Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Cutopia,

The rule of thumb should always be: if you do recognize that is a link scheme, google will too.

If I were you, I'd make every piece of content sent to publishers really unique, not with slightly different text. If you do not want to be penalize, put real effort in it.
Yeap, its really possible that google dismiss some or all of those links, not because are the same links, but because it is a clear link scheme. Its perfectly normal to have the same url in many articles/referred pages. The penguin algorithm is really powerfull and ahs became smarter every year.

Hope my advise helps.
Best luck.
GR.

Ps: if you still implement it, would love to hear back the results. It could prove im wrong!

Hi ramb,

Short answer: No, it won't affect your ability to rank in Google. Unless both sites (non-www and www version) compete for the same search term and one of them isn't blocked in the correspondent robots.txt file.

If you can, make sure to have a redirection rule so as everything in the non-www goes to the www.
It bugs me why aren't you redirecting the complete non-www to the www version.
Two possibilities come to my mind:

1. You can't redirect the whole non-www due to some app or technical need. 
   In this case, both versions, if accessible to Google, will be treated as different sites. Thus, you must be sure that both robots file are correct for the given subdomain.
2. You have a separate website, which contains different content from the www version (this usually happens with subdomains with different page types, such as products.abc.com and categories.abc.com)
   In this case, please be sure that you know what you want to be blocked and have each robots.txt file in their subdomain.

Keep in mind that Robots file only controls where you don't want googlebot to access in the public version of your website. When a certain page or group of pages are blocked in robots.txt, google won't access them anymore thus not knowing if that page has what it needs to rank for any given search term. Google might rank lower and users will see a note in search results, leading to a lower CTR.

Hope it helps.
Best Luck.
Gaston

ok, you said link scheme and that text viries slightly, im sorry if I missunderstood your question.

Does the pages linked in B or C have a link to A? If that´s the case, then you are in trouble.

There is no way to assure that will be no harm, because google keeps the whole history of every site, so they can link internally from that history and somehow punish sites. From my point of view it can be a little suspicious to Google.
I´d separate a few weeks from publishing each blog post so it looks less unnatural. And also, remember not using exact match anchor text in every text and/or using the same anchor text.

Hope it helps.
GR

Hi Alex,

Actually, the website age is not that big of a ranking factor anymore. You can rank in the top positions with a website a few months old.
Also, with just guest-posting is not enough to rank high.

I'd suggest you take a deep and comprehensive read to the Moz's beginners guide to SEO. I think that there are quite a few things to optimize that you are missing.
For example, title tags. You should make them more descriptive and focused on the main keyword/phrase you are willing to rank.

Hope it helps,
Best luck.
Gaston

Hi Simon,

Yes, redirect chains are an issue and should be resolved. Google has said that they can handle well up to 4 redirects. When the 5th occurs, Googlebot stops crawling.
On another note, your site is indexed (check this image) and if you have removed a noindex tag recently, give google some time to process your site.

A tip that could help you rank, at least for your brand name (assuming its Costwold Flat Roofing) is adding it to the H1 tag.

Hope it helps.
Best luck.
Gaston

Hi Joao,

1- DA drop, that could be many reasons. Considering the case that you've not done any major updates and/or created spammy links or disavowed them (in moz's tool) then, its possible that the top domains increased their authority, as they DA cant increase over 100, it makes the lower DA domains to decrease.
2- It's hard to say why your site drop some rankings without your site's URL. If its the case that you have not made any changes and/or created spammy links or disavowed links (in Google Search Console), then its likely that your competitors made some improvements.

Keep in mind that DA/PA or any other metric outthere does not tell the quality of any site. its just an approximation of what that tool understands about google algorithms.
More info here:
Mozscape API updates
Open Site Explorer Guide - Moz Help hub

Hope it helps.
Best luck.
GR.

Hi there,

On one hand, I'd advise against only looking to increase Moz's metrics. Keep in mind that they are a private measurement and they are trying to guess what Google's Search Algorithm might consider important to rank a website higher, looking (mostly) at backlinks profiles. You can find more information about Moz's metics here: Link Explorer resources - Moz Help Hub.

On the other hand, for higher rankings there are many things to consider, some of them:

• Creating high quality and engaging content.
• Making sure GoogleBot can crawl and understand your pages' content.
• Focus on answering the user's questions and intents, not just creating content for the bots or for the sake of creating content.
• Engage with users and other publishers to get your content shown, eventually, some links will point back to you.
• A tip: Analize your competitors' rankings and what they are doing to rank higher.
• Another tip: Focus on understanding how and with which terms your potential users/clients are googling. Then create content for those queries, don't forget the 1st point.

Also, there are many more recommendations and more detailed in these resources:
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide - Google Search Help
The Beginner's Guide to SEO - Moz
A Simple 7‑Step SEO Tutorial for Beginners - Ahrefs

Hope it helps,
Best luck.

Looking a little further, you only have 2 redirect hops. As I said earlier, there is no big of an issue. And, you won't get any improvement in rankings, nor will impact your crawling (you only have 1 page).

It looks like you have 2 different rules:
1- http:// -> https://
2- non-www -> www

I don't think that your hosting provider will help you with these redirects. You'd have to do it yourself via .htaccess file.
Here you have the htaccess documentation, if you want to know more.

Hope it helps.
Best luck.
Gaston

Hi Cutopia,

For passing Linkjuice, 301 is the recommended method.
To mantaining the rankings, it has worked for us to set a canonical and wait some time (a few weeks), then redirect 301. Tha what has worked for us in a XXL ecommerce, in order to let Google recognize the new site then a redirection.

Hope it helps!
Best Luck!
GR.

Hi there,

I need to clarify that 301 redirections, definitely pass authority. That's not even a discussion.

As you are asking about merging (I guess) 3 smalls websites into a fourth and big one, that's a really tricky question. It depends on many other factors, some are:

• Content matching
• Answering user questions
• Brand relationship

In my experience, doing this kind of merging is a messy process and in many cases, it ends up losing some of the previous rankings/traffic already gained by the small websites.
I'd suggest you focus on improving the main website and, if applicable link to that page from the small websites.
If that overlap is harming your sales, your brand strategy or other marketing efforts, then you should act accordingly. But if these websites are different identities and by themselves bring sales, that overlapping might be beneficial for you in not letting competitors rank there ;).

Hope it helps,
Best luck!

Hi Andrei,

Found your issue: There is an already blocked in robots.txt parameter added when redirected from www to non-www.
I'm attaching an image so you can follow me better.
I used this web: whregoes.com
To solve this issue, I'd try to figure out why that parameter is being added, and remove it or allow its crawling.

That parameter it's blocked in the 2nd line of your robots.txt:
Disallow: /*?

Another way to check what's going on is via the inspect URL tool in search Console.
1- Log in to the www property
2- Inspect URL, only the home page (https://www.probike.ro)
3- Ask to check the live version
4- (wait a few seconds) Google will tell you what they are seeing
--> I guess here you'll find the message that it's being blocked in robots.txt

Also, checking your declared sitemap, it goes to a 404 page. You'd want to take a look here: https://probike.ro/pub/sitemap.xml

Hope it helps.
Best luck.
Gaston

eCTinIP

Hi there!

If there isnt any video shown in the results, its very likely that Google understands that people does not look for videos results by that query.
There is a great opportunity as you say ranking videos, but not in that search query. If you dont mind, I'd like to recommend you to try SEMrush and its keyword tracker, they show the rich snippets for any selected keyword. It's very usefull to kickstart a research from there, it may help to find other paths for finding video rich results.

Yeah, keyword research takes time. Finding the gap where to put all your effort is difficult, always be sure and try to confirm that you are targetting the correct set of search terms with other tools and/or other proffesionals.

Hope it helps.
Best luck.
GR

Hi there,

Are you sure that you are referring to Google's Search Console? I'm seeing your site indexed, and there are more pages indexed than the one present in the sitemap. Counted roughly 700 and site: search shows over 800, You can see it for yourself with this link to the search or in this link to the image.

I don't really see why your rankings would have decreased because of an existing error in the sitemap. Having a sitemap correctly installed and crawled does not mean better rankings.
I'd suggest you reassess your website and the keywords that are performing poorly, there might be something else causing it.

Best of luck,
Gaston

Hi there!

Would you mind explaining a little bit more what is the issue? Probably with a screenshot of what GSC is reporting you
I'm seeing that all those pages have a self-canonical correctly set up.

Hi there!

Yes, pages with poor user experience do affect SEO, even more if those pages receive traffic from google.
So there are two scenaries here, regarding whether they receive traffic:

1. They do receive traffic, either move to other CMS (like wordpress and woocommerce) or improve those pages experience.
2. Do not receive traffic, leave them as is.

Alls this is considering that you are not able to change Robots.txt and do not want to move to other CMS.
Adding nofollow links will not make any difference, because Google does honor the robot.txt, so pages blocked there will not be crawled never. So as to remove them fron index is crucial beind allowed in robots(or what's the sabe, not being disallowed)

Hope it helps.
Best Luck.
GR

Hi Mike,

As long as you are referring to Wordpress, yes it's safe to remove tags that have no content nor are being used.

Best of luck.
Gaston

Hi there!

In my opinion, for SEO purposes it is correct to have a unique page (really different from other, not just changing the city name and location) por each big city you are optimizing.
Thus said, a subfolder is useful in order to show google the name of the city in the URL. It is common that google considers parameters different than folders.

Also, remember to avoid duplicate content. /dallas/ and /dallas/index.php should not be accesible and indexable for google. Redirect one to the other or canonicalize one to the other. Same with www, non-www, http and https versions.

Hope it helps.
Best luck.
GR.

Hi there,

Well, there is no hard evidence that Google still considers those backlinks after the redirection is gone. Neither that after a year backlinks actually carry value.
If you don't have the urgent need to remove that redirection, I'd keep it for as long as I can. It doesn't hurt more than a few bucks a year its domain renewal.

Hope it helps.
Best luck.
Gaston

Hi keith,

As google says they honor next/prev signals there whould not be any problem with your pagination. Keep in mind that it could take some time to completely understand the new structure and start showing the correct results. For a 10k pages ecommercer, i'd say about  6-8 weeks.

Also, please make sure that those pagination tags are implemented correctly.
Here some resources:

Indicate paginated content - Search Console Help
SEO Guide to Google Webmaster Recommendations for Pagination - Moz Blog
Pagination & SEO: Best practices - YOAST

Hope it helps.
Best Luck.
GR.