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Thanks for the advice, that's really helpful.

Hi, There could be a variety of things that could have caused this, but I would start by asking a few questions: Did the drop happen quickly? Did it go from positions 1-3 to 20 below in a day or two? Is the SERP volatile? Has there been lots of movement for the SERP historically? Have other sites in your space seen negative drops? I know there has been a lot of movement in the last few weeks. Some general things I would jump into to start looking: Core technical elements. Was the page de-indexed somehow? Was the page canonicalized elsewhere? Did the core on-page elements get re-targeted to another term or removed? General health of homepage/site Is your backlink profile healthy? Did you ever purchase links/did someone purchase negative links to your domain? Is your content scraped or duplicated across other sites? Is your website mobile friendly? Does your site load quicker than 5 seconds? As Nikki mentioned, it's also important to look at who is ranking now. What is the DA of their site compared to yours? Is it much higher? Is their quality of content better? If the drop happened quickly it's likely that something technical went wrong or you've been hit with an obvious penalty. If it's happened over months, it's probably less obvious and could be multiple things. I know that's not a straight answer, but those are some starting points I could think of with the information provided. Hope that is helpful!

Hi Ed Yes would love to see the whiteboard Friday on it! No, not seeing it as an issue, more trying to workout why it's happening and how I can provide the customer with the 30 stone option - we don't sell any so I've mentioned it to the product managers. My other struggle is the changes I can actually make to the product page - this is controlled by a development team in France and we have little room to make changes which can be frustrating. You're last point about product pages interfering with one another will be a big one for me. I have so many products which are almost identical, say I have 4 x high back faux leather chairs with arms, these pages will always compete & how do you get around this? We've tried to optimise so we have variations of the keywords in the titles, so they're all slightly different, but if Google knows these are all related surely they're always going to compete? Thanks! Becky

Hey Eric_S, Glad to hear you're starting the SEO 101 journey. 1. You can view which keywords your site currently ranks for on a domain level or a page level through using the MOZ keyword explorer tool, selecting either "domain" or "page" and inputting the URL into the tool. It should then show you a list of all of the keywords and their volumes.  This can also be done using tools like SEMrush or AHREFS. In order to view the search traffic on your site, you will have to look at its Google Analytics data, or any other tracking program you may be utilizing and sort the data to find out the number of users that come to your site via organic search. (This is a little vague, and will vary depending on which program you're using for analytics, so feel free to ask for clarification or do further program-specific research.) 2. Excel or google sheets both work well for keyword documents. 3.  There are a lot of different analysis that can be made by finding the keywords you currently rank for. You can find keywords with higher volumes that you would like to rank higher for, and try to re target pages to achieve this. Simply having a keyword mapping document outlining the targeted keyword for each page can also be useful when writing things such as titles and h1s on a page. It really depends on your goal. I hope this was helpful! Lydia

Google’s mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. In other words: to build the perfect search engine that helps people nd what they are looking for. Google always wants to show you the best result for your search query. Google has updated its algorithm numerous times over the years, but their goal remains the same: Google tries to get you the best result. Google gives you the best results by ranking the most relevant and usable websites, and combating spam. Sites that are only built to make money, or otherwise created purely to rank in order to make money, should not be on top of the search results. Sites that give the user what they searched for should always be on top. Google also rewards sites that give have nice user experience (including for instance sites that load fast). So Google always keep in mind user behavior and user intents, so probably on specific users and region you fit their needs at least in theory and for the other region you do not fit that need, The other factor is your competition probably you have different competition level so in one country you are the best because there's no better competitor and in another country there are many sites better than you.

Yes! I read the example backward. I'm with you! All pages should point to C.

Thanks David. Moz pro isn't showing any changes in search visibility. And yes, Google gains are outweighing Bing/Yahoo losses. So I suppose people might be moving. This article says that they're not: http://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/united-kingdom but perhaps my audience is.

Exactly as you said. I wonder what ranking fluctuation or dip we can expect with main domain due to this deindexing of sub domains. Someone claims that ranking will be dropped, but how? Still sub-domain "B" will be there with all backlinks. So the backlinks are there technically. Please let me know your valuable thoughts on this. Thanks

Hi Andrew Here a few things to check or rule out: Are those pages accessible to be crawled (not blocked with robots.txt etc) Are they also internally linked? (ie;s crawl with Screaming Frog, starting at the homepage and see if they turn up) Is the page actually indexed (search the URL in Google) but just not showing up in Search Console? How long are you waiting before resubmitting - also does it literally get half way down the list, or do you mean 50% are not indexed? Overall, I would just submit the sitemap and you don't need to keep resubmitting. I would rather do some crosschecks to make sure the URL is accessible (crawlable) and even maybe indexed already, just not showing in the report. Usually, there's some other issue with the URL besides a sitemap issue - and like you mentioned, I'm not sure how long you're waiting, but it can indeed take weeks for them to show up.

I'm seeing this same issue on a client site I consult for. The pages have images added through the WYSIWYG as a workaround to add more info. We're using ASP.net which I realize is a legacy platform. I'm betting those dates are coming from the image creation date. Any updates on this issue appreciated.

No, well-presented, user-friendly popups like exit-intent popups won't have anything to do with the ad blocking that's going to happen.

No changes here. Sub-domain is still a separate unit from Google's POV. Links are not liquid and your pages are not communicating vessels you don't lose any "juice" by linking to new pages but things happen. You can try running your website through Netpeak Spider, (disclaimer: I work for the company which developed it) it can calculate internal page rank for your pages, maybe you'll find something unusual there.

Hello, Some technical factors: Internal linking structure Architecture and Crawlability Https (Http secure) Existence of Meta description Site speed Keywords included in the domain Use of flash Domain .com My two cents, I'm sure there's much more out there Hope this helps!! If you like the answer, don't forget to select it as BEST ANSWER Roberto