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Thank you. The 301s have been put back. I did wonder if I needed to do anything at all! (I'm a great believer in leaving well alone - why poke a wasp's nest if you don't need to lol)

Over the last month there has actually been a slight increase in organic traffic to the new website.

My concern is that some pages seem to have been removed from the index. Also (which I didn't say above) that impressions have gone down - however this could be seasonal rather than anything sinister.

Do you know of a tool that shows you which urls are in the index - aside from Google, I mean - something I can extract into a spreadsheet?

Thank you for helping me again today

Hi,

I have a bit of an issue...

Around a year ago we launched a new company. This company was launched out of a trading style of another company owned by our parent group (the trading style no longer exists). We used a lot of the content from the old trading style website, carefully mapping page-to-page 301 redirects, using the change of address tool in webmaster tools and generally did a good job of it. The reason I know we did a good job is that although we lost some traffic in the month we rebranded, we didn't lose rankings. We have since gained traffic exponentially and have managed to increase our organic traffic by over 200% over the last year.

All well and good.

However, a mistake has recently occurred whereby the old trading style website domain was deleted from the server for a period of around 2-3 weeks. It has since been reinstated.

Since then, although we haven't lost rankings for the keywords we track I can see in webmaster tools that a number of our pages have been deindexed (around 100+).

It has been suggested that we put the old homepage back up, and include a link to the XML sitemap to get Google to recrawl the old URLs and reinstate our 301 redirects. I'm OK with this (up to a point - personally I don't think it's an elegant solution) however I always thought you didn't need a link to the xml sitemap from the website and that the crawlers should just find it?

Our current plan is not to put the homepage up exactly as it was (I don't believe this would make good business sense given that the company no longer exists), but to make it live with an explanation that the website has moved to a different domain with a big old button pointing to the new site. I'm wondering if we also need a button to the xml sitemap or not? I know I can put a sitemap link in the robots file, but I wonder if that would be enough for Google to find it?

Any insights would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,

Amelia

Thank you for the links.

I have canonicalised the filtered products, and have put a request in to make the H1s editable so will alter those as soon as I can.

Thank you all for taking the time to answer this question, I appreciate it greatly.

Best wishes,

Amelia

Thank you!

Thank you Patrick. I think I agree with you, but I'll wait for other responses as well! It's been like this for over a month so a few more days won't harm it

Best wishes,

Amelia

Thank you - yes people do use very specific queries to find mortgages. We have landing pages for the higher volume keywords (I won't bore you with the list!!!).

I don't want to rank for 'Mortgage Comparison' as we don't offer residential mortgages - just those for business purposes (such as BTL) so although we'd get a huge amount of traffic our bounce rate would go through the roof - or we'd get enquiries we couldn't deal with which would be a waste of resource...

I appreciate your point about the H1s - and I'll get these updated as soon as I can (I think our devs need to do some stuff to the page to allow me to edit it myself) - Thank you!

Thanks again,

Amelia

I've had problems and emailed them to ask what the devil is going on - they replied saying that they would compensate me for the time the service is down for. That was last week. I logged in this morning and my rankings were tracked successfully, so I emailed them to ask what compensation I will be getting... So far I haven't had a response, but they gave me a discount last year when a similar thing happened so I have every expectation of them fulfilling their promises.

Hi,

I'm in a bit of a quandary.

I have this page: https://www.commercialtrust.co.uk/compare-products/

As you can see we have provided filters to only display Fixed rate, Tracker rate, Variable rate, High LTV and HMO products for users.

At the moment our canonical tags all point to the main Comparison page, but in order for the search feature to work dynamic urls are created. So for example on the fixed rate page (https://www.commercialtrust.co.uk/compare-products/fixed-rates/) when a user puts in their search criteria the url ends up looking like this: https://www.commercialtrust.co.uk/compare-products/fixed-rates/?PrevTab=HMO&PVal=250000&Amt=100000&Tme=20&SearchId=5508

Now, my quandary is this - should I make the canonical tag for the filtered products (fixed, tracker etc) like this: https://www.commercialtrust.co.uk/compare-products/fixed-rates/ or should I keep it at https://www.commercialtrust.co.uk/compare-products/ ? The comparison page shows all products, ordered by the lowest rate and with a pre-set search, limited to 20 - so not all products will be displayed on the page - and some products (like the high LTV ones) are not displayed on the main comparison landing page anyway...

Thanks,

Amelia

Thank you Kane. We currently use Linkedin advertising, but more for driving leads than visits. It's not as successful as I hoped it would be, but we've had vouchers to keep the costs down so hasn't been a total flop. I think perhaps you're suggestion of using it (and Facebook) for content distribution is great and I will definitely look at this as a possibility.

Thank you also for the lowdown on these different platforms - its good to know which ones are best for targeting the right type of traffic we want to attract - e.g. B2B (though many landlords wouldn't necessarily consider themselves 'businesses' - even though technically they are).

I've read a lot of negative stuff about this kind of content distribution - and can totally see where the naysayers are coming from - who wants to be associated with '10 celebrities looking ugly at the beach' etc type articles? I want to be careful about this as negative associations could really damage us. However, we do need better content distribution so I am prepared to give it a shot for a month to see how it works out. I have read that the algorithms they use should put our articles on the bottom of relevant articles - but I don't always see this happening - most of the content seems to be BS about celebrities having weird bodies or some such rubbish even on serious financial articles. This is both a reason for us to be shy of it (bad association) and give it a go (we should stand out as being the only credible/relevant source in the bunch). Like I say, I'm prepared to give it a go. If you don't TRY these things, I guess you never know!

Have you used any of these before? If so, what were your experiences of it? How did you overcome some of the problems I've outlined above?

Thank you again!

Best wishes,

Amelia

Thank you Ryan.

Have you used any of these, and were they any good?

You may not be able to answer though as I suppose it depends on many variables - the content itself, the subject, the audience etc etc. I suppose I've answered my own question: only way to know is to try it for myself!!!

Have a great morning/afternoon/evening -I don't know what time zone you're in!!! - have a good one

Amelia

I use a lot of the ones you've mentioned here too, but in addition: SEM Rush - which I don't think anyone has mentioned yet?

It's good for Rankings, competitor analysis, adwords analysis and SEO audits - it finds broken links, missing alt text, dupliacte meta tags etc etc. I find the reports it generates quite helpful and easy to use. I've used it for keyword analysis too in the past, but as my site is up and running I don't really do a lot of this anymore - I know what keywords bring in traffic... I'm pretty sure that I only scratch the surface of it and that there is a lot more to be got from it, but I only have so many hours in a day!!!

I don't just use one tool though - I use a few at once and combine the findings. I don't expect one tool to do it all

Hope this helps,

Amelia

Hi,

I am looking into content discovery platforms such as Taboola and Outbrain to promote my website content.

We currently publish 2-3 articles a week, relevant to UK landlords and business owners. Our articles get around 7,000 unique visits a month - I'd like to increase this significantly.

The articles are all well-written, well-researched and relevant to our niche. I would really like to widen our audience base beyond just search (which is where the majority of our visitors come from), as I believe that there is a huge potential for traffic growth if we can get in front of the right people at the right time (which doesn't necessarily mean in the SERPs).

Do you know of any other content discovery platforms beyond the ones I mention above?

Has anyone else used these sorts of services in the past and if so, what sorts of results did you get?

Thanks,

Amelia

Hi,

We have a 'Why Choose us' section on most pages of one of our websites, and it hasn't affected our SEO in the slightest. It helps inform people as to why they should choose our company as opposed to the competition.

I don't believe it's 'garbage' - SO LONG as it's well executed. It drives conversion for us, so I think it's worth having.

I don't think it's worth having if there is nothing to differentiate yourself (or your client) but that's a different topic.

As far as SEO goes, it does no harm - so long as the rest of the content on the page is unique and useful.

Good luck, whatever you choose to do.

Amelia

Have you (or the company in question) tried contacting the newspaper to ask for the page to be updated/a new page/article written as the original version is so completely different to what the company now does?

Hi,

I just wanted to say that everything has been fixed. I was able to downgrade successfully.

Thank you James for sorting this out for me!

Best wishes,

Amelia

Thank you James. Most appreciated

Thanks, will do

Hi,

I wish to downgrade from a Large account to a Standard account. When I try to do this I get the following message:

The Moz Analytics Standard Monthly subscription offers fewer campaigns, keywords, crawled pages, and social accounts than you can currently track. If you wish to move to the Moz Analytics Standard Monthly subscription, you will first need to archive or delete 146 keywords, 1 campaigns, 1 social accounts.

**BUT **I only have 146 keywords, 1 campaign and 1 social account - do I have to archive the entire thing before I can downgrade? That doesn't seem very fair! I thought the Standard account gave the following:

• 5 Moz Analytics Campaigns
• 300 Keywords
• 250,000 Crawled Pages
• **15 **Social Accounts

What gives, Moz?

I only need the standard account now, so please let me downgrade - or my boss may make me get rid of it completely!!!

Thanks,

Amelia

Have you checked the site in the Panguin tool (http://www.barracuda-digital.co.uk/panguin-tool/)? I would do that before you blame a plugin! Not saying it definitely isn't that but check it wasn't an algo update first.

Good luck

Amelia