Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hello,

There is no definitive answer, it really comes down to how you want people browsing your website. For instance, I would suggest a user stay within the same tab if they click from one blog article to the next. There's no reason they need to have a new tab opened. Now if they are on a product page and you have a suggested items section, once they click the suggested item should open in a new tab. This will let the user remember what they were originally browsing along with seeing additional products.

Also, I believe many users get suspicious once a new window opens when they click something. If they are expecting to stay within the same window or even tab. It can look spammy or like an ad/pop up, which could result in closing all.

Browse any major website, how often are you forced to open a new tab or window? Hardly ever, the only time it happens is when you are leaving the main URL.

I hope this helps.

Chris Hickman

Adficient.com

Hello,

Yes you are able to upload multiple sitemaps to your Google Search Console. Often sites that have thousands of pages will create multiple sitemaps to make it both easier for them to manage and search engines to crawl. Just make sure to keep them separate, what I mean by this is have one sitemap dedicated to your blog and blog only, same with your Magento site. Don't cross-reference pages into both.

Hope this helps.

Chris Hickman

Adficient.com

Hello,

Is everything on your site properly optimized? For instance, is your site speed scoring well? Often people will leave a site if the page is loading too slow. Research shows it's often after 2 seconds.

Are your landing pages associated with the terms or queries that are bringing users to the site? People will often bounce from a page if it's not related to what they searched. However, it often takes more than a second to realize the page you're on is not related to the search though.

Where's this traffic coming from? Search, direct, social media? If it's direct and only a second, then a bounce, that would strike me as spammy.

Hope this helps.

Chris Hickman - Adficient

Hello,

If your links are from the navigation don't worry about having too many internal links. The Moz tool is more of a suggestion and will not differentiate between navigation links and other on page links. Ultimately you do not want to have a page that appears as an internal link farm, and search engines will distinguish between navigation and other links.

Hope this helps, if you have more questions just ask.

Chris

Adficient.com

JP,

The best reason to have comments on a site is to add some additional value and increase in engagement. Other than that, they are not necessary. You want to have comments that are thought out, relevant, and helpful. Avoid the spammy links, which happens quite a bit on a WP site. There are some good plugins that blog spammy links, I would look into those. You can also approve any back links, which I would suggest. This way you don't get the spammy comments. Those comments are not adding any value to your page.

Hope this helps.

Chris

Adficient.com

Hello,

There's an number of reasons of why a site may outrank another site. With a quick comparison it does appear your site is better in a few areas. There are some pretty typical SEO changes I would make to increase the site's ranking.

1. Review your meta - Looking at a few pages on your site I would suggest reviewing your meta, including title and description. Utilize your location and keywords within both the title and meta description. You're wasting some great real estate.
2. Build some back links - The number, and quality, of back links pointing to your site are very low. Avoid posting to strictly directories. I suggest finding quality business listing sites (like FourSquare) to post your business. A few high quality back links will separate you from the competition.
3. Write your own content - I threw your latest blog post into CopyScape and it turns out it's just a copied and pasted article from another site that was posted a few weeks prior. Create some content that people are asking questions about, develop content that is helpful and entertaining to users.

These are just a few points, I would suggest a complete site audit to see where else you are missing opportunities. If you would like some additional information feel free to contact us.

Chris

Adficient.com

Hello,

The tool I would use to find a competitors new back links would be ahrefs.com. You can plug in any domain and see new and lost links from different time periods. This is not only helpful for checking a competitors links, but it's great for tracking any links your site may have lost.

If you're looking for more information on comparing your site to the competition.

Chris

Adficient.com

Lee,

One of my favorite tools is Agency Analytics, which is excellent for tracking keywords. It updates daily, so you get very accurate reports, and it's very simple to use. You can also track the keywords from the date you entered them, this is great for our team, since we can show ranking increases since we started a campaign.

I would suggest trying them out, it's pretty helpful.

Chris

Adficient.com

All you need is a hosting account and to point the domain to a specific directory containing your .htaccess file.

Place your 301 redirects in the .htaccess file and you will be good to go. No WordPress install is necessary.

Hi, glad to hear your rebranding is going well. I think it would be appropriate to mention your previous brand name briefly within the page content. Because of the backlinks with anchor text to the old name this may allow you to continue to rank for that name.

I can't imagine that it would do any harm so long as you do not change your new title tags also. This might become confusing in terms of branding for SEO. Overall, I don't think it is necessary or a concern, but it could provide you additional exposure if people are looking for the old name.

Charles,

My suggestion would be to jump in and begin playing around with the tools. The best way to get an idea on how things work is to click around and see what features each tools have. You'll quickly learn how to navigate the tools and see how each tool operates.

If you want some videos here are a few links to what Moz has created. These may be helpful in showing what tools are capable of.

https://www.udemy.com/user/seomoz/

https://www.youtube.com/user/MozHQ

Hope this helps.

Chris

Adficient.com

Hello,

A simple solution would be to add a robots.txt that will close the page to bots. This is typically for pages you do not want search engines to crawl, however if it is spammy and it's just 'fake' traffic from bots this could cut down on it.

If you would like it to be removed from your analytics you can add it to a removal page. Essentially, it will not show any traffic that goes to that page.

Hope this helps.

Chris Hickman

Adficient.com

Hi Wallace, You should not be so concerned about going ahead with the 301 redirects. While you will see a temporary drop in traffic, your new website will be indexed quickly and should take over your search rankings.

Google webmaster trends analyst Gary Illyes recently confirmed that 301 redirects will not cause a loss in PageRank or page authority. The backlinks you have acquired for your old domain name will still benefit your new domain name if the proper 301 redirects are kept in place.

There may be other issues that could affect your rankings such as switching to a new web design or changing your title tags. If you keep everything consistent I believe you should not have any major loss in Google rankings. Best of luck.

Aaron,

It looks like the backlink profile has had some ups and downs over the last 12 months. There was a drop in Nov, then peaked around the end of May and has been dropping since. Now if you have been removing links this would explain quite a bit. In the last 60 days 48 domains removed links. You may be losing older links that could influence your organic traffic. Make sure you're always adding new, high-quality links.

I didn't see a blog, are you adding new content to the site?

Also, you should fix the 'our products' drop down menu, doesn't fit in all browsers. You can use browserstack to check this.

It doesn't look like a penalty, but keep adding links, just make sure they are quality links.

Hope this helps.

Chris Hickman

Hello John, interesting dilemma you have. I think you have a good idea as well. I would be interested to learn about the level of competition for this term, I imagine it can not be that intensive if your PDF is ranking #1.

My recommendation would be to build the landing page, but include some of the content from your PDF as a preview. You can then offer the free download sign up to continue reading. It's likely the PDF is ranking well because of the content.

Of course you will want to create a 301 redirect to the new landing page from the old PDF URL. Also, keep the same title tag or anchor text that people are using to link to the PDF or the title that Google is currently giving the PDF. I think you have a good chance of retaining the #1 ranking if done right.

You may also have meta information within your PDF that you will want to migrate to the landing page. We're a big fan of landing pages at AdFicient and this sounds like a promising opportunity. Best of luck.

Hello, because you are using a country code domain name and not a generic domain name for your second site it should not be as big of a problem. Google does have some guidelines for international sites and duplicate content. They say that you should try to have unique content for the specific country.

I recommend you consider doing this for your high priority pages and make them have unique titles and copy. Then you would want to use a rel="canonical" tag to all other pages that directs to the .com site.

If your goal is to get the com.au website ranked on Google Australia then you will want to make it as unique as possible from your primary site.

Hope this helps. Best of luck.

Hello, I took a look at your site and it seems like the responsive design is working fine. The only content I notice that is going off screen is in your copyright text. When the screen is very small the text "WolfAutomation.com/www.wolfautomation.com" is partially obscured. I'm not sure if that's the source of the error, but you could try to include a space or shorten this text to see.

I always like pointing out the linking C blocks when comparing the competition. If you're not familiar with linking C blocks, these are essentially IPs from servers of domains that are pointing to your site. You may have 10k backlinks, but they are coming from 2 C blocks. Ideally you would want to have a large variation of links, coming from an assortment of C blocks. In a nutshell you want to have links coming from all over, but make sure they are diverse, relevant, and high quality. It does take time.

Hope this helps.

Chris

Adficient.com

I think Linda is referring to the head <title>tag. The original question references link title attribute which is not shown on search engines.</p></title>

Hi Myles,

Good question. The short answer is that it is not necessary for SEO if you have pages linked elsewhere (such as your menu and category pages), but it can be beneficial. The reason it can be good for SEO is to cover all the bases and make sure that even your least important posts and pages get some internal links to them and get crawled.

It can be a great resource for users to find things on your site. The main purpose of these pages is for users.

If your sitemap is going to be very massive I would consider using other navigation menus, sub-navigation menus or categories instead. Otherwise go ahead and add one.

Matt Cutts of Google has previously said that an HTML sitemap can be more beneficial than XML sitemaps for indexing. Both are recommended. Hope this helps and best of luck with your SEO efforts.