Welcome to the Q&A Forum

1. Are you using a CDN?
2. Did you update all your internal links to https? 
3. Did you update all of your canonical tags?
4. Did you update all of your hreflang tags?
5. Are you using plugins/modules from a third party? Are they secure? Do they have documentation or a rep you can contact about migrating to https?
6. Some CMS's have specific settings that need to be altered when migrating - make sure those were done correctly. 
7. Use screaming frog to check for any external scripts, and ensure they're calling https. 
8. Did you update your old redirects?
9. Did you update your robots.txt file to include the new https sitemap?
10. Did you enable HSTS?
11. Do you have a disavow file? Did you update it for HTTPS?

Bonus:
Did you update all of your other paid campaigns, analytics, etc. to reflect the migration?

Hi Steven,

DMOZ and other sites like it are either gone or are nearly ghosts. This is relatable to the conversation on machine learning, where one group believes you can program AI to learn and another (smaller) group believes you have to program all human knowledge into an AI manually to create a true artificial intelligence. Machine learning works, it's efficient, and widely adopted by the rest of humanity. The other approach - one that requires a lot of endless heavy labor - has died off for obvious efficiency reasons (and it doesn't work).

DMOZ was owned by AOL, which was recently purchased by Verizon. I've no doubt Verizon pulled the plug because it was resources spent on a dinosaur that has no value. It was a precursor to modern search engines, but I don't think anyone was using it for its intended original design.

Truth of the matter is, companies that don't invest in machine learning when a competitor in their industry is are going to the grave. You just can't compete with that level of efficiency with human hands.

Is anyone else experiencing this?

Thin content could be the culprit, but there are other things it could be as well. Without access to historical data, past SEO activities, etc. it's nigh impossible to tell you why you're experiencing a drop in rankings, especially since you're citing the "fred" update, which we still don't know anything about.

When I visited that URL the site structure seemed odd to me, as I was redirected to http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/b, which is pretty deep in your site architecture. This means links to your website www.key.co.uk are passing page rank down through three subpages to get to /b. Page rank should pass 100% through 301 redirects now, but I'm not 100% certain how Googlebot views your structure since it seems like you've got a redirect chain going there. If you can simplify your site architecture and check Search Console to make sure that it's technically healthy, then you're off to a good start.

Hi Rick, sorry for the hiatus, I have a couple other questions for you.

1. Have you set up conversion tracking? Has there been an increase in conversions?
2. Do you have any campaigns running? Print, broadcast, radio, etc.? Many offline campaigns cause a boost in organic searches for my clients.

Hi Beachflower,

Did you ever get a resolution to this? I'm curious to see what the outcome and solution was. If this is a malicious attack then you'll need to consult someone who specializes in net sec, but I've dealt with a few different kinds of attacks before so I can make a couple of recommendations.

1. Change all of your logins. Make them unique and difficult for a bot to guess. Then set it to lock out users after five incorrect guesses. This prevents brute force hacks.

2. Add a honeypot to your login forms. A honeypot is a hidden field that bots will try to fill out on a form. Users can't see it, so they don't fill it out. If it gets filled out, the program knows it's a bot, and invalidates the attempt to login.

3. Use screaming frog to find all the js that was maliciously inserted on each URL and create a "cleanup" list. A developer should be able to write a simple "find and replace" program that just deletes it.

4. Consider migrating to https if you haven't already. This can prevent Man-in-the-Middle attacks (MIM) on your site, and also confers several SEO benefits such as improved user experience, a slight boost in ranking, and faster site speed (HTTP/2 integration).

These are just a few first steps to take and a Net Sec professional will have much more to add. Hope that helps!

1. It's great that you haven't been manually penalized! Unfortunately, yes I have seen pages drop off the map entirely before for specific keywords. Most keyword tracking tools only search the first 100 results, so if you don't make it inside that bubble it will display a null value like (--). It basically means you need to up your game. Most often you can make it well inside those first 100 results by applying on-site SEO tactics. Update your meta data, make sure relevant pages are linking internally to the page you're trying to rank, and improve the amount of unique quality content on page. Put some focus on the user experience.

2. You can disavow them, but I would strongly recommend you first check which ones are marked nofollow. You don't want to disavow those because they're already compliant with webmaster guidelines. For the rest, communicate with the bloggers you've paid and see if they can switch it to nofollow. Give them a couple of weeks. I don't think you need to jump straight to the disavow file if you can get a significant percentage of those links marked nofollow. I generally avoid using disavow files as much as possible because it's like the nuclear option. Last resort.

Moz has a pretty sweet tool with their spam score. I love how easy it makes it for the novice-intermediate SEOs to do a good job keeping their site quality up without needing a ton of oversight from a director or SEO manager. Check out Moz's article on spam score to get an idea how it works: https://moz.com/blog/spam-score-mozs-new-metric-to-measure-penalization-risk

I think if you have 4 or less that's pretty rock solid. It's an approximate value, so don't hyperventilate if you can't get it down to 0. Even this blog has a spam score of 1/17.

Thanks Miriam, you've been super helpful. For the time being I'll close this ticket but if I can get some solid data then I'll happily share the data with the Moz community in one format or another. Cheers!

Thanks Miriam, I don't think there's a ton of value to be had for this one particular client (not enough to make me conduct an extensive study on the matter), but even that is shooting from the hip.

Do you know of a heatmap study that shows how people interact with knowledge panels? If I can prove that X% of users interact with the competitor space on those panels then I may have a case to perform further research. Which if I did, I would share here, because I am a sharing kind of person

One of things I noticed when I clicked through some of the profiles was that it was pulling information from Google My Business, which makes me think that the information in there may be tied to it. I have a hard time believing that it truly is as simple as "people also search for (x) website" because I've seen Google posting businesses that are marked as permanently closed in this space, and I can't imagine people are repeatedly searching for a closed business in their area.

Hey Debashish, I'll try to answer your questions in order so they make the most sense, because they're good ones and they mirror perfectly the same questions we all see in this industry.

1. We really need to define penalization here first. Unless you're getting a message in Google Search Console telling you that your site has been manually penalized, then you haven't been penalized. Next we're going to make an assumption, which is that you gained some ranking benefit from illicitly garnered backlinks. And finally, we're going to assume that Penguin caught on and devalued those links. This means you haven't been penalized per se, but you're no longer deriving optimization benefits from those links. So 'recovery' in this sense is going to mean something different.

Recovery from a manual penalization does not mean you will return to your previous rankings and organic traffic. It means that you are no longer being blacklisted by Google and your site is being indexed by Google again. But in both cases, what a client wants to know is "when will my previous rankings return" and the answer is that they will not. If you were ranking highly before due to inadvisable link schemes and those beneficial links were devalued or disavowed or removed, then you aren't going to see a return those strong rankings. You're going to have to fix things so you're obeying webmaster guidelines, then begin competing in another way that's within guidelines to bring yourself back to the top.

John Mueller gives this response every time he's asked this question in his Hangout series, and he gets asked it A LOT. You can see those videos here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKoqnv2vTMUMqH8IyzOMBc_Z8i-S6-tVJ. This channel is a really fantastic resource for learning some intermediate to advanced SEO tactics via Q&A with John Mueller himself.

2. You can submit a disavow file via Google Search Console. Again, this is going to tell Google that you don't want any of those links to be associated with your site for the purpose of ranking. What some SEOs are guilty of doing when clients were hit with Penguin penalties was to disavow ALL backlinks instead of just the naughty ones, and this got them back in the index but completely nullified a lot of valuable and credible links.

Consider that it takes 4-12 months to implement and begin to reap the benefits of well thought out white-hat optimization strategies, and use that as your timeline for 'recovery', because again you're not going to see an immediate return to your previous rankings and will need to implement new tactics.

Define "useful". What business outcome are you hoping to achieve with it? If your intent is to get your business onto a host of local directories, then it's useful. If you want to ensure you have a good position in the map pack and local organic SERP, then it's useful.

If you're already ranking highly in spot #1 and #2 and don't care to be on directories, then maybe it's not the tool for you. It's a relatively small expense, and I think having accurate NAP+W information around the web can only be of benefit to your business, so I would recommend it. However it really depends on your budget and what outcome you hope to achieve. I don't expect it to generate a ton of leads for you.

Hello fellow Mozzers,

In Google's knowledge panel there is a section at the bottom that says "people also search for" and a list of competitors is displayed. I'm hoping to get some information I can use to get my client listed there on top of the local organic results. The more SERP presence, the better. Attached image should provide clarity to those who are confused. I suspect I know the answer to this question, but since I can't find a source to verify my beliefs, I'm crowdsourcing. Thanks in advance!

NhoihY1

Yes, Google can penalize you for hiring bloggers. They view this is a link scheme (source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356) and it's something that SEOs have been doing for a long time. Google has gotten better and better at catching these types of schemes, so it would not surprise me in the least if you were caught up by Penguin, which now operates in real time and simply devalues links instead of putting your entire domain into a sandbox.

To keep your strategy in line with Google's webmaster guidelines, you should request that those links be marked "nofollow". There is still a lot of value to this kind of outreach even with a "nofollow" added, so I wouldn't recommend you necessarily stop doing what you're doing as the bloggers have been honestly informing their audience that an editorial review was requested.

Some of the ways nofollow links can still help you:
1. quality referral traffic
2. backlinks generating backlinks over time

Best of luck, let me know if you have additional questions. Thanks!

If by orphaned you mean that the pages are inaccessible from other parts of the website and Google is unable to see them, then technically no, it's not impacting your rankings. Or it could be technically yes, depending on how you look at it.

If Google can't see the pages, hasn't indexed the pages, then it doesn't factor those pages into its algorithm. If those pages contain valuable content that users would like to see, then they should be accessible, and making them accessible to users and to Google can improve your rankings.

I would ask why they're orphaned first before making changes though. If they're landing pages meant only to track SEM campaigns, or test pages to try new code, etc. it makes sense to keep those pages orphaned. Context is key. Don't open pandora's box by accident! But keeping them orphaned isn't actually impacting your rankings, because it's as though it doesn't exist to Google. So proceed cautiously, and may the odds be ever in your favor.

It makes sense semantically and search engines (particularly Google) are able to understand language better than most people think. Go ahead and add "in", and furthermore if Royal Oak is a city, use proper grammar and add the comma before the state. It's not going to be a problem to add it, but it may be a problem for you to have poor grammar on your site as proper spelling and grammar is actually a ranking factor.

Well it could be a few things. Either it's always been there and you never noticed it before, your company/client added it but did so in a way that populated it out over 1000 times as an error, or the site was hacked and the js was inserted by a malicious entity. It looks like they're using a link shortener in the src part of that js, which makes me nervous.

Wow, this is a loaded question. The way I see it we can break this up into two parts.

First, subdomains vs. domains vs. subpages. There has been a lot of discussion surrounding which structure should be used for SEO friendliness and to keep it really simple, if you're concerned about SEO then using a subpage structure is going to be the most beneficial. If you create a separate domain, that will be duplicate content and it does impact rankings. Subdomains are a little more complex, and I don't recommend them for SEO. In some cases, Google views subdomains as spam (think of all the PBNs created with blogspot.com) and in other cases it's viewed as a separate website. By structuring something as a subdomain you're indicating that the content is different enough from the main content of the root domain that you don't feel it should be included together. An example of this being used in the wild appropriately might be different language versions of a website, which especially makes sense in countries where the TLD doesn't represent multiple languages (like Switzerland - they have four national languages).

Next, the concept of duplicate content is different depending on whether it's duplicate internally, or duplicate externally. It's common for websites to have a certain amount of duplicate or common content within their own website. The number that has been repeated for years as a "safe" threshold is 30%, which is a stat that Matt Cutts threw out there before he retired. I use siteliner.com to discover how much common content has been replicated internally. Externally, if you have the same content as another website, this can pretty dramatically impact your rankings. Google does a decent job of assigning content to the correct website (who had it first, etc.) but they have a long way to go.

If you could assimilate the new content and have the pages redirected on a 1:1 basis to the new location then it's probably safe enough to do, and hopefully you will have it structured in a way that makes it useful to users. If you can't perform the redirect, I think you're more likely to struggle with achieving SEO goals for those new pages. In that case, take the time to set realistic expectations and track something like user engagement between new and old content so you have a realistic understanding of your success and challenges.

Just to verify - this is js that your company/client did not insert themselves?

As long as the links are marked nofollow you don't have to worry about being penalized for unnatural link building. To stay in line with Google's webmaster guidelines you should make that a part of your strategy. If you're getting hundreds of dofollow links in a matter of days, Google is going to know those are unnatural whether they have a high DA or not.

Google has stated in the past that they may pass value through a nofollow link, so don't consider it a dead end for SEO efforts. I would consider any link from a legitimate website to be of value, regardless of what their moz score is. Remember that any score from moz or any other third party is an approximate measurement of Google's algorithm and does not guarantee anything. There may be something valuable to your website on other sites with a low DA.