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Hi there, The fact that your DA did not increase in the last months is not an issue. There might be a lot of reasons why that happened, im listing just a few (it doesn't that's your case): No better links added The total sum of authority on links added and on links lost is zero The entire ecosystem gained authority and there is no net increase As always, I'd strongly suggest you and everybody to dont worry that much about increasing any private metric (DA, PA, DR, TF or whatever) but focus on creating great content and if linking opportunities come, be sure that those links come from high quality and topic-related websites. I'd recommend you focus more on other aspects of SEO rather than backlinks and improving private metrics. I guess that taking a deep read to these resources might help: - Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide - Google Search Console Help - The Beginner's Guide to SEO - Moz - A Complete Guide to SEO: What You Need to Know in 2019 - Search Engine Journal - A Simple 7‐Step SEO Tutorial for Beginners - Ahrefs Best luck, Gaston

Hi Nathan, You are right. There was a broad algorithm update. Google made it official with a tweet: https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1216752087515586560 Yet, I haven't seen any change in my webs nor any comment from my colleagues about big changes. Hope there is nothing to worry about. Best of luck to all of us. Cheers, Gaston

Agreed with what Gaston explained and would also add that you should check all elements on your website when it comes to what GSC is reporting. For example, it could be that you have an image ranking for that keyword in position 15 on the Image SERPs and a page from your website is actually ranking on position 50.

Thanks for your response EGOL, I always really value your comments. I think this makes a lot of sense. How many times have people tried to game the SERPs with minor tactical deployments, only to see Google drop it all within 6 months? Focusing on delivering that which Google's algorithms attempt to seek (high quality content), can only be positive

Your "authority " is on your domain - on your subdomain "www" (or without) but not on a new sub-domain. So if you want to take the authority with you, you need to pick a subfolder. Thatswhy -> no difference between sub-domain or new domain in your case. Also the reason why it should be possible to pick a subdomain, what i still wont do But if you link them well, you will benefit from your domain. Ok in this point, it looks more organic to link to a subdomain than to a different one.  But e.g. linking to a new domain wich is yours in the footer  is (according to john mueller) ok, because google is clever enough to know that this is not sponsored or spam, but one of yours.

Hi Check the Google Search Console forums, to see if there is a bug or delay in reporting data. Sometimes the data falls flat and will be restored within a few days. Martijn.

The weighting of internal links is vastly inferior to the weighting of external links. I guess if you had no (or very few) external links hitting your site, the internal links might skew Google's view a little. But if some of your pages had even a few robust links coming from off-site (which are perceived as less biased links) then the internal linking wouldn't create any drastic movements. Footer links are often largely discounted, anyway - as they are not prominent and web-users don't often use them

While typing in  "Latest from ***.com" may trigger some press releases or news sites to show. The Google SERP is not strictly Google News. The Moz screenshot you attached showed Moz's latest blog posts at that time, and were not related to Google News to my knowledge. Hope this helps!

My initial thought is Google does see your website as authoritative, which is why you are ranking for some of the "secondary keywords", but you are getting outranked on the "top keywords" due to the competition being more optimized. I would look into the links that the outranking competitor websites/articles have that you do not to see if you can duplicate any, and then revisit your page's on-site SEO. So In addition to the link profiles, check the higher ranking competitors pages total content length, H2s, H1, Meta Title and different types of content (videos, images, embeds, etc) to see if this gives any clues to why Google is ranking them higher for your top keywords.

Not here, but many of our clients are well established and highly authoritative. I would anticipate that for smaller sites trying to build up (and survive online) the impact would be higher

That’s something I’ve seen. Credentialed folks taking up much more space in the first pages of the SERPS. I don’t have credentials, and will not be spending the time / money in that direction, but I see the advice in many of these higher ranking results, and it’s often used and abused / recycled info that doesn’t do the job, or outright incorrect (I know my stuff, not a hack job ;). But yes, you bring up another concern of mine... Is what I AM unfixable. Thing that gives me some light / hope are some of sites taking up high rankings are not credentialed at all either. One is a kid in his mid / late 20s who writes about SEO / Marketing and... random sex articles? I believe he’s a social / outreach / networking phenom though, has links from super high DA sources. Get Roman and For Hims are obviously purely commercial, but have money for high ranking placement and to get MDs to write articles. There are also several “pick up artist” and “alpha method” ”bro type sites” with no credentials, (and some with very little links built to them), ranking for mediocre content... All this gives me hope to stay in there, but I’ve definitely seen the trend you’re mentioning here...

If I'm understanding your question right, there are various sub-pages on the directory, and you want to redirect the directory and not the sub-pages. In that case, the only damage to SEO would be the ranking given from the directory page, so you would have one less internal link. It will be the same as redirecting any page/post that links back to the sub-pages, so in most cases, it won't be noticeable unless the directory page itself that links to the sub-pages is highly ranked. Daniel Rika - Dalerio Consulting https://dalerioconsulting.com/ info@dalerioconsulting.com

Thanks, I think I'm going to try to get it done, just because I like things neat and tidy, lol. Also, who knows when Google will switch it, might as well fix it now.

Does it change back to the old title just on Google, or on your actual CMS?

Have you tried outlining your Google Analytics data with Google's algorithm updates? You might have been affected by a Google update that happened over the past few weeks?

Thank you for such an encouraging and supportive answer, we all really appreciated reading your thoughts. We have actually focused on content a lot in the last 12 months for exactly the same reason you've mentioned (you can see our pretty active, health and therapeutic treatments focused blog here: https://www.themassagerooms.com/blog) and that has definitely helped. But what is most concerning is that we still seem to very largely lag behind many of the other smaller competitors in terms of key keyword SERPs (like the ones you mentioned), even though we have much more content, better DA, great Google LightSpeed scores, etc etc. What I mean to say is that we completely agree with all that you have said - and will also take on board your Local points - they are all very sensible in from an absolute perspective. But we are still confused as to why sites like massagejoy.co.uk, massagepeoplelondon.co.uk and even ubermassagelondon.co.uk ... all of which have lower DA, less content, less good quality links in etc (the last one has a DA = 1 , hardly any content and according to Moz not a single external link in!) rank better than us? It just seems to smell very strongly of something slightly askew and we have no idea whether we can somehow get someone in the know at Google to investigate?

There's actually no such thing as 'exactly similar'. If something was 'exactly similar' to something else, you would instead describe it as 'the same'. Similar means close to the same, but different. Some degree of difference is implied! I'd try to work the pages to be as similar as possible, but if the URLs weren't exactly 'the same' I wouldn't be super worried. Another thing, are you confusing AMP with having a mobile site, or a mobile responsive site? AMP is usually separate to your mobile site: Desktop site: loads for desktop / laptop users Mobile site: may use the same URLs as your desktop site and load the same content, but responsive styling makes the content suitable for a mobile display. For some older sites they might have separate mobile URLs, but this is generally frowned upon for modern SEO (e.g: ancient "m." subdomain sites) AMP pages (not a site): versions of your normal web pages, which are stripped down and load really fast. Most mobile users in the first world will not see these very often, but if they're in an area with terrible signal / speeds the AMP page can load instead of the regular mobile page. Situational URLs for users whom have permanent or temporary bandwidth issues So it's the mobile site's pages and the AMP pages (#2 and #3) which should be similar. You should not be making #1 and #3 similar, it wouldn't make any sense to do that. I guess some desktop users might see AMP URLs from time to time, but I'd have thought that AMP takes over from mobile 99% more often

The reason why your keyword experiencing "keyword dancing"  just because last month (September) update their algorithm. Here is the volatility broken down by category or section WMRu0a7

Hi Tom, Thanks for your response on this. I have seen several credible websites state that canonical image URLs are not used by Google and should not be used, even on MOZ I have read this too I believe. Interested to know your source on this? The use of our own self-hosted cdn to load images using multiple connections is following Google's image best practices - this is recommended across the web too. So not sure what the problem is you are highlighting there? The only thing that was a concern was the fact we are using a different domain entire, not the deployment of the self-hosted cdn. The og:image and structured data image are using the primary domain, and again, that is following best practices. Thanks