Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Yea, I wouldn't worry too much about those. You should however, specify the purpose of those parameters in Google Search Console - it'll help Google better understand their function. Here's a good guide on how to do that: http://www.shoutmeloud.com/google-webmaster-tool-added-url-parameter-option-seo.html

Charles,

Don't pick your keywords based on what you can rank for, pick your keywords based on what will send qualified visitors to your site. Changing the keywords you target isn't going to fix an incomplete or broken SEO strategy, it's only going to lead to more problems - i.e. not getting qualified traffic.

As Ken mentioned, look at why you aren't ranking for keywords and make adjustments. The crawl report, on-page grader, and page optimization tools here in Moz will help your troubleshoot what's going on with your rankings and identify places you can adjust your tactics.

Hi,

I wouldn't recommend the noindex approach here. Three of your four URLs are parameter'd versions of the homepage; meta tags are applied at the page level, not by parameters. This means your noindex tag would apply to the homepage - no good!! You could put a nofollow attribute on the links that point to those parameter URLs, but don't expect it to have a huge impact on your SEO efforts. Your /members/ folder might be worth de-indexing via a noindex tag, depends on what is contained in that folder. It sounds like it's probably account-level pages, if that's the case, you can and should keep those pages out of the index.

Hope that's helpful!

Stephanie,

YouMoz is a section of the blog completely dedicated to user generated content. Though it looks like they've paused submissions while they reconfigure some things regarding YouMoz and the Moz community.

Awesome, hope you're able to get this setup. Domain-wide duplication would be a tragedy!

Hi Matt,

We have a fun little trick on our website that involves phone tracking. We use DialogTech to display a different phone number based on which medium the visitor came from. Then, in our forms, there's a hidden field on the form titled "Medium" that reads the phone number in the header. If the phone number displayed is for our Adwords campaign, the hidden field sends "PPC" in the Medium field, and so on for each medium. It can be tricky to implement, but it's a pretty solid way to assign attribution to specific form completions.

Skyler,

You're close, give this a shot:

Disallow: /*?utm_

This will be inclusive of all UTM tags regardless of what comes before the tag or what element you have first.

Happy to help!

Google is less concerned about the actual structure of your URLs, and more concerned that you pick a horse and ride it, which you've done by canonicalizing 2 variations to the third. In your example, the third URL is perfectly fine, since it will always remain constant. The other 2 can change depending on how someone navigates to that product. I'd keep it the way you have it.

Hi,

In your example, you have 3 URLs that render the same content it sounds like. If this is the case, I would assume you're canonicalizing 2 versions to the third. In this situation, you'd want to use the canonical version in your XML sitemaps. You don't want to point search engines to URLs in a XML sitemap then have them go elsewhere when they find the canonical tag.

I just noticed that clicking on the entire slider, even out to the sides where it appears to be just white space, takes you to another page. At first I didn't realize what I was clicking that got me to the next page. When I do Crtl+A on the page, the full width of the slider images shows highlighted in blue, but to the side of those images outside of those bounds is linked. I'm wondering if Google sees this as cloaking and kicked out the homepage as a result.

*I did see that AGM pointed out it's indexed now, but that's not to say this wasn't the cause of original de-index.

Awesome, glad you got it working! Always happy to help a fellow Mozzer!

Are you using Chrome? I think the versions for Chrome and Firefox differ slightly...with search profiles being a possible point of differentiation.

HA! No side payments happening here!

Here's what mine looks like: http://imgur.com/a/8oidh

They recently made a bunch of changes to Mozbar, so a reinstall might be necessary.

Hi Robert,

If you've got Mozbar installed, you can create different search profiles for different locations. When you go to Google with Mozbar turned on, you'll noticed a 'Search Profiles' menu in the upper left. Click the drop-down, set your location settings, and save the profile. From there, run your search, then change the drop-down to the desired location.

You're not kidding, this does defy explanation. When did it drop out of the index?

In all honesty, I don't have a solution, you've already checked everything I would have. I'm mostly commenting so I can keep up with this issue and see how it unfolds. Very curious to see if anyone can identify what's happening here.

This is a weird situation, Screaming Frog isn't having any issues pulling your meta descriptions. Before you spend a bunch of time trying to fix this, I'd wait until your next crawl and see if the issue persists. It might just be a glitch in Moz.

Regarding your meta keywords tag issues, don't fix them, just remove that tag altogether. Search engines don't even look at that tag anymore. The only purpose that tag serves anymore is giving your competition an inside look at what you're targeting on what page.

No problem, good luck! Moz has plenty of great resources to help you along the way. Be sure to check out the beginners guide to SEO.

Responses to the first 3 questions:

1. HTTPS is in place, but a redirect is not in place to push HTTP to HTTPS
2. Ok good, keep all Search Console profile intact, it's a good way to identify problems specifically as they relate to HTTP and HTTPS indexing (you don't want both to show)
3. This search, site:albertaautosales.com. As you can see when you click that link, you've only got a few URLs indexed, 2 for the homepage, with and without HTTPS.

Now that I have the domain, I see a few problems.

1. You have no internal linking - Screaming Frog will not go beyond the homepage. Upon further inspection, the only internal link I saw on the homepage was to a dead URL
2. Google isn't creating a robots.txt file for you, there's just nothing for them to crawl as a result of my previous point.
3. I cannot view your source code, if I can't see it, chances are Google can't either.

If this currently live version of the site is placeholder for development, I'd recommend putting the old site back out there and working on the new site in a development environment.

Hi David,

I've got a few questions before I can provide any advice.

1. Is the site using HTTPS everywhere?
2. Why shut down the HTTP Search Console profile? You should always have all four versions of your domain setup in SC - http/https and www/non-www.
3. Have you done a site:domain.com search in Google to verify indexation?