Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Ok great thanks Donna All Best Dan

ok thanks Daven i'm going to sign up to the beta test. Have a goog day

Hi Pol, No, not just by changing the both the URL and canonical to something new and different. You'll need a redirect. Is there a reason you can't?

Like Linda said, it's a bug that should work itself out (if it hasn't already). It's not a problem with your website, but a glitch on Google's side and should be cleared up and working again in a few days. Hope it's back for you!

So, we all "nofollow" most of the external links or all external links to hold back the page rank. Nofollowing links does not mean you retain link juice or page rank. That page rank gets dropped rather than being transferred to another location. Is it all same about external links and nofollow now? I don't understand your question but if you mean should all external links be nofollow, the answer is no. As Google has suggested, you should still tag trustworthy destination links with the follow attribute.

Hi, "nofollow" doesn't mean that we don't trust them. We do apply nofollow to just not violate Google policy guideline. Thanks

Hi Chris, I want to be sure I'm understanding your business model. It sounds like your business is virtual (doesn't make in-person contact with customers) and might be along the lines of a directory or a lead-generation company. Am I close to getting that right? If so, then basically you are limited to go after organic rankings for the terms you want to rank for. Virtual businesses are not eligible for inclusion in Google's local results, so what you want to do is evaluate your ability to compete for spots in the organic results for the terms that are important to you and your customers. An example of this would be the review platform Yelp. Yelp specializes in a product: business reviews. They have been so successful at becoming known for their review product that when you search for a very wide variety of businesses in Google, Yelp pages often come up on page one of the organic results due to the authority this brand has built. Another example would be something like ZocDoc - a directory for medical professionals. If you search for 'doctor san diego' or 'doctor boston' or 'doctor burlington', chances are strong that you'll see results coming up from the ZocDoc directory, because they have become a perceived authority when it comes to finding a local doctor. So, your own brand needs to take a look at where you can build this type of authority, whether on a local or national level, and then create the types of content that can begin to earn organic rankings for relevant terms. Hope this helps, and please feel free to provide any further details if our community isn't quite understanding your exact business model.

Hi, You could add the following code to your .htaccess to redirect all dated urls to non-dated version: RedirectMatch 301 /([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)/(.*)$ http://www.**domain**.com/$4 Change domain.com with your domain name. This should create a redirect from http://www.website.com/blog/2016/04/10/topic-on-how-to-optimise-blog to www.website.com/blog/topic-on-how-to-optimise-blog (and every similar situation).

Agreed, I'd happily answer here to leave both the questions and answers available for others to find when they go searching

Thanks both. Very useful and much appreciated.

Hi Becky, I found adding 200-300 words for the category pages worked best for my ecom site. I use 400-500 words for the main body on the products I sell. I (somehow) ranked number one on Google the previous 2 years based on organic content writing - no backlinks My ecom site is LikeChimp.com - you can see how I use good content to rank, check out the page categories vs the product description: http://likechimp.com/product-category/buy-facebook-event-attendees/# Hope this helps.

Dear Linda, Thank you again for your quick answer. I know the question broad and it is. My questions is "what are the keywords that my target segment (say Spanish speakers in Mexico aged 13-18) use the most in Google search". This is indifferent to the topic and the idea is to understand the topics that they are interested in. Is there a way? Many Thanks,

The numbers in the MozBar, PA, DA, links, can be found with Open Site Explorer. Just input the URL you want to examine and hit enter.

No need for a long explanation, just don't use it. I don't think it will help you at all and all you'll do is increase your risks of getting a penalty...and throw $99 away.

I'm not an International SEO expert. This is just my opinion. I agree with Thomas that links from high-quality destination sites are going to help your rankings regardless. Just to confuse things, I also agree with you that you need to strike a balance when it comes to just how many of your links come from other destinations. If, for example, you want to rank for SEO in the UK and your website has a majority of incoming links from the UK, I would expect those links reinforce and help boost your UK rankings because Google knows people prefer to shop locally. If, on the other hand, you are trying to rank globally, then you'd want (and benefit from) inbound links from other destinations as well. So I think your assumptions are good. Reputable inbound links from other destinations are helpful so long as they don't confuse Google about which audience you're targeting. I guess you could use other international SEO techniques like hreflang tags, your URL structure, geo-targeting in GSC, and localized content to reinforce that if you were worried. I don't know of any case studies on this topic.

Hi, I'd recommend using a sitemap index. It allows you to address multiple sitemaps in GSC so you could have one for 'static pages' and another which generates for blog content.

Thanks Jim,  When I said drop that was page rank as I have been tracking through Google Search Console search analytics.  We have an adaptive site that detects the users equipment.  I URLs are the same in both environments.    When I look at desktop the average page rank dropped 4 positions taking us off the front page while the average position on mobile dropped a half a position.  Does that help?  Thanks

Thank you James. We are just keeping things as they are right now and working on backlinks. Any more ideas from others on this topic? For what it's worth I also discover a potential bad/penalty link. I asked another question about this here.