Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Ben,

Short answer: URL structure has too small of an impact on Google rankings.

Long answer:
I work in XXXL e-commerce and had similar discussions and eventually tested different approaches. We saw no gain in rankings nor in impressions.
Also, hired some of the world best agencies and consultants to help us out. They came to the same conclusion. We cannot argue the data of our experiments.

• Tested in different categories and in different countries.

There is also, the discussion that having a shorter URL helps in rankings has been addressed by John Mueller in some Google Webmaster Hangouts (currently can't find it), he said that it makes little to no difference. Instead of focusing on changing your internal systems and structures, use that energy and resources to improve user experience and content on the site.
There is a great possibility that your decline in Google traffic is due to other deeper issues. I'd suggest you and your team focus more on competitive analysis and trends on user behavior that trying to change the whole website URL structure.
A neat tip that I've sometimes been given is, check your internal linking. You might probably be linking too much or too little to your best pages.

As you may imagine, this is not a simple issue. There is no clear actionable and probably just one change won't revert that steady decline.

Hope it helps.
Best luck.
Gaston

Hi RandyHT,

There is no SEO value in redirecting Exact Match Domains (EMD) to your current and primary domain.
A long time ago (3-4 years) it was a tactic that allegedly helped in rankings for the terms contained in the redirected domains.

I guessthat they are trying to secure those domains and don't let competitors have it.
Don't worry that much about it.

Hope it helps.
Best luck.
Gaston

Hi SEOCT!

It's completely fine to have different website designs for different regions.
You have to be sure that the content is targeted to the selected country and that you've set the correct configuration of hreflangs.

When it comes to hreflangs, remember that it has to have a self-referential tag too.
For some further information:
Tell Google about localized versions of your page - Google Search Console help

These resources always come handy in cases like this:
Hreflang generator - Aleyda Solis International SEO - Moz Learning Center The Guide to International Website Expansion: Hreflang, ccTLDs, & More! - Moz Blog The International SEO Checklist - Moz Blog

Best luck.
Hope it helps.
Gaston

Hi JK,

Thanks for the reply.

First of all, this is an old article, and many (if not all) of the information given has changed in Google search algorithms.

In the case you are describing, in nowadays SEO (2019), I'd suggest you not to focus on having any keyword weight in the domain/subdomain.
Keep both services in the same domain, under the same company name. Google will understand that its the same company offering two services. Of course, you should have different pages for both services.
Probably would be of help, creating really good content to give context and use internal linking to tell Google which are your main pages and targeted search terms.

Hope it helps.
Best luck.
Gaston

Hi ghgj2222j,

Please, don't only focus on keywords for its search volume... Focus on WHAT USERS ARE SEARCHING. Usually the most searched is also how users are searching for your product/service.

There is no simple answer for your issue. I'd use logic and common sense there, do you know how users search for your service? In Google Search Console, can you relate impressions with that search volume?

On a side note, placing a keyword in the title and meta description won't send your page to the top, its just another signal for users.

I'd strongly recommend you to take a deep read to these resources:
The Beginner's Guide to SEO: Search Engine Optimization - Moz, specifically the forth chapter: On-Page optimization
And Google has their own guide: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide - Google Search Console Help

Hope it helps.
Best luck.
Gaston

Hi Aslan,

The answer here should be to target the phrase that best matches the user intent. 
If Google considers you as a good answer for "services" will also be a good answer for "service". Probably won't rank on the same position, yet will be on the same page.
As English is not my mother tongue, I'll try to help you with how I'd solve it.

First of all, please don't rely on private metrics and private tools that try to simulate what's seen on google. They do their best but **never will reflect **how Google ranks a page nor how many impressions it might have.

This is the way I'd try to solve this issue:

1. As you already have some research, I'd go with that: "... services", the plural one.
2. After some time, you'll see in GSC on which phrases your page is ranking.
3. There you can check whether the plural or singular version has more search volume
4. Update your content with some extra information and, if needed, change the main phrase. Google will reward you
5. Go back to 2.

Hope it helps,
Best luck.
Gaston

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

Hi ramb,

It's totally fine to have different robots.txt files for different subdomains.
Thus said, http://domain.com and http://www.domain.com are different subdomains. Consider the one with non-www as the full root domain.

In case it is needed, here you have Google's official resource about robots.txt: 
Learn about Robots.txt file - Search Console help

Hope it helps.
Best luck.
Gast

Dammit, my mistake. 
Was proabaly still asleep. I've checked with my log files and updated it

Thanks Alex!

Hi MP33,

If you have access to the Google Search Console property, then its recommended to tell Google that you've updated the sitemap file.
Also, there is no harm in updating sitemaps often. I wound't recommend you to update it several times a day. But once or twice a day is completely fine.

Probably this official document might be helpful:
Learn about sitemaps - Search Console Help

Hope it helps.
Best luck.
Gastont

What Alex has pointed out is what you're needing.

Also, I'd like to remember you that Googlebot crawls from several IP ranges. Not only the 66.xxx.xxx.xx.

EDIT:
Alex pointed me out that I've made a mistake. So I've checked my data in server logs.
In some of the sites I'm working, most of the traffic comes from the range: [66.249.6x.xxx-66.249.7x.xxx]

Always, when in doubt, with a reverse DNSlookup you'll find out whether it's an official GoogleBot or not.

Hope it helps.
Best luck.
Gaston

Hi Richard,

Definitely, you shouldn't worry about spammy links. As you keep spotting them, throw that list into the disavow file.
There are some comments from an authoritative person in the community: Marie Haynes.
Disavowing in 2019 and beyond – the latest info on link auditing

Hope it helps.
Best luck.
Gaston

Hi Jarod,

What you should be asking yourself is whether you need those pages to be indexable and having information available to Google.
If you don't want them to rank well, they probably won't need any meta description. Remember that if a page has no meta description, Google will take some of its content and place it as meta description.

On a side note, Moz reports will show errors and analyze every page that you have enabled to be indexable. 
Also, you can choose to ignore what Moz's report tells you. You might probably know more about your site than Moz.

Best luck.
Hope I helped.
Gaston

Hi Brandon,

It's perfectly fine to have some 404s. Google Search Console reports them as a warning, as you might have some 404s that you aren't aware of.
Also, as you are having that much errors where your site has no business, I'd suggest you to check whether the site has been hacked or there is something going on there. You might want to check your website security and update your plugins and CMS, if that the case.

Hope this helps.
Best luck.
Gaston

Hi Laura,
Hope everything is fine

TLDR; If your site is already in mobile first index, then a slow speed in mobile will affect your rankings.

What you need to know is whether your site is in the mobile-first index or not. You can check that by selecting several pages of your site in the correspondent search console property, through the coverage report looking into the last crawled URLs and clicking in the inspect URL. What to seek, specifically? What says in "Crawled as." Take a look at the attached image.

There you will find out if you are in the desktop first index (crawled mostly as google desktop) or mobile first index.
What does this mean? That your site will be either judged to rank with the desktop or the mobile version. 
If your site is in the mobile-first index and has a poor speed performance in mobile then won't probably rank high.

Hope it helps.
Best luck
Gaston

8Zf3DOv

Hi Jason,

Don't tear apart your subcategories into subdomains. It is much likely to perform poorly and cannibalize your search terms.

I'm working in XXXL e-commerce where there are over 30 subdomains for each country. We found that this configuration isn't good enough to compete with other big players, on google search.
So, we've run some test and found that moving from subdomain to subfolder into a bigger subdomain pays in traffic.

That said, I'd focus more on checking what your main competitors are doing. There might be a lot of opportunities optimizing what content you are offering users.
A tip, check how their and you are rendering for mobile views. There might be a low hanging fruit over there. Unless you are already doing that

Hope that helps.
Best luck.
GR

Hi vtmoz,

Given the limitations you are telling us, I'd give noindex in robots.txt a try.
I've run some experiments and found that noindex rule in Robots.txt works. It definitely won´t remove from index that pages, but it will stop showing them for search results.

I'd suggest you to try using that rule with care. 
Also, run some experiments on your own. My first test would be only adding one or two pages, the one that causes more trouble being indexed (maybe due to undesired traffic or due to ranking on undesired search terms).

Hope it helps.
Best luck!
GR

Hi Mat_C

There is no issue with that Meta Robots tag. This is not the reason why those pages aren't indexed.

I'd look a little deep trying to understand why Google didn't want to index that pages. 
Do you have access to that website Search Console? What does index coverage report say? 
Have you tried looking for one of those URLs in the "URL Inspection Tool"? There you might find why Google chose not to index it.

That said, assuming that the site has as CMS Wordpress, the widely known YOAST plugin allows you to configure to be non-indexable many "known to cause issues" pages, such as tag or archive pages.
Have you checked that this is not the case?

Also, there is another common reason why pages aren't indexed: Canonicals chosen by Google. This happens when some pages are almost identical and/or serve for the same user intent, so Google's Algorithms consider them as the same and just set one as the canonical for other, even when there isn't any canonical tag present.

Hope it helps.
Best luck.
GR

I agree with Martijn.

The idea behind what he's explaining is the pace and how acceleration on getting backlinks.
Remember that Google has the most advanced algorithm detecting backlink schemes and tactics, they'd eventually get that your site is creating links against their guidelines.

Hope it helps.
Best luck.
GR

Hi Vijay23,

Why would you say that you have trouble indexing backlinks?
Are you able to see which backlinks is google seeing?

As far as my knowledge goes, there is no method for telling google to consider quickly to that you have a new backlink. Remember that google takes its time to analyze every website with its links.
My recommendation is to wait at least 6-8 weeks after the backlink is placed to consider an impact. Also keep in mind that's really difficult to isolate the impact of just a backlink.

Hope it helps.
Best luck.
GR