Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I personally check webmasterworld.com, they have a Google Updates and SERP Changes thread for each month.

BTW: love your website (sorry for off-topic)

Hi Adrienne,

I would try to use Barracuda's tool: http://barracuda.digital/panguin-tool/

sometimes it gives a clue when exactly the drop has happened (and what update has been near that date).

Also you could check Moz's Updates history: https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change

These will help you, if your website has been hit by an algorithmic update.

Let me know if you need further assistance.

Keszi

Hi Simon,

I will quote from: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6066468?hl=en

1. Fetch as Google can’t currently fetch your URL because the server took too long to reply.

OR

2. Fetch as Google cancelled your fetch because too many consecutive requests were made to the server for different URLs.

Note the URL is not unreachable for all of Google-- it is just unreachable for the Fetch as Google simulation tool.

Keszi

Hi Akhilesh,

You should check the article written by the Moz help team: https://moz.com/help/guides/getting-started/campaign-setup (check also the FAQ part).

If that doesn't help, feel free to contact the team at: help@moz.com. I'm sure they will help you resolve the issue.

Keszi

Hi there,

Redirects should always be written in a relative to absolute path.

So the .htaccess file for http://tshirts.com/ should contain something like:

Redirect 301 / http://www.mainsite.com/tshirts.html
Redirect 301 /blue.html  http://www.lampclick.com/blue-t-shirts.html
Redirect 301 /white.html http://www.mainsite.com/white-t-shirts.html
Redirect 301 /black-tshirts.html http://www.mainsite.com/bk-t-shirts.html

I think that should solve the issue.

Keszi

I would vote also Yoast.

Hi there!

First of all, I believe that you shouldn't use both canonical and rel=prev/next. The two techniques do not work together well: "In cases of paginated content, we recommend either a rel=canonical from component pages to a single-page version of the article, or to use rel=”prev” and rel=”next” pagination markup." (quoted from http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html"

Basically you have more possibilities:

• Do not set up canonical or rel="prev/next", but use noindex, follow meta robots tag for pages 2+ (kind of old school, but still works as a charm)
• Implement Rel="Prev/Next" but without a canonical! the two elements do not work together (as mentioned above)

I think the best method for you would be to have a rel="prev/next" and have the canonical removed.

I hope this helps, Keszi

Hi,

Could you point out the website or what platform you are using? maybe it would be easier to help.

When everything else fails, I do the XML sitemaps manually (Notepad++ and Excel). But Screaming Frog also is helpful.

Keszi

Hi,

Yesterday there was a Mozscape Index update. (https://moz.com/products/api/updates)

More than possible you can see the effect of that update. It is enough if your current linking domains have their DA drop, and it can effect your DA value. But as John mentioned above, if the rankings have not been effected, I would not worry about it.

Keep up the good job!

Keszi

Hi,

Would you be able to post a URL? Maybe there is something you have missed with the implementation. More eyes, see more.

If you cant/wont post it publicly, send me a PM.

Keszi

Hi there,

This is one of the reasons why the hreflang tag was created. You can learn more about this here: https://moz.com/learn/seo/hreflang-tag

Also I would advise you to read Dave's post about it: https://moz.com/blog/hreflang-behaviour-insights

I hope this will clear it a little bit.

Keszi

I would terminate with them. (even I would use those 6 weeks to have them clean up the stuff they have done).

Read through this post by Rand: https://moz.com/blog/google-says-yes-you-can-still-sculpt-pagerank-no-you-cant-do-it-with-nofollow .

Quite old, but still valid in my opinion. So if you want to nofollow the tags only because of sculpting the follow links value, then there is no sense making it.

We are using a similar approach with pages we do not want to index, but they are beneficial for our visitors. (similar case to yours)

Hi Thomas,

I remember that there was a mozinar (https://moz.com/webinars/advanced-wordpress-seo) that helped me a lot answering these kind of questions. I think that would be useful for you too.

Regarding your question: if it is useful for the visitors, but you believe it causes (in any way) duplicate content.... I would set them to noindex, follow.

If you have the time, watch the mozinar, it describes the issue quite in detail.

I hope it will help you.

Keszi

Hi there,

It can take quite some time until you will see effect of the disavowed links file. For example in one of our projects I've seen it took almost 6 months until we have seen some recovery after submitting the disavow file.

Also what I'd advise you to check if your rankings were only effected by the lower quality links you had in the past. One tool that might help you with that is Barracuda's Panguin tool: http://barracuda.digital/panguin-tool/

Basically it will use your Google Analytics data, and overlap with the known google updates. That could also highlight if your website was hit by another update meanwhile.

I hope this helps a little-bit.

Keszi

Hi Joginder,

I would propose to contact the help team with this kind of inquiry. The fact is, that we, as a community, wont be able to help you out with such a technical issue (but engineers from Moz can take a look from their part).

Just go and write an email to them: help @ moz.com

I am convinced that they will quickly answer your question there.

Greetings,

Keszi

Hi Mark,

For some projects I have also set up more than one GWT profiles, but that was only to make sure that Google does take in consideration the preferred URL version I have set.

What you are currently doing is that you give Google three different URL versions that you would prefer in search results. If you are showing the same content one these three version than I would say it is wrong to apply different versions.

But we need to clear up some stuff: http vs https protocol.

• Does your website has a site-wide https protocol? if so: why do you need to register the http protocol website in GWT?

If you are running on an apache server, you can force people/bots to visit only the https version. You can do this by creating a redirect rule from .htaccess:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.example.com/$1 [R,L]

• Does your website has only for a particular folder on which it uses https?

Then you can simply create a rule that redirects that specific folder: somefolder in this example

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} somefolder
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.domain.com/somefolder/$1 [R,L]

If you are using a sitewide HTTPS protocol, then I would go with only one GWT profile for https://www.example.com (and I would make sure that all traffic is redirected to the https://www version)

If you are not using sitewide HTTPS protocol, I would create more profiles:

1. One for https version
2. One for the http version

www versus non-www version.

Now we have two versions here:

• If you prefer www over non-www

#Force www:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [L,R=301,NC]

• If you prefer non-www over www

#Force non-www:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.example.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://example.com/$1 [L,R=301]

This way we make sure that only one version is going to be crawled and indexed by the Big G

I hope this cleared it up a little.

Greetings,

Keszi

Hi Kevin,

1. Could you share the URL with us? That way we could take a closer look.

2. There are a few articles about the most common redesign issues, Thomas has listed them here: http://moz.com/community/q/website-redesign-seo-checklist

Maybe you will find something there.

I hope it helps! Keszi

It was the same in our case. Could do nothing more, then just disavow him.

Unfortunately there are people who fall in his trap, and pay for the removal.

His websites are not indexed in Google. Therefore I hope Google doesn't count any links/anchor from his sites.