Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Look at your landing page report comparing the before and after time period for organic traffic. Is it specific landing pages that have lost traffic or is the 35% drop roughly consistent across the board?

You have a bunch of pages (787) ending in html that are timing out with a 504 Gateway error.

Here are a few examples.

https://www.scottscastles.com/book/enquire/baronial-castle-54.html
https://www.scottscastles.com/book/enquire/beautiful-historic-mansion-31.html
https://www.scottscastles.com/book/enquire/beautiful-holiday-house-23.html

I sampled a few with a site: command. Many are still indexed so that could be the problem. A few are tagged as no-index, but they're the exception rather than the rule. Many are canonicalized to https://www.scottscastles.com/property/enquire/ or https://www.scottscastles.com/property/unavailable/ but none are redirected.

I'd start there.

If it's only been a month, it's still early days. It can take 2-6 months for all your citations to propagate throughout the local search ecosystem.

Also bear in mind proximity to the perceived industry center for your city is very important. Your business ideally would be centered in the area where most other garden maintenance businesses are clustered. Mike Blumenthal explains this concept best in Bright Local's free "State of Local Search" recorded webinar (from 2013). Start listening at time stamp 25:30.

I must be thick because I certainly don't understand the statement "they are arguing that these images should NOT have alt text as it doesn't add anything to the disability screen reader as the image text would be repetitive with the text on the page. "

No, I haven't run into this problem before. Perhaps they're referring to situations where alt tags just get stuffed with keywords. Image alt tags shouldn't just repeat the text on the page or act as a repository for keywords, although that's often what you see. Image alt tags should accurately describe the image first, use keywords second and where it makes sense.

So, for example, this page has an alt tag coded for the little blue button above that depicts Roger, the company mascot (<img <span class="html-tag">alt</img <span>="Roger_blue_square"). The text "Roger blue square" doesn't appear anywhere else on the page. (Well I guess it does now!) It's a bit succinct - first time visitors might have a heard time understanding what the image represents - but it is accurate and isn't just stuffed with "Moz Q&A Community" keywords.

I'm waiting for the day when Google decides to start penalizing folks for doing what you've described above.

Danarchism raises a good point. Is there a place where crawl impacts are noted? Given the respect that your metric has earned and the number of questions it raises when there are unexpected fluctuations, it would be really helpful if Moz shared their observations.

Also wondering (like Danarchism) if that's already available and I too have missed it. If that's the case, please share.

Lastly, was this a one-time anomoly that's now fixed?

Hard to tell without knowing the name of the business and the website, but I'd make sure you have a Google My Business listing and local schema on the page. It's a place to start.

According to Google patents. But if I were you, I'd search for the category and town you're trying to rank for and see what Google shows. I don't think it's always as cut and dried as the patents would suggest. It's definitely a possibility though. Your statement "in a village just outside of my town" will have bearing - depending on whether you're trying to rank for the town or the village.

It really depends on the nature, link and traffic patterns of your site Andy. If the vast majority of those 2,000+ 404's are coming from pages that should never have been indexed in the first place, you can probably get away with Luis's 2nd suggestion. If they're differentiated, valuable, and show evidence of incoming links and traffic, you've got some work ahead of you.

You might be able to streamline the process by inventorying and grouping like pages, then doing group redirects. But I suggest you do some analysis first to determine whether the effort is warranted.

A meta refresh can be used as a back-handed way to redirect one page to another. It works but causes a delay in the page rendering which is considered a poor user experience and therefore typically tagged as a warning.

What causes a meta refresh? You probably have a meta refresh tag in the header section of your code. It would look something like this - . "30" means wait 30 seconds before doing anything. The URL listed after that is the page you want the website visitor redirected to.

How to fix? Get rid of the meta refresh tag and replace it with a 301 redirect. Here's Moz's help page on 301 redirects. https://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection

Does that answer your question?

You should not rel canonical to the first page in a paginated series as subsequent pages are not duplicates of the first.

Here are Google's recommended best practices where it talks about this very thing - https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html.

Thought provoking discussion Rebecca!

I'm with you in thinking there is potential for Google to start using misleadingly labeled images in it's ranking algorithm. Alt tags in particular. They're supposed to be used, in part, to help visually impaired search engines and people understand what's being shown on the page. If they don't do that, if they're just stuffed with keywords, they lessen the value of the page. In that context "Hawaiian sunset" has more value that "church", "travel site" or "inspirational quote", even if dozens or hundreds or thousands of other sites use the same descriptor.

I also agree with Egol's opinion that unique content derives value from its perceived popularity; its ability to earn repeat and lengthy visits as well as exposure, links, and shares.

I consider it a best practice to use unique images accurately named and described (using alt tags) with a brief and accurate description of the image that incorporates keywords. Not easy or even possible all of the time, but a good target to aim for.

Don't know. It probably depends on which images you fetched and rendered. I did some image searches and wasn't able to find many images on your site, only the ones whose actual file names were visible in the HTML.

Yes Jennita, it does help. Thank you for the explanation.

You have a very confusing and convoluted site structure. It may be preventing Google from indexing all the pages on your site.

For example, when I navigate to Shop > Chakra Essential Oil Roll Ons > Hemp Hoppin Chakra Balancing Essential Roll On Oil, I land on URL 1 https://**www.**hariomhemp.com/collections/essential-oil-roll-ons/products/hemp-hoppin-balancing-essential-roll-on-oil-100mg-cbd.

URL 1 redirects to URL 2 - https://hariomhemp.com/**collections**/essential-oil-roll-ons/products/hemp-hoppin-balancing-essential-roll-on-oil-100mg-cbd (without the www).

That page (URL 2) canonicalizes to URL 3 - https://hariomhemp.com/products/hemp-hoppin-balancing-essential-roll-on-oil-100mg-cbd, a different one again.

URL 3 - https://hariomhemp.com/products/hemp-hoppin-balancing-essential-roll-on-oil-100mg-cbd is indexable.

There is a 4th URL that shows up in a site scan - https://hariomhemp.com/collections/frontpage/products/hemp-hoppin-balancing-essential-roll-on-oil-100mg-cbd. It is also canonicalized to URL 3.  It is linked to from the Home page as well as the /collections/ and /collections/frontpage. The later two URLs do not appear in your site navigation.

So you need to look at your site navigation again and clean up some of this confusion. That may not be the source of your problem but it's where I'd start.

How is your own site doing wrt inbound links from external sources Jesus? Do you have many? Are they coming from quality domains? Related domains?

I share your frustration and see this type of thing all the time. It seems you have to go above and beyond in order to neutralize the advantage keyword incorporating domains have.

I would do as Dan has suggested and go after some very high authority links within your industry. That's the fastest way to level the playing field in my opinion.

John,

there is no right answer to your question, no rule of thumb. As I said earlier, it really depends on your originating pages and how much traffic, bookmarks and inbound links they currently have.

Matt Cutts says "there is no limit to the number of [direct] redirects we'll follow".

If it was me and I was worried about slowing down the site, I'd create all the redirects and watch site speed. If the site slowed down, I'd deal with that then. It's easier to drop redirects than it is to try to recover lost links because the redirects weren't there in the first place.

While the explanations offered make sense and I agree with them, you say it's happening "a lot". What's "a lot"? A couple of weeks? A month? More than that? I would think that the difference you're seeing should lessen if you're controlling for all the other influencing factors mentioned above. If not, it would seem as though there's something else at play.

I'd start with the canonicals. They're not set correctly.

Your home page (https://www.pacificsmoke[dot]com) has a canonical of www.pacificsmoke[dot]com/home.  It's missing the "https://" in front and "/home" should be dropped from the end.

The English version of your home page (https://www.pacificsmoke[dot]com/en/) is canonicalized to www.pacificsmoke[dot]com/home. It too is missing the "https://" in front and should be canonicalized to itself.

I'm assuming because of the /en/ page at the end of the page above and your location (in Canada) that you plan on creating a French version of the page. If that is the case, you will also need to introduce hreflang tags. If that's not the case, the /en/ page is a duplicate and should be removed.

If you need help with hreflang tags, Gaston Riera previously answered in a question in Q&A about hreflang tags and listed a bunch of helpful resources. You can find them here - https://moz.com/community/q/hreflang-tags-and-canonical-tags-might-be-causing-indexing-and-duplicate-content-issues.

Other pages may have similar problems.

The RS SEO Joomls extension looks very promising. I've only just begun to poke around with it, but would recommend starting there unless others have different suggestions.

7 months is not an excessively long wait time. It can take longer. You may also never hear back.

Thanks for posting this question seoman10. I've been meaning to and keep forgetting.

I'm having the same problem. Emails that publish to my Windows Outlook 365 inbox hang the application.