Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Making sure that the https pages are canonicalized to https pages should be relatively easy and within your control. I would get that done right away.

If the canonicalization wasn't done right in the migration, it makes me wonder what else may not be right with the move to https. You might want to look here https://moz.com/blog/seo-tips-https-ssl, especially the links under "best practices" and double check all that.

The unnatural link clean up and reconsideration request will be more work intensive and take a lot more time and is on some level not entirely within your control, as you are left at Google's mercy.

Both need to be done, but they seem like very different sized problems with very different timelines to payoff.

Best of luck! ... Mike

Yes, I would not worry about the differences in how OSE views the different url's PA/DA This would be for the reasons already noted, plus OSE is not Google.

The main issue is to make sure your recent move to https is buttoned down.

If you haven't already, look at this on Moz, especially the links to best practices on migrating to https. https://moz.com/blog/seo-tips-https-ssl

Best of Luck... Mike

Do pages of vehicles that are in inventory for a short time actually deliver monetizable traffic?

If the answer is no, because they are up for such a short amount of time, you would have to weigh the value of having them indexable in the first place vs creating an ever-growing list of missing pages.

Having a lot of 404s or 422s is a bit of a negative. Is there really no way to add the step of 301ing to their removal?

Making the pages non-indexable via noindex once they are indexed will not remove them. You either have to 301 and/or request removal from the G's index. Is there a programmatic way to turn their removal into a 301 to the top inventory category page?

Good luck!

Hi Roman,

Depending on your answer to Nicolas's points, I think it may be more likely that despite the sheer quantity of links, it just doesn't do much for you.

If this is something you control and depending on how spammy Open Site Explorer says this domain is, it would be much better to get one good, in-context, non-anchor text targeted link from their most authoritative page.

If it is a spam factory and you don't control it and you don't want the one good link, consider contacting them to request removal, document your effort and then submit a link disavow to Google. Here's Moz's handy guide on that: https://moz.com/blog/guide-to-googles-disavow-tool

Best of luck!

Paul, I hear you brother. Nobody enjoys link building. It takes what it takes. Evidently, in fashion it takes free stuff and gift cards. Yes, kind of hard to explain to others.

Negative keywords would have their biggest value as a way to filter out unproductive queries in paid search... not SEO.

Yes, the keyword explorer can help you build a long list of negative keywords for your adwords/paid search campaigns. As such you could use those negative keywords on the adgroup, campaign or account level and save your client alot of money in non-converting clicks.

For organic search, you'd really be using Keyword Explorer to get ideas for keyword phrases you can/should compete for.

Hope that helps!

Hi,

Not sure I fully understand the question as you intend it, but here goes...

Net/net, quality links from authoritative sites to your site will greatly help your site/pages rank.

On your automatic page authority of 1 point, that just means that Moz says it's indexed. It's not visibility into Google's love for your page.

On white hat link building as a philosophical issue, I agree with you AND it is beside the point. Backlinks are important to achieving search rank and will evidently continue to be. If Google, in all it's A/I wisdom, suddenly decided that sites with a purple color scheme would rank batter, you would quickly see a lot of purple sites. It's just the way it is.  Whatever Google values, competitive site owners will find a way to deliver.

Best... Mike

Yes, definitely read the beginners guide.

Okay, this is just off the top of my head about issues other than on-page content. Consider in whatever order:

• Original choice of competitive niche. If it's too tough to compete or is so nichey there is no search traffic, you can't win no matter what you do.

• Link profile https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/  Is the content good enough or are you in some other way able to promote quality links to your site?

• Site architecture. How far from the homepage is any given page? Try for two pages or less.

• Site speed (hosting + code) https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/

• Mobile friendliness https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/

• Google Search Console fixes/improvements (errors, indexability, html improvements, etc) https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home?hl=en

If you have a site that is targeted to a niche that you can/should compete in (and where there is traffic), with a good link profile, constructed properly, loading fast, mobile friendly and not too broken, you ought to succeed to some degree. And then just don't forget the good on-page content!

Best of Luck! ...Mike

I think the much more likely culprit is that it is a new site. What do you get when you enter "site:http://www._____.com" in google? If the pages are indexed, one can't blame for the robots file for lack of rank.

Good luck!

Mike

Started working on a site and learned that the person before me had done a fairly sketchy maneuver and am wondering if it's a net gain to fix it.

The site has pages that it wanted to get third party links linking to. Thing is, the pages are not easy to naturally link to boost them in search.

So, the woman before me started a new blog site in the same general topic area as the first/main site. The idea was to build up even the smallest bit of authority for the new blog, without tipping Google off to shared ownership. So, the new blog has a different owner/address/registrar/host and no Google Analytics or Webmaster Tools account to share access to.

Then, as one method of adding links to the new blog, she took some links that originally pointed to the main site and re-directed them to the blog site.

And voila! ...Totally controllable blog site with a bit of authority linking to select pages on the main site!

At this point, I could un-redirect those links that give the blog site some of its authority. I could delete the links to the main site on the blog pages.

However, on some level it may have actually helped the pages linked to on the main site.

The whole thing is so sketchy I wonder if I should reverse it.

I could also just leave it alone and not risk hurting the pages that the blog currently links to.

What do you think? Is there a serious risk to the main site in this existing set up? The main site has hundreds of other links pointing to it, a Moz domain authority of 43, thousands of pages of content, 8 years old and Open Site Explorer Spam Score of 1. So, not a trainwreck of sketchiness besides this issue.

To me, the weird connection for Google is that third party sites have links that (on-page-code-wise) still point to the main site, but that resolve via the main site's redirects to the blog site. BTW, the blog site points to other established sites besides the main site. So, it's not the exclusive slave to the main site.

Please let me know what you think. Thanks!

Hi,

Thanks for the response. To answer your question, some quality scores for KWs that produce cost-effective conversions are as low as 1 to 3!

Yes, but if you look at CTR for the first 4.75 years of some of these 5 year old campaigns, it is greatly improved... previously less than 1% and now about 3%. In the case of new campaigns or a new account, yes, the KWs will start with a 6, but it won't have that anchor of longstanding bad CTR affecting account quality (in the case of a new account).

I just think it would make alot of sense to start fresh with first new campaigns and if that doesn't do it, a new account.

I'm dealing with an old adwords account that has been managed by a wide variety of people over many years.

From what I can tell, the account has always struggled with low kw quality scores. In addition to other quality score improvements (SKAGs, better landing pages, more ad testing for CTR), what do you think of throwing in the towel on this account and starting a new adwords account... importing the better part of the old account?

Any hidden pitfalls I should be aware of and precautions to take or is it all opportunity to start fresh?

Thanks!

Hi,

I'm considering devoting either my time to or jobbing out an adwords audit. The account has about a dozen campaigns and in total about 60 ad groups, 15 landing pages. About 6000 clicks and about 450 lead gen conversions. Conversions are phone and thank you page. The account involves search, display and retargeting. Client is looking for actionable insights about both the account and the landing pages, prioritized, in order to lower cost per lead.

Here are my questions:

• How many hours of work?

• How extensive of a deliverable is the result?

• What might this cost if I hired a knowledgeable individual (not a big firm)?

Thanks!

Hi Jordan,

Thanks for the message. How long did it take to crawl out of the 30% drop? I imagine the 30% centered around their most competitive keywords, potentially better converting is why more competitive.

What would you consider a worst case scenario?

Thanks!

Working with a long established/organic successful site that, for brand reasons I disagree with, is verging on changing its domain name.

Other than 301ing individual pages to their new domain name equivalent, getting canonicals updated, updating SSL certificates,  new Google Search Console with old settings, maintaining the old robots.txtetc what else is worth paying attention to?

Assuming I do all of that, how bad a hit to organic over what period of time might this result in? 6 months ago we migrated to https and that was hardly felt, but this is really a brand new domain name altogether.

Thanks!

I have a client who is has structured data for live business webinars.

Google's documentation seems to talk more about music and tickets than this kind of thing.

At the same time, we get an error in search console for "Name" and location, which they list as "webinar."

Should I removed this failed structured data attempt or is there a way to fix it?

Thanks!

Hi,

Let me first say that I really like the tool DeepCrawl. So, not busting on them. More like I'm interested in the relative importance of two items they call as "Issues."

Those items are "Incomplete Open Graph Tags" and "No Valid Twitter Cards." They call this out on every page.

To define it a bit further, I'm interested in the importance as it relates to organic search.I'm also interested in there's some basic functionality we may have missed in our Share42 implementation. To me, it looks like the social sharing buttons work.

Also, we use Share42 social sharing buttons, which are quite functional.

If it would help, I could private message you an example url.

Thanks! Best... Mike

Thanks for the answers Matthew & Martijn. So, I'm going to go with what I have in place... 301s to the main forums page to pick up/recycle the incoming links to that section and removing the /news category from where Google News looks for news, but not leave the Google News program altogether right now.

Thanks, again!

HI Matthew,

Thanks for the insight. On your, "I think the important part is that Google doesn't suddenly crawl a bunch of 404s that they think are news pages of some importance" would you robots.txt out the old category they looked at (/news) or leave it and figure out via the mass of 301s and the removal from the url structure we told them to crawl, so that Google figures it out on it's own?

Hi Martijn,

We still have the old /news url still in Google News. I don't think  we've ever submitted a news site map.

Is there any downside to deleting the url structure they're currently looking at, which does forward to our forum? Or, would it be better to just get out of Google News altogether, since we don't really have or publish news anymore? Is there a downside to that?

To summarize... delete the url they look to as news or get out of Google News altogether... what do you think?

Thanks!