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effectdigital

Common issue which people run into and complain about on a routine basis. The thing is, you always have priorities to decide upon as a business owner. Are you like Coca Cola with a huge brand, where people visit your site directly - your product is only associated with you and keywords / SEO is not a big concern? Then your H1s should be more weighted towards CRO (conversion-rate optimisation) and user-enticement

If on the other hand, you are not well known and you are entering into a competitive market - leave your vanity at the door. There's no point having a site that offers wonderful UX with all copy 100% on-brand, if your traffic suffers and you have no audience. First you get the traffic, then when your users become more brand-loyal you decide what other measures to take (further down the line). But the ascertainment of traffic is, at this juncture - your primary concern. Without any visitors there will be no ROI and no profitability to speak of

That being said - people can easily overdo optimisation to the point that a site looks very spammy, even to Google. At that point you won't get any traffic and if you do, people won't stick around for long

No individual web-page should serve more than 5-7 keywords, unless it's a one-page design implemented with a modern HTML5 structure (multiple H1s are actually okay in such a scenario - but still, one-page design's just aren't very good for SEO)

You take the top 2-3 keywords and insert those into your H1, the rest should be in the copy of your site. You forget that you're competing with enterprise-level businesses who will go the extra mile to customise their site layouts to work in content in clever, non-intrusive ways that aren't enabled by default on most basic sites or site-builders like Shopify or Wix (or even mid-tier custom designed websites). Every time the easy to mid-tier site production routes become more complex, those at the very top innovate further to stay ahead (that or they just coast on their colossal SEO authority / link metrics, until such a time as innovation becomes a requirement). You're in a race, you're not the only one running

You can be clever in terms of creating compact keyword optimisations. If you wanted to include "holiday home tasmania" & "tasmania holiday rentals" in the H1 of your homepage, you'd write this:

"Holiday Homes & Holiday Rentals in Tasmania"

Without over-repeating itself, that string of text basically combines every element of both the keywords which you cited. You could probably get away with "Holiday Homes & Rentals in Tasmania", but since "holiday homes" and "holiday rentals" are both distinct search entities, I'd rather recap that info in the title

Your site and business exists because people need it and search for it. It's nice if you want to consider what you do 'chic', but unless there's data backing up that - people are specifically looking for that, your vanity is getting in the way of your success. Where you say "It seems really awkward & not in keeping with the chic, designer image I am trying to project" - what's the point of projecting an image to no one?

First get your audience. Then analyse the data, find out what they want (not what you want), then serve it to them. In a way, SEO is no different than starting a business. Think of your website as a physical outlet and Google as a road that's passing by. Look at the surrounding shops and stores, what do they say about what the community wants? How can you give that to them, whilst also standing out?

SEO is a medium for online success but it in no way offsets your business choices and / or decisions. Another thing you need to remember, competitors may not seem to have sites much better than your own. But in their time, when they were new, they were in some way revolutionary - that's what scored them all their backlinks and audiences (which cement their ranking positions). To overtake them, you have to be BETTER, not the same. Yes it's hard, costly and the stakes are high

effectdigital

Ok let's have a look here.

So this is the URL of the page you want me to look at:

https://www.nubalustrades.co.uk/

I can immediately tell you that, from my end it doesn't look like Google has even cached this page at all:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nubalustrades.co.uk%2F (live)
https://d.pr/i/DhmPEr.png (screenshot)

As you know I can't fetch someone else's web page as Google, but I do know Screaming Frog pretty well so let's give that a blast

First let's try a quick crawl with no client-side rendering enabled, see what that comes back with:

https://d.pr/f/u3bifA.seospider (SF crawl file)
https://d.pr/f/9TfNR5.xlsx (Excel spreadsheet output)

Seems as if, even without rendered crawling the words are being picked up:

https://d.pr/i/426Ck9.png

Only the rows highlighted in green (the 'core' site URLs) should have a word count anyway. The other URLs are fragments and resources. They're scripts, stylesheets, images etc (none of which need copy).

Let's try a rendered crawl, see what we get:

https://d.pr/f/ijprbx.seospider (SF crawl file)
https://d.pr/f/c8ljoF.xlsx (Excel spreadsheet output)

Again - it seems as if the words are picked up, though oddly fewer are picked up with rendered crawling than with a simple AJAX source scrape:

https://d.pr/i/y3Jv51.png

That could easily be something to do with my time-out or render-wait settings though (that being said I did give a pretty generous 23 seconds so...)

In any case, it seems to me that the content is search readable in either event.

Let's look at the homepage specifically in more detail. Basically if content appears in "inspect element" but not in "view source", **that's **when you know you have a real problem

view-source:https://www.nubalustrades.co.uk/ - (you can only open this link with Chrome browser, it's free to download from Google)

As you can see, lots of the content does indeed appear in the 'base' source code:

https://d.pr/i/8BzTjd.png

That's a good thing.

That being said, each piece of content seems to be replicated twice in the source code which is really weird and may be creating some content duplication issues, if Google's more simple crawl-bots aren't taking the time to analyse the source code correctly.

Go back here:

view-source:https://www.nubalustrades.co.uk/ - (this link only works in Chrome!)

Ctrl+F to find the string of text: "issued by the British Standards Institution". Hit enter a few times. You'll see the page jump about.

On the one hand you have this, further up the page which looks alright:

https://d.pr/i/8AlJJ1.png

On the other hand you have this further down which looks like a complete mess, embedded within some kind of script or something?

https://d.pr/i/mJJaqa.png

Line 6,212 of the source code is some gigantic JavaScript thing which has been in-lined (and don't get me started on how this site is over-using inline code in general, for CSS, JS - everything). No idea what it's for or does, might be deferred stuff to boost page speed without breaking the visuals or whatever (there are many clever tricks like that, but they make the source code a virtually unreadable mess for a human - let alone a programmed bot!)

What really concerns me is why such a simple page needs to have 6,250 lines of source code. That's mental!

What we all forget is that, whilst the crawl and fetch bots pull information quickly - Google's algorithms have to be run over the top of that source code and data (which is a much more complex affair)

Usually people think that normalizing the code-to-text ratio is a pointless SEO maneuver and in most cases, yes the return is vastly outweighed by the time taken to do it. But in your case it's actually very extreme:

https://www.prepostseo.com/code-to-text-ratio

Put your URL in and you'll get this:

https://d.pr/i/nXBu0S.png

I tried like 5-8 different tools and this was the most favorable result :')

It is clear that, even were the page successfully downloaded by Google, their algorithms may have trouble hunting out the nuggets of content within the vast, sprawling and unnecessary coding structure. My older colleagues had always warned me away from Wix... now I can see why, with my own two eyes

Ok. So we know that Google isn't bothering to cache the page, and that - despite the fact your content can 'technically' be crawled, it may be a marathon to do that and dig it out (especially for non-intelligent robots)

But is the content being indexed? Let's check:

Those are all special Google search queries, designed to specifically search for strings of content on your website from all the different, primary content boxes

Good news fella, it's all being found:

https://d.pr/i/Zlb926.png

Let's make up an invalid text string and see what Google returns when text can't be found, to validate our findings thus-far:

https://www.google.co.uk/search?num=100&ei=SfQYXJitEomwtQWRk43QDg&q=site%3Anubalustrades.co.uk+%22what+the+heck+I+don%27t+even+I+never+wrote+this+on+my+site+how+dare+you%22

If nothing is found you get this:

https://d.pr/i/FGvT49.png

So I guess Google can find your content and is indexing your content

Phew, crisis over! Onto the next one...

effectdigital

If you can share a link to the site I can probably diagnose it. It's probably that the content is within the modified (client-side rendered) source code, rather than the 'base' (non-modified) source code. Google fetches pages in multiple different ways, so using fetch as Google artificially makes it seem as if they always use exactly the same crawling technology. They don't.

Google 'can' crawl modified content. But they don't always do it, and they don't do it for everyone. Rendered crawling takes like... 10x longer than basic source scraping. Their mission is to index the web!

The fetch tool shows you their best-case scenario crawling methodology. Don't assume their indexation bots, which have a mountain to climb - will always be so favourable

effectdigital

It's because Google believes that your page doesn't sell the product (which makes the page dramatically less useful) which is due to them crawling your site and caching pages from the wrong data centre (apparently somewhere in Australia!?)

Check it out. Here's your beautiful page:

https://wattbike.com/gb/product/atom

Look how beautiful and useful it is, with the ability to buy the product and with all that nice content:

https://d.pr/i/obxBVq.png

Now let's look at Google's cache of the page:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https%3A%2F%2Fwattbike.com%2Fgb%2Fproduct%2Fatom

You can clearly see in that above link, we're querying Google's cache of the "gb" version of the page (%2Fgb%2Fproduct).

But how weird is this? It's cached the AU page 'as' the GB page ,which states to Google that the product isn't available to buy:

https://d.pr/i/wkZzh3.png

Uh - what Google!? Are you high? Why have you cached the AU page as the EN/GB page. I bet you any money, that has a huge amount to do with this.

I reckon' you've got regional redirects installed which snatch up users and force them into their own region's version of the site / page - unless a user manually uses the flag to change their location. Seems like good UX right? And it is, but don't apply the same logic to Google

Exempt Googlebot from your regional redirects if you have any (do it via user-agent based .htaccess / web.config exclusion, your dev will know what that means!)

You may find that by doing this, Search Console starts giving you more error reports in other areas. That's because you will have lifted a veil that has been cloaking certain issues underneath of redirects (leap that hurdle when you come to it)

Either you have a Google caching bug on your hands, or they deployed the wrong data centre to cache your URL, and that's when the redirects bork'd everything. IMO, that's what it is

Even if this isn't 100% accurate it will be enough to get a good dev-tective sniffing

Hope that helps...

effectdigital

I am assuming the site isn't yours and doesn't belong to you. That makes things trickier and it means you'll be working with estimates, but it doesn't make things completely impossible!

There are tools which monitor Google organic search positions and paid ads (AdWords) in order to specifically estimate the Google traffic which a site or web-page might be earning.

SEMRush is one tool (paid, though you can get some limited data for free):

https://www.semrush.com/info/wikipedia.org

You can see a little chart here:

https://d.pr/i/P2GoDU.png

They basically look at search and ad rankings and then estimate traffic by pitching CTR (click through rate) data against ranking position data. It's very ballpark, but it is at least something you could look at. SEMRush also has a "chart tool" whereby you can input sites and metrics and build comparative charts (quite nice). Keep in mind you can only see traffic data by Google region (e.g: USA / Google.com or UK . Google.co.uk) and getting to an all-encompassing global view can be tricky (and time consuming)

Ahrefs costs more but we have found their traffic estimates to be more responsive, accurate and easier to manage (especially if you just want to see flat global data):

https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/overview/v2/subdomains/recent?target=wikipedia.org

Again, it's a paid tool with some free data. You want to be looking here:

https://d.pr/i/4KJVOM.png

The only thing you are seeing there, is organic (SEO) traffic, not PPC (paid search) traffic. Although the data is narrower from one perspective, it's much easier to get global data. In addition to that, I do find the data to be more accurate, especially since the search volumes which Ahrefs uses within its traffic estimates contain click-stream data to enhance accuracy:

https://help.ahrefs.com/keywords-explorer/faqs-and-troubleshooting/how-accurate-is-keyword-search-volume-in-ahrefs

That being said, nothing is perfect:

https://help.ahrefs.com/site-explorer/faqs-and-troubleshooting/why-dont-the-organic-traffic-numbers-reported-by-ahrefs-match-those-i-see-in-google-analytics

Some people have even done studies comparing different tools, including SimilarWeb's traffic forecasting which I have little / no experience with:

https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/how-accurate-are-website-traffic-estimators/

I heard down the grapevine a few years back, that SearchMetrics (which is quite expensive) is actually pretty good at all this stuff. What I was told was that, they buy ISP (internet service provider) data and use that to forecast and estimate traffic to different sites instead. If that is true, it would be by far the most accurate traffic data available, but would come at a premium.

I believe that earlier on in my career, I had a little play and it was pretty robust. Platforms change though, you'd have to contact them to see if they still offer similar data.

As you can see, there are different options with different strengths and weaknesses. Accurate, digital, legal competitor surveillance technology is seldom free. Even if you're not buying the data from the competitor (who would never sell it to you! Plus it might be fiddled...) - you're still paying someone. Either someone who resells ISP network data, or someone who has 'done something clever' to get more accurate Google-traffic forecasting than the rest.

Hope this helps

effectdigital

FYI!

Only her homepage 301s to her new site.

Some of her deep-link 404-ing URLs do not 301, and those are the ones which Moz picked up:

https://www.poppyporter.com/racing_wings_earrings.html

If you load the above URL, you will notice that in the URL bar it **does not **change to .co.uk. The 301 is homepage (or maybe 'key-page') level only

The domain is in fact, not parked and still hosts custom 404 pages and other content :')

effectdigital

Hi there Poppy!

For my own benefit and for the benefit of others who may wish to look at helping you solve this, just going to pop the spam results URL here:

https://analytics.moz.com/pro/link-explorer/spam-score?site=poppyporter.co.uk&target=domain

This is the spam score which is worrying you:

https://d.pr/i/wl6Dz0.png

And these are the links which Moz thinks are bad:

https://d.pr/i/tNjbse.png

These are the notes from Moz on why linking sites and / or pages get higher spam flags:

https://d.pr/i/SDKfmc.png

Basically if Moz identifies that a linking site shares common features with other sites that have factually gained Google penalties, then links from those site will raise the spam score higher and higher. For some reason Moz seems to think that Poppyporter.com fits that pattern, hence the high spam scores for those four links

These are the URLs for the offending web pages:

If you visit those URLs, you will see that the site is not in fact parked at all. Although those pages all result in error 404s, if the site were really taken down - how come the Poppy Porter logo and branding are still there? How come featured products are still listed? If the site were parked and taken down, it wouldn't have your stuff still on it. Clearly it does and it is not parked (hence the custom 404 pages are still rendering)

If your site were really parked, the 404s would look like this instead:

https://d.pr/i/Qqtojd.png

It would be a blank white page with no branded styling. Nothing except for the server's response! The fact that it's still all styled, shows that your old site is still online. Individual pages may have been taken down, but at large that site still exists

Interestingly, if you click any link on your old site, it moves you to the new site

Let's look at one of the 404 pages on your old site, which does not redirect to your new site and is still live:

https://www.poppyporter.com/racing_wings_earrings.html

As you can see, there's no redirect to the new site:

https://d.pr/i/gJ7uKT.png

If we look at the source code of a live (but 404-ing) page on poppyporter.com (say if we examine the shop link in the top-line nav):

https://d.pr/i/dwdVut.png

You can see very clearly that, you have two sites live and one is linking to the other!

I'm not a betting man and I don't have loads of info available, but if I _were _a betting man I'd say, this is what has happened:

You didn't shut down your old site properly, leading to a 'broken' old site with loads of 404s and broken styling
You tried to 'point' your old site to your new site with some kind of link architecture update, maybe in the DB or CMS
Moz saw that the old site was all janky and broken with loads of broken looking and 404-ing pages
Moz gave your old site a higher spam score than it used to have because now it's all bork'd (broken)
But there are links from the old site to the new site
So now your new site is inheriting the negative spam scores generated by the botched move from old site to new
It's possible that the old site had legitimately high spam scores, but I can't say for certain. Certainly after this botched attempt to move across, you have ended up with a spammy looking (and acting, in terms of status codes) old site. Because of the links, those negative scores are being pushed from the old site to the new one
As stated I don't know if the old site had high spam scores prior to the botched move and you need to investigate that with some urgency, as it will entirely shape your next movements
If the old site was very spammy and you were trying to make a 'clean break', you have undone that by interlinking the old site with the new one. Certainly you'd want to perma-kill the old domain as a matter of urgency! Kill the links, kill the pages that are still up, do not redirect from old site to new etc.
If the old site had good metrics before the botched move, you want to replace all the links and live-URLs with 301 redirects. Only do this if you are certain that Google hadn't penalised the old site. This can be a bit of a technical thing to do

Anyway the long and the short of it is, yes your old site is still live - yes it is linking excessively to your new site! One way or the other, it needs sorting out...

effectdigital

All of the plugins I can find allow the tag to be deployed on pages, posts etc. You pick from a pre-defined list of existing content, instead of just whacking in a URL and having it inserted (annoying!)

If you put an index.php at that location (the location of the 404), you could put whatever you wanted in it. Might work (maybe test with one). Would resolve a 200 so you'd then need to force a 410 over the top. Not very scalable though...

effectdigital

Hmm, that's interesting - it should work just as you say! This is the point where you need a developer's help rather than an SEO analysts :') sorry!

Google will revisit 410s if it believes there is a legitimate reason to do so, but it's much less likely to revisit them than it is with 404s (which actively tell Google that the content will return).

Plugins are your friends. Too many will overload a site and make it run pretty slowly (especially as PHP has no multi-threading support!) - but this plugin, you would only need it temporarily anyway.

You might have to start using something like PHPMyAdmin to browse your SQL databases. It's possible that the uninstall didn't work properly and there are still databases at work, generating fresh URLs. You can quash them at the database level if required, however I'd say go to a web developer as manual DB edits can be pretty hazardous to a non-expert

effectdigital

I think you're right to streamline your code, just for neatness! I'd do something more like this:

alt="Products Page">Products Page

It's just nice to work in some alt text to get higher relevance scores

The number of links you deploy per page depends upon the SEO authority of your site and individual web-pages. I am of course talking about PageRank which is still a leading factor in Google's ranking algorithms! Everyone knows that TBPR (Toolbar PageRank) is dead. That's the little metric you used to get on the Google toolbar for Firefox (before Chrome was created). This was a simplified version of PageRank and a rough indicator, which people misused (so Google took it away)

'Actual' PageRank (which SEOs have never seen) is still very much at large and operates, roughly along these principles:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

Here's an image to help you out:

https://d.pr/i/WsySN1.png

Basically web pages are referenced by other URLs across the web and gain PageRank. This gives a web page an amount of 'SEO authority' which travels along axioms of relevance (e.g: even a link from the world's biggest pet store, won't help a car insurance company to rank much higher). Links from web pages with higher authority and trust metrics, which are relevant to the target page (both in terms of linguistic semantics and actual usage) are worth more. Links from pages with low SEO authority which have low trust ratings, which are completely irrelevant (for users and search engines) are pointless at best (and may even have a negative impact)

The obvious implications of this knowledge are that, networking your site with other websites is a good way to raise rankings (so long as it is done properly and ethically, in an editorial manner - advertorial links don't count). That being said, these rules also hold true for the internal linking of your website! It's called PageRank, not DomainRank or SiteRank. Any time two pages link between each other (internally or externally) PageRank does flow

When one page links to another correctly, it loses some PageRank. A fraction of that PageRank is gained by the receiving web-page (unless no-follow tags are used, in which case the 'sending' page still loses some authority, but the 'receiving' page gains none - it's vented into cyberspace)

Many large, well-known sites use this to their advantage. Virgin have several expansive eCommerce driven web properties which leverage deep-linking menus and faceted navigational links to really push their long-tail traffic to its maximum! This serves them very well. That being said, Virgin have monstrous budgets, digital PR and corporate backing which you likely can't match

What's right for one site, can be totally wrong for another! If you have very little SEO authority and / or trust to begin with, then using too many internal site links can cause your homepage and category-level URLs to 'bleed out'. Think of it as, hooking up a complex water irrigation system (to feed a greenhouse of tomatoes) to a single bucket of water. All of the tomatoes receive one tiny drop of moisture, and die at basically the same time they would have - had no irrigation been attempted! But were that bucket confined to 2-3 tomato plants, they might survive a few weeks (even if the rest of the crops died). It's the same with internal linking, horses for courses and all that

Be careful when reading up on SEO theory as it's almost always highly contextual and applies to very specific situations only

effectdigital

You are right to be concerned and many in the SEO community don't really feel that Shopify has 'nailed' SEO yet. It started as a slightly nicer version of Wix where you could build your own site pretty easily but obviously they handle a lot of the eCommerce aspects as well (thus it's very attractive to business owners, sadly it's not great for SEO)

The community is expanding and the number of plugins and add-ons for Shopify is broadening. The problem is, many developers working on the Shopify platform don't have too much SEO experience (at least, that has been my experience of the Shopify community)

If you are finding that certain items are missing from the 'base' (non modified) source code, that is a concern. Google can technically crawl generated content and links (which are rendered client site), but that required headless browsers and client-side rendering. On average that takes 10x longer than basic source-scraping. Google's mission is to 'index the web', so although they have this new technology and functionality they wouldn't arbitrarily decide to take a 10x efficiency hit across all indexation (that would be nutty and would go against their prime directive)

Rendered crawling is deployed by Google for popular web pages. When it is used, it is not used with the same frequency as basic crawling - and not everyone gets that special treatment!

If you're not Santander or Coca Cola, you should be thinking about how you can help Google rather than how Google will "certainly use their latest technologies to help me, a small to medium business owner - at any expense!" - it just won't happen (sorry!)

The Shopify community is commerce and design led. One thing they are really bad at, is latching onto one-off isolated comments from Google (such as "we can crawl JavaScript now!") and then applying that to everything without testing it first in iterations. The fact is, sites that perform more server-side rendering do still perform better than sites which rely too heavily on client-side rendering (especially as that drastically impacts page-loading speeds and burdens the end user)

If I was finding lots of critical stuff that didn't appear in the base (non-modified) source code and my site wasn't a household name, I'd be really - really concerned!

I am sure that the right Shopify designers and developers could sort it out for you, but it may be costly. Especially as devs in that community won't believe you that it's necessarry, and will fire loads of posts to you (from Google) stating that what they have already done is fine. Comments from the horse's mouth are useful, but not without greater context

effectdigital

Just remember, the only regex character which is supported is "*". Others like "" and "?" are not supported! So it's still very limited. Changing the response from 404 to 410 should really help, but be prepared to give Google a week or two to digest your changes

Yes, it would be tricky to inject those URLs with Meta no index tags, but it wouldn't be impossible. You could create an index.php file at the directory of each page which contained a Meta no-index directive, or use a plugin to inject the tag onto specific URLs. There will be ways, don't give up too early! That being said, this part probably won't add much more than the 410s will

It wouldn't be a bad idea to inject the no-index tags, but do it for 410s and not for 404s (doing it for 404s could cause you BIG problems further down the line). Remember, 404 - "temporarily gone but will come back", 410 - "gone - never coming back". Really all 410s should be served with no-index tags. Google can read dynamically generated content, but is less likely to do so and crawls it less often. Still - it would at least make the problem begin shrinking over time. It would be better to get the tags into to non-modified source code (server side rendering)

By the way, you can send a no-index directive in the HTTP header if you are really stuck!

https://sitebulb.com/hints/indexability/robots-hints/noindex-in-html-and-http-header/

The above post is quite helpful, it shows no-index directives in HTML but also in the HTTP header

In contrast to that example, you'd be serving 410 (gone) not 200 (ok)

effectdigital

You have taken some good measures there, but it does take Google time to revisit URLs and re-index them (or remove them from the index!)

Did you know, 404 just means a URL was temporarily removed and will be coming back? The status code you are looking to serve is 410 (gone) which is a harder signal

Robots.txt (for Google) does in-fact support wild cards. It's not full regex, in-fact the only wildcard supported is "*" (asterisk: matching any character or string of characters). You could supplement with a rule like this:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /*revslider*

That should, theoretically block any URL from indexation if it contains the string "revslider"
Be sure to **validate** any new robots.txt rules using Google Search Console to check they are working right!

Remember that robots.txt affects crawling and **not indexation!** To give Google a directive not to index a URL, you should use the Meta no-index tag:
[https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93710?hl=en](https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93710?hl=en)

**The steps are:**

Remove your existing robots.txt rule (which would stop Google crawling the URL and thus stop them seeing a Meta no-index tag or any change in status code)
Apply status 410 to those pages instead of 404
Apply Meta no-index tags to the 410'ing URLs
Wait for Google to digest and remove the pages from its index
Put your robots.txt rule back to prevent it ever happening again
Supplement with an additional wildcard rule
Done!

-

Hope that helps

effectdigital

It's unlikely that if two pages are both very useful for a query, that Google would de-list one purely because it's from the same domain. If neither page is very high value in terms of content or popularity, what you are suggesting can happen. But instead of taking the 'easy' way out and de-indexing one, your end goal should be to make every page as useful as possible!

You will rarely ever benefit in the SERPs by doing a 'quick easy thing' which adds no value to your site, pages or the wider web. Always ask how you could be informing, educating or entertaining the web in a fresh new way which hasn't previously been done. If you're doing what has been done before, you need to do it at least 3-4x better to steal that audience and exceed the historic popularity of other information sources

If your categories really all are on the same level you might want to address that by having architectural (URL) layers to distinguish the categories. Whenever you say to yourself "I can't do better", that is a big problem as not all of your competitors will share that some mindset. Do you want to be the one who gets ahead? Then you need to push on!

insead of having "/anxiety" and also "/anxiety-counseling" on the same level, why not have "/conditions/anxiety" and also "/practitioners/anxiety" as well? That way the URLs are different but there's also a hierarchical structure which helps Google to work out which is which

I think you're right that your blogs may contain content that is more relevant to the queries which you have specified. That being said, de-indexing them doesn't magically make your commercial pages more relevant. It's not necessarily going to make your commercial pages rank better, or at all. As such - maybe doing heavier CRO on the non-commercial pages would be the most advisable solution!

If you ever find yourself thinking "aha I can do this quick clever thing to make Google do what I want instead of putting their users first" it's almost certainly the wrong tactic

effectdigital

So you have! According to Ahrefs the site averages around 1,193 visits (all countries) per month from SEO (Google) specifically. These estimates can be inflated or deflated depending upon how well their keyword index covers your particular website. From Ahrefs you have a 'Domain Rating' of 82 which is really strong.

Looking in SEMRush it's less favourable with the tool suggesting you see between 150 and 300 visits a month from Google in the USA. SEMRush's keyword index (and general handling of data) isn't as good as the stuff you get out of Ahrefs so that's pretty much what I was expecting.

The Ahrefs estimated SEO traffic chart stretches back to 2015 so it seems as though traffic from Google was ascertained in a relatively sustainable way.

I think that you could find a buyer for your site. What they'd be willing to spend would depend upon their current resources and ability to 'keep it going'. Someone who could only just afford the purchase would see diminishing returns as they might lack the ability to invest in future content and community management. To someone with deeper pockets, maybe they could afford to spend over ten grand on it.

Certainly the metrics are pretty decent. Obviously I haven't dissected those metrics in a granular way by conducting some kind of forensic analyses, but the top-line signals are pretty good (in my opinion)

effectdigital

That's pretty good. One big red flag is when sites have like, 60+ CF and like 13 TF or in the single digits. If you want you can send your site to the email on my profile and I'll have more of a look. It still won't be full depth but should show if you have a dud or not. Up to you though

effectdigital

I think it could be something that someone would buy, but obviously that would need a more detailed investigation. It's great if Moz's metrics are high, but is that universally agreed by other tools? For example is the Ahrefs Domain Rating similar to Moz's Domain Authority score? Does SEMRush see the site as a link toxicity risk? Does Majestic SEO give reasonable Trust Flow and Citation Flow read-outs?

It also depends what the backlinks are like. Certainly it's great if there are a lot of linking domains (and the number of overall links isn't disproportionately different to the number of linking domains). But some of those links might be great, whilst others might be garbage.

You can get three really nice articles (1,000+ words written by a proper PR person, not a link builder!) posted across three really nice sites (with DAs ranging from 65 to 80+) for about £700 GBP / $890 USD. You have to figure that, since those are one-time posts, the value of each containing site must be significantly higher (in the thousands or tens of thousands of dollars)

When prospecting websites as potential link opportunities, I also look into tools like SEMRush or Ahrefs which give estimated traffic figures for those websites (although the traffic estimates are usually only estimates of what those sites take in from Google). I would certainly do the same thing in a lot more detail if I was going to be buying a site rather than a one-off placement. Some tools give even better traffic data for 3rd-party sites which they buy from ISPs and build a front-end around that

If your site could assure a buyer across different platforms (even if some readouts were variable, if they were all relatively high...) then I don't think you'd have too much trouble selling it

Of course some shady black-hat cats might wait for you to get sick of it and delete your own site. They may then buy your expired domain and use something like an advanced scraper to pull the (historic) site files off the 'WayBack Machine' (webarchive.org) and resurrect your website for $20-$40 USD

Be wary of the necromancers of the web

effectdigital

Yeah that's pretty much overkill. "No-follow" isn't actually named very well as it doesn't prevent users or search engines from 'following' a hyperlink. I know, it was named really badly! In fact many people feel it's not even a directive to stop links from being 'followed' (or visited)

What the no-follow tag is commonly used for these days is to denote the difference between editorial and advertorial hyperlinks. It's only really an issue with external links, rather than internal ones. If you have placed content on another site (and you paid for it, like a sponsored post) with a link pointing back to your own site (to try and get referral traffic), the 'no-follow' tag lets Google know that the link is advertorial in nature and thus should not pass PageRank to the receiving domain / web-page

Because of this a lot of people believe that if you no-follow a link, it doesn't vent or lose any PageRank. This is false. If a link is default ('followed'), then an amount of PageRank will be lost from the linking page and donated to the receiving page. If a link is 'no-followed', the PageRank will still be lost by the linking page but the receiving page just won't get anything (so it gets vented into cyberspace). This is to stop "PageRank sculpting" using no-follow links from being a viable SEO manipulation tactic

As such, all no-following your duplicate internal links will do is vent tiny chunks of SEO authority without them then being appended to other pages on your site (so little bits of authority just get lost from your website's ecosystem)

It's not a huge problem that you should freak out about, in-fact the noticeable difference in performance via either implementation (I would guess) would be negligible to totally unnoticeable

But still - why chip away at yourself right? That's what your competitors are there for

effectdigital

I'd say that it's because the 5-star rating (as far as I can see) doesn't appear on or is not visible on the active page.

You have two competing forces here. Google's data and web-crawling teams push people to use JSON-LD. There's no argument that it feeds data to Google faster! A lot of the more recent documentation from Google's WebMaster tutorials does in fact push people towards the JSON-LD implementation

On the other hand, you have Google's anti-spam team. From their POV the JSON-LD implementation isn't so rosy. They used to purport the benefits of the Microdata implementation and with good reasons. With Microdata you have to physically have something visible on the page and then you wrap the schema around it. This stops people from feeding false-information to Google (which is far, far easier with the JSON-LD approach)

I have found that stuff marked up with Microdata is often far more likely to render in Google's SERPs (and far less likely to gain "rich snippet spam" penalties) than the JSON-LD stuff. It may feed the data slower, but the way it is structured forces people to deploy it in a more (yet not always wholly) legitimate manner

Basically Google is internally conflicted on which implementation is best. There are undoubtedly use-cases for JSON-LD where you actually just can't use Microdata, and in some of those instances it's legitimate to deploy JSON-LD instead (but you have to be really damn sure in terms of what you are doing!)

Sites have external metrics associated with them like authority and trust. If a site is highly regarded and trusted by Google, they may be willing to swallow the JSON-LD implementation method as it benefits their web crawlers. On the other hand, if a site is less known or has a history of shady practices, Google will often deny the JSON-LD implementation (or give the site using that implementation a penalty of some kind)

Remember, just because something is technically 'valid', that does not mean it's a legitimate implementation (which conforms to Google's guidelines) and it doesn't mean that Google will listen to the directive

effectdigital

This is an interesting question and I can see why, with many modern agencies focusing on 'keyword cannibalisation' you would consider this action. What you have to realise is that Google still largely sees the web as a mass of interconnected pages. If your blog categories supply decent enough content to rank for those related terms, there's no guarantee that if you turn them off - Google will make the same evaluation of your business-aimed (service-level) categories instead

That being the case, I'd actually let time and data lead the way. In Google Analytics you will probably find that some service-level categories gain more traffic, whilst for some categories their contextual blog iterations bring in more

You might consider learning more about CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation). In my opinion, there's rarely a time where turning traffic off is beneficial. But could those blog category URLs be re-designed to point users more easily (and more often) to their commercial counterparts? Probably

I do tend to no-index 'tag' URLs as they are messy and non-hierarchical, they can fudge up your equity flow from A to B. But actual categories with a hierarchical structure? Those are pages which you do want to rank

You might also consider whether there's some clever way to just have one category which lists posts and also commercial offerings on a given thematic basis. Really, architectural unification should be your end goal!

Remember: there's absolutely no guarantee that de-listing one category type would cause the other to rank. They're very different pages with contextually different content. Keep an eye on both and strategize to one day, eventually bring them together. That's what I would do!

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