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Hi James,

I don't think you have anything to worry about here.

I'm assuming you publish the content on your WordPress site first, before you send out the web-based email? If that's the case, Google is pretty good at identifying the original publisher of content and devaluing other web pages that feature the same content.

If you are worried about it and can easily add "noindex" tags to these web emails, do it. If you can't "noindex" them, I wouldn't be concerned about any duplicate content "penalties".

Cheers,

David

Hi Brandon,

It looks like you've changed the original question...

The original question was to do with a drop in the number of internal links. Are you sure it's external links you are talking about?

Cheers,

David

To add to this, you will also probably never get star ratings to appear for your homepage. I've never seen star ratings appear on a homepage but would love to see any proof of it ever happening!

John Mueller said back in 2014 that "review rich snippets should only be used in cases where "the main topic of the page needs to be about a specific product or service." -- using them on your homepage in general wouldn't be like that."

Article on SE Roundtable here.

I'd think you'd have a much better chance of getting them to display in SERPs if you moved the ratings markup to relevant service pages on your site.

Cheers,

David

Hi Green_Web,

It looks like you have the same default title tag for all of your blog posts. The main pages on the site look like they have more suitable title tags.

The blog section looks like it's in WordPress and has a default title tag in place, which hopefully is not hardcoded into the post template.

If you don't have access or have the ability to edit titles, I would suggest talking to the devs and get them to use the post name in the title, but ideally, you would be able to independently modify all page titles through a plugin like Yoast.

The reason you may be seeing a more suitable title tag sometimes is that Google won't always use your specified title tag in SERPs - it can sometimes use your h1 heading (for example) if it thinks that is more relevant to the user's search query.

Cheers,

David

Hi Paul,

Thanks for the input. I'm definitely not saying to use UTM tracking on internal links, but I do see it happen quite a bit.

This has gone down a different path than what I think was intended so I'll update my first comment to help avoid any confusion.

Cheers,

David

You definitely shouldn't block all user agents from crawling UTM URLs.

This will mean that links from external sites to you UTM URLs are not crawled - so you'll be losing out on any potential benefit from those links.

If you want to block UTMs to clean up your Moz crawl report, go with what Eric mentioned above:

User-agent: rogerbot
Disallow: /*?utm

Cheers,

David

(note: edited comment to help avoid confusion about using UTM parameters internally)

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

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

Hi Garrett,

Looks like it's a brand new domain with no links pointing to it (according to a few SEO tools).

How long has it been live?

If you can start getting sites linking to you and do a bit of PR, you can probably help speed up the process.

It doesn't look like you're doing anything wrong or you've missed anything, but I think this one will just take a bit of time (another week or two?).

Cheers,

David

If you want to leave a legitimate blog comment to engage with the author and the community, go for it!

If you're only leaving blog comments to get links to "help your SEO" - don't do it.

It's spam and it won't help you at all.

Hi Luke,

The onsite SEO for both sites actually looks pretty good - looks like Moz has helped you optimize the pages well!

Where both sites are not doing so well appears to be with the links pointing to them.

On the Document Management Software site, there really aren't any good links pointing to the site. It looks like there are a few really old businesses linking to it, but that's about it. Not enough "quality" links for it to be competing with the top sites for "document management software".

On the physio site, it looks like there are a lot of old "SEO links" pointing to the site which would be doing more harm than good (hopefully these are disavowed), eg:
http://sportsinjurycentre.net/sports-physiotherapy-kippax-expert-sports-injury-management/
http://diagnosisneckpain.com/neck-ache-sufferers-talk-to-a-deakin-physio-for-fast-relief/

In summary, onsite SEO is looking good but I think you should focus your efforts on improving the offsite SEO for both sites.

Cheers,

David

Hi Luke,

Don't worry too much about your DA.

Have you lost rankings? Have you lost organic traffic? If the answer is "no" to both questions, you're doing fine.

DA will fluctuate with each update because there are different volumes of links crawled by Moz each time. Maybe they crawled less links pointing to your domain or maybe some sites have stopped linking to you.

If you haven't lost any links, you might see your DA increase in the next Moz update.

If you have lost links, try to reclaim those links or create new links to replace them.

Hopefully you'll see an upwards trend in your DA over time, but don't be surprised if it's a bit up and down along the way - and don't stress if it happens to be down. Focus on more important metrics like organic traffic and keyword rankings.

Cheers,

David

No.

Hi Matt,

Just to clarify what Martin said, adding alt text to your images won't actually help your images get indexed, but they will help improve your rankings in image search - so they are two separate things.

If you do an image "site:" search, you'll see that 40+ of your images have been indexed: https://www.google.com.au/search?q=site:bayareahomebirth.org&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj5_LfJ0qDUAhVIlJQKHQeFCVIQ_AUICigB&biw=1280&bih=590&gws_rd=cr&ei=HCEyWemYKcib0gS3jIzYBw 

It's only been two weeks, so the rest of the images may just take a little bit longer.

I can also see that a lot of your images are not hosted on your domain (they're hosted with Squarespace).

If you are looking at indexed images in your Search Console account, these images will not be reported as indexed in your SC account because they are not hosted on the same SC domain - but they are actually indexed.

You can check to see if an image is indexed by pasting the image URL into image search, eg. https://www.google.com.au/search?q=https://static1.squarespace.com/static/56b65664b09f955cb8aed482/t/56ba99d5555986520338de96/1455069653711/big%2Bpoo%2Bbig%2Bbath.jpg&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjZnOif1aDUAhXFH5QKHT0PDrcQ_AUIBigB&biw=1280&bih=590

Overall, I don't think you have any issues with images being indexed - just reporting accuracy issues because some of them aren't hosted on your domain.

Cheers,

David

Hi manoman88,

Sounds like you know what you're doing and the short answer is yes, what you have outlined above is the perfect use for hreflang tags despite there being slight variations in the product available to these different countries.

Cheers,

David

Hi Muzz,

No need to use hreflang if you only have your content available for a single region/language..

If you eventually have your content available in other regions/languages, whether it's on the same domain or a different domain, you should definitely use hreflang to ensure the locations are being served the most relevant version of your content.

Cheers,

David

Hi Alex,

I worked on a site a while ago that did something like this to get the location of users in order to serve them location-dependent product pricing.

These redirects didn't seem to hurt their organic performance at all, but the devs eventually got around to using some simple JavaScript to obtain location information, and the redirects were scrapped.

Is the site you are talking about using redirects to get location information? If so, I'd suggest speaking with the devs to come up with an alternative.

Cheers,

David

Hi,

You can run a crawl in Screaming Frog without JavaScript rendering enabled to see how well your site can be crawled without JavaScript.

That will be a lot faster than trying to simulate a crawl manually.

Cheers,

David

Hi Dustin,

Looks like the problem is that you have two canonical tags on your parameter pages.

eg. on lines 24 and 25 of the source code for this page https://www.stickylife.com/custom/vinyl-decals?limit=30 you'll see:

With more than one canonical tag on a page, Google will ignore both canonical tags - which is why you are getting duplicate issues.

You'll need to remove the second canonical tag to overcome your issues.

Cheers,

David

Hi Becky,

The solution to your problem is to remove the hreflang tags from the canonicalized product pages.

Doing this will leave only your canonical URLs specifying hreflang - with these pages also having the self-referring canonical tag in place.

Leaving the canonical tag in place on the duplicate product pages will continue to solve your duplicate content issues - no need to specify hreflang there.

Hope this helps!

Cheers,

David