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I'd be interesting in why you're planning to move from Magento - you tend to find most people graduate up to Magento from Shopify or WooCommerce as their inventory and business grows.

So I'd usually suggest actually improving the Magento install unless you're looking to radically simplifying your business and product lines and won't be looking for the in-depth functionality that Magento offers...

Hi,

The answer to the first question is yes - many publications, including niche titles will have a features calendar available, or will regularly email enquiring if anyone has products, news or can help with features...

Second question? In addition to HARO and Pressloft, I'd look at the big PR lists etc. It does mean dealing with some spam requests, but can be worth it if you have the time.

Is it a small, local type business by any chance?

Despite what a lot of best practice will say regarding location pages - they still work for a lot of small, local busineses, particularly in uncompetitive niches. Generally, I'd say 500 cities/towns is massively overdoing it, and there are a lot less spammy ways of achieving something similar, but it may well have contributed to the hit...

If the clicks are the same, then actually it's fine. No one was visiting and buying via the impressions you've lost. However, I'd say it's worth looking at the location/local SEO optimisation again and redoing it in a less spammy way to ensure your client won't panic if they ever look at impressions in Google Search Console (Pretty unlikely for most clients)...

I'm going to disagree with Alick300 slightly.

You won't need to rebuild all your links in terms of the minimal loss of ranking signals. Although I'd consider it for the top 1-2% (and also any local citations etc, etc). This is based on some experience with testing whether updating links can make a marginal difference on various sites post migration, and seemingly it can help if you're just missing out on the next ranking position (for want of a better metric).

And it's also worth checking prior to migration whether the switch to https will create any redirect chains. For example, you might have an old page link that was redirected, and now redirects again to the https version etc. The Moz crawl will highlight any chains/loops you have with existing redirects...

Some quick thoughts, based on a career mixing marketing with writing for various niche publications....

Generally most publications which ran something around Back to School content will be either publishing a new version or updating it. It's also worth making a note of the author, as freelancers will often shop similar articles around a number of sites, and will be known for certain niches.

Traditional print/online publications quite often have a features calendar which they make available on request, and sometimes publish online to help suppliers/advertisers etc plan ahead.

It's also worth using online tools for journalists like HARO (Help a Reporter Out), and responding to requests for Back to School related content.

Making sure you're easily findable when journalists are looking to quickly grab some examples to finish the article they have to submit in 30 minutes

It could be an intermittent slow server or one that's dropping out occasionally. There are various services which allow you to monitor uptime (e.g. Pingdom etc).

Who owns the sites redirecting? It's pretty rare to have someone redirecting to a site they don't own or have any business relationship etc with...

If it's the same person, and the redirects are spammy/not sending useful traffic, you can just turn the redirects off.

Was it a manual or automated penalty?

If it's automatic, it can take a long while before things return to 'normal'. Obviously if you've disavowed lots of links, then you'll have lost any value they were originally offering, so to get back to the same ranking positions, you'll need to build a lot of new, clean, ethical links with a decent value.

Throwing your url into Open Site Explorer immediately throws up some links I'd want to investigate and potential remove for starters. If you've already been penalised, still having any dodgy links in place will continue to cause issues.

The other thing is that traffic to the keywords etc may have changed over time. It's worth considering whether there are other trends (e.g. a downturn in the housing market), which might mean even ranking number 1 for a term won't bring in as much traffic as it did pre-penalty, simply because not as many people are looking for it...

Is it something like 'non /' to 'trailing /' to 'https' by any chance?

It's not a major issue as far as I'm aware - I've had it on a few sites where I wasn't able to implement changes to the redirects, and it didn't stop the sites from ranking as well as would be expected.

But it's also solvable - just implement the redirect rules for http non / to https, and http trailing / to https rather than in a chain.

Hi,

This is an issue I work with a lot. Over the last few years it's become a lot harder to earn natural links for my own sites and for client sites, as people move onto social networks, and away from blogging etc.

So what's the solution?

You could try paying journalists/writers. However, it will be expensive, particularly for any reasonable quality links. And real journalists don't tend to sell paid links - it tends to be the lower level contributors in blog and guest post sections, who are quite often found out (I know various media owners who purged their sites of contributors selling links, wiping out £1000s in paid links...)

So what can you do?

Create something amazing and linkable.

It could be something that's incredibly valuable and useful. A guide to all the related local services if someone is moving to the area for example (e.g. house movers, house sitters, useful local organisations etc).

It could be something that's newsworthy. For example, every gift and experience site went through a phase of creating the most outlandish and bizarre gifts they could, themed around current news and holidays. Things like 'the most expensive valentine's day hamper in the world', for example.

You could work with local organisations (e.g. charities), or sponsor a local team of some kind.

That's for starters. Obviously if you want more specific ideas, that's the sort of thing I'm paid to do for a range of businesses!

The link is working, but when you put a url in the Moz Q and A section without http, it'll append on the end of the q and a url. Copy and pasting the miamirealestatetrends url into your browser will work fine

Sounds like it - Reddit commonly puts people in a hidden sandbox if they've been spamming.

Only you know whether you've constantly spammed your blog or been more sensible and also shared other content, commented and built up a decent profile.

But basically there's no real solution, other than using Reddit as intended rather than spamming until the situation might improve. "You can try and contact the admins to get your ban revoked. It's extremely rare for the admins to reply and/or unban banned users though".

If your username is banned, you can check here: http://amishadowbanned.org/

But otherwise it's time for a new account and IP address and not messing it up this time.

You'd be fine with one mention of Women, otherwise you risk keyword stuff in your page title.

Plus even if it ranks, it'll look terrible in search results.

I'd wait a while before worrying - rankings can be all over the place for 24 hour periods. I've had specific terms go up and down 300+ positions over the course of a week recently, and there seems to be quite a bit of change going on.

If the desired page hasn't recovered in the space of 1 week+, and you've sorted all internal links, then I'd look at external link sources and see what's happening there that could be triggering the confusion. For instance, a newly discovered link to the individual hotel page?

Additional relevant content always helps as well

If you don't want to rank for the individual hotel at all, you could canonicalise it to leave it on the site and working for visitors, but obviously you'd lose any rankings for that particularly hotel name.

I'd second Patrick's advice - I've seen people try and do this with redirects and canonicalisation, and it normally leads to a mess that has to be sorted out in the future...

Are you looking at mobile, desktop or combined? There's been the confirmed Google Algo update for mobile: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2016/08/helping-users-easily-access-content-on.html

There was talk of a ranking update over Christmas, but I've also seen rankings often affected by a drop in interest/CTR over the Christmas period with business-to-business sectors due to the holidays.

I've seen a variety of results across clients, but a couple have declined over the last 3-4 days, so i'm investigating at the moment. At least one of them had some mobile-related issues, so I'm wondering if the two things may be related.

Just another quick point - the downside of pointing towards the Swedish site is that it's on a .se domain, and is probably hosted etc in Sweden, so while that wouldn't stop it from ranking in UK searches, it won't help.

(Funnily enough I've resumed learning Swedish recently, as I have family ties there, but haven't got on to flooring yet!)

So if you're wanting to remove the swedish-supplier.co.uk site and only use the new site, the logical thing would be to redirect the current swedish-supplier.co.uk site with 301 redirects.

That'll keep most of the authority you've accrued in the past, and transfer any current customers across.

The key task is to map out how it will work, because the homepage will be a straight swap, for example, but your old site may have content which isn't currently on the newly-acquired company domain, so you'll either need to direct those pages to the most suitable equivalent, or create new pages on the newly-acquired company domain to point the old stuff to.

Assuming no issues, you should see a pretty straight swap between authority and traffic as the redirects take effect. But if you're wondering about how to go about it, it's probably worth investing a small amount in getting an SEO professional/agency with experience in cross-domain redirects involved, even if you do the bulk of the work yourself and just get them to sanity check it.

You'll also probably want to check that the new domain is set-up correctly, and is registered with Google Search Console and the location is specified etc, plus it's also worth thinking about whether you want to continue using the same analytics account from the newly-acquired domain if it's got some installed, or from your swedish-supplier site, in which case, you need to copy across your existing code, remove it from the old site, and note the change in your GA account to be able to refer back to it...

Basically what Patrick said.

Also it's worth saying that it's pretty easy to move a blog from WordPress.com to .org it you wanted to do it without a developer - having done it quite a bit, I think my record is about 30 minutes to have the new blog up and running (the only complication is if you have particular design functionality, but if you're on wordpress.com, that's unlikely)....

Plus it'd speed up the loading time for your blog which is taking a while to load right now...

Seems strange that the duplicate url is being created - without knowing if you've used the Twitter embed option or a plugin, it's a bit difficult to figure out the issue. You're probably better off solving it by fixing the duplication issue, rather than hiding it with a redirect, as you'll end up with a large number of redirects in place if it continues...

If you did just want to redirect everything, then the easiest would be to add a redirect via .htaccess for anything /www.twitter.com to redirect to the proper blog post title.

Honestly, I'd question having the Twitter feed on your blog? If it's just your own posts appearing, then it's not going to offer any value over having a follow button - it's only if it's aggregating multiple sources that it's worthwhile...