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That link you placed to your site is no follow btw.

That's a good idea - you could even display a banner ad that pops up anytime a user accesses the site "Shipping on all products delayed x weeks due to global pandemic". I think people would be pretty understanding.

I just took a look and it appears your site is indexed at least when I use the Google operators. I know that's not the best indicator though. I also ran a quick site crawl using screaming frog and nothing insidious jumped out at me.

Here's a few things to check:

• Look at your search console account to see if your pages are indexed?
• Have you submitted an XML sitemap?
• Have you looked at your server logs?

Based on your question it seems like your site is relatively new? If that's the case it will take some time to actually rank for more competitive terms. No need to worry just yet.

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!

What's your goal when it comes to blogging? Are you trying to gain backlinks? Or Are you trying to drive more leads?

I think it largely depends on what your goals are for blogging. If you're hoping to build backlinks and rank well I'd self publish on my own website.  But then I'd leverage Medium and LinkedIn as a means of content distribution.

However, since you mentioned rankings and backlinks I'd publish on my own site. I would target content themes/keywords that aren't super competitive and maintain a consistent publishing schedule. I would also spend a healthy amount of time promoting that content as well.

Also, I'd recommend setting up a subfolder for your blog rather than a subdomain.

But before making any decision I'd take a step back and just think through my goals first.

Best of luck!

Absolutely, you're welcome. At least you know there are no major technical issues. Have you done any keyword research? Are the terms you're targeting too competitive? I noticed you don't have a ton of backlinks and you seem to be targeting the travel niche.

That could be one issue.

I would recommend running your site through a technical audit. Here's a good template for that: https://www.distilled.net/technical-seo-audit-checklist/

Hey, I took a look and it looks like your site is fairly new. It's likely Google is still crawling and slowly indexing content on your site.

I'd use a web crawler like Moz and/or Screaming Frog and make sure all the pages are easily accessible. Also, try requesting the "Live URL" in Search Console to see how Googlebot views the page. You should also double-check to make sure your XML sitemap is up to date and submitted in Search Console.

Also, it just takes time for a new site to get indexed and ranked. I know it sucks but it doesn't happen overnight and you have to be patient. Keep producing good content and try to build some initial backlinks to get started.

Best of luck!

I'd be extremely wary about buying any gigs on Fiverr, to begin with. Also, there's anecdotal evidence to suggest buying domains for link equity alone won't work.

Here's some more information on that topic from Search Engine Land.

Best of luck!

Sometimes if you have a manual penalty you will receive a message through Search Console. Other times you'll have to pay close attention to your organic traffic and rankings to see if you've been impacted by any recent algorithm updates.

I've never heard of a site being penalized from bolding too many keywords but I'd pay special attention to how you acquire backlinks and make sure you're producing unique content.

Out of curiosity have you noticed any drastic drops in rankings or organic traffic to warrant your site being penalized?

This depends on the size of your site. In some instances, you can just use excel to analyze your server logs. Or if you have the resources you can use a paid tool like the SEO Log File Analyser from Screaming Frog.

Here are some resources from Moz that might be helpful for you:

https://moz.com/blog/uncovering-seo-opportunities-via-log-files

https://moz.com/blog/technical-seo-log-analysis

However, if you have a large site you might run into some issues using excel or Screaming Frog's tool.

With a larger site, you might be better served either looking at a small subset of the data or using an enterprise analytics tool like Altreyx or Knime to do your analysis.

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?

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

Sorry to hear you have to come on board and clean up someone else's mess :/.

The first thing I would do is reach out to the development company and request they remove the extra site. It's very likely it's having an impact on your organic visibility.  If that doesn't work you could request Google remove that website from its index based on a violation of intellectual copyright laws.

The second thing I would do is a detailed audit of all your redirects. It's likely there could be a few key missing redirects in there somewhere.

Request a copy of all redirects within your Htaccess file and make sure: they are topically relevant(think 1:1 matches no blanket redirects), and no redirect chains present.

Also, go into your GA and pull the top 100 or so pages with any sort of historical organic traffic and make sure they are redirecting properly.

Another thing which I'm sure you're aware of but whenever you migrate domain names there can sometimes be an initial drop in organic rankings.

Best of luck

Depending on what CMS you're using you should be able to add a meta no-index tag sitewide fairly easily. I know with WordPress there's an option in the backend under "Setting", "Reading" Discourage search engines from indexing this site that should allow you to apply a meta no index tag site wide.

If you're not on WordPress you should be able to edit your code and apply a no index sitewide. You might need a tool like FileZilla so you can set up some sort of FTP access and edit your Header file directly.

Cheers

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!

Hey there --

Blocking resources with the robots.txt file prevents search engines from crawling content the no-index tag would be better suited for preventing content from being indexed.

However, previous best practice would dictate blocking access to /wp-includes/ and /wp-content/ directories, etc but that's no longer necessary.

Today, Google will fetch all your styling and JavaScript files so they can render your pages completely. Search engines now try to understand your page's layout and presentation as a key part of how they evaluate quality.

So, yeah this might have some impact on your SEO.

Also, if you're using a plugin to cache content you should want Google to crawl your cache content. And in my experience, Googlebot does a good job of not indexing /wp-content/ sections.

So, for your example page, https://example.com/wp-content/cache/minify/df983.js it shouldn't end up in their index.

Hope this helps some.

Hey there,

Did you receive a manual penalty notice in your Google Search Console account? I took a look at your site and noticed a significant fluctuation in the total amount of keywords ranking that started around September 3rd.

I'd start by researching any algorithm updates and look at any recent development changes you may have made. According to SEO Round Table, there was a lot of fluctuation around August 29th - 30th.  So, it's possible you could of been impacted.

Best of luck!

Hey Carrie,

The first thing I would do is figure out which version is already indexed by Google or like other Mozzers have stated pick the version with the higher page authority according to Moz.

Also, in the event, your CMS doesn't handle the trailing slash issue you can update your Htaccess file to set up dynamic redirects to whichever version you prefer.

Daniel Morell has a good guide on htaccess SEO specifically there's a section on how to force trailing slash within the htaccess file.

Good luck

Hey there,

Yeah, I'd go ahead and Implement the canonical tags to the higher-performing website on category and product-level pages.

However, if you're feeling a little unsure I'd recommend testing it with a sample set of pages and just monitor the impact to your client's site and adjust accordingly.

That's a bummer they won't let you consolidate the sites though. 

The other thing I'd probably consider is investing a bit in local SEO since your client sells home good products.

Hope that helps.