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One more idea is if I write some code that says if a link on my site gains more than say 3 votes that it turns into a dofollow. Again, I plan on submitting links to competitors sites for any ebook I can find, so it sould actually be a helpful resource.

Thanks Matt. Appreciate the insight. Funny though: I came here to hopefully shed some subscriptions. Hadn't heard of Ahrefs before though, so it looks like I'll be adding a subscription. Lol.

1. It's not bad to have pages that are not directly linked to your site. In fact a good lot of PPC landing pages aren't typically linked from anywhere within the navigation or website itself. Keep the page in the sitemap if you want it to remain indexed but if you only care about the direct traffic, it doesn't need to stay. You can definitely 301 the old page to the new one but you said you previously hid the parent? I would only 301 redirect if you're 100% sure this is the way it will stay forevermore. So it really depends on why you're removing and what you essentially want to happen.

Hi Eric, Thanks for your answer, but as said in my original post, I can't get rid of these URLs because of tracking (these tracking parameters are used all across the website in order to know from where products are the most clicked etc). One of the only spot where the product URLs are 'parameter free' is in the sitemaps xml. Most of the time, a link from a list page to a product URL will look like /style/cuff-gold/804-item.html?ref=by-shop%3afashion-and-lifestyle%3a, while the 'true' URL is /style/cuff-gold/804-item.html. In order to prevent duplicate content from these tracking codes (I have seen some products being indexed twice or more because of this), the 1st URL has a meta robots 'noindex,follow' and has for canonical the 2nd one (which has a robots 'index, follow'). I just wanted to make sure this could be the best solution in our case (as we unfortunately can't get rid of these tracking codes) in order to have only clean product URLs indexed, and only once!.

To deliver the 10x idea to a macro degree, it is approximately being higher page than you were and looking at others to learn about what you could do to be better.

Yay! Awesome!

When it comes to duplicate content, Google typically compares one web page versus another web page. So, if the site does have a different company name (franchise name) and carries a different set of products or a some similar products, then it sounds as if the pages on the site won't be considered duplicates. They may be similar, but not necessarily duplicates. It would be best to make sure that each site doesn't use the same exact web design template, as well. You can run the site through Copyscape.com and Siteliner.com to identify duplicate content issues with the sites. Most good writers will be able to write the content in a way that talks about the same products or services but doesn't include the same text as other sites.

Rachel, All the links going to /autos are telling Google that the page is valuable. Changing /autos to a landing page is then telling search engines that the landing page is valuable but it will require some work to gain some page authority. A link from this page will not bring as much link juice. However, A link is usually more authoritative than a redirect. Changing a redirect to a page might lose some juice. I think the best solution is to create http://billingsgazette.com NEW PAGE NAME and use it as your new landing page, fill it with great content and link it in the menu with the old anchor text "Autos" From this page, you can add a link to http://billingsgazette.com/autos using some cool anchor text. I then recommend that you add a link DIRECTLY too http://www.montanawheelsforyou.com/ at the bottom of the page in Sites & partners with the anchor text Montana wheels.

Yes, that should work just fine. As Logan mentioned, I recommend you test it in the robots.txt testing tool in Google Search Console.

Hi there. Well, Analytics has only couple hours delay, not days, that's where I'd look. Also even Google rankings algos have some delay, so you won't really be able to 100% see how the changes affected the positions. Also look at past year behavior, if it's seasonal, you will see the repetitive traffic behavior in Google Analytics. Other than that I don't think there is anything to go by immediately besides intuition and experience. Hope this helps.

Hi Shauna, This is a great question. I am understanding your scenario this way, but please correct me if I'm wrong: Your client's house is in Dallas. Your client's office is in Farmers Branch Your client would rather be listed in Dallas than in Farmers Branch. If this is incorrect, please let me know, but if correct, please read on. Google does not consider Farmers Branch to be inside of Dallas, according to Maps: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Dallas,+TX/@32.8601609,-96.9429002,11z/data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x864c19f77b45974b:0xb9ec9ba4f647678f Farmers Branch is outside of the city borders. So, in Google's eyes, we know that Farmers Branch is considered a unique entity - not a part of Dallas. Given this, your client's safe options are based on his business model: If this is a brick-and-mortar business, the client has no alternative but to list it in Farmers Branch on his website and citations. If this is a service area business that customers don't come to (like a plumber) then your client has a choice of whether he'd like to base his operations out of his Dallas home or his Farmers Branch office. Google is okay with home-based businesses, provided that the phone number is dedicated to the business and is staffed during normal business hours by someone who answers the phone with the business name rather than just saying "hello" like a resident. There are very obvious benefits for the client of basing himself in Dallas instead of outside of Dallas, but this is only an option if nobody comes to the business in person. If people come to the business in person, you're back to option 1. Any variation on the above two courses does put the business at risk, and so, as the SEO, it's our job to let the client know of the guideline-compliant options and of the risks of bending guidelines. Hope this helps!

It would affect all your mobile / tablet rankings and wouldn't affect your desktop rankings as much. Like I said it could be your competitors have improved theirs, rather than yours getting worse, if you can work out when roughly the decline started to happen - ask your devs what they rolled.

Hi Danny! How'd that crawl end up? If Andy answered your question, mind marking his response as a "Good Answer?" It'll get him some bonus MozPoints, and it helps us keep track of things in the forum.

Logan is correct--if you look at the canonical tag in your example in the source code you're not using the full URL, you're only using a snippet (the relative) URL. So, rather than /barn-junior/tilbehor/hansker-votter/junior you need to change it to https://www.gsport.no/barn-junior/tilbehor/hansker-votter/junior.

Hi Matt, It's still not resolved to be honest. All though it seems likely that Google are just overriding our Meta Title, although we still don't know why they've chosen that rather than our one. Cheers J

Yep, that certainly can be confusing, but there is potentially a good reason for it! Allow me to explain. The score within your listing report is representative of what our system observes at this exact moment. So, it is a snapshot in time of how your listing distribution looks. This means that if, for example, one of our partners had an API outage at the time which caused them to be unable to report your listing's status to us, then that listing would appear as blank within your listing report and be reflected as such in the snapshot score. However, issues like the one that I described above are completely temporary and do not impact your actual listings on those sites. So, we also include a "golden" score on your dashboard which is calculated with the best status we've observed from each aggregator over a longer timeframe. This score is intended to give you a more normalized impression of your listing score which is not impacted by unimportant volatilities. I would say that both are useful in their own context, but you're absolutely right that it's not especially clear. I'll see if there's anything we could do to articulate that difference a bit better.

Thanks, this is super helpful

Thanks for your responses!  I think I will start with Moz Local and go from there, and look into Pro/Content as we get things moving along.