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Another good way to test, grab your family, kids, friends etc..
Tell them to goto your site and find something, then ask them how easy was it and find out what wasn't easy an adjust.
Do this with at least 5+ people and you can have some actionable insight on what to alter.
This is by far the best advice you could have given, tricks and tactics only serve part of an issue while strategic planning and a forceful hand can prove to blanket the issue in solution + results.
More straight forward advice needs to be given like this, and I'm glad there are folks like yourself on here speaking about such.
Thanks!
Also to add on a bit,
Most SEOs would never have many issues if they would step back away from the " latest & greatest tactics " and applied more effort towards the user. Plan and fulfill their needs and think through the eyes of your customers. You won't have to devise clever content, you'll already know what is needed and even how to target it.
Content isn't king, the User is.
Also to add onto what Andy has said:
There are people trying to make money off the removal of those backlinks, so in today's world unless it looks like a legit site, better off to just disavow, most likely they're going to ask for money.
Also, this might not be a competitor, it might be a scraper too, what has puzzled me from day 1 about penguin is, how can you punish a site that gets scraped backlinks? Often they use keywords anchor text and so forth.
So disavow, and keep up the monthly checks...
To add on to Gaston's Reply,
Wikipedia is up that Top 10 or 20 sites that could do everything wrong ( in fact some do ) regarding SEO and still rank number 1, Google's reasoning for this is basically, their too big to fail. If people started not seeing wikipedia pages, heads and traffic would roll.
So since Google knows that traffic will continue as long as certain sites are always listed, they will overlook their SEO issues.
I don't know for how long though, as I see pages from wiki that are awaiting deletion ranking on page 1 and 2 sometimes, not to mention the sometimes completely inaccurate information on some of wiki's pages, although rare doesn't boast well for SERPs relevancy.
So to put it in otherwords, Wikipedia is above the law...
Hello,
I would double check to make sure that all versions of that older domain were redirected, the www and non www, http and https, make sure they all are redirected to the same one.
Make sure that nothing has been done with the redirects in any form, I don't know if anyone else has access to these redirects, but it's very easy for someone to of done something.
Also make sure that these are actually being indexed and Google isn't just having some weird rankbrain fart with the pages it's cached, as I too did a redirect / redesign in march abouts and have been awaiting 700 pages to go bye bye from indexing, however we're down to 659 now, sometimes this number goes up sometimes it goes down a few, but nothing wild.
So when you do a site.domain.com search, Google might show you 100+ pages, but click towards the end of them and see if Google shows you the results or if the page count actually decreases and nothing is shown, this would mean that the pages are just cached and on the road to being forgotten.
Google will keep caches for a bit, in case of an opps moment or even hack attack recovery.
But from 78k to 89k seems like a big jump, but if you had 400k pages to start with, and when you do a site:domain.com and if the last group of pages return nothing, there is a good chance this is just Google's url caching dreaming of electric sheep...
Yes,
Because you then get to control what content summary, image and even headline or keyword is used, not to mention you can customize them based on the url.
This is helpful in general as it makes your brand more consistent throughout social media, consistency = trust.
Great info above,
I was under the impression that only a few of those links would actually carry any weight, that the majority of them will be discounted.
The rel canonical tag to the root of the site could work, but would be better to have a metatag like
<metaname="robots" content="noindex, nofollow"> </metaname="robots">
For each page that is developmental and not supposed to be live. This will tell google to just ignore these pages, that they are not ready to be indexed and be part of the internet.
It's generally not recommended to do a rel canonical to the homepage, just because it's saying that every page on the developmental site is from the homepage, as well google is still indexing these pages and this could cause issues later on. It's just better to noindex nofollow the dev pages before they go live, since then you can migrate the new to the old and not have some huge issue later on.
I send something like this to your private message as well.
Hello,
Got to remember that if you create a page for each keyword variation, that those pages are going to have horrible metrics and could even hurt ranking for that keyword because of such.
I have really seen great results when you focus all intent on the user, is making a bunch of pages that barely have content but target that keyword going to really help users?
It would be better off to try and target one page for many variations, especially if that page is going to answer the user's search query. That's really how you should be setting your pages up, the keyword they rank for should be keywords that contain info being searched for otherwise you're going to have bad traffic that could send bad signals.
You'd be better off writing blogs for those keyword variations and tying content and other pages ( like the parent keyword page ) into them with links to help add authority.
Brand terms are mainly for homepage, about us page and possibly landing page of a category parent. Otherwise using your brand ( unless in a blog post ) is kinda stuffing things and wasting space that could be used by other keywords.
You're very welcome, glad this helped.
As a web developer and SEO I understand far too often that the two worlds are not in constant communication about many of the things that matter. As well aren't always up to par with latest knowledge from each opposing fields.
This far too often leads to those moments where things happen.
Glad you monitored these and spoke up to seek answers, if not you, who else would have? That's always the scary part.
Another good practice to take into effect is to start going to Google Webmaster Tools and going to:
Search Traffic > Links to your site
Goto full view and download / export a copy to cvs, open in either google sheets or excel and date it, next time you have an issue, you can repeat the above process and then using a compare feature ( plugin / extension ) in google sheets ( not sure if there is one for excel ) and figure out what links were removed much faster.
Ahrefs can do a good job, but since it doesn't have all your backlinks, can also be just as much frustrating.
Google is weird really, it has chosen to reverse the title for my homepage placing the company name at the beginning, removing the pipe and using a colon instead, but keeps the other text?
Hello,
Ok, that certainly can cause some ranking issues, if persay you've for whatever reason got both the preview / development site being indexed as well as the live site, that will confused google and possibly mean that you'd either loose ranking for those keywords or even not be considered at all for that keyword query.
Something that could be tried is to go into Google's Webmaster Tools and click on Google Index > Remove URL, this is a temporary url removal tool that google has incase of mistakes and such. Might be worth it to have the preview sites you've seen indexed entered in the URL removal tool and even do a site:domain.com ( replace the domain.com with the preview site domain ) to see what all is being indexed still and maybe even add those as well.
You're main goal is to basically tell google to forget those URLs, as long as the preview site has noindex nofollow on it now and you remove those currently indexed urls in WMTs you might be able to recover some of that rank loss if not all.
I'd also do some research to see if competitors have made any recent changes that would increase their visibility but to ultimately remember that there is signs of a google update release brewing as well, so if the above actions yield no results, next best option is to wait a few weeks while tackling other tasks.
Hopefully this has helped
Here is some site migration guides to help in the future as well to prevent this kinda issue:
When you say preview site do you mean your development site as in when you do redesigns, is the preview site domain where you host the redesign site before it's live?
Also, not sure if you have noticed but there seems to be some testing or even a Google update in the works, and with Google still yet to release Penguin never know.
I've been experiencing 1 to 2 page dances with keyword rankings over the last 6 days for our major keywords, some appearing on page 2 at the beginning of the day and then appearing on page 4 around the end of the day, doing this consistently over the last 3 days.
So certainly seems SERPs is being adjusted, just not sure as to the why.
If you have been concerned about keyword changes over the passed week, I'd say to hold tight that the rest of us are experiencing this as well and just are in the mercy of Google.
If it's been longer than that, then you might have competition that's doing things better, got to remember that for every site that increases in rank, the rest of the sites adjust to that.
**Edited to add the link of the recent update chatter: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-update-chatter-22306.html
It still takes place, and can be up to a page apart in ranking a site for one keyword and capitalized and lowercase as well lowercase results were 1,450,000 and uppercase were 2,430,000 that's kinda offputting since for many keywords, it's going to be a matter of preference of a user on how they will either uppercase or lowercase a search term.
It's sad 3+ years later it's still the norm.
I'd also check to make sure all backlinks are still present and accounted for, or see if you have plus or negative backlinks from moz here.
If for some reason their index didn't get as many of your backlinks as it had before, you'd DA will be lowered. Now I don't think this is very fair nor accurate for smaller sites, since unless your a huge site, you will not get all your backlinks crawled, so you won't get a complete picture of your DA nor the Backlink profile, infact, only google holds the keys to all your backlinks and even they could use some work in how they are listed to us.
Just remember, backlinks play a HUGE part of the SEO game, when in doubt, check backlinks.
Yes there is, you'll need to do a site crawl.
To do this you'll go to the top menu bar, click on Moz Pro > site audit
Then enter your site url and hit crawl this url, you'll get a report after a bit that will go into detail what is going on in terms of errors and warnings that need fixing.
You can also doublecheck these by using another SEO checking software or site, like woorank or SEMrush site audit.
Hope this helps, also if you're site is under 500 pages, download screaming frog ( it's a web crawler ) it has a limit of 500 pages, for the free version, but can still give great insight as to what's going on with your domain.
I'm trying to target one page for one broad 2 word keyword, however, because our niche revolves around this keyword and it's synonyms, the keyword is used on every other page, thus creating the issue of non-targeted pages taking the rank instead of targeted page.
I've thought of using synonyms on each page, so that no one page uses the same keyword, but felt this could be seen as spammy or could just hurt overall relevancy towards the main keyword, thus a loss of rank.
I understand page authority also plays a part, but also seems that every page other than the page I want get's targeted.
Hello,
It really has to do with " Does google see these backlinks as natural or not " since most people who will naturally be linking to you, will not use the keywords you really want them too, normally they will just use your domain.com address other times it's 4 or 5 words like " and this company who does this ". So Google is pretty good at not giving the same credit to a link that has exact match keyword anchor text as a backlink using your domain.
So honestly, keyword anchor text isn't as helpful as you might think, while one or a few might help, there is a quick point where anymore past a certain point will start to hurt your rankings and that's why many SEOs now don't use keyword rich anchor text backlinks and if they do, it's playing with fire.
Unless the backlink is from a high authority site, and relates well, using keyword rich anchor text could ultimately hurt more than help.
Some light reading:
Hope this helps!
Thanks!
Was hoping to recover a month ago but if google is still having these old urls cached, then they very well think we have them still, so hopefully once the urls are gone in google's brain we should see some improvement.
Thanks for clearing that up, hope this helps others in the same boat or somewhat close.