreflang in HTML Header Hope it helps. Best luck. GR
| GastonRiera0 -
What will SEO be like in the 2020's?
Maybe by the 2020's we'll have moved away from link based indexing entirely? Definitely, agree with the AI angle - there is so much at work in the background (and foreground) now. We're already in the era of voice (this article outlines how voice search is changing SEO)!
| Alexanders0 -
Meta Description
Thank that confirms my thinking. I had seen that with trip advisor and other websites but wanted to make sure that was ok. Thank you,
| seoanalytics0 -
Pages automatically generated
Thank you for your answer. I did use yoast seo with a no index to fix the issue and currently deleting everything in the search console.
| seoanalytics0 -
Back links with instant effect?!
Hi there, IMO, the site that has more traffic, more relevancy and more authoritative, will be the one effects the quickier. That said, you could go testing with all black hat methods, it's known that most of them works for a really short period of time. I'm in no position to recommend any Im against that practices. Hope it helps. Best luck. GR
| GastonRiera0