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Hi Robert

When did you start to see the ranking drop and was it for all your terms?

Thanks

Hi Robert,

It is hard to help you with this without having more details on your site itself. There are many things that could cause a ranking drop. Have you run your links through Opensite explorer to gauge their spam score? What sort of anchor text do these links have? What changes did you make around the time of noticing the ranking drop? How long has it been going on?

Sorry to answer your question with more questions but there are so many factors that can cause a ranking drop, so establishing more detail will help the community help you further.

Best

Matt

Hi Laura,

I believe http://www.seopowersuite.com/rank-tracker/ will provide the data you are looking for - you can track keyword rankings on different search engines in different countries and see what page is ranking. This should be easy to monitor your different ccTLDs.

Hope this helps

Matt

I know it probably isn't what you want to here but if you have lifted images from Google Images without checking the copyright status I would shoot it again - I don't think a copyright disclaimer will protect you. This is the last thing you want to cause you an issue - people like Getty Images are always on the look out for sites unauthorized use of their images. This can lead to hefty fines - I have seen sites fall foul of this...

Hi Marina,

I have come across issues with redirect plugins on WordPress when trying to deal with http and https. They can have bugs which can cause redirect loops or other issues causing your page not to load. When you say your design is messed up do you also get a warning about the page containing insecure elements or similar? This often happens when moving a site to https - you may find this plugin helpful for dealing with this issue - https://wordpress.org/plugins/ssl-insecure-content-fixer/ - then you can choose to have your site fully https if desired.

In terms of the redirect what server are you on? If you are on an apache server you can easily take care of this redirect by logging into via FTP and then editing the .htaccess file.

The following code will allow you to redirect the whole site to https if you fix the layout with the above:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.domain.com/$1 [R,L]

replacing your www.domain.com with your domain.

I personally would go down this route and have your whole site on https once you have dealt with design/content issues - but in order to help with your decision take a look at this great post from Cyrus Shepard - https://moz.com/blog/seo-tips-https-ssl

*Note many sites have now moved to https - look at Moz for example.

Hope this helps!

Matt

Hi Vlad,

What I meant was you needed to declare it like this

and not the way you did it . The best tip I could give you is make sure you encase each type of schema inas this allows you to easily nest the different types of schema on a page. I can see that this is the case with your other site after having a quick glance.

Hope this helps

Hi Ravi,

Only certain product pages will show rich snippets, so the ones you are looking at may not show but others most likely will as your product markup is coming back as valid in structured data testing tool. I have seen it mentioned that Google only stores a certain amount of data needed for rich snippets on a websites products pages - somewhere estimated to be between 10-50%.

Hope this helps!

This is the correct code and will validate if you copy and paste it into the structured data testing tool -

ASG Seamless Gutters Inc

• About us
• Testimonials
• Email Us

70 Leete St., Springfield, MA 01108 (413) 455-0800 info@asggutter.com <time itemprop="openingHours" datetime="Mon,Tu,Wed,Thu,Fri, Sat 7:00-19:00">Monday - Saturday 7:00a-7:00pm</time>

The postaladdress schema wasn't declared properly so wasn't being read and you needed to close this set of postaladdress schema with a prior to opening hours which are part of the HomeAndConstructionBusiness schema.

Hope this helps

K1KKwfa.jpg

I agree with Moosa and Danny - in terms of I use Screaming Frog (full paid version) on a stripped down windows machine with an SSD and 16GB of performance RAM. I have also download the 64 bit version of Java and increased the memory allocation for Screaming Frog to 12GB (default limit is 512mb) - here's how - http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/user-guide/general/ (look at the section Increasing Memory on Windows 32 & 64-bit)

I did this as I was having issues crawling a large site - after I put this system in place it eats any site I have thrown at it so far so it works well for me personally. In terms of speed of crawl large sites such as you mention will still take a while - you can set crawl speed in Screaming Frog, but you need to be careful as you can overload the server of the site you are crawling and cause issues...

Another option would be to buy a server and configure it for Screaming Frog and other tools you may use - this gives you options to grow the system as your needs grow. It all depends on budget and how often you crawl large sites - obviously buying a server such as a windows instance on Amazon EC2 will cost more in the long run but it takes the strain away from your own systems and networks plus you should effectively never hit capacity on the server as you can just upgrade. It will also allow you to remote desktop in on whatever system you use - yes even a Mac

Hope this helps

Hi Adrienne,

In terms of the URL not claimed error can you confirm how you are doing this - there are several reasons why this can be lost including - trying to claim more than one URL in Merchant Center - for this you need a multi-client account which I linked to in my original response. You can also lose it if your site becomes unverified in webmaster tools - what I would suggest is that you look at this Google help article in relation to this and see if any of the reasons apply to you - https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/176793?hl=en-GB

Hi Adrienne

This means that Google has processed that number of items in your feed but there is an error with them - go on feeds and then click on feed name - you should see a message at the bottom that tells you what the error is with the items in your feed - this can be one of several things that mean you items aren't eligible for shopping.

I have never had an issue having two sites setup under one webmaster tools account - what verification problem are you having when you add and verify another site in your account? Have you tried alternative methods in the options?

In terms of Google Merchant Center how have you set this up - you may find this useful regarding having multiple websites under one account

- https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/188487?hl=en

Hope this helps!

Hi Jamie,

I was asked this question recently by a client and my response was that as long as your site can be crawled efficiently and read by Google having a w3c compliant site won't make a difference to rankings. I also pointed out to them that amazon.co.uk - has nearly 400 errors  and  over 100 warning when you run it through w3c validation tool but they do well in the SERPs!

Hi Audrey

I thought you might find this post an interesting read if you haven't already seen it - http://searchengineland.com/actually-google-doesnt-hate-haro-links-190173

Hi

I can see that Tom and Ryan have done a great job of handling the most obvious issue that may have caused your site to drop in terms of changing to HTTPS. You have also mentioned the fact that you have changed some significant on-page factors which could definitely be the culprit.

However I thought I would just add this - I saw someone move to HTTPS and they did implement the correct redirects and then register both versions of the site in webmaster tools and so on. However they still saw a noticeable drop in their organic traffic which turned out to be caused by a significant drop in site speed after moving to HTTPS.

You may have already checked and your site may seem fast but I would double check the speed of your site with Google Page Speed Insights and GTMetrix (another speed tool I like). If your site seems slow look at what you can do to improve it with the recommendations on these tools (as this will help your site whatever) - also speak to your host and explain you are seeing a decrease in speed can they help.

This tactic worked in this case and I just thought I would mention it as another angle to approach this.

Hope this helps!

Brand or domain anchor text links are far more natural than keyword anchor text. Gaining links that are brand or raw domain from an authority site will benefit your sites authority. I always look at it like this - if you didn't know anything about SEO and you liked a site that you wanted to link to and this site sold blue widgets for example would you link via the domain/brand name or by entering "blue widgets"? You would go with the more obvious, easier option domain or brand - hence this is far more natural in the eyes of Google and far more likely to have been earned naturally. Increasing authority is all about earning links not (dare I say it..) link building. Focus on creating great content and making people aware of it then the links will start to come naturally. SEO isn't a quick fix, so approach this with a strategy looking to build a quality online presence and establish a relevant audience for your site through social and other channels.

I think you may find this post interesting - http://www.searchenginejournal.com/image-alt-text-vs-image-title-whats-the-difference/

Note the following:

"Include your main keywords in both, but change them up. Keyword stuffing in alt text and title is still keyword stuffing, so keep them relevant and meaningful"

If possible I would populate both title and alt tags for images but make them different variations rather than having them as the same. I know this is a challenge and as Dirk mentioned as you may be limited go for identical but try and be as relevant as possible. Depending how your site is setup you could potentially custom code your template to populate the two elements from slightly different but relevant data on the page.

Again I think you might find this on-page SEO post by Rand interesting -

"For search engines, the image's title, filename, surrounding text, and alt attribute all matter from a ranking perspective. In particular, those doing SEO should know that when an image is linked, the alt attribute is treated similarly to anchor text in a text link."

http://moz.com/blog/visual-guide-to-keyword-targeting-onpage-optimization

I agree with Dirk - the names you have suggested would work fine and there is a clear difference between each. Obviously the more descriptive you can be with each file the better - but often easier said than done on eCommerce sites.

The biggest issue here is that the developer did a blanket redirect to the homepage of the new domain - never a good plan. You are using a 301 redirect to tell search engines that a page and its content has moved to a location - however the content should still be the same or similar. That way the URL that is being redirected to is still relevant when people visit via the old URL. Obviously when you do go down the route of doing 301 redirects even done properly can cause some fluctuation in rankings, but it is best practice to minimise impact of such a move and transfer old authority gained through links.

As you say why did the developer or site owner decide they needed to move domains? If they were doing well to start as you say this really doesn't make sense. You can reverse a 301 redirect  - this old Q&A you might find interesting.

http://moz.com/community/q/undo-a-301-redirect

If you are going to reverse things I would do page level redirects from this new domain back to the old.

Go back to the old structure and URLs if possible - do you have an old sitemap or crawl of these? If not you will find the way back when machine handy for seeing old site structure I find - http://archive.org/web/

I would then submit a new up-to-date sitemap of your old domain in Google Webmaster Tools.

On a side note - has the on-page such as page titles and other ranking factors been changed since the move to the new site? If so I would look to change these back to when you had stronger rankings.

Not a simple case as you say but I hope this helps

Hi Jac -

take a look at this http://wistia.com/learning/advanced-seo-with-distilled and this http://moz.com/blog/video-seo-post-rich-snippets

These will tell you everything you need to know about video SEO and help you develop a strategy that works - they are by Phil Nottingham who is an expert when it comes to Video SEO

Hope this helps