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Hi Kristina Problem fixed - the websites analytics was suffering from Ghost Spam URLs. A new one for me! Best Duncan

There are a few different things this could be, none of which are that much cause for concern, thankfully. Some questions to ask: Where are you seeing the rankings fluctuate? In the Google interface? In a ranking tool? In multiple tools? Since Google is testing things all the time and results are more and more personalized, it's pretty common to see keyword fluctuations, especially in rank tracking tools. I would check the keyword in a second ranking tool, and also Google it in a private window, to see if you can duplicate the results - if not, it may be a quirk of the tool and not of the rankings. Along those same lines - do you see your organic traffic to that page fluctuate along with the fluctuations in ranking? Since you're on page 2, you may not be getting a ton of traffic from that specific term, but it's worth checking on. If that's not the case and the rankings really are fluctuating, what other changes can you note in the SERPs during the changes? One example from my own life: I had a client who was targeting a term that Google seemed to be trying to figure out whether or not it was appropriate to show local/localized results. The presence or absence of that local pack changed that SERP a lot. Ranking fluctuations like this are pretty common, especially once you drop off the first page. If it's not seriously impacting your traffic or conversions, I wouldn't be too concerned about it. Your best defense here is a good offense - try to bolster that page's rankings and authority to get it on page 1. I know that's easier said than done, but it's a lot easier to deal with ranking fluctuations when they're between spot 4 and spot 7, instead of page 2 and page 5.

It doesn't sound like a penalty problem at all, otherwise you'd see more of your pages impacted. You're saying you've done internal links to them - but only mention footer links. Have you also put internal links in your texts, pointing to these pages) I honestly don't put much value on footerlinks, as they're not part of the main content on a page. From my experience these don't really add much compared to links in the main content (the category/product descriptions or whatever text you have on there). I would focus on a few of the deeper pages and give them some internal links from your stronger pages to see if you can boost their authority.

Piggybacking on Kane - since these bad/phantom pages were in one folder, can you request removal in Search Console? It should at least speed things up. Unfortunately, the links can show for weeks or months after they're removed, even if Google doesn't seem to be caching them. If the pages aren't indexed/cached, and the numbers in the console seem to be gradually dropping, I'm not sure if there's a lot more you can do, unfortunately.

The Moz crawl report will also show 404s.  I sometimes find that different spiders may find different things.  Between the Search Console report, Screaming Frog (great investment) and Moz, you should have a nice collection of things to fix.

No... it may simply mess up with canonicalization in certain cases (eg: ASP based websites) and surely is not that user friendly (people tend to type in URLs lowercase, apart some crazy people)

Hi Cayenne. This can happen in cases where Google views the mobile site as a non-mobile or as the only available result to a desktop search query.  Here's a recent blog post from Google during at the time of the change: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2015/04/faqs-april-21st-mobile-friendly.html What you'll want to check is the mobile friendliness and load speeds of both the mobile and desktop sites. At times people have seen very slow loading desktop sites with lots of PageSpeed issues get outranked by the lighter mobile versions. Next, use the various checks mentioned on that page to ensure that mobile.domain.com is indeed viewed as mobile by Google. And here's Moz's guide to provide an overall picture of what the mobile site should accomplish: https://moz.com/learn/seo/mobile-optimization Cheers!

Don't forget that every keyword is different - how you rank depends on what you're doing compared to other sites targeting that term, not just what you're doing on your own site. So some keywords just take a larger, higher-authority link profile to rank for than others. A good place to start with getting links for that page would be to look at the backlinks that other pages that rank for that term have - you may be able to get some links from the same or similar sites.

Brand or domain anchor text links are far more natural than keyword anchor text. Gaining links that are brand or raw domain from an authority site will benefit your sites authority. I always look at it like this - if you didn't know anything about SEO and you liked a site that you wanted to link to and this site sold blue widgets for example would you link via the domain/brand name or by entering "blue widgets"? You would go with the more obvious, easier option domain or brand - hence this is far more natural in the eyes of Google and far more likely to have been earned naturally. Increasing authority is all about earning links not (dare I say it..) link building. Focus on creating great content and making people aware of it then the links will start to come naturally. SEO isn't a quick fix, so approach this with a strategy looking to build a quality online presence and establish a relevant audience for your site through social and other channels.

Advertisements can definitely reduce the quality of your website in Google's eyes, however, if your site as a whole is informative, 100+ pages and optimized as you described, I might take a quick look at over optimization of link anchor text or the site for competitive keywords. Definitely check WMT for any warnings from G as well and, be aware, that the Hummingbird algorithm just rolled out. Also, are the affiliate links set to rel=no follow?

Hey there From an SEO point of view, there is not going to be much difference in either option.  Both options have 3 or less subfolder levels and both would contain the keyword attempting to target. I'd approach this from a user experience perspective - do you think it will be beneficial for the user to have a /Ford-Cars/ subfolder, in order to show them where they are - or would the page itself accomplish this? Similarly, if you create a category page for /Ford-Cars and /Toyota-Cars/ etc. - will you be able to add some quality content to this page and also use the page to rank for some other keyword terms?  If you can, then I'd use the /Ford-Cars/Ford-Mondeo structure as you will be passing down 'strength' to the product page from the category page. Look at point 14 in this guide - which mentions content hubs.  Imagine a similar structure for your website, the hub - which would be /Ford-Cars/ in your example, could actually be easier to rank and gain authority to and in doing so, this would power the specific product pages, helping them to rank too. Hope this helps.