Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Are you looking for landing pages on your own site? If so, Google Search Console is your best bet. Go to Search Analytics, click on the query you're interested in, and Google will show you all of your site's pages that have ranked for that term within the last 90 days, along with their impressions and clicks.

Moz and most ranking trackers will also show this. You can go to your campaign in your Moz Pro account and choose Analyze Keyword under rankings. Choose a keyword and scroll to the bottom to see a list of what ranks for the first 5 pages on Google.

Does this help? Do you know which keywords you think you might be ranking for multiple times, or are you trying to find those keywords?

Best,

Kristina

First of all - don't stress out! You won't be penalized for broken links. Google penalizes for shady behavior, not honest mistakes.

Like Andrew said, make sure that you aren't linking to any of the pages you removed from your site, and that you've removed them from your XML sitemap.

Then you should be good!

Good luck,

Kristina

You're probably already doing this, but make sure that all of your tests are using the Googlebot user agent! That could cause different results, especially with the robots.txt check.

A sense check: what is your plugin going to offer over Google Search Console's Fetch as Google and robots.txt Tester?

Hm, I've done a lot with Optimizely in the past, and it's never caused an SEO problem, but it's completely possible something went wrong. Since that's your first inkling, have you tried pausing that test and removing the Optimizely code from the homepage? Then you can determine whether or not it's an Optimizely problem.

Another thing you can do is use the Fetch as Googlebot feature in GSC. Does GSC say it can fetch the page properly?

If it says it can, try searching for "site:www.yourcompanysite.com". This will show if Google's got your URL in its index. If nothing comes up, it's not there; if it comes up, Google's decided not to rank it for some reason.

After those steps, get back to us so we can figure out where to go from there!

Good luck,

Kristina

I would be incredibly surprised if internal links to the homepage caused the issue. Google expects you to have a bunch of internal links to the homepage.

What you're going to need to do now is do a thorough review of all of the external links pointing to your homepage. I would do this with a tool - I recommend Kerboo, although I'm sure there are others that could do the same thing. Otherwise, you can look through all of the links yourself and look for spam indications (steps outlined in this handy Moz article).

Either way, make sure that you pull your list of links from Ahrefs or Majestic. Ideally both, and merge the lists. Moz doesn't crawl nearly as many links.

Since you haven't gotten a manual penalty warning, you're going to have to take as many of the spammy links you find down as you can and disavow the others. For speed, I'd recommend that you immediately upload a list of spammy links with Google's disavow tool, then start asking for an actual removal.

Keep in mind that you're probably going to disavow links that were helping rankings, so expect that your homepage won't come back ranking as well for nonbranded search terms as it used to. You'll probably want to start out uploading a very conservative set of URLs to the disavow tool, wait a couple of days to see if that fixes the problem, upload a bigger set, check, etc.

Good luck!

What a weird plugin!

Like Gaston said, Google can deal with pagination that's on separate pages, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was a period where they crawled/indexed too many pages.

Is there an option in your plugin to keep things the way they are?

Yep, that'll work!

Maybe you should noindex user profile pages until they've been active on the site long enough that a) you're sure they're not a spam bot and b) they're actually active users, with some interesting information to share on their user page?

Like Shaliendra said, this is your call. It's really about your website goals, and what those user pages do for the site. Are you getting much organic traffic from user pages? If you aren't, it's probably easiest to just noindex all user pages. But if some profiles are bringing in organic traffic, I'd recommend that you add a noindex tag immediately, but remove it once someone has commented a few times.

Does that help?

Hi Patrick,

Hm, that's tough. No, I haven't seen anything like that on my site. Could you give me some more details?

• Did your landing pages lose traffic across the board? Or did some fare worse than others? It's possible that only a few really key landing pages were hit, which is having a large effect overall.
• In Google Webmaster Tools, have you seen a dip in impressions along with clicks? If there's a dip in impressions, then search patterns are probably changing (even if you didn't expect seasonality in your niche). If impressions are still high, look for the specific keywords that have a lower click through rate.
• Have your branded searches dropped? Like Jasmine said, it's possible that there's a competitor out there that's stealing your traffic by getting people to search for their brand rather than yours, which would be hard to catch. Any changes like that in your industry?

Best,

Kristina

Thanks for the shout out, Ryan! Although, I think Smashing Magazine has already answered this question the best:

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2014/07/22/responsive-web-design-should-not-be-your-only-mobile-strategy/

Basically, what you want to do is load high quality images for desktop, but remove those images or serve lower quality images for mobile. You can either do this by loading the images you need with JavaScript rather than CSS, so matchMedia can change the images based on device type, or you can set up your server to deliver differently sized images based on device type.

Hope this helps!

Hi Ehren,

Google has said that they send those warnings before they actually crawl your site (why they would bother you with a warning so quickly, I don't know), so I wouldn't worry about this if the warning is the only sign you're getting that Google might be crawling disallowed pages.

What is your Google Webmaster Tools account saying? If Google isn't reporting to you that it's spending too long crawling your site, and the correct number of pages are indexed, you should be fine.

Let me know if this is a bigger problem!

Kristina

Hey Alex,

It sounds like you've already got some assurance from Patrick, but I wanted to quickly throw in my 2 cents.

The answer to your question has more to do with the people looking for your services than it has to do with a right or wrong structure. It sounds like you're making this change because you think that it makes more sense for people to search by industry than by services. If that's true, you're right, you should center your site structure around industries like you suggested. You should definitely double check with keyword volume, and by asking your customers how they searched for your site, though.

Personally, if I were looking for CRM consulting, I wouldn't look for "sharing economy CRM" (because I work for a company that's a sharing economy). I'd just look for "customer relationship management consulting," then maybe ask them if they've ever worked with a sharing economy site before.

If you check with your clients and look into keyword volume and I'm right, I'd keep the site structure the way it is, and flesh out the services pages and link to pages that are dedicated to how well you do CRM in different industries, assuming there's enough data for that. The key here is to make sure that you're writing content that your potential clients are looking for, not just filling out pages to show that you have a robust site.

I hope this helps!

Kristina

Yeah, the 301ing could be creating an issue. Google Webmaster Tools really isn't good at following through redirect paths. After hearing that, and reading everything that Matt researched, it's probably worth reaching out to your .edu partners and asking them to update their links to the proper URL for your site (including if it's https now!).

Also, forgive me if I just missed your answer, but have you set up an https profile of your site in Google Webmaster Tools? Google absolutely distinguishes between the two - my site upgraded about a year ago, and I watched traffic drop in one and jump in the other. I keep both now to monitor inbound links that are to either. It's worthwhile creating a profile with and without www as well.

I've heard theories that Google doesn't like you changing your page title too much, but I've never seen that substantiated. So, I recommend testing this for yourself:

**Paid option: **For brand searches during the holidays, run an AdWords Search ad that uses a seasonal message. Compare the metrics of the seasonal messaging vs the metrics of the ad for the rest of the year to see what searchers are more likely to click on. This will tell you searchers' preferences, although it won't tell you Google's reaction to you changing homepage content.

Unpaid Option:

• Identify the non-seasonal vs seasonal keywords that you'd like your homepage to rank for. Start tracking them in a tool like Moz. (I don't think that just changing the page title will drastically change rankings, but you want to be sure.)

• Change your page title, and have Google recrawl your page immediately using Fetch as Google. I've been able to get new page titles up within an hour that way.

• Keep the page title up for the shortest time span you can to get a significant amount of traffic.

• Ideally, you'd get enough traffic each day that a day's worth of traffic is fairly predictable, so a change in the page title will show an obvious spike or drop in traffic, depending on rankings and click through rate.

• If your traffic varies a lot day by day, though, change it once a week.

• Look at the changes in traffic, rankings, and conversions.

Hope this helps, and let us know what you find out!

Kristina

Kelli - the first thing I thought was what garfield_disliker asks: have you set up Google Webmaster Tools to ignore these parameters that are important for the cart page to load?

That said, Google Webmaster Tools is run by a team that's separate from the primary search team, so it's possible that GWT is flagging an issue that isn't an actual issue for Google. Run a search in Google for "site:yourdomain.com/UpdateCart" and see what URLs Google has indexed. If they have that 404ing URL, that's not good. If they have correct URLs, it's possible that this is a Google Webmaster Tools thing.

Hey Adam,

There are a few tools out there:

http://smallseotools.com/code-to-text-ratio-checker/

http://tools.seochat.com/tools/code-to-text-ratio/

I've never used them, though: I think that the importance of code to text ratio is making sure your page doesn't take too long to load, or look like spam. I'd recommend you check out this other Moz Q&A to look into that:

https://moz.com/community/q/how-important-is-my-code-to-text-ratio-on-web-pages

Good luck!

Kristina

Hey Letty,

It's been about a month since you posted this - how are things going? Did the information Thomas give you help the process?

Just to make sure I'm clear on your original question, the situation is:

• You have 5 desktop websites on 5 separate domains
• You have mobile versions of the site, but just on 1 domain (as an "m" subdomain)
• All of these sites currently share the same mobile platform

The issues are:

• To search engines, it will look like 4 of your sites don't have mobile versions, and the one mobile site will have "duplicate" content with the other desktop domains
• Visitors may be skeptical if they try to visit one domain and it automatically redirects/recommends that they visit another URL for the mobile page

The answer is, basically, you're right. Search engines are getting pretty good at recognizing when a separate mobile URL or subdomain is actually the mobile version of a desktop site, but this structure is really confusing. (If it confuses humans, it's probably going to confuse search engines.) You should really set up separate m.site#.com subdomains for each site you own and mimic the structure of your desktop site on each one.

Did that answer your question? Is there anything else I can help with?

Kristina

Hi there,

You've got a lot of things going on here. I'm worried that Google thinks your site is exceptionally spammy or has malware, since it's showing your .pdf or .doc files but not as many of you HTML pages. But I can't make any definitive statements because I'd need a lot more information. If I were you, I would:

• Dig into Google Analytics to get a better idea of what exactly has lost organic traffic, and when

• Look at the trend:

• Is it a slow decline or a sharp drop? Sharp drop typically means a penalty or that the company accidentally deindexed their pages or something equally horrifying. A slow decline could be an algorithm change (at least the ones I've seen take their time to really take effect) or a new competitor.

• When did it start? That way you can pinpoint what changes happened around then.

• Is it a steady decline or has it been jumping up and down? If it's a steady decline, it's probably one thing you're looking for; if traffic is erratic, there could be a bunch of problems.

• Find out which pages are losing traffic.

• _Are all pages on the site losing traffic? _If they are, it's probably an algorithm change or a change that was made by webmasters sitewide. If it's specific pages, it could be that there's now better competition for those key terms.

• Which pages are losing the most traffic? When did their traffic start to drop? Is it different from the rest of the site? You may need to investigate at a deeper level here. Individual pages could have new competition, you may have accidentally changed site structure and lessened internal links to it, and/or it may have lost some external links.

• Get an accurate list of every unique page on your site to clear up duplicate indexation and find out if anything _isn't _in Google's index.

• Add a canonical to all pages on your site pointing to the version of the URL you want in Google's index. It's a good way to make sure that parameters and other accidental variations don't lead to duplicate content.

• Divide that list into site sections and create separate XML sitemaps by section. That way you have a better idea of what is indexed and what isn't in Google Webmaster Tools. I got this idea from this guy (who is also my boss) and I swear by it.

• Based on traffic in Google Analytics, pick out pages that used to get a lot of traffic and now get none. Search for them in Google with site:[url] search to see if Google's got them indexed.

After that, if you're still stumped, definitely come back here with a little more info - we'll all be happy to help!

Kristina