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https://moz.com/blog/comprehensive-analysis-domain-authority

https://moz.com/blog/domain-authority-seo

Hi Cristiana,

It sounds like you need to implement hreflang on your sites.

Hreflang can be complicated but you can start reading about it and how to implement it here: https://moz.com/learn/seo/hreflang-tag

Cheers,

David

Hi wonderdome,

You are correct that Bit.ly is for shortening links but it isn't something you use for link building and it doesn't make the link for valuable when you use it.

And that it a huge number of bit.ly links - it must be a huge site! My guess is they use bit.ly links for all of their social media posting.

Cheers,

David

Hi Fubra,

You can disavow at a domain level, so no regex is required (and I don't think it will work).

Just add "domain:" before the domain, eg. domain:spammysite.com

Marie Haynes wrote a good guide to using the disavow tool here if you need any further information: https://moz.com/blog/guide-to-googles-disavow-tool

Cheers,

David

Hi Chuck,

It's strange to me that the "NOINDEX, FOLLOW" would be automatically added to these pages.

The canonical tag is correct so I wouldn't use "noindex" here - it's redundant.

John Mueller from Google recently explained why canonical and "noindex" shouldn't be used together: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-noindex-rel-canonical-confusion-26079.html

Cheers,

David

Hi Sonar,

Sorry to hear about your migration troubles!

I don't think you will find generic advice too helpful, but I'd be happy to take a quick look to see what's going on and possibly give you some specific recommendations.

Are you able to share the domains with me in this thread or through PM?

Cheers,

David

Hi smithcorona,

By default, Search Console will display the global average rank of you keywords, while Moz and Ahrefs will show you rankings for a specific country.

If you choose to only look at the average rank of your target country in Search Console, you should see the results are more closely aligned.

Cheers,

David

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 Bruce,

There was a bit of a debate about this recently - whether a cross-domain canonical could be a new type of negative SEO attack: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-negative-seo-via-canonicals-redirects-25614.html

But I personally don't think it would be a successful negative SEO strategy.

Having disavowed the domain, I think you have taken all the precautions you can and I wouldn't be too worried about this having a negative impact on your traffic and rankings.

Cheers,

David

Hi Rajesh,

Yes, you are correct.

If an image links to your site with no alt text, it will be reported as blank anchor test. It's always best to use alt text and make sure it's descriptive of the image.

Cheers,

David

Hi DigitalMarketingSEO,

This sounds like it's Google having some issues with your React website.

There are plenty of good SEO for Javascript guides out there that I would recommending reading through:
https://www.elephate.com/blog/ultimate-guide-javascript-seo/
https://builtvisible.com/javascript-framework-seo/
https://www.briggsby.com/dealing-with-javascript-for-seo

How did the "Fetch and Render" look? Was Googlebot able to see your page exactly as a human user would?

Can you share the URL here (or PM me)? I've done a lot of work on JS sites and I'd be happy to take a quick look to see I can give some more specific advice.

Cheers,

David

Hi jacleaves,

I'm interested to see how this works out for you!

Please post an update after you've finished your work

Cheers,

David

Hi Nigel,

I agreed that what you said is the best solution in this case but noindex can definitely be done in robots.txt.

I'm not sure of the questionable sites you've seen it mentioned on, but I'd consider Stone Temple and Deep Crawl to be reputable sources.

That said, I always like to test things for myself!

I tried robots.txt noindex on one of my own big sports news websites a little while ago because I didn't want to manually set thousands of old posts to noindex. The robots.txt noindex worked fine.

Cheers,

David

Hi Nigel and Jens,

Just to clarify - noindex is valid in robots.txt for Google but it's not recognized by Bing.

Here's a case study by Stone Temple on using noindex in robots.txt: https://www.stonetemple.com/does-google-respect-robots-txt-noindex-and-should-you-use-it/

From their case study, it was found to be pretty effective, but not 100%. It would be a good solution for large websites, but if you're only looking at 100+ pages I would do as Nigel said above and implement the meta robots noindex tags.

Cheers,

David

Hi jacleaves,

The problem here is with your canonical tags (more info on canonical tags here).

This page: http://amishdirectplaysets.com/playset-details/?mfgID=A-1&catID=4

Has a canonical tag pointing to: http://amishdirectplaysets.com/playset-details/

The same thing is happening on all of your product pages.

I would change all of your product pages to use "SEO-friendly" URLs and have a self-referring canonical tag.

Eg. your example page: http://amishdirectplaysets.com/playset-details/?mfgID=A-1&catID=4
Would become: http://amishdirectplaysets.com/playset-details/a-1-standard-climber-vinyl-playset
And the canonical tag would point to: http://amishdirectplaysets.com/playset-details/a-1-standard-climber-vinyl-playset

Cheers,

David

Hi Jeff,

You can use hreflang to target the same language in different regions.

Google provide a good example of this about halfway down this page: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

Like in the example here, you may want to use the US version of the site as the English default and specify regions for the rest.

Cheers,

David

Hi Wickstar,

In addition to geo-targeting in Search Console, do you also have hreflang tags on all sites?

If not, you should definitely add these (more about hreflang here: https://moz.com/learn/seo/hreflang-tag).

Aleyda Solis created this great hreflang Tags Generator Tool that can make implementing hreflang very easy - especially with the new XML sitemap export option.

Cheers,

David

Hi Steven,

Is your goal to have Google rank both pages for searches like "self storage vancouver"?

Ranking two pages is going to be very difficult (but not impossible) to achieve and I would consider combining the locations into a single Vancouver self storage page. From there, users could see both locations and choose the one that's more convenient for them.

I'm not sure if you would have any issues with this - are they franchised businesses?

Cheers,

David

Hi Christian,

The current robots.txt shouldn't be blocking those URLs.

Did you or someone else recently change the robots.txt file? If so, give Google a few days to re-crawl your site.

Also, can you check what happens when you do a fetch and render on one of the blocked posts in Search Console? Do you have issues there?

Cheers,

David

Hi Eddy,

Edit: this was already answered before I could post my reply. But I've left the example.

The issue with the meta robots tag is that you are using curly quotation marks around robots and noindex:
You have:
“robots**” content=“noindex”/>
Instead of:
name="robots" content="noindex"**/>

This will fix your issue.

Cheers,

David