Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Yes, I tried the old Search Console option before I posted in here but sadly, it just redirects you back to the new version. However, I didn't even think about the redirect opportunity and considering the website is built on Wordpress, that should be easy enough to set up.

Thanks so much!

Hi There,

Thanks so much for your reply. The trick with this is that the page that is showing as a sitelink is not even part any of the website's sitemaps. We just rebuilt the website for the client about 3 months ago - went from static website to Wordpress and for some unknown reason - Google is remembering a .php link from the old website somehow, but it is nowhere in our FTP, so if you click on it - it provides a 404 error.

The other disadvantage is that the old website was never SEO'ed or had proper page titles so users are confusing that sitelink as the new website link and it goes to a 404 page and people think the website isn't working.

Have I explained a bit better? Does that change your suggestion? Thanks!

Does anyone have any recommendations on how you can tell Google (hopefully via a URL) not to index that page of a website? I have tried through SEO Yoast to hide certain sitemaps (which has worked to a degree) but certain functionalities of Wordpress websites show links without them actually being part of a "sitemap" so those links are harder to hide.

I'm having an issue with one of my websites - the sitelinks that Google is suggesting are nowhere near the most popular pages and I know that you can't make recommendations through Google not to show certain pages through Search Console. anymore.

Any suggestions are greatly appreciated! Thanks!

Brick and mortar - I have a patio furniture store.

I actually ended up finding a link for Google Customer Service and got on a support call with a rep to review my situation. There was quite a bit of back and forth and proof required to show why I wanted "temporarily closed" vs. Closed and I needed to provide a 're-opening date' to achieve this. But I was able to achieve it.

The other thing to mention is that there are two ways you can be found on Google for Business listings:  1) via Google Maps Search (google.com/maps) and 2) Google Search.

For the Google Maps Search it is not possible (I confirmed with a Google specialist) to temporarily close a location via the Maps. Google Maps requires you to be open or closed.

For Google Search, once the seasonal location is ready to re-open you have to contact them again to have "Temporarily Closed" removed from your listing.

Hope this helps.

Just wondering if anyone has any suggestions about how to go about getting some approximate costs for keywords through Google Adwords to assist my SEO efforts. I don't want to open an AdWords account, just looking for costs. If the pricing is too high then the opened account was a waste of time. So if anyone has any resources to find out this information, that would be great! Thanks in advance!

Thank you so much for the suggestion. The info you tried above was the first way I tried to mark as temporarily closed but as soon as I tried to close all the "regular" hours I got an "invalid or missing data error". Do you know if this only works if there are special hours set (i.e. for holidays?)

Hi there,

Not sure if anyone will have any insight but I have a seasonal business that I am closed for from September to March. I don't want to mark my business as  "permanently closed" through Google My Business as I don't want my customers to think I've gone out of business. I've seen a few times through forums that you can change your business to temporarily closed, but I can't find the specifics on how to do this. Any insight, suggestion or resources would be great!

Thanks!

Hi there,

Just wondering if anyone knows if you have to delete your campaign through your Moz account if you change a campaign you are monitoring from http:// to https:// - seems like it would be quite a dramatic delete for a security feature but I wanted to check just in the case.

Same website - just added an SSL.

Thanks!

Hey Moz Community,

I've been reading some articles that Facebook no longer likes if Business Pages run contests on their Pages. I was thinking about doing something super simple with a "Like, Comment, and Share" type of an entry. Does anyone know if this is still allowed - I can't seem to find a concrete answer. Even the guidelines for Facebook seem a bit vague. I could always take the contest offline and use a landing page on my website to generate traffic but that also doesn't help with my social following.

Thoughts, insights all welcome.

Thanks!

Hi Emily,

Thanks for the reply. Basically, we went from being a garden centre to expanding into other areas. Like clothing and home decor. Because the garden market in my city is not like it used to be, we knew we needed to change our product offerings to keep thriving. So while, we still sell flowers and potted plants, we know it's not our "money maker" and not where we want to focus our SEO efforts.

Looking for some advice

I have a domain that has been registered since 1999 and currently hosts my website - the problem is that my business has moved in a different direction and my URL is no longer associated with my main product offering. For example in the past I was xyzgarden.com however now something like xyzhomedecor.com is much more appropriate.

How should I handle this so that I am not at a disadvantage for SEO.

thanks!

Matt Dunlop

• 4 minutes ago
• Edit

Thank you so much for the reply!

I've been working on tracking, analyzing and optimizing this particular website for about a year now. I've optimized my homepage for the best and most specific keyword I can and I've got a 94% optimization score on the page (I can't put the keyword in the URL as it's the homepage). I've added in my competitors into OSE and reviewed their backlinks and besides some local advertising backlinks they have received, my Moz stats are much better than the competition. There is one competitor in particular that is mult-national company and I know that as a small business I don't stand a change in ranking higher than them, however, the other top competitor I have in my local market - does not optimize and still ranks higher than my site. One of the largest frustrations I have with this particular competitor is that the page that results higher than mine has little to no content on it and in other searches (because we are in the same industry) - their homepage will rank higher than my optimized interior pages. We use facebook and link back to our service pages which contain our keywords as often as possible and my crawl from Moz shows 1 missing meta description tag (on a category) and that's it.

I did read up on the Moz Blog today and it seems like everything is on-track but there's no progress. I should also mention that the website is built on Wordpress and as far as I know from the stats I am pulling from Moz - I've covered my bases.

I'm not sure what other specifics I can offer that might assist me with this challenge.

I guess at this point - maybe a second set of eyes on an audit (outside of Moz - because I look at that all the time) is what I need????

If you have any recommendations on a comprehensive site audit, I'd be very interested.

Thank you so much for taking the time to respond to this.

Thank you so much for the reply!

I've been working on tracking, analyzing and optimizing this particular website for about a year now. I've optimized my homepage for the best and most specific keyword I can and I've got a 94% optimization score on the page (I can't put the keyword in the URL as it's the homepage). I've added in my competitors into OSE and reviewed their backlinks and besides some local advertising backlinks they have received, my Moz stats are much better than the competition. There is one competitor in particular that is mult-national company and I know that as a small business I don't stand a change in ranking higher than them, however, the other top competitor I have in my local market - does not optimize and still ranks higher than my site. One of the largest frustrations I have with this particular competitor is that the page that results higher than mine has little to no content on it and in other searches (because we are in the same industry) - their homepage will rank higher than my optimized interior pages. We use facebook and link back to our service pages which contain our keywords as often as possible and my crawl from Moz shows 1 missing meta description tag (on a category) and that's it.

I did read up on the Moz Blog today and it seems like everything is on-track but there's no progress. I should also mention that the website is built on Wordpress and as far as I know from the stats I am pulling from Moz - I've covered my bases.

I'm not sure what other specifics I can offer that might assist me with this challenge.

I guess at this point - maybe a second set of eyes on an audit (outside of Moz - because I look at that all the time) is what I need????

If you have any recommendations on a comprehensive site audit, I'd be very interested.

Thank you so much for taking the time to respond to this.

Hi There,

I am currently struggling with the ranking of my website. No matter how many initiatives I try (backlinking, blog commenting, social posting, etc.) I can't seem to make any progression in Google Search. I've done competitive metrics through Open Site Explorer and can't seem to really find the reason why my site is not ranking as well as my competitors. The only one possible glaring element I've thought about is my website URL. This company is in the heating and cooling industry and majority of my competitors have either "heating" or "cooling" or both in their website URL's but mine does not.

Does anyone have any thoughts or recommendations on if changing my URL and then redirecting my current URL would be a step in the right direction help me to climb the rankings in Google Search?

Thanks!

This is amazing and EXACTLY what we need! Thank you so much! I will look into it right away!

One of my clients came to me today asking to mirror their current website and host it on a different domain (i.e domain.com and domain.ca). Their reasoning is that there is no actual way to confirm via form entries from their website which visitors are submitting the form from an organic perspective and which ones are submitting the form through an Adwords ad campaign referral they are running (which I have nothing to do with). I know Google Analytics will show you visits to pages on a site and then you can find out which source (organic vs. cpc) they came from, but it won't confirm the source on the actual form entry. So my client feels the only way to find out this information would be to mirror the website so that the separate analytics would validate  their Ad spend.

Does anyone know of any tools that I could use for something like this? I do NOT want to mirror the website as I am fearful of duplicate content and the YEARS of organic SEO work I have put into this website going to waste.

The other element I should mention is the client only wants to have this "mirorred" site up for 2 months.

Any thoughts, suggestions and arguments for a mirorred website are welcomed!

Thanks!

Can anyone recommend any tools that review Shopify websites for SEO? Or any resources? I work on a e-commerce website and ever since we implemented an SSL certificate to make the site more secure for purchasing - I have seen that all the pages on the site are not being indexed. I also have been trying to rank for keywords and for about 4 or 5 of them (for which I created page specific content) - the homepage seems to be pulling up in the rankings but never the page I created that is keyword specific. I usually work on Wordpress but I can't seem to figure out what it with the Shopify platform that is so difficult for my SEO efforts.

Any help or suggestions are appreciated.

Thanks!

Wondering if there are any webinars or websites available to help me better understand and break down the different categories and what they specifically mean when you run a website through the Compare Metrics in Moz?