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Hey George, As you say, Google shouldn't be inferring ranking adaptations from your data, for your site (within your Google Analytics profile). If they use any data in that kind of way, it would probably be from Search Console (which is actually Google's data, from their side) If you can identify that it certainly is bot traffic, then it's unlikely that Google would move on it at all. They're very good at detecting fake traffic. Back in the day 'click-farms' used to be a thing, hundreds of people in third world countries (or a robot) clicking Google search results to try and increase CTR. If they've taken measures to filter that out (which they have) then 'dumb' bot traffic shouldn't impact you much That being said, if all the bot traffic slows your site down a lot and then causes real users to react negatively to their browsing experience, that could be something which Google might pin you on Your main thing to do is to really identify the traffic and what network domain it's coming from. If it looks obviously 'bot-like' then you can take measures to block requests from that area of the web. Be careful though, it might be a legitimate crawler, even Rodgerbot (the Moz crawler!) See if you can pin the traffic to a network domain in GA, and then an IP-range in something like AWStats or server-log based analysis software. If you can say, yeah that IP range is probably that network domain and my vague idea of what it is, is X - then you'll be in a much better (more informed) place to proceed

Hi, I had been in a similar position, dealt with 10+ websites with the same issues, but now fixed. The nature of the business were the same, services the same just the markets were different like .in, co.uk, .ca, .us etc. We were skeptical initially as we had a plan to set up a blog or something on all the local sites or not, but then the question arise duplication, conflict etc. So what I did, I went with seperate blogs for few of the top performing sites. Lets say, co.uk and .us, the services were the same and so does the keywords. Since we are using hreflang, ccTLDs, International targeting enough singals for Google to understand which page belongs to which country. We started rephrasing the master content kind of more LSI approach and published them under co.uk since that was 2nd best perfoming markets we had first one was US. In this way, we didn't consfuse Google and our users yet we were writing some quality content and rephrasing them with LSI approach to publish them on other sites. But initially, Google was showing the US content in UK and UK content in US, but it got fixed once we had enough content on the site. Plus moving to subdomain just to make it central no I won't suggest you to do this. What should you do, It's time consuming but long lasting, produce the content, rephrase with the LSI approach, add or less the content based on country requirement or whatever you feel like doing and then tag content / URLs with self-referential hreflang and canonical tags

seoman10, I do realize that DA is not a Google metric, my thought was that SSL (or TLS) would be a factor in calculating the DA score, especially because of the recent changes Google has made with secure/not secure sites. Thanks for your time! I consider this answered

I think that what you link to should be both relevant to the topic and superior in some important way to the information that you have on your own website.  That's my guide to outlinks.

Thanks effectdigital, Screaming Frog did show H1s on blogs so I am going to assume it is a non-issue.

What questions do people have when they contact you? That's a content idea. What questions do people ask on Quora? Trip Advisor? bicycling forums? What FAQs do your competitors have? Take that FAQ content as an idea, then write a whole blog post (if there's enough content) and start to outrank them.

Great thanks for your help. We'll wait a week or two and check again. Thanks Tanya

Ok but how about if my title is totally different on the tour operator website. Instead of "Tuscany bike tour" I write something like. "Cycling through olive groves and vineyards in Tuscany" Does it change something ? and does the fact that the tour operator would only copy part of my page change something. They wouldn't copy the reviews or the introduction.

If you are using anchor text that is not on the landing page it sends mixed signals to the search engine. Remember that search engines are just complex directories trying to give the user the most relevant result. If your keyword doesn't match the page it's linking to then the likelihood is it will lose its relevance equalling a lower authority signal and lower SERP. If you are using a relevant keyword for anchor text then you can weave it into the landing page. Hope that helps

It is possible to earn the #1 position away from Amazon.  But, to do that you need one of two things... A) A heavyweight site that is known as an authority in the product category where you are trying to compete with Amazon. B) A lightweight site that has multiple pages of deep content for the keywords that you are after.  You need a site that is well known enough for those keywords that people ask for it by name (meaning that they use the domain in Google queries or type the domain into the address window of Chrome). Situations A) and B) are earned through years of work, not by tossing up a few great pages or a ton of pages loaded with prattle.

Converting four categories of a blog into four outhouses will diminish your impact. Keep those four categories on your current site and work to make then excellent. You use two words that worry me... "growing" and "millions".    A ton of gold is worth a lot.  A ton of crap will sink a ship. So, if your emphasis is on volume rather than quality, they you need a change of focus.

Not I didn't leave the old sitemap.

You should be good, but it's always something that you can A/B test without compromising the integrity of the content!

Hi, Are you using any kind of filters in Analytics, for example, exclude bots, exclude queries and pages anything like this?

Hi, I don't see any big problems with an API integration like this. There is a lot of companies that are using data from other content providers (through an API) that you are in most cases mostly looking at how you can enrich that content. That's why I would leave the pages indexed and make work of enriching the pages with as much other (more unique) content as possible. Martijn.

I certainly don't think there's any harm in a self-referencing confirmation, if anything it gives a bit of a 'you are here' marker I found a Stack thread which might be handy: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29816633/breadcrumbs-on-current-page ... seems pretty relevant. Obviously they're using microdata and not JSON-LD, but the logic should be similar

This was an issue that yoast came up with on an upgrade with wordpress in the middle of 2018. It may be worth a little research into how their "purge" plugin worked as it did exactly this. Using the htaccess file simply tell google not to index the resource pages then they will naturally over time fall out of the search  or you can purge by Log into the Google Search Console and select the desired website. Click on “Optimization” in the left-hand navigation. Click on “Remove URL” in the sub-menu. Click on the button “create a new request for removal” on this page. Once this is done and they are set to no index. Problem solved.