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Thanks - good question. I agree with a previous poster that any website should possess friendly URL'S, such is a given these days and ultimately aids user awareness and navigation. You really should carefully research and think about the time required for URLS rewrites - these can be quit dangerous and if not done properly can damage your rankings. Certainly breadcrumb trails are a big plus so that's something I would definitely recommend.

Is this here to stay, do you think...? I'm so wary of Google's changes, I don't think I'll be lengthening my titles to make better use of the width until the dust settles a bit. EDIT: http://www.thesempost.com/new-title-description-lengths-for-google-seo/ (inb4 Google rolls back to the previous layout in one week's time.)

Sending the searcher to another ad-ridden SERP doesn't surprise me. Google is the ultimate ad-pushing scraper site. The Related Topics featured snippet seems to be quite similar to the People Also Ask feature that usually appears below the featured snippet separately. I've seen no mention of them on getSTAT's Featured Snippet whitepaper either, and that was quite thorough SERP research. How new are Related Topics? Or am I being silly, and they've been around for a while?

Glad to help!

Google Page Rank was deprecated and not updated since the end of 2014, and the public facing Page Rank metric was generally too broad to be able to use as a useful tool... The only change now is that Google has killed it off completely for any third party tools to pull data, so it's completely dead... In terms of your own site, you're better off looking at whether a page is attracting traffic via organic & paid search and social channels as a measure of success. In terms of external sites, the various tools (Including Moz) which allow you to check metrics are generally more useful - Page Rank never supplied an equivalent to Domain Authority (As a 'site' page rank was the page rank of the individual home page), and although the crawl amount often isn't quite as wide as the resources of Google, the individual PA scores are more granular, so you can more accurately look at closer competitors if that's your thing...

Just because Google is choosing not to display your titles and descriptions doesn't mean it hasn't indexed them. It's content and in the source code. It's indexed. It's being taken under consideration for ranking purposes. Google ultimately controls what is displayed, however. Titles and meta descriptions are merely a polite suggestion. There is no way to opt out of those rewrites 100% of the time. NOODP is only good for opting out of Dmoz descriptions, if you even have one there at all. (Most newer sites probably won't since inclusion hasn't been relevant for at least 5 years, probably longer.) It's not the only alternative snippet source. It's much more likely that Google will just find relevant text from the page itself to populate a description snippet, and NOODP will not block that. If Google is choosing its own snippet over mine, I don't always worry about it unless it's choosing something that's just flat out bizarre. I also like to look at Google's rewrites as instructive. The algorithm is serving up something that it thinks is more relevant to your query, and these days, with RankBrain and the entire menagerie in play, it's getting pretty smart. So if Google is rewriting my description, which means that Google has decided that particular text is relevant, then I'm going to take notes on what text it's grabbing and seriously consider adjusting my own description to be a closer match to whatever Google is inclined to serve up. If Google is literally pointing out the most relevant text for that query, maybe we should listen, right?

As @jessconfitti said, you are 100% correct. If a user browses more than 1 page in your site, it would not be a bounce. Even if after the second page the users clicks back to whatever Website they came from.

Above the fold my site always has a title that perfectly matches the query, a seductive subtitle that I hope will elicit reading, a spectacular image that I am willing to spend big bucks for, and a carefully crafted opening paragraph that states the basics of the topic. What else is above the fold?  Not much, just my domain name, which is killer.  The page looks like a newspaper with the full intent that nothing else will detract from the content or the domain (there are a couple of visible ads that do not interfere with the content - that pay for this stuff). I know for a fact that having your relevant content above the fold is essential.  Someone once designed me a fantastic template and the image at the top was killer killer killer... it was spectacular but irrelevant for most pages of the site.  Visitors bounced and I had enough traffic at the time to know that it tanked within a couple hours.  Ad revenue sucked too. I removed that image and the only thing left above the fold was the domain, the titles, the image and the text (and a couple ads that interfere with nothing).  In the next 60 minutes the people started exploring the site and the ad revenue was up multiples. It's like some athletic events... run as close to naked as you can.

Hi Kady, I did tweet about this and Aleyda and Gianluca were both kind enough to reply. It does seem that at present, it's not as widespread in other languages as in English, but it's also interesting to note that it seems to be less common for Italian queries vs Spanish. The example from Gianluca was "que es una meta description" which on Google.es displays a Direct Answer. In Italian I tried "cos'è una meta description" but no Direct Answer was given, just regular search results. Maybe it's because in Italian for example, there's no equivalent article which explains what a meta description is which meets all of Google's requirements for displaying a Direct Answer... but that does seem unlikely! Daniel

Hi Saijo, Absolutely! in fact that is exactly what I was looking for in the Information Box, I wanted to see the source of the definition. When citing a source it feels like it would look better to cite Merriam Webster rather then Google, if that makes any sense. But perhaps Google is aware of that perception and this is an effort to change it. I know there is a difference between Snippets and the Information Box or I think Google calls it "Knowledge Graph", but when I didn't see a source my wheels started turning. I really like the Snippets as you and EGOL point out, they are extremely helpful and can be a valuable source of traffic. Thanks guys for your thoughts, Don

Thanks Eric - While we are well-aware of various ranking monitor tools (we currently use MozPro), that's the essence of our question here. And it leads to the bigger question: What is main value of SEO these days given how it's realistically possible that most of your target audience is now getting personalized SERP results anyway. So then why put in all the effort to rank for particular terms when you could be easily displaced by sites your audience has viewed more regularly than your own and hence Google gives them the better position over yours regardless of having better SEO implemented on your site?

Not true, actually. On desktop it's just displayed differently. If you do your search, you can see that nordstrom name is actually on the right of breadcrumb names. So, that's another thing. If you can get your company name to come up like that (it usually is being pulled from Wiki), your chances go up by a lot rbSMHG1

What you're showing is not the results of a Google Algorithm update. When there's an update, the traffic goes down suddenly--not slowly over time. It looks more like there was some new links or new traffic to the site for another reason--which Dmitrii is referring to, it doesn't appear to be an algorithm update.

Brilliant thank you. Another question I have is, obviously titles need to be unique, so if the only difference is capacity, & my titles are something like Euro container 50L & Euro container 80L - is this just going to be seen as keyword spamming? I can't make the titles hugely different if the products are part of the same 'range' Is there a better way? Or is the alternative not to split the products?

I highly recommend checking out our beginner's guide to SEO to give you an idea of everything included in a solid SEO foundation and to learn more about what your site may need. Another great resource on Search Visibility and how it's calculated can be found here.

Yep! You can set all kinds of Custom Alerts in Google Analytics. Go to Admin->Custom Alerts (far right column) and configure them any way you want. Here is an example that might be close to what you are describing above. Alert Name: High Sales Product: This Applies to: Product SKU = Value Alert me when: Product Revenue = Increases by more than = Value % There is some flexibility in the metrics to configure the way you want. You can't do everything but hopefully you find some options that match what you are looking to do.

Ok, thank you.

Jarred, Whenever you move to a new domain name Google will keep the old domain name indexed for up to a year (or longer!). It's just the way that Google does it, I suspect that it's because you may change your mind and go back to the old domain. Having the old domain indexed in Google isn't a problem, as users should be redirected to the content on the new domain. It will take up to a year for Google to stop indexing the old domain. By the way, make sure you use the Google Change of Address Tool in Google Search Console, it will really help.

Glad you're seeing the site back in the rankings. I would definitely keep digging, though. A 14-month disappearance is not something you want to chalk up to an error, because you could easily relapse days or weeks from now. In other words, it's good news, but don't let your guard down.

Hello Sarmad, I don't recommend having a single-page website on the front-end. You can handle the loading of content however you like: Javascript, lazy loading, dynamic serving.. as long as each section/page has a different URL. A hashtag is not a new URL, but rather a named anchor link to somewhere else on the same page. Thus, using this technique you would only have a single page indexed in Google, not a lot of room to target different topics. Lots of sites use the parallax design style, but have multiple pages. Parallax and single-page are not necessarily synonymous. The most common use on a multi-page site would be to tell a story on a landing page or the home page. More concerning to me right now is that it looks like they're putting their clients' sites on their own subdomains, which are fully indexable by Google: https://goo.gl/z9dSDl .