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Great thanks, we use to but we don't anymore. Why would this show under my organic segment if it's paid? I'll look over the resources thank you

thanks, that was a help

Hi Becky Along with Sean's message above, a tool I highly recommend is Panguin Tool. You can line up your Analytics along side algorithm updates and go into much more detail about what updates may have helped boost your rankings. Hope this helps! Good luck! Patrick

Thanks Martijn. I figured that was probably the answer, however, there seemed to be some hubbub over this issue, so I was wondering if there are any other issues regarding AMP pages being hosted elsewhere. Do you have any insight you could share in that regard?

Did you manage to finish your research on this particular subject? if so i would be extremely interested in hearing about your findings.

Were they referencing Rank Brain in their article? The statement sounds similar to an explanation given on what Rank Brain is and how it impacts search. It does seem like a bit of hyperbole but I see their point and I agree with it to a certain extent. I believe the purpose of a machine learner is to continuously innovate without human intervention so that improvements are made while you sleep. It's my understanding that Rank Brain does this based on feedback from users. It's the perfect solution to handling the complexity of search, and would result in a continuously changing algorithm. I do see a lot of websites ranking without backlinks. Try any local home services query - they're mostly propped up by citations which is a little different than your standard backlink.

Hello, you mentioned you have previously done this with 301 redirects. It is possible to do without penalties or losing rankings on your primary domain. However, the problem arises that you are essentially splitting page authority with the sub-domain which can potentially be treated as a separate website. I would not recommend using sub-domain for your forum to avoid the issue of competing with your primary domain. Forums can be a great source of content and traffic so I would give it the best opportunity to do so on your  domain. It would also be good to spend some time on maintenance to correct those errors and moderate poor quality / spammy / and thin content if necessary. If you do decide to use a sub-domain, you would want to make sure to provide relevant links on every page back to your primary domain. Best of luck with your forum.

Thank you for your detailed and clear explanation.

Hey Shirley - Thanks for the question! Short answer is no - the information does not have to be different. What should happen with a canonical is that the search engines will see the canonical and apply the ranking for Page A to Page B. However, the search engines do tell us that a canonical is a suggestion and that they do not always respect it if they think it was either a) done in error or b) is being done to manipulate. So, assuming Page B really is a duplicate of or a better version of Page A, yet you want to keep Page A around for some reason (PPC landing page or other), then the meta info will likely be similar anyways. Finally, if you are canonicalling Page A to Page B, make sure that Page A is not in your XML sitemaps! Good luck! John

Yes, that would make for a better internet indeed. A lot of these occur because the merchants keep the discontinued product URL in their feed and/or the page returns a 200 status code. Technically this should be considered a "soft 404" since what the user was looking for isn't there.

Yes, any URL that has over 50,000 URL's should have a sitemap_index, within that xml sitemap index should have listed the other category specific URL sitemaps. These are best organized in the hierarchy of the website structure to reinforce your schematic URL structure.

Hi Kevin so I got a message saying your reconsideration has been approved but your rankings may not improve or words to that effect. i think the next step is a link detox.  Im considering having someone who is experienced with recovering Google penalties. I don't want to have to change domain unless it's a last resort. another think to mention is that I'm getting high traffic from exotic places and Russia. Also my bounce rate is 4.2% which is weird.

Hi MissThumann, Wouldn't it be nice if they could just tell us what we all need to do to rank well? #wishfulthinking As you probably know the ranking factors are not appreciably different for Bing/Yahoo than for Google, but you will always see some disparity between them. Based on this, I suggest that you make sure you are as diligent with your Bing Business Listing as you are with Google. We tend to put a major focus on Google, but ensuring that your Bing Business Listing is verified and filled out completely is an important starting point. That will assist you in locally ranking for Bing queries. Otherwise, look at those ranking ahead of you and see what they are doing you are not, then see if you can manipulate a page to rise in the rankings. If you aren't try using Bing Webmaster Tools so you can find better insights into which pages are getting traffic through Bing and which aren't so you can determine which pages might need the content tweaked for Bing. Like Julie suggested, find out how important it really is for this website to be ranking on Bing (or Yahoo). Do these search engines bring in enough traffic for you to devote a lot of time trying to decode the algorithm? Or are you better off putting most of your eggs in one basket with Google? Good luck!

Hi pragnesh9639, Do you have Google Analytics installed on your website? This is definitely the most accurate way for you to dive deep into the data and see how your website is performing in Google organic search results. Unfortunately, I don't know of a tool or website to check the organic results of (competitors) websites that are not yours.

Ruben, In my experience, it's a decent low-budget site search tool. However, it does have a few hangups. As you mentioned, it shows ads unless you pay for a higher tier of subscription. Also, the aesthetics of it are also somewhat limited. It's difficult to make it look good within the frame of the rest of your site. And last, but most importantly, Google custom site search is exactly the same set of pages that are indexed for regular Google searches. While this isn't a problem for most, there are instances (for larger sites specifically) where you'd want to noindex or disallow certain types of content to not show in the SERPs, but you would want that content to be accessible via internal search. Think of a University site for example: TONS of URLs on a college's website, whether it's events or course catalogs, a lot of this doesn't need to be shown in SERPs. If you're using Google custom search, these same sets of pages will also be inaccessible there. Hope that helps!

Thank you all for the replies, Surprisingly the keywords in question are climbing back up in SERP's, Eventhough I still have no clear answer of what the cause could have been, I am happy to see the Search Visibility Score rise! Thanks

@Thomas I did check Zappos.com but I can see that they have no internal links at all. Is this an MOZ bug or their secret of trade?

I have seen reports that bad/old dates are impacting CTR, but the argument for how this impacts ranking is long and perilous, as we all know It does seem likely that bad dates at large scale would impact a wide range of engagement metrics.

Hi, No, they shouldn't penalise. A lot of companies are bought out by bigger companies and then only have 1 page on a new domain to redirect all of their pages to. I would say that there would be little to no chance of any penalisation. All the best, Sean