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Grettelp, You can sometimes have more success getting ideas for local keyword phrases using the free Google Keyword Planner tool. It allows you to specify a geography you're interested in - city, municipality, county, township, state, province, country. Google Keyword Planner does not give specific volumes (they give rounded figures for groups of related keywords), but you'll at least get an idea of what people are searching for and can test it. You can also see a sampling of the phrases people are using to find your content by looking at search queries in Google Search Console, also free.

Fetching, rendering, caching and indexing are all different. Sometimes they're all part of the same process, sometimes not. When Google 'indexes' images, that's primarily for its image search engine (Google Images). 'Indexing' something means that Google is listing that resource within its own search results for one reason or another. For the same reasons that Google rarely indexes all of your web-pages, Google also rarely indexes all of your images. That doesn't mean that Google 'can't see' your images and has an imperfect view of your web-page. It simply means that Google does not believe the image which you have uploaded are 'worthy' enough to be served to an end-user who is performing a certain search on Google images. If you think that gaining normal web rankings is tricky, remember that most users only utilise Google images for certain (specific) reasons. Maybe they're trying to find a meme to add to their post on a form thread or as a comment on a Social network. Maybe they're looking for PNG icons to add into their PowerPoint presentations. In general, images from the commercial web are... well, they're commercially driven (usually). When was the last time you expressedly set out to search for Ads to look at on Google images? Never? Ok then. First Google will fetch a page or resource by visiting that page or resource's URL. If the resource or web-page is of moderate to high value, Google may then render the page or resource (Google doesn't always do this, but usually it's to get a good view of a page on the web which is important - yet which is heavily modified by something like JS or AJAX - and thus all the info isn't in the basic 'source code' / view-source). Following this, Google may decide to cache the web-page or resource. Finally, if the page or resource is deemed worthy enough and Google's algorithm(s) decide that it could potentially satisfy a certain search query (or array thereof) - the resource or page may be indexed. All of this can occur in various patterns, e.g: indexing a resource without caching it or caching a resource without indexing it (there are many reasons for all of this which I won't get into now). On the commercial web, many images are stock or boiler-plate visuals from suppliers. If Google already has the image you are supplying indexed at a higher resolution or at superior quality (factoring compression) and if your site is not a 'main contender' in terms of popularity and trust metrics, Google probably won't index that image on your site. Why would Google do so? It would just mean that when users performed an image search, they would see large panes of results which were all the same image. Users only have so much screen real-estate (especially with the advent of mobile browsing popularity). Seeing loads of the same picture at slightly different resolutions would just be annoying. People want to see a variety, a spread of things! **That being said **- your images are lush and I don't think they're stock rips! If some images on your page, post or website are not indexed - it's not necessarily an 'issue' or 'error'. Looking at the post you linked to: https://flothemes.com/best-lightroom-presets-photogs/ I can see that it sits on the "flothemes.com" domain. It has very strong link and trust metrics: Ahrefs - Domain rating 83 Moz - Domain Authority - 62 As such, you'd think that most of these images would be unique (I don't have time to do a reverse image search on all of them) - also because the content seems really well done. I am pretty confident (though not certain) that quality and duplication are probably not to blame in this instance. That makes me think, hmm maybe some of the images don't meet Google's compression standards. Check out these results (https://gtmetrix.com/reports/flothemes.com/xZARSfi5) for the page / post you referenced, on GTMetrix (I find it superior to Google's Page-Speed Insights) and click on the "Waterfall" tab. You can see that some of the image files have pretty lard 'bars' in terms of the total time it took to load in those individual resources. The main offenders are this image: https://l5vd03xwb5125jimp1nwab7r-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/PhilChester-Portfolio-40.jpg (over 2 seconds to pull in by itself) and this one: https://l5vd03xwb5125jimp1nwab7r-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Portra-1601-Digital-2.png (around 1.7 seconds to pull in) Check out the resource URLs. They're being pulled into your page, but they're not hosted on your website. As such - how could Google index those images for your site when they're pulled in externally? Maybe there's some CDN stuff going on here. Maybe Google is indexing some images on the CDN because it's faster and not from your base-domain. This really needs looking into in a lot more detail, but I smell the tails of something interesting there. If images are deemed to be uncompressed or if their resolution is just way OTT (such that most users would never need even half of the full deployment resolution) - Google won't index those images. Why? Well they don't want Google Images to become a lag-fest I guess! **Your main issue is that you are not serving 'scaled' images **(or apparently, optimising them). On that same GTMetrix report, check out the "PageSpeed" tab. Yeah, you scored an F by the way (that's a fail) and it's mainly down to your image deployment. Google thinks one or more of the following: You haven't put enough effort into optimising some of your images Some of your images are not worth indexing or it can find them somewhere else Google is indexing some of the images from your CDN instead of your base domain Google is having trouble indexing images for your domain, which are permanently or temporarily stored off-site (and the interference is causing Google to just give up) I know there's a lot to think about here, but I hope I have at least put you on the 'trail' a reasonable solution This was fun to examine, so thanks for the interesting question!

That's great! I'm glad to hear that.

Thanks for your response. Blocking Roger-bot looks like it might be a good idea. Will this affect the DA calculation?

That will depend on the directory tools like Synup, Moz Local can tell you when they go up on certain sites. If it's not a popular one there are a few different scenarios : Do they give you a temporary page that is only visible to you and will go live after it's approved? You can check the HTTP header response fo it and if it returns 200 it's probably approved and live. Do they give you a live URL that says it's pending verification? Scrape the page and use XPath to see id that bit of text changes. etc Give us some more info on it and perhaps we can help.

Good call on filtering by target country.  This gets the rankings a little closer to what Moz & Ahrefs are telling me.  Thanks.

Hi, It sounds like the 301 isn't implemented correctly OR Google didn't yet crawl the old URLs after you implemented the redirect. How long ago did you change the URLs? If it's only a few days ago I'd just wait for Google to crawl your old URLs again and detect the 301. Hope it helps.

Not a problem I find that all too often, if the question is a bit ambiguous - people will ignore it. If there are only a handful of interpretations, I will still try to answer

Hello mattl99! You are really fortunate.  You got two 10x responses from Roman and Bob. I'll add just a little...  about.... Your visitors and your niche... If you are selling very simple and common items that everybody uses and knows about then you don't need to write a huge description - just explain the specs.  But, if you are writing about things that involve effort, knowledge and creativity of your visitors to purchase, then you need a lot more than specs.  Items for do-it-yourself projects, items for craft/hobby projects, or the tools, parts and accessories needed for complex goods.  These require a lot more effort and the visitors both need and expect your expertise to help them decide, purchase, use and enjoy.

I don't believe you will incur a penalty but you won't get the full ranking benefit if it was visible. Google does discourage showing search engines one version of your site and searchers a different version. But I don't believe you will incur a penalty from hiding an H1 tag.

In general, websites that allow you to 'submit' (and therefore create guaranteed links) are usually of intrinsically low value. At most, they usually don't boost your rankings meaning that you have wasted your own time. In link building, quality trumps quantity (volume) every time. Instead of thinking which directories or article-wheels to submit your content (or site) to, think about the value-add. Does anyone really browse most of those directories or do most people just Google it? Will anyone see your page? How often - one person per year? **Will they follow the link? **(that's a key question) Relevance is about more than just semantic contextual word-play. Just because some website is about the same thing as your website, that doesn't mean that any and all links which you place 'must surely be relevant'. Why is it relevant for a user to follow the link? That's real relevance. If you are considering relevance without thinking about end-user value-add, then you're just saying words and not really taking the Google philosophy to heart. It's about creating something that adds value to the web (something which other websites don't supply). If your site doesn't add value to the web, then it has to do something that another site already does, but infinitely better (in such a way that users flock to it, like how FaceBook killed MySpace). If you're not adding value to the online community and you're not putting in the effort to sink the competition through sheer effort and positive energy, never expect to rank well. Link 'building' isn't what it used to be (in terms of how easy it is to shoot up rankings), Google's Penguin algorithm (now integrated into its core algo-set) can see through thin, 'made just for SEO' content and links in an absolute heartbeat. You really need to think about your service and how to style it a heck of a lot better. You want people engaging with your female escorts? I'm not here to judge - but those websites don't do much to push their talents as a 'premium' service. Even with solid, powerful links - the sites linking to you would probably just get penalised instead of your site(s) doing well (sorry! But it's probably true). If you can escape the bare-minimum effort mentality, you can succeed in modern SEO. Ger with the long-termist philosophy. If you just want to make a quick buck with PBNs and stuff like that, there are (assuredly) better communities to service your needs than this one

Absolutely not a problem

What a niche, interesting question! You could mean two things here, an on-page snippet that describes the product - or the Meta description which is strictly machine-read and which is used in Google's results (though not as a ranking factor! I'll get to this in a minute) If you mean an on-page description, having duplicate snippets (so long as they are very small) with one changed word or term is not, by itself in isolation - likely to Garner a Google Panda penalty or algorithmic devaluation. If however the description is really the only unique element on the page, you may be at some small to moderate risk of that. But here's the thing - SEO is a competitive environment. Just because you don't get a penalty for not doing the best thing - does that mean you shouldn't do it? If one of your competitors is supplying more in-depth, better, more unique (value-add) information then they will outrank you (so long as their popularity / authority and trust metrics are similar to your own). Small comfort will it be, that you have no penalty - if your results for product URLs suck. Will it matter to you why you aren't getting traffic? Probably not - the commercial outcome could be the same If you mean the Meta description, it probably won't matter very much at all - but let me lay some knowledge on you. Just because Meta descriptions have no special place in Google's ranking algorithm(s) that doesn't mean they can't benefit your SEO. But how can that be!? OK - so it's known that Meta descriptions (well written ones) have an elevated chance of forming SERP (Search Engine Ranking Position) snippets in Google's results. If your ranking position contains text which does a better job of compelling a Google user to click through to your website, it stands to reason that writing decent Meta descriptions can make your existing ranking positions supply more traffic and work harder for you (without even shifting). Neat huh? The key of course is that Meta descriptions should be written from a CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation) perspective and not from a keyword / SEO perspective. So - now you know. Do your best to compete and elevate yourself above others by supplying deeper, value-add (for end users) content on-page. In terms of Meta, CRO makes traffic flow! Hope this was helpful

Not a problem!

The following page returns a 410 status code in the HTTP header: https://www.seattlesouthside.com/event/poverty-bay-blues-brews-festival/42/ That would be a very likely reason. You should check your other pages as well.

You might be able to get some highly relevant referral traffic from forums, so forum links aren't completely useless. But as Logan and Martijn said, if you are doing this type of link building purely for SEO reasons, then your time is definitely better spent elsewhere. Cheers, David

Thank you for taking the time to respond. Makes a lot of sense, I appreciate it.

Have you consider using tools like Moz Local, Synup, etc If you prefer to do it manually Create a list of Business Name Variations Phone Number Variations Address Variations Website Variations Then do a " " search in Google. eg: https://www.google.com.au/search?q="business"+"123456"