Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Generally speaking, what you're describing is the fact that the sites just don't have enough Domain Authority and links in order to rank well for the keywords you're targeting. If the sites are new, it might take some more time, as they may be "sandboxed". They need to become trusted more.

I know it's possible depending on your host, but in the case of a Shopify-hosted website if they're saying in their own forums that it can't be done then they can't (or won't) do it. At that point either using Shopify's blog or subdomain (not recommended) are your choices. If you have an existing blog and need to import the posts to Shopify you can use: https://apps.shopify.com/blogfeeder .

Hi, I'm trying to read over your content and it just keeps loading more products. Very frustrating. You should consider pagination and having a default amount of products load on the page. Regarding your internal links, you have one the says "2000 gifts for men" and one that says "shop gifts for men". These links point to the page the exist on, with a hashed URL. Links should never point to the same URL on which they live, I see this a lot and its very frustrating, it looks spammy to search engines, and is confusing/frustrating/irritating for searchers. They click that link only to be taken to the top of this long page again? Not a good user experience. There's also a link for your homepage buried in "..." in the first paragraph, that also looks spammy/cloaky to me. I'm not saying these page load and internal linking issues are your whole problem, but they're definitely not helping your situation and the simplest things like this should be tackled first. There are no external links pointing to this page, if your competitors have similar pages with some recently acquired good quality external links to them, this is potentially the cause of your recent decline.

Hey There! Thanks so much for taking the time to contribute to this discussion. The geographic variations you mention sound normal to me, but the issue of the companies consistently ranking highly for no apparent reason is interesting. Are you saying the search is yielding a onebox (just one result) or a normal pack? Is the name of the business an exact or close match of the keyword phrase you're searching for? Is the business right in the middle of a cluster or similar businesses? Sounds like a good puzzle!

Canonicals and hreflangs must be treated separately. My rule, and this what I said at LearnInbound, from where SEMRush tweeted the tweet you embedded in your post, is this: First set up and/or solve all canonicalization issues your site may have; Once you have solved the canonicalization issues, you can work on implementing the hreflang only on canonical URLs (not canonicalized) In that case of pagination the pages 1, 2, 3, 4, et al have self-referential rel="canonical", so - ideally - the hreflang must reference to the corresponding pages 1, 2, 3, 4, et al of the same pagination in the other country and/or language version. Finally, you are correct regarding the "view all" being the canonical URL of a paginated series.

Awesome. Thanks so much for taking the time Laura! Our website is +1m URLs so I might just do that.

Hi Simon, that is very strange! Would you kindly send an email to help@moz.com so we can see what is going on? Thanks. Christy

Hi Eric, I do know that those are competitive, but my coleague just keep telling me that its possible to rank them higher. With tool did you use for backlink checking?

Hi Eric! You are right on that Bing's guidelines are actually pretty similar to Google's. Just wanted to take a second to mention, though, that the practice of creating fictitious suite numbers is not recommended and not necessary. Back in the day, Google did have the worst time parsing out individual practitioners or businesses at a shared address, with merged listings often resulting. This is no longer the case; Google has really improved in being able to parse this out, provided practitioners follow some basic safety steps like obeying naming conventions, having unique phone numbers, choosing different categories and ensuring that each practitioner has his/her own landing page on the website. The recommendation to create fictitious suite numbers stems from the days when merging was such an issue, affecting thousands (millions?) of medical practices, legal practices, real estate firms, etc. in their ability to list themselves properly on Google. But, these days, it's much more important to be sure that you're only listing a real-world address, and you can do so with pretty good confidence that Google will understand that lawyers A, B and C all work at 123 Main St, and that the listings won't merge, provided you've followed all the guidelines to the letter. Hope it helps to know this, and I hope you'll keep participating as we all continue learning Local together - a never-ending process!

Some of your pages lack enough content or unique content for Google to care: This: http://carpetcleanertn.com/carpet-cleaning-specials/ isn't indexed. But then, why would it be? http://carpetcleanertn.com/carpet-cleaning-spring-hill-tn/ this isn't indexed - but ... yeah. No content except an image on this either: http://carpetcleanertn.com/gift-certificates/ None at all here: http://carpetcleanertn.com/great-nashville-area/ Your pricing & services page aren't being indexed but that's because they're near-copies of the actual chemdry page. See attachment. I think if you wrote clean, new copy for the pricing & services page you'd see them get indexed but since they're super-close to the original, Google has chosen to only index one. vLWyTlO.jpg

I would suggest having a bit of a read over this old blog post which gives  you the necessary info to implement the rel=canonical tag correctly. https://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions I do not think that having the rel=canonical tag pointing to itself would necessarily harm your site, but it is probably best to avoid this if possible as is redundant code. If you have a dynamic meta / header include this might be the best solution for you if you cannot control it manually or by editing the code. I often have the rel canonical running in numerous pages, especially to help reduce MVT pages from being indexed.

Honestly, I would avoid using the same titles as a competitor. You want to stand out in the SERPs, not look like everyone else. It is possible to optimize your titles and still make them different enough to catch a searcher's eye.

Hi Abdul! Are you able to share your site's URL and the search terms that are returning that result?

If you are going to literally shut down your m. subdomain, then the best way to do it is to use 301 Permanent Redirects to redirect the traffic to the appropriate page on the main domain. I would NOT use canonical tags in this case.