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Just want to echo Patrick's answer. He's pretty much got the right idea. Most rankings not on page #1 will jump all around. I would only be really concerned if it dropped from page #1, down to page 4-5 etc. Also, I would also agree that you don't need to focus too much on rankings week to week - and in addition - I wouldn't focus on rankings for a single keyword too much.

To see if you have some sort of site-wide issue, I would check your Impressions in Google Console Search Analytics. See if your Impressions have dropped in the same timeframe.

I would also look to queries where you already rank page #1 - and be sure those are optimized for CTR with titles and descriptions, and then see if you can find out if users are happy with those pages - maybe with goal tracking or some sort of measurement to see if they are converting etc.

Then - really focus on "local SEO", here's some resources:

• https://moz.com/local-search-ranking-factors
• http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/
• http://www.evolvingseo.com/2016/03/29/005-local-seo-phil-rozek/ (disclaimer: that is my Podcast)
• https://moz.com/blog/category/local-seo
• http://blumenthals.com/blog/

Fortunately I predicted this question a year and nineteen days ago: http://www.evolvingseo.com/2012/08/10/clean-sweep-yo-tag-archives-now/

No seriously, you just want to run that analysis to make sure you're not killing a random tag or two with some traffic or links. In which case you can selectively delete and/or noindex.

-Dan

Hello!

Welcome to the world of SEO, and Moz

Before making any big changes, I would do a few things:

• Keep an eye on your daily rankings for the top keywords to that page. Quite often these sort of rankings changes are normal to a certain degree. I would give it some time and keep an eye on the flux to get a sense for how much they are moving around.
• To piggyback on that, definitely be sure to track / watch rankings and metrics for many keywords, not just the top volume keyword.
• Also - did you see a NET loss in organic traffic to the page also? Sometimes, because of all the long tail keywords, despite losing ranking for a top keyword, you may not lose much traffic.
• Track competitors rankings too! You'll probably also see their rankings shifting around a lot - and this is a great way to tell if the ranking changes are just 'normal' for your space.

As you can see, a lot of good SEO is about having clear data that paints the whole picture

Now to your question specifically, I highly doubt that would trigger a keyword stuffing issue. Google is pretty good at mapping out the contents of the page. They likely know this is user generated content, and don't count keywords in there the same way they do you 'main' content.

I would dig around for common accessibility or technical issues - like mobile friendliness, do a fetch and render in Search Console (and make sure the images etc are accessible) etc.

But in short, unless you see a very clear drop in rankings, traffic across many pages and many keywords it's likely 'business as usual' with normal algo fluxuations 

Maybe 35 of them?

You can just leave those 35 indexed then.

I would just really like to get rid of most of them. It's so cluttered! Tags make up for nearly 60% of my site. That's no good.

Bear in mind you can delete from being visible in site navigation (remove tag clouds, tags from footers, tags at bottoms of posts) but the tag archives will still actually exist. So you can remove the links on-site without actually deleting the pages.

Like you siad in your posts, tag archives can be thin and Google is not down with that. I want to merge the tags with that Yoast Term Optmizer tool but it isn't available anymore I'm worried about doing redirects because that is a lot of redirects!

If you remove tags from on-page links and noindex the ones that aren't bringing traffic that should solve things. 35 redirects for the rest that are bringing traffic is not too many

I also have a question on categories. I currently have three categories each with 12 subcategories. The subcategories are city names. (I work for a bar that has 12 locations). Is that bad form? Would you set it up differently? And if I have a category named nightlife and a subcategory under it named Baltimore, should i check them both for a Baltimore nightlife post or just the Baltimore part?

I would think about how often you'll post in each category. What you don't want is a category with only a post or two sitting in it for months or years. If you think, after a year, each category and sub category will have say 7-10+ posts in it, than it should be fine. It's all about having each category archive be full of content and unique!

Hi There

Not 100% sure I am interpreting the question correctly, but let's give this a shot Few things to do;

• make sure to first install Yoast like Thomas suggestions
• noindex subpages of archives
• keep categories indexed, that's fine.
• you can choose to remove /category/ from the URL but I recommend leaving it there.
• Yoast should automatically add proper canonical on each page automatically. as long as you don't do anything else to effect this, it should be all set by default.
• be sure to noindex tags, these are not needed in the index.

Some further resources for you;

• http://moz.com/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success
• http://moz.com/webinars/hands-on-answers-to-the-most-asked-wordpress-qestions
• http://wordpress.tv/2013/08/13/justin-briggs-seo-in-wordpress/

Hope that helps!

-Dan

Hi Jeremy

To my knowledge this is not possible with wordpress.com - this is a little old but states such is the case: http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/is-it-possible-to-embed-canonical-url-in-my-posts-and-pages

adamxj2 posted a good link below from Google, which gives some other steps you can take to help mitigate common issues a canonical tag is meant to address. I find that very often people use canonicals as a band aid anyway, instead of a deeper fix - so there is likely another way to achieve what you need to.

Hi There

To step back a second, not all blog posts or pieces of content need a focus keyword. It depends on the goals of your content, and how you are trying to get it traffic. It looks like a lot of your content may be best suited to get traffic from social media etc. That's great, and in that case just write your article and don't worry about the focus keyword too much because it may rank for stuff by happenstance, but your main traffic sources won't be SEO.

That said, sometimes you may create content because you specifically see an opportunity to maybe rank for something where there is a "gap" in existing content in Google's search results. For example, you may notice a lack of great results for something like "pembroke welsh vs cardigan corgi" - and as a goal, you may set out to create the best piece of content on that topic to rank for it, and SEO is your primary goal. In that case, you'd enter "pembroke welsh vs cardigan corgi" into Yoast, and it will tell you how well your article is optimized for that based upon simple best practices.

So in other words - focus keyword is great when you know your target keyword ahead of time and are writing an article based off of that. If you're just writing an article for non-SEO purposes, maybe you'd refine a target keyword after the fact, but it's not a huge concern.

Choosing your focus keyword also has to do with just knowing good keyword research in general. There's two main factors to think about. Search volume and competition.

• Search volume - how many people look for the keyword per month. For blog posts it's best to stick in the 10-1,000 searches per month range.
• Competition - there's no single competition metric (Google does not provide one) but you can judge competition by experience of looking at search results or using a tool like Moz's keyword difficulty - which will give you a number from 1-100.

The trick of course is to try to find the highest volume but lowest difficulty, and that's a great beginning point for choosing focus keywords.

Hi There

We were just saying the type of content being created seemed like a very good fit for sharing on social media.

I'd say if it's your goal to be practicing SEO - that process and SEO work should start way before writing a new blog post and entering a focus keyword. You would want to begin everything with keyword research. This helps you determine what to create content about to rank for things.

You may also want to learn a little about how different pages should rank for different things - and your homepage should target your main over arching topic. This will be usually the broadest, most highly searched term.

There's some great resources on keyword research:

http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/keyword-research

http://backlinko.com/keyword-research

http://www.copyblogger.com/keyword-research/

If I'm understanding the question here's what you'll need to do:

1. Redirect the Hubspot blog URLs to the non-date URLs
2. Redirect the Dated URLs to the non dated URLs.

So _instead of _ a set of redirect chains (like shown in my graphic here you'll end up with something like this) - because the dated URLs were already created and "out there" you will have to redirect them to the non-dated URLs as well.

In terms of doing this quickly/automatically since it's 300 URLs, I'd usually do something like this:

1. Put the list of old Hubspot URLs in a spreadsheet column A
2. Put the new dateless URLs in colum B
3. Do some sort of matching work to get the appropriate URLs side by side so they match (what's done here depends on how your URLs are setup - maybe just alphabetical sorting will work)
4. I usually use some concatenates etc to then create each line of Redirects for the .htaccess file

If you're working with Hubspot or something like a partner they should be able to help you with the technical lifting.

PS - My redirect images come from this post, which is about finding and fixing redirect chains

Hi Denise

I would give Raven's Schema creator a try and let me know: https://wordpress.org/plugins/schema-creator/

-Dan

PS - Yoast SEO is much better for an SEO plugin. I wrote about why here and how to switch here

Denise

Ahh right, sorry about that. There is no plugin I'm aware of. You might want to try this method though: http://www.bloggingspell.com/add-schema-org-markup-wordpress/

Hi Julie

So in terms of pure accessibility from a technical standpoint, I think you're good. The content from inside the plugin appears to be showing in the HTML of source code, so this means it's perfectly accessible to Google. And to Google, it's part of the page just like other content (even though to you, on the backend, it comes from a widget).

What Roman is referring to, which is a good idea, may be this Top Places schema - https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/top-places-list - which is in Beta, so you have to click "express interest" to see if you can be accepted to try it.

Hi There

There's two possible ways I can think of you may want to try. Segmenting by landing page or segmenting by keyword/source.

**Landing Page ** - depending on the site, there may be specific pages (like products for ecommerce) that are obviously more purchase based. You can create a segment to show you all traffic that came by way of landing on one of these pages.

Keyword/Source - there are also purchase intent keywords like "buy, for sale, for purchase" etc - you can create a keyword segment which includes all of your purchase intend words - exclude branded terms, "how to" information intent words etc. There may be certain sources that you know are informational - like if you're linked to in a resource etc that's an informational visit - but if your product is in a "top 10 products" list, this referral traffic may be more purchase intent.

So really there's no blanket way to do this. You have to determine what determines the intent of traffic for your site and create segments around those parameters.

Hope that helps!

-Dan

Hi

Yes, I've heard of http://qandaforums.com/  The guy who developed it is a host on the "Automate My Small Business" Podcast.  I'm not sure if its available yet - last time I checked when you go to sign up, it says they're taking Beta testers.

But you can see it in action, as he has it going on the website for the Podcast at - http://ask.automatemysmallbusiness.com/

I was thinking of trying on a site of mine just for fun.

-Dan

Hi Tafser - thanks for helping out! Just want to point out, looks like they have a mobile site at a mobile subdomain which passes the test: http://m.prismpharmamachinery.com/

Dan (Moz associate)

Hi There

First off, I rarely delete pages. Better and easier to noindex. That way you get them out of the SERPs and reduce the poor user metrics, but people can still find the pages otherwise and you don't have to 301 redirect them etc. You can delete if you feel they are just a bad user experience over all of course - but I noindex as a starting point.

Anyhow, regardless, here's how I access it - first I use a custom report with the following metrics (you can play around with them);

• pageviews
• entrances
• new visits
• avg time on page
• exits
• exit rate
• "page" for the dimension

Thresholds - starting point (I use filters)

• pageviews - I start with over 50
• avg time on page - less than 30 seconds
• exit rate - great than 80%

I like to end up with a list of maybe 50-100 pages that fall within the thresholds. Every site is different. But I try to isolate 50-100 of the worst pages (we're assuming maybe a 2,500+ page site).

You can throw a segment on there if you want to segment just Google Organic traffic - that could in some cases be more accurate.

Hope that helps! Interested to see what other people do.

-Dan

Jeff

Google may have crawled your site, but has not updated its cached version of the homepage since June 3rd (where the title tag was in fact different).  I'd wait it out a little bit more, I'm sure you'll see it update soon.

-Dan

PS - you can just click on "cached" next to any search result to see the most resent version.

Hey There. Yes, I generally utilize mainly custom reports and segments for clients, as everyone goals and markets are different. Essentially, just creating the reports won't bring any "results" but our analysis and utilization of the data - takeaways and next step actions are what bring the results

But segmentation is totally essential to analytics: the words of Avinash say it much better than me ---> http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/web-analytics-segments-three-category-recommendations/

-Dan

Hi Ram

Is this you? I found it searching Google: https://wordpress.org/support/topic/why-my-site-getting-soft-404-errors-from-search-term-on-404-page-showing-in-gwt - and thought it would be helpful to know the actual site (and there's some more details in your thread there).

Anyhow, this is the URL getting a soft 404: https://akclinics.org/search/{search_term}/ (because you are showing a 200 OK, but there really is no content there, and looks like a 404 to the user)

You mention it's linked from here: https://akclinics.org/search/{search_term}/

But the question is - where is that linked from? I've crawled the entire site and can't find a reference to that URL anywhere.

You're normal search URL looks like this (even if the query is empty): https://akclinics.org/?s=

It shows the proper ?s= parameter.

So somehow, it looks like Google is finding and crawling the wrong search URL. It's using /search/%7Bsearch_term%7D/ instead of /?s= - even for an empty query. Maybe this was the old search URL for your old site?

The fix I think is to:

• find out where / why Google can access /search/%7Bsearch_term%7D/
• remove any links or references to /search/%7Bsearch_term%7D/  and/or redirect it to /?s=
• OR just return a real 404 code for /search/%7Bsearch_term%7D/

Let me know if that makes sense.

TITLE TAGS

The ONE on-site small change you could make and possibly yield the best result are the TITLE TAGS.  Home page primarily, but the others too.

Right now, you have:

Life Coach Boise Idaho | NLP Boise Idaho | Hypnosis Boise | Hypnotherapist Boise

Try only targeting 1 keyword and your location. That's it. So maybe:

Life Coach - Boise, ID | Bob Weikel & Associates

Then target the other keywords on other pages.  Traditionally speaking, each keyword you're trying to rank for should have its own page.  So have a page for each one of your services.

You don't need to repeat words so much in the title tags.

For location based businesses, title tags generally work best (in my observation) when they target one keyword, the location, and the company name.

I hope this helps - its the "most bang for the buck" IMO

-Dan