Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I agree with Ray. However, I tried to crawl both your old url & new one always got a "Connection refused" error in Screaming Frog (even when reducing crawlspeed & increasing default response timeout). . Maybe this is completely unrelated, however never had this on other sites before. Did you try to fetch the new pages in Webmastertools?

Your robots.txt is quite long - you're sure that all pages that need to be indexed can be indexed?

(completely unrelated to the indexing problems - I used webpagetest.org to see if your site was accessible by other automated tools - it worked, but also revealed that your pages are extremely heavy to load)

Dirk

Hi Justin,

To see if your site is indexed - try site:zenory.com -> this gives you the number of pages in the index (35 in your case).

In webmaster tools you can add the sitemap of your site - Google will indicate how many pages of the sitemap are indexed. I noticed that the /sitemap.xml for zenory.com only contains entries for the (identical?) sister site in New Zealand - you should have sitemaps for each of your domains. It's possible that these sitemaps exist already. You use hreflang - check here http://moz.com/blog/hreflang-behaviour-insights if you did everything according the rules.

Improvements - on the technical side - the images you use are quite heavy. For the blog / category pages you use rel next/rel previous - I would rather put these pages on noindex / follow as they have little added value for search.

Probably most important is the keyword research - which are the keywords you want to rank for, what is the volume that they represent, do you have the content that corresponds with these keywords. What are your competitors - what keywords do they rank for, ...etc. A  nice post on keyword research can be found here http://moz.com/blog/keyword-research-in-90-minutes - and there is off course the beginners guide http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/keyword-research.

Hope this helps,

Dirk

Unless you're selling pizza's yourself, these links are not going to help you much

This strategy is not really going to work - most sites make links on testimonials and comments nofollow (just to avoid that other webmasters are just going to post comments to create links). Not that nofollow links are necessarily a bad thing (check https://moz.com/blog/the-hidden-power-of-nofollow-links) - but these kind of nofollow links normally add no value.

You might want to check this link https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-link-building and all the resources you can find here: https://moz.com/blog/category/link-building

A lot of reading & studying to do - it might be a relief for you that even experts sometimes get it completely wrong http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-failures

Good luck,

Dirk

Could you check these "problem" url's with a tool like web-sniffer.net of http://tools.seobook.com/server-header-checker/ to be sure that the pages are really returning the correct status. I encountered similar problems with 404 before - while visually the correct page was rendered - the header returned a 404 status. You could also try "Fetch like google" in Webmaster tools.

Would be helpful to have an actual url - if you don't want to disclose the site - you could send it via private message.

rgds,

Dirk

Hi Justin

As Luis indicates - the hreflang is not properly implemented - which you can also test here: http://flang.dejanseo.com.au/

As mentioned in this post - https://moz.com/blog/using-the-correct-hreflang-tag-a-new-generator-tool you can generate the hreflang here: http://www.internationalseomap.com/hreflang-tags-generator/

Long story just to confirm that the suggestion of Luis is correct - update the hreflang to

should do the trick. If you want to have one as default for all other languages (suppose you want to show zenory.com as default when the language is not one of the three options, you add:

See example on http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.be/2013/04/x-default-hreflang-for-international-pages.html

Important: the tagging needs to be identical on all three sites and needs to be present on all pages (with the correct url of course).

Currently the x-default is different on all three sites which is confusing for Google.

rgds,

Dirk

Hi,

This is a recurring question on the Moz Q&A - you might want to check Rand's post about fluctuation of the DA in relation to index updates: https://moz.com/community/q/da-pa-fluctuations-how-to-interpret-apply-understand-these-ml-based-scores

Dirk

Hi,

I wouldn't worry too much about redirecting it to the normal site. It has lousy content at the moment, but the moment you take ownership, you'll redirect it to your site with quality content. Anyhow, Google will see that the ownership has changed as the DNS records are changing, there will be a new owner in webmastertools, the content is changing etc.

As it is a typosquatter, he will probably not have put the effort to build (cheap & spammy) links to this domain, and will not have done many efforts regarding SEO - so probably from an SEO perspective this is probably a quite clean site.

You could put the domain a few months in quarantaine to be sure- putting a static html page like 'did you want to visit mydomain.com - click here', activate webmastertools, check the linkprofile, see if any warnings from Google are coming.

If everything looks ok after a few months, you just activate the redirect

rgds,

Dirk

Update: noticed to late that the robots.txt is blocking googlebot - so Google officially isn't aware that the site is linking to low quality site - so would not have too many doubts on redirecting

Like Monica is suggesting- keywordtool.io is great. Being a bit of a car freak myself - Brand + Modelname + (model)year are the most popular terms for new cars - in combination with review/price/launch date... Given the fact this particular model was already shown on the Paris motorshow there should be enough information available to write some interesting stuff about it.

rgds,

Dirk

Hi,

The example I quoted in my reply about Paul's pizza (it's not exactly the same - but quit close)

For the newspaper: if it's just an ad random links (e.g. in the footer) it doesn't look really natural. If the newspaper is featuring an article about a legal issue and it's quoting your law firm in the article, than the link would be quite natural.

For the retirement homes: Google is quite aware that if you're in a retirement home you have entered the last phase of your life; so it's not really unnatural for a retirement home to feature some articles on your final "bucket list" - which could include content on how to make a will. If on these articles they quote your law firm, or if the content is entirely written by your law firm, it would be quite logical to mention the original source (or even better - put a canonical url pointing to your site).

Basically - natural links are quite easy to detect. Just ask yourself: if no link building for SEO purposes existed, would the publisher include this link? If he would, it's almost certain that it's a good link. If he wouldn't, it's not really a good one.

rgds,

Dirk

Hi,

You still have some duplicates - for each page the https & http version exists - I would choose the https version & redirect the non-https version to this one.

There are a lot of pages which have no H1or an H1 that doesn't really add value. Title idem - not always covering the content:
Example: http://www.mercadonline.es/anuncios-sevilla -
Title: Resultados de la búsqueda - MercadOnline.es
H1: missing

Apart from this - I guess your target audience is looking for quite specific info (like BMW for sale Sevilla) - as far as I can see you don't really have optimised pages for these queries.  A potential landing page for this query would be: http://www.mercadonline.es/ads/motos-motocicletas/12162 - but Title, H1, Metadescription are not adapted

Title: Motos, motocicletas - 12162 - MercadOnline.es
Meta description: En Mercadonline.es encontrará diariamente una amplia gama de motos y motocicletas - 12162
H1: Vehículos

=> try to adapt these to make it more specific to the corresponding search query.

Hope this helps;

rgds,

Dirk

Hi,

At the bottom of the knowledge graph there is a small link (Feedback) where you can indicate a problem with the data displayed. Did you already report the wrong birth date this way. There is also a link to the legal form - but I understand from your question you already tried that.

Google is pulling the information from different sources - you could try to make sure that enough reliable sources have the correct birth date (for actresses I would think about IMDb). If multiple sources have the correct date - I guess the problem will more or less solve itself.

Hope this helps,

Dirk

Hi Fraser,

I doubt that it is the dummy content which is causing the troubles. You use the x-robots-tag to put noindex/nofollow on all your pages. Probably this a setting in the config of your Wordpress site. More info on the tag can be found here: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/control-crawl-index/docs/robots_meta_tag?hl=en

Apart from that :

• Your homepage is only visible when javascript is enabled - the same applies to your portfolio page.
• The images are extremely heavy to load - you should seriously consider to make them a lot lighter (more than 50% of your images > 100K (a lot of them are bigger than 500K)

rgds,

DIrk

Hi Justin,

If you have removed the site from the index, but it is still available for bots to visits, it's quite possible that it's getting indexed again:

From https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663419?rd=1:

"Important**:** To ensure your content is permanently removed, you need to do one of the following within 90 days of requesting removal. Otherwise, your content may later reappear in search results. (More information about blocking Google.)

• If the page no longer exists, make sure that the server returns a 404 (Not Found) or 410 (Gone) HTTP status code. Non-HTML file (like PDFs) should be completely removed from your server.
• If the page still exists, use robots.txt to prevent Google from crawling it. Even if a URL is disallowed by robots.txt we may still index the page if we find its URL on another site. However, we won't index the page if it's blocked in robots.txt and there is an active URL removal request for the page."

So I would keep the webmastertools active until the site has completely taken offline (or completely blocked with robots.txt)

For the other sites - I personally would keep the non-https version for a while, but if all pages are properly redirected to https it's not really necessary to keep them.

rgds,

Dirk

To quote Google: "Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results. If your site suffers from duplicate content issues, and you don't follow the advice listed above, we do a good job of choosing a version of the content to show in our search results."

Having a backlink from the copied page to your site can help Google to determine that your page is the original source - however it's no guarantee (if his site has a better link profile it could well be that Google prefers the copied site). It would be better if the copy site would put a canonical url pointing to your page.

Dirk

I noticed you're Belgian, you could also check what other sites are doing like Markplaats, 2ehands,.... in terms of site structure and on-page optimisation. Crawling them with a tool like Screaming Frog will certainly give you some inspiration. I don't know the Spanish sites for personal ads, but check them as well. If you use Semrush you can check for which keywords they rank, how their landing pages look like and how they are optimised.

You'll have to add the SearchAction Schema to your pages - however this only makes sense if you have a high number of branded searches.

More info can be found here:

https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/09/improved-sitelinks-search-box.html

https://moz.com/blog/sitelinks-search-box

Dirk

If you recently did a site redesign - you probably deleted old redirect rules as well. Google seems to keep all the url's it has indexed over time stored somewhere - and the moment the old redirects disappear - you'll see these very old url's popping up in webmastertools. I had the same experience after a recent migration, and if you search on this forum, you'll find plenty of other people who have encountered the same thing.

Nothing to worry about - if these errors in WMT are annoying you could put the old redirect rules in place again, or if they are using a seperate folder structure, you could delete these folders via WMT. These errors will disappear over time, even if you don't do anything.

I use Semrush mainly for keyword tracking / analysis - not as much for backlinks. It's a great tool to check competitors as you can check keywords they rank for & your site is not ranking. Basic subscription is not that expensive and it's one of the tools I use almost every day.

Don't know Majestic personally - for backlinks I heard Ahref is a great tool.

Dirk

Hi

Did you check the http response of domain.com/old-boring-url/ with a tool like web-sniffer.net? It could very well be that you are being redirected when you try to access the url in your browser but that the header is giving a 404 reply.

If Moz only sees a 404 on that url - the backlinks of domain.com/old-boring-url/  will not be counted as backlinks for domain.com/awesome-url/

Dirk

Hi Luke,

To me, it doesn't seem really abnormal that a university would have tons of links going to associated companies, alumni companies,.. etc. I think the basic question is - do these links look "natural" when you check them, or are they rather commercial. If they make sense on the page, or add value, I would leave them. If not, make them nofollow.

rgds,

Dirk