Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey there,

Rather than taking care of indexing your back links, focus on creating high quality content with great potential to get links naturally.

Regarding the back links, the rule is quality over quantity. Especially now, when Google sees primarily the amount of domains and doesn't care about how many other back links are pointing from each of them.

Hope it helps. Cheers, Martin

Hey there,

Yes, the link juice still get passed on 301 redirects. Try to split the redirects in some time range so the new website doesn't have suddenly a lot of new back links. It could appear unnatural to Google.

I'm ready for any other questions. Cheers, Martin

Hey Becky,

Those pages will be found by Google if you have links pointing to them somewhere on your site. In terms of crawl budget, the more page depth the more time does Google need to spend on crawling your site.

However, with proper internal linking you should be able to significantly lower the amount of clicks. So the next step would be adding some links through relevant anchor texts. After you do this, watch the analytics and let me know if it had any impact.

Hope it helps. Cheers, Martin

Hey there,

It won't be much beneficial.

The "Powered by XYZ" tends to be in the footer which has no value as a back link. Also, it doesn't seem to be the relevant anchor text for your business. If all of your back links are through the same anchor text, it could hurt your page as there's no diversification.

I guess the websites are off-topic as well (your customers are probably from many fields). Link has a value if there's a context and the website is about a similar topic. Otherwise, it will seem weird to Google that they point back to your site if it makes actually no sense to them.

Hope it helps. Cheers, Martin

Hey there,

Unicode characters are exactly like any other character in any other encoding. It won't hurt your ranking in any way.

However, make sure that it actually help you somehow. I guess that most people don't even know how to write the "degree" symbol. Maybe you can make some space in the title by replacing this character with a different keyword?

Cheers, Martin

Hey Michael,

I've found some other threads about the same issue. You can check them, maybe it could help:
https://moz.com/community/q/how-long-will-404-errors-show-in-webmaster-tools-search-console https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/hupstYVfBzo

Best, Martin

Hey there,

I'd recommend going with the last option.

Google will understand from the existing content what is your site about. You don't need to include the word "snowboard" in every URL. If you do so, it may hurt your site instead for trying to "fool" the search engines. On top of that, KWs in URLs are not a strong ranking signal anymore.

Also, the shorter link the better not only for Google but for the user experience as well.

Hope it helps. Cheers, Martin

Hey Nikki,

If the page is 301 redirected then there is no need for canonical tag. The 301 has more "power" against duplicates because not all browsers follow the canonical tag.

Regarding your page optimization, it's just the beginning. Let's dig into link building and create high quality, topical link portfolio. This should boost your traffic.

Hope it helps. Cheers, Martin

Hey there,

Those "Cons" you named are basically your options. Either add rel canonical or create unique content. Technically, you can delete the page as well, but I guess it's not the option you're considering.

It's true that it takes time and effort so this would be probably your decisive factor. Just decide what take less time and is more convenient. I vote for adding the canonical tag.

Regarding the _low search volume, _every visitor is valuable as long as he/she converts. It might be 1 visit a day through that KW but (depending on your conversion rate and the price of what you're selling) I think it's worth it.

If you add "noindex" to your page, Google will still be able to crawl your page and see the duplicate content. So I'd choose one of the two options mentioned above.

Hope it helps.
Cheers, Martin

Hey there,

Those links are absolutely considered as back links by Google and are able to accumulate PR / link juice, as long as they are FOLLOW. It doesn't make a difference if they're indexed or not.

Hope it helps. Cheers, Martin

Hey there,

the sooner you'll redirect HTTP to HTTPS the better. You are going to have more backlinks and rankings in time so it would be definitely harder in the future.

Also, try to convince the 6 websites which already point to HTTP to change their links to HTTPS.

And then, of course, redirect each page individually, as you said.

Hope it helps, Martin

Hey there,

If it's done correctly, you shouldn't see any ranking drops for longer period of time.

Of course, there's always risk when you're playing with the redirecting but I'd follow the Google guidelines (as you correctly mentioned) and it should work smoothly.

Let me know how it worked.

Cheers, Martin

Hi Nigel,

You're right, I didn't think about the duplicates from UTM previously.

Thanks for the update.

Best, Martin

Hey there,

I've found this article full of alternatives for sliders. I hope this might help you.

https://managewp.com/slider-alternatives

Cheers, Martin

Hey there,

I'd definitely recommend Google Forms.

There are all the options you'd possibly need (check boxes, radio buttons, drop downs, etc). Plus it's free (but it doesn't degrade the functionality compared to the other tools).

I use Google Forms all the time and it works perfectly.

Cheers, Martin

Hey Alessia,

It's quite challenging to recover after your site was hacked.

In this case, I'd recommend doing all the steps in this article and then request a review by Google itself to look at your site and mark it as healthy again.

Try this first and if you need any further help, feel free to let me know. Cheers, Martin

Hey Nikki,

It depends how the file was created. If you exported it manually it won't change by itself. Especially, if you changed URL structure, added some redirects and some new pages.

I'd recommend to resubmit new Sitemap.xml to Google Search Console because the new one will probably differ quite a bit.

Hope it helps. Cheers, Martin

Hey David,

Have you noticed similar fluctuation for your competitors on TOP 3 positions as well?

Google sometimes change the SERP randomly to provide diverse results for the users. But this doesn't look like the case.

Do you have any blog on your website? You have the article for "Nikon CLS" but if you have only one on your site, it might be not enough.

I'd start publishing regularly on your site which should massively help with the rankings.

Cheers, Martin

Hey Nikki,

Yes, those are correct.

Cheers, Martin

Hey Judd,

In my opinion, there're too many links pointing to the articles in the feed.

I'd reduce the amount of articles on homepage by half which means to hide the second row for each category. Because now, the feed takes more than a half of the page. Try to add more static optimized text which will be unique.

As long as it's the discussion, I'm really excited about some other's opinions.

Cheers, Martin