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Hi there.

My thought is that it was just a coincidence. Usually, responsiveness doesn't affect rankings that dramatically, especially on desktop devices. There are many-many far more important ranking signals than being mobile-friendly.

Make sure that your website is properly optimized, you got good backlink profile etc. Also I suggest to look at your competitors. If they have improved, or there were new companies, which are better optimized than yours, and, at the same time your website is underoptimized - your rankings will go down.

Hope this helps.

So, Couple things I noticed.

1. Backlink profile is very poor. Ahrefs and MOZ OSE showing poor profile history (did you guys get hit by penguin or another update at some point?), and currently you have very few backlinks and referring domains.
2. Also, there are no backlinks to the actual page, so that decreases your chances.
3. Anchor text cloud is nothing but brand name, which has some negative impact (or rather no positive for given keyword).
4. On the page, it seems to me that there is a mix of german and english languages (not sure if that would have impact on rankings, but surely looks strange to a user).
5. Page is overstuffed with "sophos sg" to the point of ridiculousness

In conclusion, have some backlinks improvements (including internal linking and anchor text usage), considering you are only #13 for given keyword, you gonna on the first page in no time

P.S. This is just what i saw in a glance, SEO audit might be of a good help to you guys.

Hi there.

The idea of internal linking is quite simple - link with relevant keyphrase to a page, you want to have some boost amongst internal rankings. It's far not necessary to have an internal link going back to main page from each of sub-pages. Just make sure that every page is accessible and navigation makes sense.

If you have sub pages which are about "Auto verkaufen" (i assume it's quite broad keyword), maybe you should have more narrow topic sub-pages and then link to them with more specific keywords?

I believe they do get indexed, don't have any physical proof as of the moment. The easy way is to simply set it up on a test landing page, then request manual recrawl through Google Search Console of that page. and see if it gets indexed.

Hi there.

It will not make any beneficial difference whatsoever. The reason is that if domain is redirected on a dns level, that domain will not be ranked at all. So, unless you have an actual domain with content, it will be useless for you.

P.S. What you might consider doing is creating some type of splash pages for those domains with some unique information and then have a link to main website related section. However, again, since there is not gonna be really any content, those domains won't rank, even if they are full match domain.

Cheers!

Howdy.

It seems to me that you have duplicate content issues. Do you guys have any canonicals at all? How close is the content from one website to another?

So, if you want both websites to rank for the same product, which seems a bit pointless to me, since you'll have to double up all the efforts, budgets etc, you would need to have unique content on both sites, unique descriptions, all meta tags etc.

If you want only one to rank, then yes, canonical will do it. Also the link mass will have a lot of effect. Basically, if your large site has let's say 100 times more links with relevant anchor texts and from relevant websites, it can still be ranking over the microsite.

Hope this helps

Hi there.

I'd try to make space for other content - if you want website to rank (franchise or not), you will need content.

As for if you HAVE to pick between two - it depends on brand. Is brand known? Are you trying to push your brand? How people find you etc? Usually you can optimize index page for a keyword, and brand name kinda tags along.

Hope this helps.

Howdy,

What type of analysis are you talking about?

Hi there

You said "Since I added them my organic traffic has seemed to have dropped". Organic traffic to those exact pages? or other pages? You should be able to see it in Google Analytics under landing pages.

The only thing I can think of is that organic traffic is directly related to rankings, so, have you seen drop in rankings? were those pages you changed ranking for many keywords?

Hi there.

Do you see any negative results so far? Any hints at it? How spammy are those links (anchor text, DA/PA of linking pages etc)? Did/do you have manual actions taken by GWT/search console? How is your MOZ OSE spam score?

What I would recommend, if you have a suspicion that disavowing those links would help, is to disavow small part of them, let's say 100-200 and see the effects on your rankings, DA/PA and other metrics.

Hope this helps.

Thanks for response!

Well, basically, as I mentioned, the problem was due to http-header robots tag. So, after removing it, and requesting "fetch as google", it's all up and running now. The crawl time proves that as well.

Thanks for giving me idea for looking into cache times in the future though!

Me too!

Hi there.

Good backlinks, social media engagement, interlinking and more traffic to those pages (with good engagement metrics of course) are your friends here

Howdy.

Is this affiliate program spammy or tricky in any way? if not, meaning that everything is straight forward, no link exchange or any black hat seo, there won't be any repercussions. Many companies have affiliate programs which are true part of their business model, and there is nothing wrong with that.

Howdy.

As far as I understand, there is no such thing as duplicate content just for images. Duplicate content is more for the page as a whole. Especially, since you guys redirected all the links, you shouldn't have any problems, since google will simply "realize" the change.

Now, it's better to make sure that images (and all the other resources) available only through one protocol - http or https.

Hope this helps

So, the reason I recommend having images loading only through one resource is the "insecurity" of https connection, if any resources are loaded not over https. You might have seen that sometimes instead of green lock in a browser bar, it can show yellow exclamation mark - that's one of the reasons. And also it's just cleaner, if everything is loaded the same way.

Here is a link to resource about mixed content: https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/security/prevent-mixed-content/fixing-mixed-content

Howdy.

I typically set it up with accordance to this: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/enhance-site

And basically go down the list. So, logo, contact info, breadcrumbs, reviews, sitelinks, social etc. Just follow all the suggestions under "help google present you" section in the left navigation column.

Hope this helps

Very weird. Apparently it's not that uncommon. I just wonder how Google decides that it should be shown in different language. People are recommending to ask this on google support forum here: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!home Because it's google "fault", not facebook's.

Do make sure that all the targeting, multi-language content, settings etc are all properly setup though.

It wouldn't matter if links are in the hidden div or not. As long as they are in the code - it will "dilute".

Howdy.

The one metric is surely not a reason for changing a domain. Instead of worrying about DA is not pooping up, ask yourself the questions about rankings, traffic, engagement etc. So, how have rankings done up? did traffic improve? Do people have brand/domain recognition?

If any of the answers are yes, don't worry about DA. There are bunch of other ways to track your backlink building efforts. Eg., as you said, Trust and Citation Flow. MOZ has similar metrics as well.

Hope this helps.