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Are the links bad? If not, don't worry so much about where the links are pointing. The link distribution models to even out linking page, anchor text, etc. aren't necessary unless the links come from spam sites.

Building (legit) links to deeper pages is generally a good strategy since the terms are more specific and often less competitive. If you think you're under penalty, though, let me know and my advice would be very different.

I've been watching some large sites, and I've seen some pretty crazy things around the 14-17th, with most sites seeing the biggest impact in ranking drops on the 16th. It was clearly an update, but I can't find reliable info on what exactly it was - probably because it affected a small niche of sites. Does your site receive a lot of traffic for local terms by chance? My working theory is another update to local search results. (Trying to show more companies that work in that area, possibly with more local packs.)

The reason I'm thinking local is because it was the biggest shift in rankings I've seen in a long long time, and tools like Mozcast didn't pick up a big change. There are so many possible combinations of local terms that it's nearly impossible to track even a small set of keyword + city terms.

Anyway, I've seen about the same as you - a big drop for some key local terms, followed by a slow and steady recovery. The results looked pretty bad when the update was first made, so maybe Google realized it wasn't a good update and has rolled some of it back.

Of course this is all just speculation. I'd love to hear what other types of terms people have seen ranking decreases on.

It causes "duplicate content issues" in the sense that only one is likely to appear in search results if you do both. Given that Linkedin is probably more authoritative it's more likely to show up, but it just depends. It won't be a "penalty" necessarily - especially if your author name is on both. If the goal is just a lot of views, go for it. If you're trying to build the site you should probably prioritize the site.

Generally I'd recommend posting first to the site, making sure it's indexed, and then cross-publishing or cross-promoting if you don't see a lot of traction with it. But that's just because I'm generally trying to build my sites, and not LinkedIn. As I said, there are probably more views to be had on LI, but it may not accomplish site goals.

It probably won't hurt your rankings, but we would need a URL to say more. Do you see links to the fonts in your source code? If it's not immediately obvious you could try running a crawl to see where these are being linked from. It's probably a simple matter of cleaning up some CSS.

Interesting - thanks for coming back to update.

You could simply remove your name from the pages The sitelink example from Apple is at Google's discretion. They usually only do it for sites with high authority or where they're sure of your intent and have identified an entity associated with your search.

I would not mess with your robots.txt. Just decide which pages you do or don't want to show up for your name. You could try something like {Type of photos) photos by {Your Name} for pages you DO want to show up.

Generally lots of search presence is great, so I wouldn't worry. You COULD de-optimize, but it seems unnecessary.

You will see no benefit from mass-301 redirects to the home page, and it might even hurt. The only way to get value is if you redirect it to identical or similar content. I wouldn't even count on that adding value or traffic now that the site has changed hands and content has been gone for a while.

Still, if you can recover (and have the right to use) the old content, it might be worth 301 redirecting - or better yet, putting on the same URL so no redirects are necessary. Only do this if the content was good and the links were quality links. Otherwise let them 404.

If you can't put up the same or similar content, don't bother. Focus on building the site naturally.

Alright, well my advice runs counter to common wisdom: don't worry so much about whether it's on a sub-domain.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MswMYk05tk

https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/subdomains-and-subdirectories/

My feeling is that you should worry a lot more about what the blog is linking to.

I've personally had access to look into 2 of the most-cited subdomain examples. In one of them the company moved into a subdomain, but broke a massive document up into about 7 pieces - and each piece started getting organic traffic. This happened at the same time, so I don't think it can be attributed to the sub-domain movement. In another case the blog logo linked back to the blog home, and there were almost no links to the sales pages. Changing the header resulted in more links to the root domain, so yes - rankings improved.

I've heard other anecdotes of people moving to sub-folders and seeing big boosts in their non-blog rankings due to the links from the blog. For the last 5 years, though, I've seen no credible evidence. I've been in a good position to see the opposite. One more story: a friend of mine just moved a MASSIVELY-cited blog (blog PA 75) off the sub-domain, but his nav was already mirroring the www version (which has 1/15th the links). Impact on rankings: absolutely none.

I'd still install on the same server if I could, just for the sake of maintenance, but if you can't find a technical solution just make sure you link architecture makes sense.

Good answers here - did you get this taken care of? I'd say choose one domain and redirect or forward the others that have the same stuff. To explain it to my boss, I'd say.

• It confuses customers to have the same content on two domains. They might not know which company they're dealing with.
• You probably don't want half the traffic going to one site and half going to the other, especially if their content and user intent is similar. Every live domain is another analytics profiles I have to check on and watch for issues.
• Don't expect any ranking bonus from multiple domains, because when content is duplicate Google will just choose 1 page to rank.
• Maintaining multiple sites is more work than it's worth. We can get more done by focusing on our core domain unless there's a strong case for creating a new brand. (I wouldn't create a new site unless it was for a distinct brand).

Again, probably want to 301 redirect to the primary/canonical domain. If the domains have no links and no traffic (as I'd expect) forwarding through the registrar is fine, too.

Unfortunately, Google has been scaling back reviews quite a bit. We have several sites where we used to show up with star ratings on every page. Now we're lucky to get them to show up at all.

I have noticed it relies a lot on the query. If you are trying to rank for local queries where Google pulls in a local pack, for example, they're really not likely to show your stars. Maybe this is to prevent confusion. Maybe it's to help themselves on Google Maps.

Try doing a site: search with the exact URL. In my experience it's most likely to show up in low-competition searches, and nothing is less competitive than a site: search with your own site. For example https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.shopperapproved.com does seem to pull in stars.

The good news: what you have is working.

The bad news: you're at Google's mercy as to when your snippets will pull in. Page and domain authority (in Google's eyes) does seem to play a part, and the query will change things up. My advice is always to implement it, continue marketing, and wait for Google to realize you're really an awesome company/site with reviews worth highlighting.

Unfortunately, there's no magic number of reviews or count of links. It just depends on competition in the SERP.

The errors are appearing because users are immediately redirected to the login page. It doesn't actually matter whether these are 301 or 302 redirects because you're not looking to pass link equity anyway. The easiest way to deal with this is to tell crawlers (like Moz's and Google's) to ignore stuff they couldn't see anyway because it's only shown to logged-in users.

I generally block the /customer/* folder in robots.txt to avoid issues like this. And if you have a wishlist in the primary nav that's worth blocking, too. You could also just remove the Wish List link when users aren't logged in. The idea is to tell the crawlers to avoid any portion of the site where a login is required. So you could just upload a text file to canyonos.com/robots.txt that looks like this:

user-agent: *

disallow: /customer/

disallow: /wishlist/

These lines will block the entire folder, so you should only do it if there's nothing in the folder that search engines can see. In other words, use this line if everything in the folder is behind a login (it usually is in Magento).

Google's info is pretty good here:

https://developers.google.com/webmasters/control-crawl-index/docs/robots_txt?csw=1

First make sure what you're dealing with.

1. Go into Google Analytics >> Acquisition >> Organic and find the week (or day, if you can) of the drop in organic traffic.

If you don't have GA, you can try something like Searchmetrics.

2. Correlate to this:

https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change

3. Look for recovery in organic traffic.

If you think Penguin is still impacting you, I'd recommend requesting removal. In my experience it's not very effective to seek the removal of links, but it's worth a try. If you don't think it's impacting you or still affecting you, just do good stuff going forward. In either case, submit a disavow on the bad links. Don't get caught up fixing things that aren't impacting your site.

If there is an organic impact, this is what I'd suggest.

-Start with a good form letter. Include the URL where the link is located, write up a professional, well-phrased request, and send it out. If there are a ton of sites, you might want to have someone who knows a good link from a bad link sort it for you and gather contact info.

-Send a follow-up to sites that don't respond.

-Submit the disavow and wait for an update.

You could hire someone to do link removal, but I don't think it's often a good way to spend money. Many of these sites are abandoned, and no one is reading the email.

If it's Panda after all, submit a new question and we'll talk

Google is fickle when it comes to sitelinks. There's not a lot you can do to control them aside from telling them which pages NOT to show for certain URLs in Webmaster Tools. There's definitely a correlation between your highest-authority pages and pages that appear prominently on your site by default.

The only thing you can really do to get site links is to prove to Google that you're a brand and that you appear more prominently in a search for something like your brand name. It's less a technical matter and more a matter of spreading the word about your brand. Links, shares, online mentions, and real-world awareness branding actions are all likely to help.

I don't see any reason it wouldn't be pulling the page in. Maybe check on the spelling of the keyword? If you have the right URL and the right keyword, it could be a bug, but hard to say at this point. We might be able to help more with a screenshot.

Yeah, Kate's right. I don't think you can go wrong, and unless you have redirects that disagree with your preferred version, go with the non-www.

If you're using standard www and non-www redirects use the one that shows up in the search bar for the site or area of the site that you're submitting. We have a site in Google News that is www. and the news is non-www. For no reason, but we haven't bothered fixing it. We were included on the non-www. So it's possible and likely that both would work fine, but I know for sure that the one that shows up in the URL of your feed works best.

Yeah, so I always thought that Google hating on affiliate links was a myth. Then I had an affiliate site started losing rankings. They went back up when I nofollowed the links. That was years ago, but it's still my preferred solution.

I suspect Google is already smart enough to understand what's happening, but they avoid doing anything about it because it's not impacting rankings and some people use it for legitimate reasons. Maybe some site owners don't trust the site they're sending traffic to, and don't want them to know which content is working best. Maybe others have a poor method of tracking that involves redirect.

I'm familiar with Yoast's solution, but I don't think it's helpful. It might make it look like you have more internal links, but I sincerely doubt Google is going to reward you for that. I recommend nofollow in any case, and direct links unless you have some other reason to avoid them.

Magento will generally canonicalize correctly by default. What I'm guessing you're seeing are category pages that have variables for faceted navigation - again, a pretty common issue in Magento. I've seen and even "fixed" this issue for past clients with no noticeable results.

If you ARE having problems getting your pages into Google's index (check indexation status in Webmaster tools and look for exact product/category URLs to check) there is a plugin that will remove the variables for faceted navigation on category pages. The main downside is that someone who emials/shares a link will not share it with the filters/sorting attached.

Generally I recommend leaving it alone. If you're not having indexation problems, though, it should be fine to leave alone and let Google figure it out.

If you're really worried about indexation I think that's a fine solution. It's definitely easier to manage, and it'll also be easier to track pageviews in most analytics platforms. The only downside is that if someone emails or links to a category page with filters applied the recipient won't see it. But generally people share products and not category pages, so it's not a big deal. I'd probably go that route.

Also make sure that your category pages still update the URL when you go to page 2, or that page 2 is somehow also being indexed. You don't want products that don't get indexed because categories can't be crawled.

Yes, the bots will crawl the pages, but they will not INDEX them.

There is a concern there, but mostly if the bots get caught in some kind of crawl trap - where they're trying out a near-infinite set of variables and getting stuck in a loop. Otherwise the spiders should understand the variables. You can actually check it in Webmaster tools to make sure Google understands. Instructions for that here:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6080550?hl=en

Ultimately Google will definitely not penalize you for having lots of duplicate content on URLs through variables, but it might be an issue with Googlebot not finding all your pages. You can make sure that doesn't happen by checking the indexation of your sitemap.

You could also try to block any URLs with the URL parameter in robots.txt. Make sure you get some help on the RegEx if you plan to do this. My advice is that blocking the variables in robots.txt is not worth it, as Google should have no problems with the variables - especially if the canonical tags are working.

Googlebot at least is smart enough these days to know when to stop crawling variable pages, so I think there are more important on-site things to worry about. Make sure your categories are linked to and optimized, for example.

If I'm not mistaken Magento has canonical tags on category pages by default, so you might be trying to solve an issue that doesn't exist. Take a look at the source code on faceted navigation to confirm. Or you can send me the site and I'll look over it.