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Hey been a long time Moz customer but have also used Raven Tools as a complementary system. We've liked using them because they are useful for small clients pulling out a report that pulls Google Analytic and Adwords into a simple report, something the Moz reports didn't have the capacity. Recently they changed their pricing structure and without warning charged all their clients based on a usage tier system. Really left a bad taste in my mouth.  Anyone have a good tool they use for running basic Analytics reports at an inexpensive price? We will probably transition to Data Studio, but was curious if anyone else has a tool they love.

So there are two types of penalties, manual ones as you have dealt with and algorithmic ones.  So clearing a manual penalty won't necessarily clear the algorithmic one if there is an issue. If I was going to find a smoking gun it would be links like www.juryverdictalert.com that have what look like a banner ad to the site but haven't put a "no-follow" to the link. It looks spammy to have hundreds of links on low word count pages all point to you from one domain.

The other things. You rank #1 for "Verdict Videos" so that doesn't look like it is algorithmic- it could just be bad targeting. I get that is your title tag, but I didn't see the keywords in anything more than an h3 and I couldn't find a single anchor text backlink that is live (I used Ahrefs). Not that you want to go crazy with that, but you would expect it somewhere.

So yes it would be easier if you had Gmail- those would be 100% available because Google can identify right away the user's behaviour when logged in. The issue is all the other emails, Google has to be able to associate those emails though Google accounts (Google Apps, possibly by using an email as a recovery email- though don't quote me on the second one, ect)

So narrow down your retargeting, don't just use visitors that come to the site, try to identify ones that meet specific metrics- visits to certain pages on the site, time on site as an example and keep your geographical modifier tight. I would also look at Youtube for your retargeting. It has a low CPV and will get your content with rich media and Branding in front of prospective clients.

So also as an overview I would look at what do I want to accomplish, am I trying to get branding in front of the decision makers or am I trying to reach them when they are looking to make that change. If it is Branding I would say YouTube and Linkedin. You aren't going to be able to get granular enough on Facebook and my hunch is your target audience isn't there behaviorally.

If your goal is to get the right people when they are looking for Real Estate, stick with the Search Based Ads, but really look at two things. First find the right keywords. The $30 dollar keywords might not be the right ones, look for very specific searches that your target would be looking for. Don't waste your money on "commercial real estate" as an example. And the second part is make your landing page really tight. Look and experiment at Lead Capture for PPC. From my experiment with Real Estate the Funnel is very long- you need to be able to nurture them, so if they are coming in on an Awareness stage search, lead capture their so you can quantify if they are your target  early on. Just some off the cuff thoughts.

Just echoing Dmytro I would noindex, also this can help resolve duplicate issues as often the "Tag" and Search pages can create duplicates or pages the spiders have trouble with. If you are using Wordpress Yoast has a nice feature to help automatically care for this task.

I would recommend using it as a bid modifier in the same way you would use retargeting for search. The drawback is though you have a list of 2,000 historically only 30-40% of those will be discoverable by the system. Also with that you have to hit them logged into that account while searching for your specific keywords. So they may use their name@company.com in the list you have but you will lose them if they are logged into their personal gmail (and Google can't associate the two) and are searching for your services.

I would suggest using it in tandem with retargeting lists- especially when you can identify internal pages on your site that are very specific to your client base. I would also be very vigilant to negative keywords, writing high quality adcopy, and landing pages when you are in such a competitive CPC environment.

Normally I would advocate moving whatever possible to a subfolder, but I'm a bit confused by the .shop. Did you mean shop.mywebsite.com?

I would use canonical tags in this situation.

Have you tried removing them in Search Console?

We have an e-commerce client that is launching a new site. In setting up for it they decided that they want to change their navigation on the site and url structure. So everything being even, the new site will have appropriate 301 and it's built on Magento so the product pages are all structured as website.com/product-A but the category pages will now be deeper than before. So before it was website.com/product-category/product-sub-category will now be website.com/more generic category/product-category/new-subcategory/product-category. Hope that makes sense. I'm not as worried about the 301's or specific products but I'm worried the category pages dropping a folder level will hurt page authority. Any thoughts, am I being overly nervous?

Thanks for taking the time and looking at this Russ, been pulling my hair out so any help is appreciated.

I think the second is probably the issue more than the first. I would format the markup in your footer to match the format that Google Lists as well as a thought.

The other suggestion is the recent negative review might have some temporary negative weight.

So the back story on this project is we've been working as PPC and SEO managers with an ecoomerce site (Magento Enterprise based) that crashed in April. After the issue they fired their developer and switched hosting to Simple Helix at the recommendation of the new developer. Since the change we have seen a plummeting ecommerce conversion rate especially on weekends. Every time something seems really bad, the Developer gives us a "nothing on our end causing it."

So doing more research we found site speed in GA was reporting crazy numbers of 25+ seconds for page loads, when we asked Simple Helix gave us answers back that it was "Baidu spiders" crawling the site causing the slowdown. I knew that wasn't the issue. In all of this the developer keeps reporting back to the site owner that there is no way it is hosting.

So the developer finally admitted the site could be slowing down from a Dos attack or some other form of probing. So they installed Cloudflare. Since then the site has been very fast, and we haven't seen turbulence in the GA site speed data. What we have seen though is the appearance of 524 and 522 errors in Search Console.

Does anyone have experience with Cloudflare that seeing those types of errors are common in usage? Is there any other thought what might be causing that and what that means from the servers, because the developer reports back that Simple Helix has had no issues during this time.

This has been a super frustrating project and we've tried a lot different tests, but there is really abnormal conversion data as I said especially during peak times on the weekend. Any ideas of what to chase would be appreciated.

It can be, especially if there is a lot of content on the site doing it. I would also be worried in this case because of the content is short (could be seen as thin) and is common quotes so it is probably duplicated on other sites. I would lean toward cleaning it up.

Yoast has a great tool for fixing this. That or I would noindex one category.

Just curious how you think Pigeon affected a wedding directory site?

The disavow can take some time and may not see results until the next refresh of the algorithm that was causing the issue. We had a number of clients that came to us with a drop in traffic and rankings over the last year. We did extensive back link removal and disavowing. We saw some limited improvements but it wasn't until the November refresh that all of them "got out of jail" and returned to the first page for their keywords.

My other thought for you is that while you said you disavowed bad links, I ran your site through ahrefs and it's showing a large spike of new back links over the last month. Most of them are pretty spammy looking. http://authority-domain.com/computers_and_internet/calendar/society/dating_relationships/?p=8

If you are already dealing with a bad link profile I'd stay clear from directory link building.

You might want to elaborate on the type of issue. Is it a penalty or has it been affected by a recent change in Google's algorithm?

The issue isn't the 301, that's already been taken care of. Unfortunately it is a branded url, so that can't be changed, even if they did start over though on a new URL that wouldn't solve the duplicate site floating around out there.

Here is my issue and I've asked a related question on this one. Here is the back story. Site owner had a web designer build a duplicate copy of their site on their own domain in a sub folder without noindexing. The original site tanked, the webdesigner site started outranking for the branded keywords. Then the site owner moved to a new designer who rebuilt the site. That web designer decided to build a dev site using the dotted quad version of the site. It was isolated but then he accidentally requested one image file from the dotted quad to the official site. So Google again indexed a mirror duplicate site (the second time in 7 months). Between that and the site having a number of low word count pages it has suffered and looked like it got hit again with Panda.

So the developer 301 the version to the correct version. I was rechecking it this morning and the dotted quad version is still indexed, but it no longer lets me look at the cache version. Out of experience, is this just Google getting ready to drop it from the index?

Ranking factors I would look over, how fresh is your content and how fast is the site? I would also run your site through copyscape to see if there is someone scraping the site.

I would also look over your link profile if there are too many spammy exact match anchor text links. With that I like to go back and compare my GA data to major shifts in the algorithm. It helps to identify what issues need to be fixed.

Something else to consider why you might want to omit them, that is an easy way for your competitors to do keyword research.