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You will rank for both, once your site has earned enough authority on the topic. Google appears to be interpreting the terms as synonymous. You're likely seeing variations cause they (Google) are perpetually testing.

If I search for "woodscrews" today, only one page 1 search result (Screwfix) uses "woodscrews" in their title tag and on-page content. The nine others do NOT and yet still manage to rank on page 1 for the term.

You may see different results, but my point is, it may be less of a conundrum than you think. If you want to try to rank for both variations, you're going to have to out-optimize all competitors, including the 1 (Screwfix) that does manage to rank for a different spelling of the term. Screwfix has not used the spaced version of the term (wood screws) even once on the page. When you take into consideration EGOL's points, that may be a problem for you.

Also of note, Screwfix does NOT rank on page 1 for "wood screws" (with the space). So they really have traded off one for the other.

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.

Your redirect is not working. It seems to be circular.

If I click on your old URL (https://www.roomsindex.co.il) I'm redirected to the new (https://www.hour.co.il). That part's good.

If I click on your new URL (https://www.hour.co.il) and use the Moz extension to look at your HTTP status, I'm told your new home page (https://www.hour.co.il) is redirecting to your old home page (https://www.roomsindex.co.il). So you need to get rid of that redirect.

Check your .htaccess file again.

Have you reviewed this?

https://moz.com/blog/wrong-page-ranks-for-keywords-whiteboard-friday

It's a good question and the answer depends on how much competition you're up against.

Yes Google recognizes your location using geo tags and footer content. I generally try to optimize without using too heavy a hand when it comes to city names. But if you're having trouble ranking using the more subtle tactics alone, then, by all means, employ the city name in your title tags, meta description, H1 headers, and so on. Just make sure your content doesn't start to look "stuffed" or unnatural as it may turn off visitors. It's most important to keep them interested and engaged.

Looks like you took Nigel's excellent advice and have implemented the redirects. That's great.

I did notice however, that you're redirecting vivitecsolutions to www.vivitec and then www.vivitec to vivitec (without the www subdomain). I suggest you get rid of the middle redirect and go directly from vivitecsolutions to vivitec. The redirect "chain" unnecessarily slows your site.

Related to your #7, I think citations will continue to diminish in value to the point where unrelated and unauthoritative sources will no longer "move the needle" or be worth acquiring. Local SEO companies are going to shift gears and put more emphasis on providing education and services around reputation management and link-earning. I realize some of that is happening already. I just think we're going to see more of it.

You think there might be a big change in local players this year? That's interesting. Are you thinking of any one company in particular?

I agree with Skye AP. There's no lasting value to paid links, just increased risk. I know it's cliche, but your best investment is in creating and publishing truly original, sought-after, high-quality content and then promoting the heck out of it on sites where your best prospects, customers, peers, and influencers like to hang out.

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.

Search Engine Roundtable is reporting they're seeing indications of a possible update on 9/27.

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-algorithm-update-26437.html

I'd don't think the changes you made to robots.txt are the reason for the drop.

ColesNathan,

Have you seen what Google has to say about canonicals? https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en

You might find it helpful. They list reasons why you might want to use a canonical tag including those identified above and a few others, for example, for letting Google know your priorities when it comes to crawl budget and SERP display.

Canonicals can also help undermine plagiarism. If scrapers leave your self-referencing canonical intact, it will tell Google you are the originator of that content and consolidate link signals into your URL.

Grettelp,

You can sometimes have more success getting ideas for local keyword phrases using the free Google Keyword Planner tool. It allows you to specify a geography you're interested in - city, municipality, county, township, state, province, country.

Google Keyword Planner does not give specific volumes (they give rounded figures for groups of related keywords), but you'll at least get an idea of what people are searching for and can test it.

You can also see a sampling of the phrases people are using to find your content by looking at search queries in Google Search Console, also free.

Do we lose backlinks and domain authority when we change domain name?

Assuming your site structure, file and folder names, and content remain the same and you do 301 redirects then no, you would not lose backlinks and domain authority. You should also:

• benchmark key metrics (for example, site speed and rankings);
• update internal links (don't forget about your non-html pages as well);
• check for and fix and redirect chains;
• tell Google (via Search Console) that your domain name has changed;
• set up new properties in GSC (www, non-www, http, https), set your preferred profile and geography, and eventually merge profiles into a set;
• transfer your disavow file in GSC;
• track 404 errors (that could indicate you've missed some files) and customize your 404 page to help visitors that encounter them as a result of your domain name change;
• update any external URLs with UTM codes that point to your site (UTM codes get stripped with redirects);
• update your domain name in Google Analytics;
• update your sitemap and add to GSC as well as your robots.txt file;
• I usually update major sites that point to me as well, things like Google Maps, local data aggregators, and social media sites; and
• check your traffic, rankings, and GSC daily for a while so you can react quickly if something's amiss.

Unfortunately, it is rarely the case that only your domain name changes in which case you'll need to a page-by-page mapping. Don't forget about images and PDF files that may be indexed separately from HTML pages.

Check out this slide presentation (https://www.slideshare.net/bastiangrimm/migration-best-practices-smx-london-2018) from SMX London 2018. It was recommended by John Mu at Google and is really useful.

No.

Just keep an eye on it. If you continue to see impressions and clicks, scan your site again just to make sure all content has been converted and there aren't any lingering files hardcoded with http. You server-side redirect will take care of it. The only possible downside is the unnecessary redirect which slows rendering a bit. Not a show stopper.

Steven,

Start by viewing your analytics to see what categories and tags are currently working for your audience. I suspect you have over-engineered your current solution and a lot of category and tag pages aren't being visited, or if they are, not for very long.

Next, make sure you don't have overlapping or redundant categories or tags, for example, "family portraits", "family reunion portraits", "maui family portraits", and "maui senior family portraits". This confuses your audience and makes it hard for you to ensure consistency and analyse results. You might want to have events as categories (weddings, reunions, births) for example, and locations and venues as tags.

Then, don't create a category or tag for everything. Set a minimum number of posts that would fit into the category or tag. You don't want a category or tag page, for example, to contain a single blog post.

Position your search button higher on the page.

Lastly, if you don't want a football field-sized list of categories and/or tags, use a drop-down.

I looked at your site Steven. Do you know that you have a mix of active and indexed pages that are http, https, and blog posts in a subdomain as well as subdirectory? You might want to clean that up.

Srinivasan.n,

I expect if those 3,000 pages are indexed and have content, they're ranking for something. Maybe not for the search terms you'd like them to and maybe not anywhere near page 1, but they're all likely still ranking.

What are you trying to do? Are you trying to figure out if you have content that can or should be removed, consolidated or updated? If yes, you might find this post helpful - https://moz.com/blog/content-audit#15.

Hi Tom3_15,

Should I create a new view in analytics? No. There's no need and you want to easily compare before and after.

Should I also create a new https property in Google search console and set it as the preferred domain? Yes

If so, should I keep the old sitemap for my http_ property while updating the sitemap to https only for the https property?  _Keep the old sitemap for your http property. Add the new sitemap (with https URLs) to the new (https) property.

Thirdly, should I create a new property as well as new sitemaps in Bing webmaster? Yes

Finally, after doing a crawl on our http_ domain which has a 301 to https, the crawl stopped after the redirect, is this a result of using a free crawling tool or will bots not be able to crawl my site after this redirect? _I don't know why your crawl stopped after the redirect. I use screaming frog and it continues to crawl after the 301 so it might, as you suggest, be a function or shortcoming of the particular tool you're using. BOTs should be able to continue to crawl your site after the redirect. Google certainly can.

Hi William,

I took a quick look at your GMB Listing. It doesn't display your address.

When I plug your business name and zip into the Moz Local Check Listing tool, your business comes up with an address (34th street) that is different from that listed on your website (49th street). The 34th street address is used on a significant number of the data aggregator sites as well as sites like Brownbook, Mapquest, Yahoo Local, Yelp and Yellow Pages.

That's undoubtedly at least part of the problem. You need to fix your address so it is consistent in all places.

Hi Trent,

I agree with Roman in that I would definitely do one before the other - much easier to manage and troubleshoot. If it was me, however, I'd do the https migration first. Why? Because there will be less moving parts. You only have to worry about the protocol change and can put aside renamed or dropped URLs until a later date.

I agree with Gaston. The most important thing to do is to plan and execute carefully. In my experience, failures are usually caused when insufficient time and care has gone into planning, executing, testing the migration.

You'd also be wise to benchmark existing metrics and settings before pulling the plug. It'll streamline problem-solving should an issue arise.

This post is also helpful - https://searchengineland.com/take-back-lost-links-220462. It explains how to reclaim lost links when it's not obvious why rankings have dropped. It's possible you've lost backlinks that pointed to previous versions of the site that haven't existed for years and this post provides a step-by-step technique for reclaiming them.