Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Looking at your results I would hazard a guess that you were affected by the Google core update Dec 3rd.

There was a major upheaval, I felt if too. All that can be done is to analyse your sites and read through why you may have been hit.

Take a look at the MOZ blog post here: https://moz.com/blog/googles-december-2020-core-update

Hi,

I'm in the process of helping a client with a wedding show & supplier directory. Could anyone give me pointers as to the best practice for the architecture?

Because the suppliers and shows will be listed geographically is there a possibility for the site to seem keyword stuffed?

thanks, MOZ brain, you guys always rock.

There are a few different ways to speed up your site.

1 -My personal favourite Cache plugin is LiteSpeed as my host uses a lightspeed server (they are popular) who is your host?

2- sign up and use Cloudflare. Both W3 Total Cache and Litespeed will interface with it.

3- Use GTmetrix to analyse your site along with page speed insights. It has a better breakdown of problems

4- Quite often it's the images that slow down your site as they are not optimised.  Smush does a decent job but my favourite is ShortPixel.  You can buy an amount of image compression for a small amount and leave it live. It works in the background perfectly.

Hope that Helps

Nathan

I've decided that the duplicate content issues on my site weren't worth the effort from the amount of traffic the archive pages on my WordPress site received no I decided to no-index them using Yoast.

Now I have 60 meta no-index crawler warnings. Should I just ignore these? It seems I get warnings, either way, I use the site.

Does anyone have advice on how to move on with this?

2% is really low! I would not worry about that. Sometimes there are sites that scrape and link to you that you have no control over or the sites you link to have themselves been seen to have a negative effect.

I wouldn't stress over 2%

As Kate said above competition is different for all keywords. I find ranking for geographically specific keywords fairly easy but when I broarden that only slightly I find it very hard to compete as many more companies are targeting the same thing.

The hardest thing in SEO is to identify what your customer puts into the search bar, often this is different to what we would as we are blinded by our own knowledge. Ask a child to find your site using search only and you'll soon see.

I hope that helps

Hi

Because you are duplicating the site it is bad for SEO. To address this you need to add the canonical tag to the master page. I'd look at your analytics to see where the majority of your traffic comes from, either mobile or desktop and add it to that version of the page.

More info on that here: https://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization

I hope that helps.

Hey there,

It sounds like you've stumbled upon part of a PBN.

Comments are usually nofollow so it is questionable that purely commenting would do any favours to you.

So I've felt a rather large cliff dive on my major keywords but minor keywords are doing well.

I've been told about a COVID19 update. Does anyone in here have any pointers or knowledge about this? I've dropped around 9 places and more importantly off the first page for my important keywords

I have a weird issue that I just cant fathom so I thought I'd ask you guys. One of my clients sites: positivepathfoudation.org has social bookmarks as we all do but the Facebook link when clicked on mobile (I have ios) shows a broken link when the address is correct and works when opened in desktop.

Anyone have any ideas?

I'm hearing the jungle drums banging away about a broad core update this week. Anyone else heard this?

Usually its retrospective and an oh my I've dropped/gained but I don't usually hear about it beforehand.

Anyone else heard this?

Darin got there first! Domain Authority. It is the current metric to judge the effect a site has within the algorithm to rank for its niche.

I don't want to copy Darin's post, I'd recommend the links he's given you. Happy reading

Effectdigital has hit the nail on the head there. A well performed 301 redirect is your answer and the links given are perfect.

This was an issue that yoast came up with on an upgrade with wordpress in the middle of 2018. It may be worth a little research into how their "purge" plugin worked as it did exactly this.

Using the htaccess file simply tell google not to index the resource pages then they will naturally over time fall out of the search  or you can purge by

1. Log into the Google Search Console and select the desired website.
2. Click on “Optimization” in the left-hand navigation.
3. Click on “Remove URL” in the sub-menu.
4. Click on the button “create a new request for removal” on this page.

Once this is done and they are set to no index. Problem solved.

I can't give you a definitive answer but I did some testing a couple of months ago on this very subject.  So I can share my experience.

I played with mysite Title using    ,    -   |    as separation  within the title using exactly the same text and page and watched the fluctuation over 2 weeks each. The Pipe separation was head and shouders above the rest. This is now what I use.

If you are using anchor text that is not on the landing page it sends mixed signals to the search engine. Remember that search engines are just complex directories trying to give the user the most relevant result. If your keyword doesn't match the page it's linking to then the likelihood is it will lose its relevance equalling a lower authority signal and lower SERP.

If you are using a relevant keyword for anchor text then you can weave it into the landing page.

Hope that helps

Superb answer Ed!

Thanks, Roman,

You are echoing my sentiments. I'm glad I wasn't having a meltdown.

Thank you so much for this, I have experienced this with one of my clients, its a real pain for the honest person just trying to run a business. We rely so much on SERP to bring in business and when something like this has the potential to affect it is most frustrating.

I have just discovered that the WordPress theme I have been using for some time has no follow internal links on the blog.

Simply put each post has an image and text link plus a 'read more'. The Read more is a no-follow which is also on my homepage. The developer is saying duplicate follow links are worse than an internal no follow.

What is your opinion on this? Should I spend time removing the no follow?