Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Jon,

A canonical tag can be used as you described, but you may have issues in your case.

The issue is that search engines treat canonical tags as a recommendation, not a directive. Meaning that they can choose to ignore the canonical tag if they think it's not appropriate.

In your case, if the canonicalized (link bait) page is getting more external links than the other page, it could increase the chance of the canonical tag being ignored because search engines might see it as the better page.

I think it would be best to have a single, high-quality page, but if you absolutely must keep the pages separate, use the canonical tag and see how things go.

Cheers,

David

Hi Marcus,

You could add canonical tags on the location pages that have no listings and point them to a top level region or another close-by location that does have listings.

The canonical tag will pass on any authority that each location page has and overcome the duplicate content issues that you are seeing.

I imagine that this would be a nightmare job if it had to be done manually, so hopefully you (or your developer) can set a rule that if there are no listings in a location it automatically points a canonical tag to another relevant page.

Another option would be to "noindex" location pages with no listings. This will solve the duplicate issues but won't pass on any authority the location pages might have.

Cheers

Hi Mike,

Yes, after 2-3 weeks we saw the new site ranking well for the same keywords the old site used to and was getting 80-90% of the organic traffic that those pages were getting on the old site.

This was about 6 months ago and the new site now gets more organic traffic than those pages ever got on the old site.

I'd love to hear how things go for you!

Cheers,

David

Hi Annabel,

OSE and other link tools may tell you if a site is linking to you, but they are not foolproof because it depends on whether those tools have indexed those links - which could take months.

The best way to check if a site is linking to you is with Screaming Frog.

Crawl the site you want to check and go to 'Bulk Export' > 'External Links'.

This will give you a spreadsheet with all the external links on that domain and from there you can find any links to your domain.

Cheers,

David

Hi Dreamrealemedia,

I would have absolutely no concerns about losing rankings/traffic from making the changes you've mentioned.

Optimizing image files to improve page load and improving keyword targeting in title/alt text - you can't go wrong with that.

Cheers,

David

Correct. It would pass pagerank but Google would also remove the pages from index.

Can you populate the locations with no current listings with random listings from surrounding locations? Or leave older listings live on the page under a heading "Recently Sold" - or something similar?

If you want to overcome duplicate issues and keep the pages indexed, you will need to populate the pages with some sort of unique content you or are going to keep getting these issues.

Hi David,

Not having a CMS on the old site will not cause you any issues.

The main thing you need is the 301 redirects to the new domain. You should also make sure that the redirects from the old domain are redirecting to the corresponding page on the new domain.
IE. You shouldn't be redirecting all pages from the old domain to the homepage on the new domain.

You might see some decreases in organic traffic for a week or two after the change, but it should pick up to its previous levels once search engines have properly crawled and indexed everything again.

Cheers,

David

Hi Ryan,

It would be best to use Screaming Frog if you want a true indication of your internal link structure.

https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/

Cheers,

David

Hi Jon,

People usually try to click on logos when they see them but you could use some sort of click tracking/heat mapping program to confirm if they are or not. If they are trying to click, it would be a good idea to link them to something.

Where to link to depends on the type of site it is and how it's monetized.

Without knowing much about the site, I would probably link to a brand page on your own site but it could make sense to link directly to the brand's site if you are an affiliate with these brands. If you don't get any benefit from sending traffic to these brands, definitely keep the links internal!

Linking internally to brand pages on your site can also help you to rank organically for these brand terms - which can be a great driver of organic traffic.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

David

If 404 error pages are found in a crawl it means there are internal links to these pages on your site.

If you are using Screaming Frog you can choose to export 'Client Error (4xx) in Links' under the 'Bulk Exports' tab at the top. This will show you where the links are coming from on your site so you can either remove the link or update the link to the new/correct URL.

I would also recommend 301 redirecting the 404 error pages to an appropriate page in case any external sites are linking to these URLs and to pass on any authority these pages might have.

Hi HLTalk,

You are right about disavowing at a domain level.

This is usually the option I go for because (generally) it's the overall domain that's spam, and rarely an individual URL (of course, there will be exceptions) and if you disavow at a URL level you run the risk of missing some URLs which may not be picked up in various SEO tools at the time.

For the example in your first post, you would need the following in your disavow file:

domain:domainPizza.net
domain:domainPizza.com
domain:domainpizza.org
domain:sub.domainPizza.com

Whether it's http://, http://www., https://, https://www., doesn't matter - this doesn't need to be specified in the disavow file. Sub-domains are treated as a separate domain and do need to be specified in the disavow file.

As ThompsonPaul pointed out below, sub-domains will also be disavowed when you disavow at a domain level.

Cheers,

David

Hi Andrew,

This question is asked a lot on here.

Fluctuations in DA are going to happen as each Mozscape update will be different and may not pick up the same links to your site.

You should check other tools to make sure you haven't actually lost any links that may be causing the decrease, but you shouldn't really be concerned if your DA decreases sometimes.

If you haven't seen it, Rand did a Whiteboard Friday on the ins and outs of DA/PA which you might find useful: https://moz.com/blog/link-count-metrics

Cheers,

David

Hi Brandon,

Sounds like you might've updated the site template and removed some sitewide links to partner sites or social profiles.

Have you made any template changes (or header/footer changes) recently?

And just FYI, more external links doesn't mean you are doing better than your competition and the drop in external links doesn't necessarily mean you've done something wrong.

Cheers,

David

There's nothing stopping the site from being crawled or indexed so I would say that your site just happened to be down when Googlebot attempted to crawl it.

If downtime is a rare occurrence, this one time won't cause you any SEO-related issues and the message will be cleared in the next few days when the site is successfully crawled.

You can track downtime with a tool like Pingdom and if it becomes an issue it would be worth looking into upgrading you web hosting.

Hi vtmoz,

Are you saying that you don't have a header/footer on these pages? No main navigation? No breadcrumbs?

To me, that sounds like a terrible user experience. What is a user supposed to do when they get to these pages? Click the back button in the browser or manually edit the URL in the address bar?

If you do have a header/footer with navigation links, then it's not a dead end page

Cheers,

David

Ahhh yes, you are correct!

You might be able to get some highly relevant referral traffic from forums, so forum links aren't completely useless.

But as Logan and Martijn said, if you are doing this type of link building purely for SEO reasons, then your time is definitely better spent elsewhere.

Cheers,

David

Hi Omar,

I recently went through a domain change on one of my own sites and saw similar decreases in traffic.

The site changed from http://www.oldsite.com to https://newsite.com

I know that my changeover was 100% flawless in terms of precautions and things that were implemented to prevent/minimize traffic loss, but I still saw a 50-70% decrease (this was also a Google News site - which had to be resubmitted after the domain change).

I posted a thread on Google's Webmaster Central Help Forum to see if anyone else knew why there was such a decrease in traffic and was surprised to have a few people contact me privately saying they were/are going through the same thing.

My site took 17 days before seeing a sudden jump in traffic and it continued a steady growth over the following 4 weeks. 17 days was around the same time frame it took for the others to see their traffic pick up.

Provided you've done everything correctly with the site migration, my advice is "hang in there" (which I know is hard)! It shouldn't be long before you start to see things pick up again!

Cheers,

David

Hi John,

For visualizing internal link data, I think Sitebulb is the only tool that does it automatically.

You can do it with Screaming Frog data but it's a bit of a process to visualize it (check out this guide if you're interested).

Cheers,

David

Hi TapGoods,

In Search Console, next to the red 'ADD A PROPERTY' button, there is a grey 'Create a set' button.

Click this button and you can group your accounts and be able to view a combined data from these accounts.

You can read more about this here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6338828

With the Moz data, once you've created your property set, give Moz access to the set instead of the single account it would've had access to.

About the sitemap, assuming that the four URLs resolve to a single URL (which they should), you only need to submit your sitemap to the account for the URL that your site uses.

Cheers,

David