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Are there other pages that have dynamic content based on location? If this is the only one, this is probably too big of a project for such a small problem.

Are you targeting the US market as well? If you're only looking to market to UK/Ireland, you might just want to take out that dynamic content.

Have you set a location for your site in Search Console? Doing so might help Google better understand your site and shift the meta data for UK/Ireland properly.

In that case, you might have some difficulties getting this resolved. What's seems to be happening is Google is finding your US version and indexing those regardless of location. If you want to serve different content based on location, there should be a unique URL for each country. You can then specify to each version of Google (.com, .ie, or .co.uk) with hreflang tags which URL should be in which index. I'm not exactly sure how you're swapping out the meta data, but it seems like Google is only acknowledging your US versions.

As Alick pointed out in his screenshot, the title tag does use the American spelling, 'Jewelry'. Google will not correct what they show in SERPs until they're provided with something different. When searching the source code, I also found 15 other instances of the American spelling on your site, which mostly appear in the navigation. I'd recommend changing the navigation links to reflect this as well

Hi,

It's nearly impossible to tell you what happened without a lot more information. But strictly based on the information we do have, links decreasing isn't always a bad thing. It's possible they previously had some spammy links that they got rid of, which would decrease the quantity, but could've greatly increased the aggregate _quality _of their link profile.

Sounds like you're probably using WP, if so, I'd highly recommend this plugin to handle your category and tag pages. I made the same observation you did not too long ago and went on a mission to figure out the best solution, and noindexing these pages with that plugin is what I came up with.

You can write a single redirect rule that will apply to any request on the hostname. I'm not sure what server you're using, but if you use HTACCESS, there's a great post on StackOverflow on how to apply this rule: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/29029049/best-practice-301-redirect-http-to-https-standard-domain

Nick,

I've inherited a number of sites with this same problem, some of them quite large sites with rampant singe-keyword landing pages that required a lot of cleanup. In my opinion, in the long run it's definitely worth the effort to prune where you can and get same/similar content combined into one higher quality page. I've had pretty good success in combining pages into topical focused LPs.

There's been a lot of talk in the SEO world over the last year about "topics, not keywords", and this discussion is exactly where that idea comes into play. With Google's increasing effort at better understanding keyword intent, they've gotten really good at determining synonymous phrases. As a result, sites with single-keyword LPs are suffering (or will eventually) due to content cannibalization. Let's say you have a LP for "blue widgets" and another for "widgets that are blue", eventually those 2 pages are going to compete with each other and Google will choose to rank neither very well.

If you do go down the road to combining pages, here's a few tips:

• Look in Google Analytics for page metrics like organic entrances, conversions, whatever other KPIs are important for you site
• Check Moz metrics like Page Authority and links
• Grab bits of content from the pages going away - just because the overall page is lower quality than others doesn't mean it doesn't have some good content you can
• 301 redirect the old pages to the new one so search engines, people, and links will still lead to relevant content
• Update internal links and your XML sitemap to reflect the changes

Hope that helps, happy optimizing!

I totally understand not wanting to rely on plugins if they're not necessary. 301 redirects generally don't impact the rankings of a site all that much if the redirects are pointing to the same content. So dropping .html by way of a single redirect rule is not likely to ruin your organic traffic numbers.

There's only one logical reason I can come up with for this: At some point in the past, the site was not on WP and had .html extensions on URLs. When the site was moved to WP, they may have wanted to keep URLs exactly the same, which would require finding a way to add file extensions in WP.

Yes, that's exactly what I'm referring to here. Rather than having Page A > Page B > Page C, you should break those out into 2 different ones: Page A > Page C, and Page B > Page C.

Hi,

You'll want to avoid redirect chains whenever possible. Every time a URL request hits the server, it checks your entire list of redirects, if this is happening multiple times for one URL, you're slowing down page speeds. This is much more important for mobile load times since they don't have the resources of a desktop/laptop computer, but nonetheless, something you should still avoid regardless of your mobile traffic percentage.

You can easily update these by using Screaming Frog, under the Reports menu drop-down, the second option is redirect chains. This report will export an Excel doc in which you can see all of the URLs you have that have multi-step redirects.

Web Code Tools is relatively new, I'm sure it'll be expanded to include more schema types in the future. In the mean time, give this one a shot: https://supple.com.au/tools/local-business-schema-generator/.

Hi Steven,

Here's a link to the tool I use for generating schema code: https://webcode.tools/. There's a few other code generators on this tool as well, like OG and Twitter cards.

What steps did you take during these website redesign to preserve your rankings? 301 redirects are often overlooked during site migrations, if you don't take time to map old pages to new pages, you've missed a massive opportunity to hang on to a lot of the rankings and traffic you had with the previous version of the site.

There's a great post on SEO preservation on the Moz blog from a few years back, I'd go through this list and figure out what was overlooked. You should still go back and fix anything you can, but it won't have nearly the impact it would have if the tasks on this list were done at the appropriate time.

This isn't going to count as duplicate content. Duplicate content is more of a concern if someone is stealing entire pieces of content from your site and posting it on theirs.

What's happening here is actually a good thing, you're getting extra visibility and people are referencing your phone number from their site. This is great! Don't do anything to deter additional phone calls from prospective customers!

James,

They do have that threshold, confirmed by Tawny's comment on this thread from a while back.

Hi Rena,

Issues like this pop up frequently in Moz QA. Here's what's happening - the only difference on these pages is the name of the product, the meta data, and the URL. This being the case, the majority of the source code for each page is the same, when you take into account all the code for the template (header, footer, etc). Moz sets a threshold of 90% for source code match, any 2 pages that have at least 90% same source code get flagged as duplicate.

So what can you do about it? It looks like you're using these pages as product detail pages like you'd see on an ecommerce site. Product detail pages typically have descriptions providing details about the particular product. I'd recommend writing some descriptive content for each of these pages. This will increase the uniqueness of the pages and should differentiate them enough to not trigger the dupe content warning. Descriptions on these products will also help your users' experience on the site, so you're not doing this just to appease the bots.

Hope that helps clear things up!

Hi Luke,

It's a pretty common misconception that the robots.txt will prevent indexing. It's only purpose is actually to prevent crawling, anything disallowed in there is still up for indexing if it's linked to elsewhere. If you want something deindexed, your best bet is the robots meta tag, but make sure you allow crawling of the URLs to give search engine bots an opportunity to see the tag.

We've all been new to this at one point or another! I'd recommend starting out with Moz's Beginners Guide to SEO. It'll take a while to work through it all, but you'll have a much better understanding of how to improve your organic traffic by the end.

Best of luck to you!

If there's a CMS change, then yes, I agree with Brandon that it's a completely unrealistic request. I've provided SEO support on dozens of site migrations, and there's always some initial loss, even when you check all the boxes on every migration list you can find.

The only way that this is possible is if you're reskinning of a site, a la choosing a new theme in WP where URLs don't change and on-page opt stay the same. And even then, with all the UX considerations in Google's algo, you're still likely to see some flux.