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Hi Bob,

Like so many things in SEO, I'd be looking at this from a UX point of view first and foremost, then do a quick revision through your SEO glasses before implementing.

Will making this H1 change help or hinder your user experience?

To offer my own opinion in response to this question, I think the answer is 'hinder'. As a user I would much rather see just the name of the shoe both on the category page and in the H1 of the product page.

It's clean, succinct and doesn't feel like someone had an SEO agenda when they crafted it. I'd even go so far as to say I'd think twice before handing over my credit card details to a site that used product titles like "Adidas Action Series Shoes size 5 through 10 for running, walking, and hiking" rather than simply "Adidas Action Series". Even the word "shoes" is quite redundant here in my opinion.

To give you an idea of a website that ranks very well in this field in Australia, check out HypeDC. They're not our client, nor have they ever been but they deserve that link because they do a great job in most areas and they highlight my point. They sell shoes (and all things shoe-like... sneakers, boots etc) and yet they don't jam the word(s) into every title, heading and paragraph they can.

If you're looking at the Nike Air Huarache Ultra shoe, that shoe's product title on the category page is simply "Nike Air Huarache Ultra". That's it. No mention of shoe, shoes, running, walking, hiking, footwear etc. The page title is almost identical and even the content on the product page has no mention of the word shoe!

While I wouldn't necessarily recommend avoiding the keyword like they have, it's a clear demonstration that Google understands your website as a whole so there's no need to go jamming all those keywords everywhere. Craft a pleasant user experience and make sure your website in clear, as a single unit, what you do.

You may be wondering how the hell HypeDC ranks so well without using the keyword even once? All I can offer is external suggestions but I'd say it's a combination of the following:

• They don't sell 'cheap shoes' so they know their target audience are "shoe people" who are pretty likely to know what they want already so I'd expect the search volume of specific shoe models is quite high. Just referencing the specific model on a product page likely works in their favor for these searches.

• Their link profile is highly relevant, as is their anchor profile. This means from the link profile alone Google can start to understand that HypeDC = shoe store.

• They have no shortage of pages on the site that relate directly to things in the shoe industry. A "shoe size guide", a bunch of shoe questions in the FAQ, a page for each of their shoe manufacturers etc.

I'm sure there are plenty more but this post is already getting long (sorry!) but you get the picture. Don't get caught up in "where and how exactly should I place my keyword in this element to appease the Google Gods?", just make a user friendly website and 9 times out of 10 you will have made a well-optimised one by accident!

I realise shoes is possibly not even your vertical but I'm just working with the example at hand. Everything I've just said can be applied to any industry because the core principles don't change.

I hope this helps!

Hi Alex,

No problem at all, happy to help!

The naming convention creates an interesting problem. It makes perfect sense now but without understanding your range, it was very confusing. It's great to have an outside set of eyes on these things sometimes, especially since I'd expect most of your SEO target audience to be new users.

For starters, I'd consider changing the nav text from Artificial Grass to something like Our Range or Artificial Grass Range to make it clearer that this is a range, not locations; Artificial Grass is a little more ambiguous.

To further clarify this for people, you could also add a heading to the drop-down menu under that item. Something like "Select from our range below" or "Already know which product you need? Select from our range below" - something that suggests the items in this drop-down aren't locations, they're the different types of grass.

Search engines these days are quite clever so I'd expect that as long as you always reference "Easi-Mayfair" and don't allow variations like Easi Mayfair or just Mayfair, this should be clear enough.

the worry of current email addresses and redirecting the TLDs to the subdirectory.

Don't be too concerned about this. I can't imagine too many users would try to visit the domain used in your email address and even if they do, the redirect is in place and working correctly so they'll end up in the right spot. The .dk email addresses still work so changing all those users over to .com address is likely more hassle than it's worth.

It's not so much that this is going to hurt you but it also won't really help. You're far better off putting the effort into creating genuinely helpful content for each one. It's time-consuming but you only get out what you put in!

You're not going to get a manual penalty for this sort of thing but it isn't exactly a great quality signal to have most pages on your site showing the same content over and over.

The short answer is "nobody knows"

Whether or not it will ever show up is completely at Google's discretion. Generally speaking, the only time that carousel will display in the SERPs is if the website is highly authoritative.

If you think about it from Google's point of view, their aim is to provide the highest possible value to their searchers. If you were a local plumber who Tweets a quote or funny joke a couple of times per year, schema markup or not, displaying this in the carousel won't provide any value at all and takes up precious screen real estate.

There's no magic number (that Google is going to give us anyway) that will get it to display either. It could be a combination of Tweet volume and regularity, interaction, followers etc and is likely combined with the strength and relevance of your website in the context of your search query too.

Applying that schema is still a good idea in my opinion, it's just not as simple as "if I apply it to my site, it will definitely display in SERPs". This is true for all forms of schema markup. You're giving your site the best possible chance to display better in the SERPs but it doesn't necessarily mean it will happen.

I hope that helps!

Hi Mark,

I can't really comment on the Moz tools questions, though I suspect it simply has limited functionality for sites that aren't in English.

With regards to your keyword stuffing concerns for an ecommerce website, as with most things in this industry just do what makes sense for the user and (most of) the rest will take care of itself.

In this particular scenario what that means is if your current setup has an awkward number of keywords on it then you should revise, otherwise leave it as-is. For example, if you sell menswear and that word appears in the title of every product you sell that could be a problem.

Updating them all at once isn't inherently bad, it's more about the quality of the updated ones that may see a negative impact.

When you say a breadcrumb structure, I immediately think of something like this: "Letterboxes - Steel - Small | Site Name" - is that what they're looking to move to? Handcrafted ones can be made far more compelling and often less spammy but it depends on the context of your site really and how many pages you're talking about.

Regardless of the number of pages, you should at least be writing them manually for the key landing pages - remember, the main reason for a page title is to attract that click from the right type of user in the SERPs.

If you'd like to share some examples of the proposed ones I can probably be much more helpful

Hi Angelo,

Those location-specific domains are what we refer to as a ccTLD (Country Code Top Level Domain) and while they are a minor signal to both search engines and users, if they're being 301'd to the .com they won't be offering any signals at all. The only way they'd be passing strength is if they have backlinks pointing to them. If this is the case, you can expect ~80-90% of this strength to be passed via the redirect, the same as a standard link according to Matt Cutts in 2013.

If you really wanted to put those ccTLDs to good use you could create a geo-specific site on each one and have them rank individually for their respective country however I generally recommend against doing this simply because you're tripling the amount of time and budget that's required since each domain has to stand on its own merit.

No problem Cesar.

With 1500 pages, the most time-efficient thing to do right now is to keep and/or write your own for the most important landing pages and use a different template format for the others.

It's not reasonable to go writing 1500 page titles and meta descriptions right now but for at least your primary landing pages (if it's ecommerce then your category and subcategory pages), you should be writing them manually.

As for the other pages, using a templated approach is your best bet for the time being but the breadcrumb style will still give you quite a lot of duplication which is a bit of a worry. If you have 200 products under a single subcategory, that's 202 pages that all have the same keyword(s) in the title:

Category
     Category - Subcategory
     Category - Subcategory - Product 1
     Category - Subcategory - Product 2
     Category - Subcategory - Product 3
etc

A better-templated approach for an ecommerce site is to use basic product info and your brand as the page title.

For example, _iPhone 6s Replacement Screen - VX902 | FoneScreenz _

In this example it includes the name of the product on that page, and a product code which would both be variables, as well as the business name (FYI the product code and business are fabricated). This covers users searching by either product name or the specific code and is descriptive enough that it will do just fine.

Basically, the template would look something like:

[Product Name] - [Product Code] | Business Name

We've experienced almost exactly the same process in the past when a dev accidentally left staging.domain.com open for indexation... the really bad news is that despite noticing this, blocking via Robots and going through the same process to remove the wrong ones via Search Console etc, getting the correct domain ranking in the top 50 positions took almost 6 infuriating months!

Just like you, we saw the non-www version and the staging.domain version of the pages indexed for a couple of months after we fixed everything up then all of a sudden one day the two wrong versions of the site disappeared from the index and the correct one started grabbing some traction.

All this to say that to my knowledge, there are no active tasks you can really perform beyond what you've already done to speed this process up. Maybe building a good volume of strong links will push a positive signal that the correct one should be recrawled. We did spend a considerable amount of time looking into it and the answer kept coming back the same - "it just takes time for Google to recrawl the three versions of the site and figure it out".

This is essentially educated speculation but I believe the reason this happens is because for whatever reason the wrong versions were crawled first at different points to be the original version so the correct one was seen as 100% duplicate and ignored. This would explain why you're seeing what you are and also why in a magical 24hr window that could come at any point, everything sorted itself out - it seems that the "original" versions of the domain no longer exist so the truly correct one is now unique.

If my understanding of all this is correct, it would also mean that moving your site to yet another domain wouldn't help either since according to Google's cache/index, the wrong versions of your current domain are still live and the "original" so putting that same site/content on a different domain would just be yet another version of the same site.

Apologies for not being able to offer actionable tasks or good news but I'm all ears for future reference if anyone else has a solution!

Since subdomains are treated as a completely separate domain, your options here are essentially to go with an aged domain with backlinks vs a fresh domain that will be "sandboxed" for a little while.

Before someone yells at me for it, no, the Google Sandbox no longer exists but you will still see fresh domains rank nowhere for several months in most scenarios.

With that out of the way, as long as moving those maps to the subdomain doesn't provide a poor UX then this is going to be your best option. Retain the strength you've already built and keep going from there rather than starting fresh. Just be weary of the potential for existing users who may have saved favorites or emailed links to the primary domain; you don't want them landing on a functional page that looks nothing like what they were expecting!

Hi Meier,

That seems like a bit of a strange suggestion. The thing about Yoast is that it's great and powerful but it can't really be used as a task list. Rather than seeing the items as "it's on the list so I have to do it", see them more as an indicator of "I should investigate that, it might need to be fixed.

Focus more on the UX here - would changing the landing pages to blog posts improve the user experience? Chances are the answer is no so I'd just stick with your current configuration.

Hope that helps!

No problem at all, happy to help. Unfortunately the best tools that we have to evaluate these are tools like Open Site Explorer which try to emulate how Google looks at links but they're imperfect for the very same reason that I can't possibly give you a definitive answer: Google doesn't want us to know!

Unfortunately, the only way we can ever know the outcome is to implement the change and see if the rankings get better or worse - welcome to the struggles of SEO!

If you really can't afford to be taking a hit right now but it would be more acceptable in a month or two (e.g. right now is your busiest period) I'd be inclined to wait. Otherwise, it's a tough call but I'd still lean toward having them removed. Don't forget that Google has been promising a Penguin (backlinks) update "very soon" all year! If that damn update finally rolls out tomorrow you may find yourself getting slammed by it... or it could roll out next year... or maybe it'll roll out and you'll be fine. Sigh.

We have had success in doing it steadily with one of our larger clients who were in a similar situation and the results were as good as we could have hoped for but YMMV. We essentially did the removal in stages. We divided the bad domains up into batches then contacted the first batch requesting removal then disavowing.

While all this was happening we also got to work building quality links to the site as well so they roughly cancelled each other out. Then we did the same thing with the other batches of bad links until we'd been through the lot.

For us, the end result was a series of fairly marginal peaks and troughs that directly correlated with link removal and link acquisition so the net position at any given time was approximately the same. I must stress though that YMMV here - since I have a total data sample of 2 domains (this client has 2 companies/sites), it's impossible for me to say with absolute certainty that what I saw is the direct result of our process.

Hi Rachel,

Not a problem, glad to hear you're on the right track! It's great to see the pages looking unique and much better for UX.

Looking at the elements flagged in your spam score breakdown, there are some relatively easy fixes in here still which may be contributing at least somewhat. To answer your question directly I would expect it will still be related to your link profile meaning less poor links and more quality ones will be the fix.

Don't forget that this score isn't a direct Google metric either. The entire Spam Score system is meant to be little more than a system of red flags for you to investigate - having a bad spam score isn't inherently a bad thing but it also shouldn't go ignored.

As for whether or not the Spam Score takes disavowed links into account, I can't find confirmation for this either way but I'd doubt it. This would require them having access to your Search Console to see the disavowed file.

Low MozTrust or MozRank Score / Large Site with Few Links These will obviously be resolved with ongoing link building but are likely the most significant factor in current score.

Small Proportion of Branded Links As you go about your link building, it tends to happen naturally but be sure to continue building links that use your brand name as the anchor.

Large Number of External Links You do have a fair volume of external links but they all appear to be legitimate so I'd ignore this one.

Low Number of Internal Links This one is quite valid. Beyond the nav I couldn't really see any internal linking practices going on. They shouldn't be promotional links within your blogs but just making sure that any piece of content that may be relevant to another page also includes a link. For example, if we mention Adwords on our SEO page, we'd include a link to our Adwords page for users who may want more information.

No Contact Info
May be caused by the fact that the phone number tends to show up with slightly unusual formatting in each instance; either:

• 855.4.CYNTOX (429.6869)
• 855.429.6869

I'd be interested to see if changing this to just 855 429 6869 would clear that flag in the spam score. Applying schema markup here may also help.

External Links in Navigation This seems to be referring to the nav links to your login areas so it's another area I wouldn't really worry about. Changing this would frustrate users for the sake of satisfying an arbitrary checkpoint in this list which is exactly what we're not supposed to do with a tool like this!

On an interesting side note, ahrefs is still showing 42 obviously spammy referring domains. This won't change anything to do with your spam score since Moz isn't pulling Ahrefs metrics but it may not be great for your Google rankings if they're seeing the same links.

This is the correct answer.

To expand on this slightly, just make sure none of the 404s are internal (ie there are no links on your site pointing to one of these dodgy pages as a result of the hack) and you're all good.

Remove the entries from your htaccess file to avoid having to parse them constantly and let any external links to dodgy pages 404. This sort of circumstance is exactly what 404s are made for!

The only site at risk of a ranking drop from these 404s is the one pointing to those dodgy pages - who cares about your hackers' rankings?

The other comments here are correct; Adwords will not alter your organic rankings.

The issue here may be something else entirely. You mentioned that your onsite factors are better than the competition and both your site and your top competition have few backlinks. It sounds like that should basically put you on an even playing field there roughly (though it depends on link quality too) so perhaps there are some holes in your onsite that could be addressed.

You also mentioned that your engagement metrics like time on site and page views are better than the competition. Assuming you're getting this info from something like SEMrush, it could simply be that you're relying on inaccurate data to make your decisions. SEMrush is great to give basic information but it isn't 100% accurate.

If you're comfortable dropping a link to your website I'd be happy to take a much closer look for you and offer some helpful feedback? If you don't want that link public you can PM me if you prefer.

For internal links, just keep them relevant so people know what the link is before even clicking on it. If you have a guide on how to write page titles, make the internal anchor something like "guide to page titles".

As for external backlinks, if they're editorial links that someone else is posting, it's usually best to just leave this up to the site owner since they're going to make it relevant anyway. The best way to have a natural looking anchor text profile is to make it natural!

If you have to control the anchors (e..g directories or a guest post) then we typically lean toward this priority order:

1. Your brand name
2. Your URL
3. Your primary keyword(s)

That means that if you did web design and the name was "ProWeb", your anchor text profile would probably look something like this, in order of highest to lowest volume:

1. ProWeb
2. Pro Web
3. http://www.proweb.com
4. www.proweb.com
5. Web Design
6. Website Design
7. webdeign

You will get all kinds of variations like mis-spellings, "read more", "click here" etc as well but you get the picture.

I hope that helps! Just make sure you don't have your keywords as the most common anchors - it's pretty obvious spam!

Hi Laura,

Welcome to the Moz community!

Without a domain to do some further investigation, these types of questions can be some of the toughest to answer because there are so many variables that could be causing the problem.

I can't comment on your current site but what I can say is that from experience, if this is happening it's typically going to be one of three things (maybe a combination?):

• More links pointing to the individual product pages than to the category pages
• Either no or low quality content on the subcategory pages; basically just showing a big chunk of products and nothing else
• Poor internal linking with more internal links pointing to those products, the category pages in a separate section of the nav, no category breadcrumbs etc. URL structure ties in here in much the same way.

If we think about typical user behaviour, it makes perfect sense that your product pages would be getting more backlinks than the categories. If we're talking about real users in a forum and they want to reference a product you sell, they're going to link straight to that product and the same can be said in most other contexts too.

This isn't a problem at all - real backlinks being earned in a natural way is always good. It just means you may need to put some effort into driving strength to the category pages too.

Content is a topic that gets so much attention in this industry that I don't think I really need to elaborate here - just make sure there is a decent amount of high-quality content on the pages, styled in a way that doesn't bury the products. UX first!

Finally, the internal linking. It's very hard to give advice on this part without seeing the site but basically, search engines tend to look at your nav to get an indication of which pages are likely the most important on the page from left to right, top to bottom. If you have an unusual structure where the category pages are buried down in the drop-downs (or - gasp - not even in the nav because there are buttons on the home page or something!) then you're missing an easy win there.

Don't forget that breadcrumbs and URL structure should ultimately match this same layout. Something like website.com/category/product.

This is all quite vague but hopefully it makes sense to the site you're working with now. Always happy to take a closer look if you'd like to share the URL here or in PM but I completely understand if you're not comfortable with that too.

It's something you shouldn't _really _doing so it comes with the usual warning of "use with caution"...

That said, the chances of anything negative happening here are so slim it's probably not worth worrying about. If you were cloaking shady anchor text relating to gambling or viagra it would be a different story.

There are two other points to be aware of here though. Firstly, it's very unlikely you'll see any ranking difference between those two link anchors in your link profile. The other is that it sounds like you're dropping footer links on your clients' sites to build your link profile. That one is cause for genuine concern if it's on a large volume. If it's only a couple of sites, disregard everything below!

How these are treated post Penguin 4.0 I don't know just yet but at best, they're given very little weight. We've just finished pulling one of our web design clients back up from ~ page 8 after he built a large volume of those same footer links over about 6 months. It may be because they were all irrelevant links (his clients have nothing to do with web design, obviously) or perhaps because his anchor profile was 98% "Web Design". Which of these caused the problem is quite irrelevant.

We removed those links from all but a handful of sites and he's back to the middle of page 1 so the real work just started. This was earlier in the year so again, I have no clue how that same thing would play you now after the latest update.

Hope that helps!

It's hard to say exactly without seeing your site since there are so many potential variables (e.g. are most of your blog posts low quality or just a minority? etc) that would define the best way to go about it.

What I can say though is that you're on the right track as far as using analytics data to determine which ones are providing value right now. There is a danger in losing some rankings if you go removing a huge volume of these posts. Unless they're utter rubbish posts, they'll likely be providing relevance signals to Google on what your site is about. That said, I do think it's a necessary evil and I'd expect you'll be rewarded for it in the long run provided you start replacing the trash with high quality posts in the future.

As for the benefits, if they really are low quality then user engagement is going to be terrible which is obviously not what you should be aiming for. It's also going to be chewing up your crawl budget for no good reason so the leaner your site is, the better base you have to start rebuilding with quality instead of quantity. For the same reason, I generally suggest removing tags and categories that aren't providing any actual benefit too - in most cases I see they're just there either "for good SEO" or because the site owners things that's how users are browsing their site but in almost all cases, that's not true. As always, check your own data on this to be sure.

As for removing vs noindex, this one is always contentious but I lean toward removing simply because it's going to clean things up for the user too and ultimately they should be your primary focus. Having 40,000+ pages of trash on your website is a fantastic indicator to them that your site may not be somewhere they want to be and noindexing them won't do anything to change the user's experience.

Hope that helps!

You can click on the domain and see the full list of links. If you've done this and confirmed the links really are dead, it's likely that they used to exist and Google is yet to re-crawl them and notice they've been removed.

Search Console does tend to be quite laggy (ie data you see in there is quite a bit behind) so don't put too much emphasis on what you see there. If the links are gone then that will be noted soon and ultimately there's nothing you can do to speed that up unfortunately.