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You need to 404 the old XML sitemaps.  Google loves to hang onto data in old sitemaps unless you 404 them. These should help https://www.lockedowndesign.com/prevent-google-from-crawling-old-sitemaps/ https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/183669?hl=en

Roy, this is definitely a complex task--which should take careful planning and organization. The steps that are outlined in the link that you provided is a good start, but that's only a small part of what needs to be done .There are a lot of sub-tasks that need to be taken care of in between those larger tasks. When it comes to moving site A to B, there is no site C involved--so just think about it as if you're moving site A to C and then B to C. Or, you could also first think about combining both sites and rather than moving site A to B you can choose the best content on each and then just move them to site C. What's important, though, is to figure out which content and pages are duplicated on both sites and then choose the best page(s) and move those to site C. There will be content that's essentially not on both sites, so those can just be moved. The key is to spend plenty of time organizing the content and deciding which content can go away, which needs to be moved, which needs to be combined, and soforth. There is one major step that's missing in that other list, which is to use verify all sites (http and https, as well as http://www and https://www) in Google Search Console, set up those 301 redirects, and use the Google Change of Address tool to tell Google that the site's moved. There is also a mention of rel canonical, and since the sites are moving entirely, canonical tags won't be appropriate to use. You'll need to use 301 Permanend Redirects to move the content from one site to another, especially since site A and B won't exist anymore (they'll be redirected).

first of all let's make a step back. 1. when you got hit by a manual penalty (which I asusme is the case as you filed a reconsideration request in search console), you never recover to 100%. You've made a dirty play, got a yellow card for that and you have it, at least is what I would do in my personal life, so it makes complete sense that google marks people that tried to game their system anytime in their life. 2. page 1 has just 5 free spots as other 5 (from what I see) are youtube/vimeo videos, so it's harder than you may think for getting there. I'm in fact seeing you rank with your https://www.verdictvideos.com/services/day-in-the-life-legal-video/ within the vimeo results, which means you may have done a good job in your multimedia by building sitemaps and sharing them around. 3. your backlink profile is really poor. You just have 4 links pointing to the homepage, and your domain has a trust flow lower than 20. I personally find it low. And speaking about legal stuff I would want to have a trustworthy website being featured at the top. Half of your backlinks are blackfriday stuff built on low quality websites... I don't know if you have removed them or not but they seems to be an huge part of your backlinks, and the other part are highly optimized keyword rich backlinks, I would try to variate them more and build more relevant links on more autoritative websites which is what you need. Your competitor doensn't seem to have a very solid linkbuilding profile either (<cite class="_Rm">coltoncreative.com</cite>) so with the right links and the good optimization (I haven't checked your onsite SEO) you may achieve good results.

Neil, the others are right--you should first show the full content and not hide any of the content on the page like you're doing. Depending on the size of the content, though, you might consider why you're hiding the content in the first place, as you might need to create more pages on your site for that content. Adding the content to new pages on the site might be good for your users, and certainly will fix your problem. When considering the content and indexing, though, if the content is in the page source code then it will be indexed. Google does know if it's hidden, though, as Googlebot, Google's crawler, is essentially a version of Google Chrome.

I know it's a feature request we've been getting for quite some time yet, but at this moment in time we don't have the ability to limit your seated user's access to specific campaigns. Sorry about that! I hope it doesn't end up being a dealbreaker for you, but I do understand if this means you need to try out other tools for your needs.

That's great, many thanks Emanuele. Glad to hear that our suggeston of a 'folder' strategy is the best way forward, but as you say there are pros and cons for each solution. In my opinion, hosting a website 'locally' (i.e. German host for a .de site, US host for .us site) is better from a rankings perspective. I feel that this is not as important as it once was, but it still helps. Would you agree? Thanks again, much appreciated. Lee

Hey there! Our engineers have worked their magic, and we have actually just rolled out a brand new version of the MozBar - you can download it here. It's also recommended to clear your cache & cookies upon reinstalling. So far, we've had reports of great success - if you're still running into trouble after downloading the new version, please pop a message over to help@moz.com so we can collect some details from you about exactly what you're seeing:)

Additional research turned up this Matt Cutts video which addresses my question head on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjRGkc__FwQ

Love the detailed response. Thank you so much.

UGC or User Generated Content can be extremely powerful and add huge weighting to your sites SEO value, but it also has a another effect  that helps with customer credibility. As users come along and see real comments that are related to the topic, offer advice, show valued reviews etc it will then results in your content becoming potentially becoming an authority on specific subjects. Take these Moz Questions for example - some of the questions can be very small and to the point, but it is often the huge number of user generated responses that propels the questions up the search result page. So in essence UGC is extremely valuable - just ensure you lock down the bots and spammers and some types of user data (e.g. links, html etc) which can do the reverse and make you less credible as a source.

Hi, Not really, it's not very important to have the priority elements in the sitemaps at all as Google usually decides on the priority to crawl pages themselves. Regardless of what you put in the sitemaps. Having two different locations for sitemaps containing the same URLs might be something to look into in the future. They like having 1 sitemap that is completely correct without mistakes. It provides you with a better authority then having issues with your sitemap(s). Hope this helps!

Without Hreflang markup the en-US and en-GB pages will be treated as duplicate content. You do not want that. In fact, even with hreflang the two may be considered duplicates if there isn't enough differentiated content. Also, be careful with canonicals. You shouldn't specify the en-US page as the canonical URL for the fr page. The fr page is its own page and you should use hreflang to specify other language versions.

There's pretty much no-one at Google who would know every element of the ranking system, so it seems unlikely a third party would successfully replicate it all beyond what is already available via the common SEO tools. If they really had managed to completely replicate everything to the point it worked perfectly, why wouldn't they just set up their own websites to rank highly and make money without having to do client work? They may well have built their own internal SEO tool, which could do something similar to the Moz On Page Grader, for example. But considering how important external SEO factors remain to be, and the fact they'd have a much more limited data set than Moz or other tools, it seems like it would be a bit pointless unless they planned to pivot to selling their own SEO tool. So either the client ends up being saddled with a company using a tool with very little data. Or they end up being saddled with a company aiming to ditch clients and sell an SEO tool instead in the future...

I don't think there is a definitive answer there, but my gut would be that those links out to relevant content are helping the credibility/quality consideration of your page and that they may be helping time on site and user engagement data as I mentioned before. What you might want to do is test adding that similar feature to a couple of other pages and monitor ranking impact! Best, Ricky

Thank you! Yes, that´s how I like to see it too.I was just a little worried that the high increase of "exact anchor links" could disturb google /Anders

Hi Dave, Thank you for the tips. Is there any one else who has some advice for me in this situation? Thanks, Marcel

Hey Gopi, What you're looking for are LSI and related keywords as well as regularly searched questions. I've been doing a keyword research task recently so here's a big list for you, based on what I've been using: **Google AdWords Keyword Planner - **https://adwords.google.co.uk/KeywordPlanner The AdWords keyword planner is the usual starting place for me - you can check out exact match search volumes and also get ideas for new keywords based on your original seed keyword. Bear in mind that they've updated this recently so keyword variations and their respective search volumes are often grouped together which can be a little troublesome. Keyword Tool - http://keywordtool.io/ Keywordtool allows you to do much the same as keyword planner but for YouTube, Bing, Amazon and App Store searches. The results can sometimes be a little limiting in the free version but it's a great way of topping up your original keyword research. Answer The Public - http://answerthepublic.com/ This might be more what you're looking for - Answer the Public allows you to enter a seed keyword and it comes back with the popular 'where/what/how/when/why' keyword strings that users have been searching, based upon your keyword of choice. It's also got a good CSV export functionality for getting data out quickly Moz Keyword Explorer - https://moz.com/products/pro/keyword-explorer Then of course there's the Moz Keyword Explorer which gives keyword suggestions, SERP analysis, estimated search volumes and opportunity scores for a whole bunch of keywords. I hope this helps! Sean