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Unpaid plug: WPMU DEV is a good service for Wordpress as well. With their backup, optimization, CDN, and compression tech their annual fee is still below what you'd pay trying to piece together all those services somewhere else. Plus GREAT support.  There used to be a coupon code here in Moz's partner section as well. They might still have a special deal if you ask. For your situation, you'll want to check to see that your database is still referencing the same URL structure as well (look for things like switching from www to non-www as default or HTTP vs. HTTPS.) As Sean says, focus on URL structures. If old URLs are working just the same as the ones on the new server, things should be fine. Do you see any crawl errors in Google Search Console?  That will give you some of the best insights.

Consult an attorney to get up-to-speed on copyright, infringement, and fair-use.  Filing DMCAs or taking other actions that exceed your rights or infringe on the fair-use of others can result in a lawsuit against  YOU. Infringement by an upstanding company is usually done by an employee, a content writer, or an SEO who is ignorant about copyright law.   Rarely they can be guilty of willful infringement, which can result in both civil and criminal actions. If upstanding people or organizations are infringing, you can send informal infringement complaints yourself or have them sent by an attorney.  It is often better to notify them of the infringement and get it stopped before it increases. The quickest way to deal with spammy infringers is the DMCA to Google that SEAN suggests.   You can also send DMCA to their host.  If they are monitized by adsense you can complain to Adsense and they might turn off the ads on infringing pages or turn off the ads to the entire site. I am not an attorney, but have used them frequently.  They usually cost less than you fear and are usually worth more than you pay them.

Hi kh-priyam Many people use a product ID in the link because many CMS automatically create this ID in the url, and if you don't install a plugin for friendly urls, this ID will be there. There is no advantage for ranking better with product or categories ID. In my opinion it doesn't matter if you have an ID if the rest of the url is friendly, but some people think that urls without ID are better, so I recommend you to don't have a product ID in your urls. Greetings

If I understood well, your .com website has good traffic from the USA, albeit you’re targeting the UK as a market. the solution I see it to create a mirror website under .com/is/ and geotarget that subfolder to United States in Google Search Console, while geotargeting the domain to UKz Then, I’d implement the hreflang tags so to indicate to Google that it must show the UK URLs to people searching from UK (hreflang=“en-Gb”) anddto show the US ones to USA searchers. However, being the 2 versions identical, I’d canonicalize the USA versions n toward the UK one. Be aware that this is not how Google suggests to implement the hreflang, but John Mueller himself confirmed to Glenn Gabe that this is the correct thing to do for avoiding Google to consolidate the duplicated content using a version which is not the one you prefer. fianlly, if you still want to target also English speaking users not from UK or USA (I.e.: Canadians), you could add a third hreflang annotation like this: hreflang=“en“.

Hi Ali! H1s aren't really viewed as a strong ranking factor anymore. They just don't correlate very clearly with improved rankings (see: https://moz.com/blog/which-page-markup-tags-still-matter-for-seo-whiteboard-friday) though they provide VERY important signals to human visitors. I'm not sure why the site you are optimizing would have this tag at the bottom of the page. That's not really standard, so I'd advise rethinking this usage, for the comfort of users. Regarding SEO, in general, if you've identified a top phrase your client needs to be ranking for, yes, you definitely want it in the tags and text of most important pages. But, beyond this, modern marketing is moving towards the understanding of building topical authority to help you rank for a variety of interrelated terms. So, for example, let's say that the most important phrase to your client is "organic flower seeds". Of course, you'll have this phrase in your tags and text, but you must figure out how to move beyond simple on-page optimization if you want the company's brand to become authoritative in Google's eyes as relevant to this subject. So, in addition to simply having a page called "organic flower seeds", you'll be striving to: Cover everything that can possibly relate to this topic that customers need to know. Why choose organic seeds? What does "organic" mean? How do you plant organic flower seeds? How do you know how many seeds you needs? How much do you need to water them so they germinate? How do you package your seeds to keep them fresh for successive plantings? Etc, etc. Build recognition of your brand as synonymous with your most important search terms. In other words, I say "Mexican-style fast food" and you say "Taco Bell". I say "organic flower seeds, and you say "Seeds of Change". Linkbuilding, word of mouth marketing, old-school PR, content dev, paid advertising and a ton of other elements factor into becoming an authority. Google seems to be particularly swayed by this, as you will see very large brands getting away with very poor practices and still ranking, while small, unknown companies struggle. So, you've got to aim to become as "known" as you can, so that you become one of Google's go-to resources for queries relating to that phrase you've identified. Hope this helps!

Hi Fishe, thanks for sharing this. I had never really thought about filtering out ip traffic from search console data. I typically work with websites with a high enough volume that I think the filtering wouldn't likely impact my work, but it's good to know for my newer clients who may not have much brand presence and are spending a lot of time googling themselves out of anxiety. I can definitely see a use case for that scenario. Good work!

ok, Thank you, let try this,

Hi Jonathan, I hope that I can (at least partially) answer your question. We know that great content and positive engagement metrics are far more important than basic optimisation strategies like keywords in H1 or the URL. So, whilst some of the SEO 'low hanging fruit' is missing it actually counts for relatively little. I've had a quick look at the page and there's a lot of very detailed content that looks like it will do a good job of being useful / helpful to users. The challenge would be to create content that's even better, easier or more useful than this.

That's great news.... but it wasn't me.  I didn't do anything. It's possible that a competitor complained and they did a deep dive into the images being used by the site. I have a competitor with images similar to mine.  Infringers are often taking images from their site and mine.  This compeitor is extremely aggressive about fighting infringement and they have solved a lot of my problems.  One of the few situations where I have enjoyed having them in my SERPs.

Hi jfishe1988, could I ask - do you have analytics on these pages? In your initial question you suggest that the pages don't have any organic value but in responding to Alick you say that lots of them get organic rankings. As a couple of broader points: Google has given conflicting advice about how low-quality links are treated, Gary Ilyes has said that low-quality links are just ignored (which makes sense as a way to negate negative SEO tactics) so this may not be something you need to worry about if you aren't relying on these 100 odd domains to channel link equity to the site you want to rank. However, John Mueller has said that the disavow file still has value, as I say - conflicting advice. If the only purpose of these landing pages is for hyper-targeted PPC and you don't want any link equity that is coming from them in case it poisons the main site, you could consider adding a nofollow tag to those pages. That should mean that Google ignores all links from those pages to your main site. It would insulate your main site from any link-network based penalties but it would also remove any benefits the main site might currently be getting due to any backlinks those domains have.

Hi Dexter, Very interesting one indeed! If it was me I’d look to run the site through Screaming Frog and also do a Google site:yourdomain.com search to ensure none of these fake URLs are being indexed. If they aren’t indexed then you should be pretty safe According to this: https://www.seroundtable.com/404s-google-quality-signal-23568.html Alongside the custom 404 page mentioned above, perhaps you could consider creating an automatic rule that redirects any broken links direct to the homepage? Hopefilly these ideas provide some further food for thought Cheers, Casey

You're forcing your competitor to make some really bad strategic decisions.  Use this - if you know or suspect who it might be - to inform your competitive strategy. Keep disavowing the inks and they will get bored and give up because it's costing them time and resources to build them. It's like tennis.  You need to 'force errors' in your competition rathe than going toe-to-toe with them. Have they recently started advertising for the categories where you are hurting them?  If so you can look at the ads and find out their value proposition and most profitable categories and erode their market share by being better than they are and draining their resources. I don't know if there's any negative SEO police.  I'm not sure you'll get very far with that although you could hire a forensic white-hat-hacker to try to reveal their identity.  But I don't see how that will help.  And I don't like bringing even ex-hackers anywhere near my business for obvious reasons.

Recently I faced the same issue for one of my client and yes! you're right about the Search Console Disavow Tool. Well.. that helped me! I hope it helps you too.

Hi there, I do a back link audit for my clients annually, just to ensure I have a good idea of what links have been created every 12 months that may be out of my control. I usually pull all the links from as many tools as I can; Open Site Explorer, Google Search Console, Cognitive SEO, Ahrefs, SEMrush etc and compile them into a Google Sheet. You'll find most of these tools will have some sort of gauge to show you the trustworthiness of each link, however I still find it's good to scan through them manually. You get a good feel for which ones are fishy after a while. From there I go through them manually, to see if there's any really worrying ones (I also highlight ones to keep an eye on). If there are ones I want removed, I will attempt to contact the webmaster to do this. If I cannot remove certain links and I believe they are harming the site (typically it would only come to this if there is a manual penalty) then I'll look to disavow those links: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en I hope this helps

I have a related queston about "hidden" H1 tags. I not iced on my company's website that there are multiple H1 tags which is a no-no, but the first tag, which must be part of our theme, is hidden by positioning it off the screen with the following css: position: absolute; left: -9999px; What are the SEO implications to using this css? Thanks, KP

Do you do local, in-person services, or work only online? Are these directories that real people are likely to visit to look for your services?

Make sure products are in your sitemap and it has been re-submitted. You can also submit your products to request indexing for them in Google Search Console.