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Agreed.  There's some good folks in that list.

The good news is, Google's seeing your site as you can tell from: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aecigaretteanswers.com

Looks to me like the site just doesn't have the authority yet to have been pulled out of the supplemental results.

They will recrawl it but equally important is that traffic following links to your site will get where they're supposed to go. A good rule of thumb with search engines as well as humans ... it's never too late to do the right thing.

(Of course, with a Penguin penalty you might go bankrupt before they get around to rewarding you for good behavior)

Hope that helps !

There's basically two ways to look at it and John is right - testing is key.

Getting new business is critical obviously and if they're not yet bidding on your brand then I'd focus there BUT it's worse to pay for that first click and then lose the visitor when they find a competitor on the second query.  So if your competitors are bidding on your brand you need to grab it, the cost per click is less and you can't afford to lose the conversion after you're paid for the first click but you of course don't want to use some of the limited budget on a second click if you could have had it organically.

Then there comes the discussion over the cost to monitor competitor activities vs the cost of just bidding on the brand.  If it costs more to manage it and monitor then just bidding would be the way to go obviously.

Worse case you can test bidding on your brand and monitor the assisted conversions to see how that works out for you.

Part of what I'd be asking is whether your competitors are bidding on your name.  If no one is bidding on your brand name and your site comes up #1 organically then it might be best to put the budget to new visitor acquisition whereas if your competitors are bidding on your brand then you need to protect it.

There area  lot of moving parts to the questions but based on the limited information, that's how I'd look at it.

You're certainly not the only one dealing with that issue.

Fortunately it doesn't negatively impact your rankings but it sure does mess with Analytics.

Jared Gardner did a great post on just this subject that covers why it exists and more importantly, how you can block it right here on the Moz site at https://moz.com/blog/how-to-stop-spam-bots-from-ruining-your-analytics-referral-data

And it's probably good to know too that if it's the subject of that type of article ... you're not alone.  You know ... because misery loves company.

Hope that helps !

As Dimitri notes, you can click the lock to get info.

I've also found https://www.sslshopper.com/ssl-checker.html helpful.  I use it regularly to diagnose specific oddities.

For different details you can also try https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html.

What month did it drop?

That's the route to go.

Dimitri beat me to the suggestion.

It does take a long time but at least you'll know the correction itself has been picked up if you Fetch it.  You're now making me curious to get some issues like that generated on purpose and then time the removal of the warning when both a natural crawl and Fetch are used.  Is it different timing in Webmaster Tools?  Odd that I've never thought to ask that but now looking forward to a simple and easy to run test.

If it's not an urgent issue ... install analytics now and collect data for a month or two.  You'll also want to install Search Console.  Basically, if the pages have incoming links or traffic you'll obviously want to move them but if not and they're low quality they should probably be left behind.

Something in the title you sent triggered a thought and after checking I realized you're dealing with a .co.uk domain.  I have found the .co.uk Google to be far more tolerant of heavy keyword use and even link spam so you're probably in a battle with folks who are indeed keyword stuffing or worse and finding yourself having to do the same just to keep up.

It's a bit of a slippery slope but I will admit that even some recent work I did in the UK required a slightly more heavy handed approach to SEO than I'd typically do.  So while I wouldn't recommend it in the US, the title you're suggesting will probably work well in the UK.

Cheers !

Dave

Already answered repeatedly but piping in just to lend even more support to the consensus.

Good question.  I'm not sure exactly how I'd write it as it would depend on how your products are arranged.  If you have pages for each of the different cartridges so you can target terms such as LC980BK independently then I'd probably go with something like:

Buy Brother DCP-197C Ink Cartridges from Domain.com

Of course he structure would differ by printer type as this model doesn't have any searches for phrases including "inkjet" so I'd skip including that.  I also like the word "Buy" because if I'm looking up cartridges that's what I want to do.

Obviously testing is key though.

Hope that helps and best of luck ...

Dave

Hey Brian.

Obviously each scenario is a bit different but in general you'll simply want to enter as much information as you have for each field.  In the case of reviews it's pretty easy.

Schema Type - Review
Name - Name of the product being reviewed
Website - URL of the product being reviewed
Description - A description of the product being reviewed
Item Name - What you're calling it (i.e. Review of XYZ)
Item Review - A summary of the review
Rating - Your rating
Author - You
Published Date - The date of the review

Hope that helps !

I agree with Kashif.  Another option would be to block the cart in the robots or canonical all cart pages back to the root (/cart/ not your homepage) if the root of the cart is an actual page you want crawled.

It's always important to remember that every scenario is a bit different and that the title tag rules outlined by Moz are meant to be guidelines as opposed to gospel.  There are times when the title may have to extend past the recommended character count though it's also important to remember that Google uses pixels as opposed to characters so some titles can have more characters than others.

Dr. Pete (from Moz himself) created a great tool at https://moz.com/blog/new-title-tag-guidelines-preview-tool that you can use to test titles.  Whenever I hit one that needs to extend past the visual I like to use the tool to make sure that at least my marketing message is presented properly.

I'd personally focus on clicks and that might be something you want to dig in to.  While your rankings went down it may be worth checking if your clickthroughs for a query to that page went up as a percentage of what would be expected given your position.  If they did then you'll want to look at ways to boost your rankings with the given titles so when you do recover you recover with a higher clickthrough rate, if not then you may want to run some limited tests on some products to see what happens if you extend the titles back to what they were.  I mention this to insure that there wasn't a coincidence issue occurring where your rankings dropped due to an update that was poorly timed with the title changes.  It would be wise to look through your analytics, find the time of the drop and compare that with the algo change history page (also kept up-to-date by Dr. Pete ... busy guy) to help safeguard against reacting to the wrong issue.

I personally don't have a big issue with some limited keyword duplication provided it still reads right.  I don't like what your competitor's title is but then ... I don't have to - only the searcher does.

The unofficial best practice is 100 as the upper limit but in the end I'd try to think of it more from the context of how the weight passes between pages and how you want the engines and users to prioritize your content.

I actually wrote an article on this exact subject some time ago on Search Engine Watch where I show the math and how site structures to pass weight differently.  That's probably a better answer that a flat number without reason so if you're interested you can see how the weight flows with diagrams at http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2179376/internal-linking-promote-keyword-clusters.

Hope that helps and let me know if you have any questions.

Great great question.

From my experience you'll be looking at a roughly 2 to 8 week hit in rankings.  I know that's a wide margin but it depends on more than just the single redirection of your homepage on the city domains to the city page on the global domain but also includes the content and of course the internal links. You'll want to insure that you move any content that's attracting traffic, social signals or links and also redirect the pages with links or traffic to the appropriate page on the new domain.

Past that it's really just a matter of waiting and trying not to chew your nails off.

I wish you luck, that's a hard call to make but I think you're making the right one.

Regards.

Dave

A 200 is perfect (it just means "OK").  I double-checked and your canonicals' are pointing to the http version which is also what you want if you're not doing a 301.  Some tools will still show a duplication even with the canonicals but rest assured ... Google knows what's what.

Best of luck to you as you proceed forward and glad it worked out.

Regards.

Dave