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I agree with alt tags but believe google combines that with neural nets. Thank you,

Hello SO_UK, That is a tough question to answer without more details. Is there more than one URL for each job posting, or category page? If not, you can probably do without the canonical tags. If you want me to have a quick look, feel free to send me the link in a private message. Otherwise, I can only give the general advice that any time you have multiple URLs for the same page you should use a Rel="canonical" tag.

Hi Jeff, This is a tough one. Very sorry to hear about your business losses. As I'm sure you know, several the recent "core algorithm" updates from Google have focused on site quality. Via their Quality Rater program, they ask human reviewers, with specific guidelines, to dig not only into the content of the site but the background of the owners/writers. They test new substantial algo changes with this group before they update results for all users, with a specific focus on "Your Money Or Your Life" (YMYL) content, or pages that deal with serious and potentially life-altering topics. A site offering health information and supplement advice, and also selling those supplements, is in the crosshairs of this kind of review. This is just my take on it, but I expect your losses are largely due to the perceived brand trustworthiness. I'd consider toning down your on-site product promo imagery and ensuring trust-building elements (badges, ratings, testimonials, any kind of accreditations you have) are clearly visible above-the-fold. I'd also recommend building a more clear/clinical layout and typographical treatment for your advice content (blog posts, articles, etc). You might also want to consider limiting the array of supplements you promote and sell, staying away from the controversial and potentially dangerous. I also, unfortunately, would not expect immediate results from this. These core algorithm updates come several times a year, but but I worked with an auto parts retailer who lost 30% of their organic traffic+revenue overnight in the "Phantom III" update (which seemed to be a general "quality" update similar to recent core algo updates) - they had some UX issues, content that seemed there just for SEO, etc. About a year after their big drop, they made a big push to improve UX/quality and add trust-building elements to their pages, and six months after this design/UX overhaul, they regained all of their traffic in the "Phantom V" update. I suspect there is nothing technically broken with your site and that duplicate content and similar are not holding you back much - but that quality raters preferred search results with other sites for the keywords you've been ranking for. First impressions of the brand, quality/trustworthiness of content, etc have big impact here - but these reviewers are also instructed to verify that the owners/publishers of the site are accredited and trustworthy as per other online sources: "Many websites are eager to tell users how great they are. Some webmasters have read these rating guidelines and write 'reviews' on various review websites. But for Page Quality rating, you must also look for outside, independent reputation information about the website. When the website says one thing about itself, but reputable external sources disagree with what the website says, trust the external sources." Not to suggest you have scam/similar accusations showing up online, but it's something additional I'd want to look into. Best of Luck, Mike

Hello Thank you for the detailed, helpful response. I should note that most of our SEO traffic does NOT come from forum pages. The overwhelming amount of natural search traffic we receive is from product detail, category, subcategory, and related (how-to articles etc) pages on the main www.xxxx.com site. I am concerned mainly with the potential fallout of Google seeing 3000 or more 404 pages if we just delete the forum and kill the server, and am looking for the best way to handle that. I am ok with returning a 410 or redirecting anything that tries to hit forum.xxxx.com to www.xxxx.com. What do you think? Thanks

Hi Martin, Just add a robots tag with noindex. This **WILL NOT **create 404 pages, because you are not deleting that pages, and wont hurt your rankings.  Google does understand that you might not want some pages to be indexed, so just with noindex tag is enough. Remember that it should be placed in the parte, like this: <title>...</title> More info about robots: Robots meta directives - Moz About the Robots tag - Robots.org Hope it helps. Best luck. GR

Hi Chuck As Donna also mentioned, there was a small update which was finally just confirmed by Danny Sullivan of Google: https://searchengineland.com/google-confirms-small-search-ranking-algorithm-update-this-past-week-306103#.W7AVMNe0y5g.twitter So that is the most likely reason for the drop you saw. As with any traffic change, I would recommend segmenting your traffic data by both queries and landing pages (this can both be done in search console) - to isolate which/if specific pages and keywords saw drops. If so, you can then determine if it was a site-wide drop, or specific to a set of pages and keywords. If site-wide, perhaps it is more technical related, but if keyword/page specific it could be more closely tied to the algo changes.

Well let's take a look at metrics for this page and also metrics for this domain as a whole. Here's the linking page: http://www.adamfrisby.com/create-home-design-and-interior-decor-in-2d-3d.html Moz Metrics: Page Authority: 16 Domain Authority: 24 No backlinks or linking domains detected, pointing to this individual web-page 5,600+ links pointing to the domain overall, from 100 domains Ahrefs Metrics: URL Rating: 7 Domain Rating: 24 No backlinks or linking domains detected, pointing to this individual web-page 7,690+ links pointing to the domain overall, from 84 domains Majestic SEO Metrics (Fresh Index): Page-level Citation Flow: 10 Page-Level Trust Flow: 0 No backlinks or linking domains detected, pointing to this individual web-page Domain-level Citation Flow: 20 Domain-level Trust Flow: 9 Ahrefs estimate of daily traffic this site gets from SEO: less than 1 user per day (0.074 users per day on average) SEMRush estimate of daily traffic this site gets from SEO: 0 user per day At best these metrics are mediocre, at worst the link could be toxic. How can they have thousands of backlinks from only hundreds of domains, and also be seeing no traffic from SEO combined with low trust scores from Majestic?! It seems like one of those cookie-cutter sites produced to sell links to people, not like a viable link source in 2018. By the way, for me - that page took **years **to load! About 20 seconds. It would obviously score terribly in Pingdom Tools / Google Page-Speed Insights / GTMetrix (three solid page-speed evaluation tools). When people build link-farms to sell crap links to people who don't know SEO very well, they seldom care about users. Seldom spend time optimising the site for those who really matter Design-wise the site looks like pure spam to me. It looks like it has been built just to supply SEO links, like the site and contained links wouldn't exist if it weren't for SEO being an active industry. That's strictly against Google's guidelines! 'Links for the sake of it' are frowned upon, this link looks like it came from the early 2000s and won't do a damn thing for your current SEO (except maybe earn you a penalty). Relevance isn't just semantic wordplay, you get me? You have to be thinking "why would it be relevant for a user to click on and follow this link". That's real link relevance. Just because Site A and Site B are thematically related - that does not make the link relevant (whether it be image, text or whatever). By the way, image links barely ever carry any SEO juice. Google don't want to count links of a paid-for or 'advertorial' nature. Links which carry SEO authority should also carry traffic. They should be editorial in nature, and benefit the users that click on those links. This link fails all of those completely. If a page which has barely any or no SEO authority links to hundreds of pages, each of them get barely anything back. It only takes 2-3 consecutive visits to this site to force a 503, server busy. This means that whoever built the site, sure as hell wasn't planning for anyone to ever, ever look at it. Does Google even care it exists? Look at Google's cache for the specified linking page: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http%3A%2F%2Fwww.adamfrisby.com%2Fcreate-home-design-and-interior-decor-in-2d-3d.html Google doesn't even keep a cached copy. Google has technically indexed the page, for what purpose I cannot say. Probably just to keep an eye on it, because it's shady AF. Overall I give this link an F-

You have 60,000 pages that are not unique at all.  The question is not... "what will happen when we delete it"... Instead, the question is... "What will these sites have left after it's gone". If they are shells full of nothing... then your entire enterprise is not worth much.

Concentrate your efforts on one domain name and just use the other as a redirect for those people searching and mistakenly put in the non www for example. you shouldnt see too much effect but I don't quite understand the necessity of two ips though. It sounds like the problem is in the redirection rather than the IP. Personally, I'd look at the problem rather than the workaround as it could point to a larger problem of misconfiguration.

Hello and thanks for your help. Old sites are different locations of the same company-each is between 5-20 pages each. We are merging them because we feel the user is better served by having one site with multiple locations in one central spot. We are updating all of the content-for almost every page. Thanks!

Thank you for that reply. As you mentioned, I think I am more struggling with my task and that unified mission across all subdomains in an industry where only a handful of institutions can make that happen. There was lots of good information to take from this. Thank you.

Many thanks Miriam - I will have a good read of that

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