Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thank-you Miriam.  I appreciate your response here.

Hey everyone,

I'm working with a local catering company that does not have a physical address available for use.  Because of privacy concerns, the company is not open to using their home address.  The local competition in the targeted area is fairly strong and established already.  Does anyone have ideas on how I can work around this?

I'm trying to get the star ratings to appear next to our client's website in google search results.  Here is the url:https://cstoneroof.com/

I believe I have it setup correctly but am unsure why the stars don't appear: structure data test here

I pulled the rating value and count from Facebook.  Not sure if it has to be Google reviews or if FB will work as well.  Anybody have any thoughts here?

We are trying to rank this domain: https://citychurchbloomington.org/ for this phrase churches in bloomington in.

We recently had updated our domain name from citychurchfamily.org to citychurchbloomington.org because 1) it made sense for the organization, the end-user searching, and to help our rankings.

Currently we are at position #4 on page 1 but have three sites ahead of us:

1. churchfinder - in the last year this site came out of nowhere and slowly made its way up to the top spot
2. high rock - this church had held spot #1 for many years and we've struggled to challenge it's place on the search results and are somewhat unclear why
3. sherwood oaks - this site had been in spot #2 for many years and at times we've been able to challenge it's position but its held fairly tightly at spot #2 in the past, #3 since churchfinder rose up in the last year

We've done competitive research and made some changes to our meta title, description, and h1 tag on our site but we're looking to make our next move to try and break into this top tier of results.

I'm asking the community here for any insight/suggestions into what kind of move we should be exploring or making at this stage to move up.

Sincerely,

Andrew

Hi Paul,

Thank-you for sharing that.  Question, over the past few weeks we've seen our new domain climb back up into the spot the old domain was at before we made the domain change.  I still haven't added a sitemap of all the old urls to the new google webmaster property for the new domain.  At this point I'm questioning whether I should even do this at all since I'm concerned doing so at this stage may produce some sort of negative result.  I can see the index amount of the old site urls slowly climbing down but there is still a decent amount of them:  https://www.google.com/#q=site:citychurchfamily.org .  Does it still make sense to submit a sitemap of all the old urls at this stage?  If I don't will all the old urls eventually stop being indexed by Google?  Should I remove the old site entirely at citychurchfamily.org but keep my 301 redirects in place on the server?  I appreciate your first response and any help/insight you offer here.

Sincerely,

Andrew

I performed a change of address for one of our sites to go to a new domain. In the process we left out the submission of the old site's sitemap at the new property in google webmaster console and realize now that we need to do this step.  The old site has all these domains still getting indexed:  https://www.google.com/#q=site:citychurchfamily.org .  I believe that I should be making a static xml sitemap file, upload it to the new domain's root directory, and then test/submit it to google on the new domain's GWM property.  Question, should the xml sitemap contain entries for all the old domain's links that are currently still being indexed and what is the fastest way to generate this sitemap?  Any insight is greatly appreciated.

Hi John,

Thank-you for your insight.  Question, what tools did you use to do the quick check on our site?  Was it the screaming from app or something else?  Just want to learn how you did that.

I've went ahead and fixed the chained 301 redirect and fixed a number of the 301 redirects that were formerly not working as I initially thought they were.

What tools would you recommend to me for creating the static xml sitemap and do I need to do this for all the old pages on the site or just the ones with more traffic?

Also, once the static xml sitemap is created do I submit it on the new domain or the old domain?  Probably a beginner type question here but just wanted to make sure

Finally, the change of address via google webmaster console happened for these domains:  http://www.citychurchfamily.org/ and this:  https://www.citychurchfamily.org/

Should I do the change of address for both the non-www versions as well?

Your help/insight is greatly appreciated.

Looking to the community for any insights on our situation.  We moved a decently ranked domain name that was ranking between 3rd-6th in organic search results to a new domain that we thought would serve us higher position in the long term.  We went through Google's change of address tool and over a period of 2 to 3 weeks we went from being off the map with our new domain to showing up again around page 2 - 14-18th position.  It seemed that our climb back corresponded to Google indexing our new urls.  Each time a large batch was indexed we seemed to jump back up.  But, in our last report we noticed that we didn't budge any higher and some of our non-branded keywords actually dropped a little. The old domain was "citychurchfamily.org" and the new domain is "citychurchbloomington.org".  We were thinking that the latter would be a stronger domain in the long term. Any insights on why we haven't fully retained our former ranking value at this point or anything I should be focusing on? We are trying to rank for this phrase "churches in bloomington, in".   Thanks!

Hi Dirk,

Thank-you for your further clarification.

So, am I just needing to get the current canonical url on the homepage to have a forward slash at the end of the url then along with updating the "http" to "https"?

Currently, when I visit the homepage it says the canonical is this: http://kidsinministry.org/childrens-ministry-curriculum (no https and no forward slash at the end).

Thanks for your help!

Andrew

Hi Dirk,

Thank-you for taking the time to respond.  I sure appreciate it.  I am fairly new with SEO and what you are saying is a little challenging for me to understand.  Can you please attempt to break this down a little more for me?  I would really appreciate it.

Sincerely,

Andrew

Looking to the community for any insights on our situation.  We moved a decently ranked domain name that was ranking between 3rd-6th in organic search results to a new domain that we thought would serve us higher position in the long term.  We went through Google's change of address tool and over a period of 2 to 3 weeks we went from being off the map with our new domain to showing up again around page 2 - 14-18th position.  It seemed that our climb back corresponded to Google indexing our new urls.  Each time a large batch was indexed we seemed to jump back up.  But, in our last report we noticed that we didn't budge any higher and some of our non-branded keywords actually dropped a little. The old domain was "citychurchfamily.org" and the new domain is "citychurchbloomington.org".  We were thinking that the latter would be a stronger domain in the long term. Any insights on why we haven't fully retained our former ranking value at this point or anything I should be focusing on? We are trying to rank for this phrase "churches in bloomington, in".   Thanks!

I performed a change of address for one of our sites to go to a new domain. In the process we left out the submission of the old site's sitemap at the new property in google webmaster console and realize now that we need to do this step.  The old site has all these domains still getting indexed:  https://www.google.com/#q=site:citychurchfamily.org .  I believe that I should be making a static xml sitemap file, upload it to the new domain's root directory, and then test/submit it to google on the new domain's GWM property.  Question, should the xml sitemap contain entries for all the old domain's links that are currently still being indexed and what is the fastest way to generate this sitemap?  Any insight is greatly appreciated.