Welcome to the Q&A Forum

It is hard to tell without knowing the industry. But if it is an industry you know something about or are interested in immersing yourself in then it might be a good opportunity. I would check Google trends to look and see if the industry as a whole is growing. I would also check variations on the keyword or keywords you did some research on and see how competitive other terms are as well.

The technical term is a Digital Millennium Copyright Act. There's a bit more info on this page to get you started: https://support.google.com/legal/answer/1120734\. It's been a while since I've filed one of these but let me know if you run into trouble I'm happy to help.

Also, I'd only use this as a last option. I'd still reach out to the company and see if they will no index the other site.

Best of luck

It is super time consuming. Another idea I did and it worked fairly well and got me some success was using epicbeat.epictions.com to source for links. They have a free version of their platform too so all I did was input a broad search term related to my nice. Then I pulled a few of the top performing content pieces that I thought I could write and bring a unique perspective into it. I took those url's and ran them through SEM rush or another software to see who was linking to it and built an excel sheet with metrics such as, PA, DA and contact information.

Give that a try too and see if you have any success.

hope that helps some.

I would use data to back up any changes you would want to make. If you know organic traffic is starting to take a nose dive due to changes the team is currently making then pull some year-over-year before and after snapshots and show them the areas that are declining.

Explain the importance of properly optimizing the pages you are working on and try to find some sort of middle ground.

When I ran a similar query the Columbia, MD location shows up on the first page. It is the Dobbin rd location.

It would be highly unlikely you would be penalized for updating the anchor text in one blog. I would be more concerned if you had an alarmingly high number of exact match anchor text links pointing to your client's site.

I've personally used the Shopify and WordPress for both e-commerce and their blogging tool within each platform. Shopify allows you to easily add blog posts and include relevant meta data, author info and categorize each page accordingly. However, I believe wordpress is a lot more intuitive to use.

If you already have your blog on Wordpress I would not bother putting everything on Shopify. I did find a good forum with some additional information about Shopify and Wordpress you may find helpful.

However, when I put 'next day floors' in Moz's local search I see you may have some duplicates. Google could be choosing what they perceive is the best instance of the query in some searches and you may be seeing that listing being pushed further down in the SERPs.

Sorry I misread your issue. Since you are online only I would not claim any local listings. I would clean up and remove all those citations if possible though.

Use Moz's keyword research tool to identify good keyword opportunities for your company. Write useful content and build backlinks. I would start off by reading the beginner's guide to seo before you do any work though.

According to a post from seo round table a Google rep said this is almost irrelevant. However, there are a host of other ranking factors that come into play for international SEO. Keep hreflang tags, ccTLDs, and content in mind when developing your international strategy and you should be fine.

A rel canonical tag is more of a "hint" or "suggestion". It is entirely possible Google believes the urls are not equivalent and has decided to ignore the canonical.

I hope that helps some.

I believe the on page content could be causing an issue. If these 400 pages have similar content then that could be the issue.

However, in July there were some algorithm updates from Google but these appear to be mostly centered around Mobile Speed Updates. But if you have a mobile site with reasonable load times you should be fine.

But, what I'd want to know is how unique is the content on those 400 pages?

First I think it will take time for Google to completely disassociate the old domain from the new domain. With that being said have you tried to disavow all the spammy backlinks on the old domain? You could also meta no index the entire site and get it

You could also either meta no index the entire site and get it de index from Google or block it from being crawled within its robots.txt file. That is probably the closest you could come to deleting the domain.

I hope that helps some.

I think the easiest way to figure out whether or not Page Rank is properly flowing to those deeper sub category landing pages is to crawl the site with Screaming Frog.

I don't remember if a Moz crawl pulls page rank for every page but if not crawl your client site with Screaming Frog and connect to Moz's API. This will pull in the Page Rank for every page and you can sort to find out if there are any issues.

How does the hamburger menu look like on mobile? I'd be curious to see what the engagement looks like when the entire menu opens by default.

I would leave all the disallows out except for the /wp-admin/ section. For example, I'd rewrite the robots.txt file to read:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/

Also, you kind of want Google to index your cached content. In the event your servers go down it will still be able to make your content available.

I hope that helps. Let me know how that works out for you!

Image Format
I believe the preferred performance is WebP. But I usually try to use png over jpg.

Compressing Images
I think what might work best in your case is some sort of plugin like WP Smush. If you have a ton of images I'd invest in a tool or plugin that dynamically compresses images as they are uploaded to your site.

I like WP Smush because it also strips out the metadata associated with images along with compressing them.

If you have a ton of images it could be an attractive solution for you that you can scale.

Outside of another plugin, you could try some sort of cloud-based solution to dynamically compress images before you upload them.

I've tested an open-source image compression tool called Caesium in the past. This tool reduced some of my images by almost 40%. It performed better than the plugins I was using but I'm not so sure it would be a scaleable solution for you.

Out of curiosity, how bad are your load times? Are you currently running into site speed problems or are you trying to make incremental improvements?

I took a quick look and it appears as though your site was ranking a bit at one point. However, it looks as though your rankings took a nosedive.

You went from roughly 2k+ keywords ranking in some fashion to almost nothing. Without probing further it's hard to be certain what happened exactly but it could be a penalty.  And it might have to do with the forum links you've built or your content.

I'd review your content and make sure it's unique and that it provides value to the searcher. I'd also do some sort of link audit and consider removing any irrelevant forum links that were created.

Best of luck!