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Thank you for the response. I ended up disabling pagination on the category pages (as there aren't  more than 20-30 posts per category) to fix the duplicate content issues caused by paginating each page 5-10 times with the same 1000 word article on each page. I then fixed the author page Titles and Description issue by adding some dynamic tags provided by Yoast in the Author page. Simply changing it from "All Posts by (Author) - Site Name" to "All Posts by (Author) - Page 2 of 36 - Site Name" dynamically, it fixed the duplicate titles completely. Same with the meta description.. As for the home page links, I changed the linking structure entirely. Instead of random posts per category, it now has a link to each category page with the 5 most recently added articles per category under them with a link, image, and text snippet so the page will be more "static" for a while and provide some link flow to my new content, but still update as i add content. I then moved the top 5 posts of all time in the sidebar followed by the most trending article from the last 7 days (by view count). Finally, I customized my 404 page to show the top 3 articles from my top 3 categories after reading an article about keeping your 404 page relevant and helpful to your viewers just in case I have a bad link come in. I made all of these changes about a week ago and am waiting to see any changes in rankings, but I think, at least from a reader's viewpoint, the site looks much cleaner and easier to navigate. It didn't make a whole lot of sense to just randomly display whatever the theme felt like every refresh. Thanks again!

As I understand it Penguin is no longer penalizing sites for bad links but just devalues them/don't count them. So I imagine getting targeted by such methods by a competitor, or even acquiring questionable links from PBNs can't hurt you anymore, but just return 0 value?

Hi Joseph, I found Moz's Hreflang attribute guide to be very helpful when I first set up international targeting and multi-language tagging. I would recommend checking that out. You are close but you need to also include a self-referencing hreflang tag on each page so it should look like this: I will note that hreflang tags do not consolidate link authority, they are meant to ensures that the correct pages will be shown to the correct users based on their language and/or location. You can see Twitter screenshots here where this same topic was discussed. Hope this helps!

Hi Dave, We have similar issues with the new searching for keywords by root domain functionality in keyword explorer. We are based in Australia and need rankings for google.com.au, which is what we have set up within our campaign ranking reports. The explorer tool rankings are way off and not accurate for our site's actual rankings. Also, many of the top, high volume keywords that we are tracking and for which we rank on first page for are not even appearing when I do an explorer search using our root domain. Is the root domain functionality within keyword explorer providing results based on google.com rather than google.com.au? Does this mean that if we are outside the US that we can't use the tool as it is not accurate? Cheers, Damien

If the content is similar enough in terms of the intent of the keywords you are targeting, I would agree with Andrew in saying consolidate them into one page. A few things to keep in mind: 1. If you end up consolidating them into one page, be sure you are passing any link equity from the page you remove to the new updated page. 2. If the pages are both for different things and just have the same keyword in the H1, think about retargeting each page to be associated with the keyword that best matches the content. 3. If the content is similar enough for consolidating, longer content does tend to be favored in the SERPs (depending on the topic) so this may be another benefit of combining the two as well.

To be clear - specifying the image dimensions on the HTML has no effect on what size of image is downloaded from the server. It serves only to specify the space on the html page that should be reserved for the image display when it does finally load. So it gives s the impression of faster speed by keeping the page from redrawing once the image dimensions are actually known by the browser.

Thanks for this. I will set up the canonicalisation accordingly. In regards to the internal clicks. I guess I was hoping that all the clicks would essentially be added together. As in - All of the actual page clicks and all the clicks variations with URL parameters. But as internal clicks are not a ranking factor it doesn't matter. Are the links to the page with parameters the only way the 'source' page benefits through using a cannnonical?

Thank you Paul

I would say the first thing to do is to send a thank you letter to Google   the more times you show up, the more traffic you will get. If you have two pages with identical content showing Google will probably drop one in due course, you could consider restructuring one of the pages to go into the topic in more depth but you must keep it within context to avoid losing the ranking.

Hi Johnny, I'd like to be able to give you a 100% certain "yes" or "no" answer on this, but Facebook's lack of documentation always makes me say "I think", instead of "I know", for fear I've overlooked some hidden thing about their system I don't understand. In this case, I "think" you should be fine so long as you are consistently designating the same location as the company headquarters so that its phone number and address are always the same across FB and the web. But, you might want to ask here, in case you get a different opinion: https://www.facebook.com/help/community

Thanks for all your feedback. I don't think we have any technical problem. I also don't think its due to Fred. Can you  guys think of anything else that might be issue as of now in the website that is causing the issue and due that it is not  performing well in google search.

Sweet! Thanks, guys! That's a solid quite, EGOL: "Don't build your house on land that belongs to someone else."

Hey Matt, A tough subject. I'm guessing you've read all the general advice on ensuring that you've added plenty of your own guideline-compliant photos on behalf of your clients so that Google has good stuff to choose from, and it sounds like you know how to flag photos or report them like this: https://www.en.advertisercommunity.com/t5/Basics-for-Business-Owners/Remove-Photo-From-Location-Listing/td-p/1131795 But as to doing this at scale, I'm not aware of a solution that gives you any additional control over GMB images than you have with manual management. I think I once asked Local SEO Guide if their Locadium product alerts customers to new images being uploaded to their GMB listings, but I don't believe they ever replied. You might investigate that product further to see if you can get an answer. My question to them may simply have gotten lost - it's the one thing I wondered about when the product debuted. But, even if a product were to alert you to photos being added (which would be half the battle) the other half of the battle would be that it's up to Google to plunk photos into your listing - it's their choice. You can report unwanted images, but you can't proactively prevent Google from accepting them or displaying them. Definitely a pain point, and one of the impactful outcomes of Googles crowd-sourcing approach to location data.

Thanks  for the input! The move to https sitewide will be added to our re-platforming plan.

Thanks a lot for your advice, James!

Thank you for your reply but my pages are at the same level as all the other and don't have any links like all the others... The keywords are not less competitive either. So the answer is somewhere else... Do you have any other ideas ?

Excellent answer, Ben!

Hi Dave, Any thoughts on the above question?