Welcome to the Q&A Forum
Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.
Well, I checked SEMRush and they in fact report $2K on ads, but it seems that they have no data of the past. So they are just catching up with the data or Nest just started with their online ads. In any case, as the stats are just pouring in, I would leave a few more weeks before "trusting" on what SEMRush reports. I'm also sure (like you) that after that acquisition they are spending much more than 11K a month in ads.
Hold on for a week or two and see if there any changes.
Seems like your client's fault. Even though you said they swear they did not create the links, no negative SEO will waste the time or efforts on giving links to a site that was just launched and it's not even ranking well.
Perhaps your client did buy the links but without even knowing, there are places where links are sold like a "Be in the first page on Google", so common people do not associate that with spam links...
I've done a little more research on this 
I was intrigued...
My site uses a custom blog, not a public platform, if you visit it (the blog area) it looks alike wordpress but it isn't. We also use NetDNA to serve images, which is the parent company of maxcdn.
My image search in Google returns to my posts, not the images (but there are 2 differences with your site: custom URLs on NetDNA (also possible with maxcdn) and not a Wordpress site).
Then I checked for a small blog I write about SEO, works with wordpress but without NetDNA (CloudFlare instead as the CDN) and the images in google search also link to my posts.
So that leaves with only one option, custom domains. You are serving images using a third party domain, which can be seen as a hotlink by Google and therefore they may link to the domain hosting the image, as it is probably the image owner.
This are just guesses, but it looks like a nice/possible theory.
Why don't you start using custom domains with maxcdn and see what happens?
With every site redesign and restructure comes a little drawback in search engines. 2 weeks is too soon to judge, but the fact that the new URLs are being indexed,, rich snippets are showing, etc is a good sign.
There's no such thing as a penalty for a site restructure, you just need to wait while Google catches up.
Now you should be focusing in conversions/leads. Is the new site appealing to your customers? are you selling more? are you collecting some kind of feedback? That's what really matters, users.
Hope that helps!
Is terms of SEO, the server location does not carry any value. However, if you site loads really fast to France visitors, it just makes sense to rank your site higher to French visitors (yet again, confirming that server geolocation does not give you any SEO benefit).
As for your question, what you are trying t achieve isn't an easy task and there are entire companies dedicated to just that, DNS based on geolocation (Anycast DNS, Geo-aware DNS), which is what almost all CDNs do, serve the content of a Website from the closest server to a person connecting to a Website. My recommendation? try to get the fastest server you can in the area you mostly want to target (Europe? then get a server that works fast in europe) and then use some CDN service like maxcdn, or cloudflare to serve static, cacheable content from different locations and speed up site loading as much as possible.
That being said, Google offers some tools to help you target specific Countries, Languages regardless of the server location under Google's Webamster Tools.
Hope that helps!
No problem. Keep checking on SEMRush in a few days to see if those numbers are changing.
But for now, you can report to your customer that Nest wasn't doing any noticeable advertising before the acquisition. They are now, apparently, but those stats from SEMRush are just estimates based on open metrics, no one outside Google or Nest can actually give you an exact sum.
Hey,
If the grid/list view have the exact same HTML code, then it is something in the javascript that already show one or the other.
I would actually find the way to avoid the reload and change from grid to list and back without leaving the page. If you manage to accomplish that, then you don't need any robots tag or canonical, etc.
Hope that helps a bit.
Yes, 301 do send the link juice to the new page, although a little is diluted as if there was a link in the old page linking to the new page, and only that link was there.
If you are using the appropriate rel="alternate" hreflang="x" you shouldn't have any problem. For more info you can read here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en
Most likely, as the pages are the same, they won't show up at the same time, Google will serve the one that they consider appropriate for the user, hence the use of hreflang, to guide Google to know which version they should serve to each user.
I am guessing here, but Moz crawler does not respect your robots.txt file. Instead, if you want pages not to be crawled, try using the meta robots noindex for a change and see what happens.
Did you try manually fetching as Googlebot the robots.txt file via the webmaster tools? If not, do that, then click submit to index. Then do the same thing for some of the images or better if you have a file linking to all images (like an image sitemap). Once that is done, let Google recrawl everything for a few days (even a week) and try again.
Google indexes PDF contents and files almost like regular HTML. Links are followed, you can block indexing, etc. Just like regular HTML. The only thing Google can't index from PDFs are images, unless you have it in HTML format elsewhere.
I would definitely recommend converting those PDF menus to regular HTML.
You can find more info here:
Can google fully index pdf files?
Hope that helps!
I believe not. That won't be a good solution.
The best one I can suggest is you DO redirect all the old pages to the new version of them (if any) and the other ones, the ones that have no new match you should return a customized 404 perhaps with links to related pages you can have within the new design.
It will take time, yes. But that's the way to keep the most of your search traffic and pagerank.
Hope that helps.
If your main concern is page load time, then I'd suggest you look into the @media query for higher resolutions. In fact, if you use sprites, you can recognize via CSS the display and serve different sprites (or images) based on the display resolution.
Take a look at the RetinaJS project here: http://retinajs.com/
Hope that helps!
OSE doesn't scrape the entire Web, only portion of it. It takes a lot of resources to scrape the entire Web for links, however, the main ones, those that aren't that "hidden" are easily found by OSE.
Open Site Explorer only indexes a portion of the Web. If your links are showing up in Webmaster tools that's ok and there's nothing to worry about. Eventually, OSE will start showing your Links.
There are a couple other scripts/enhancements you can do to speed up the site:
In any of those cases, archive pages, tag pages, author pages, etc, I would go with a noindex,follow. As you want the posts they link to to be indexed, but you don't need the tag (,etc.) pages indexed, just followed to let the pagerank flow and let search engines crawl the pages they link to (actual posts).
Hope that helps!
Hi Demetrios,
First you are using this structure: <a rel="<a class="attribute-value">author</a>" href="https://plus.google.com/111273018705499833271">Demetrios Sourmaidis on Google+a>, while it should be <a rel="<a class="attribute-value">author</a>" href="https://plus.google.com/111273018705499833271?rel=author">Demetrios Sourmaidis on Google+a>
Have you verified the page in your G+ profile? You should link to the site where your posts are and a link to your G+ profile should be there.
Anyway, if your picture, and data is showing up in the snippet while you search, it means it is working. Try using GWT and under Labs you can find "Author Stats" that will show you the pages that are being recognized as your creations and some traffic data.
You can find more info on the link structure I mentioned here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1408986
Hope that helps!
Try turning personalized search off, using an URL like this: https://www.google.com/search?q=keywords+to+find&gl=us&pws=0
At least for me, what I see there matches what Moz shows, although those are the results shown to a person in god knows what location with personalized search off, they match Mozs'.
Hope that helps.