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It really depends on your current metrics. As Sergey said things like views, videos uploaded, shares & minutes watching are all ranking factors over there so the more you have already the better.
If your average time spent watching is really low, I'd consider moving them - but an account with history is more valuable than a brand new one so if your numbers aren't completely shot, I'd keep the channel and rebrand it.
By far the most SEO-friendly platform overall is going to be Wordpress.
While other platforms can be made to do what Wordpress does, almost a quarter of websites online are powered by Wordpress which gives it a huge community to draw resources and information from.
I don't mind Joomla (i'm the one guy, I know) and I have friends who prefer Drupal or other things for security reasons (the biggest always gets attacked most, right?) but Wordpress has Yoast SEO plugin and that is a huge help.
I have a few ecomm stores online and I use Woocommerce with Wordpress for most. I have a Magento store but ... shew. It's so much harder, it's so much more resource intense and it's not as good for anything unless you're a developer.
Good find on the homepage - I saw it was Wordpress and assumed that would take care of the problem but you're right, something is wrong.
Also, the canonical tag is set to non-www and needs to be fixed.
These things resolve themselves over time. Google (and Moz) have a record of what your site looked like. If they have 100 "pictures" of your pages and they see the www one, well that's new. We'll put that .. oh wait, it's duplicate.
They haven't gone back to see that the one it's a duplicate of is no longer there and is now redirecting. Once the bot crawls the new site entirely, those type of issues go away.
Your rankings should bounce back as soon as Google gets your domain crawled again. In the meantime if you don't have Search Console setup, do that. Go into the section that says Fetch as Google and get them to recrawl your site. Also, if you have a sitemap.xml on your site you can submit a sitemap through Search Console to help them crawl more of your site.
Those two things should get you back on track a bit quicker.
You said you don't like the idea of redirecting the root domain to a sub dir - but why? It's passing the full value of the UK site to the new location of the UK site. Makes perfect sense in my head. I would definitely do so.
I would only recommend the /US version because of the hreflangs. You can do it the other way, it's just a bit more technical to build the hreflang tags. You can use this example I've used before, though:
" hreflang="x-default" />
" hreflang="en-uk" />
" hreflang="en-de" />
This will do the trick, I believe. Then will display that in the header of every page and the request URL will grab the URL you're on so you'll end up with hreflangs for the two URL structures.
You said you could migrate .co.uk to .com/UK asap - do it as soon as you can, as long as the URL structure won't change. If you're moving from say .co.uk/about.html to .com/UK/about-us/ then you can't do it until those URLs exist. I wouldn't move the existing site over now if the URLs are going to change. This is what I was saying above - you don't want to go from .co.uk/about.html to .com/UK/about.html (and then in August) to .com/UK/about-us/
Make sense?
The static page examples are now 404 so I can't see those ones - I didn't notice a redirect before.
But the parameter pages redirect. The parameter page is still being found by Google though and if it continues can easily be fixed in the Search Console settings.
Awesome find! I did a little checking and this would be my guess as well.
Open the first two links you posted above under Acupuncture Infertility in New York City - the /female_fertility and /nyc-fertility-clinic.html pages
Look at the <title>tag for each one. </p> <p>That's the problem. :)</p></title>
If it were my site, I would move the UK site to .com/UK, then have .com/DE and .com/US.
Then I would 301 redirect all the UK links back to their counterparts on the new site, keeping as much authority as possible. Point the main homepage at .com/UK and all the inner links as they currently are.
Doing this now will definitely help your expansion in the future as well.
I would do all this after you've rebuilt the site, though, because you don't want to do 301s to 301s. Figure out what the new site will be, do the 301s to that one directly. No intermediate jumps ... it's a longer time to implement but you're better off in the long run.
Links you should be getting (related industries, etc.) shouldn't hurt you and can definitely help depending on the link source.
US links are generally .com, .net and .org. I can't see Google devaluing those even if they point at a .co.uk Imagine a NYTimes article pointing a link at BBC ... that would be the highest quality connection, right? But they're related industries and across the pond.
Would I get one from a .us site? I mean ... maybe? If it's a really decent link, sure. But I wouldn't want 50 .us domains pointing at me. That's like .ru, .ro, .ar and .it - the more of those other country extensions you have may indeed show signs of spam (there are great .ro links and great .ar links ... but if you see them, there are usually 50 of them and they were bought links.)
Some of your pages lack enough content or unique content for Google to care:
This: http://carpetcleanertn.com/carpet-cleaning-specials/ isn't indexed. But then, why would it be?
http://carpetcleanertn.com/carpet-cleaning-spring-hill-tn/ this isn't indexed - but ... yeah.
No content except an image on this either: http://carpetcleanertn.com/gift-certificates/
None at all here: http://carpetcleanertn.com/great-nashville-area/
Your pricing & services page aren't being indexed but that's because they're near-copies of the actual chemdry page. See attachment.
I think if you wrote clean, new copy for the pricing & services page you'd see them get indexed but since they're super-close to the original, Google has chosen to only index one.
Are you getting the message in Search Console that there were errors crawling your page?
This typically means that your host was temporarily down when Google landed on your page. These types of things happen all the time and are no big deal.
Your homepage cache shows a crawl date of today so I'm assuming things are working properly ... if you really want to find out, try doing a "Fetch" of your site in Search Console.
Crawl > Fetch as Google > Fetch (big red button)
You should get a status of "Complete." If you get anything else there should be an error message with it. If so, paste that here.
I have checked the site headers, cache, crawlability with Screaming Frog, and everything is fine. This seems like one of those temporary messages but if the problem persists definitely let us know!
Do you know that the read more tag on that page actually displays less and read less actually displays more?
When I put that page through Pingdom Melbourne I get a 5.09 second load time and 1.6 MB page size. That's a bit long and you get a 45/100 (red) score on Google Developer's Tool for mobile and a 70/100 on desktop: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.yellowoctopus.com.au%2Funique-gifts%2Fgifts-for-men
The site at #1 gets a 79/100 mobile and 92/100 desktop and is only 209 kb and loads in 2.37 seconds on Pingdom: http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/bol6kH/http://www.giftsforblokes.com.au/
You have what looks to me like some link spam going on. There are 30 domains that link to you on just one IP address and another 20 from a second IP. That's 50 domains across just two IP addresses. The odds of that being natural are astronomical and very, very unlikely. https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/referring/v2/ips/subdomains/fresh/all/1/refdomains_desc?target=yellowoctopus.com.au
You also have a staggering number of links from .org, .net, .uk, .ru, .de, .info and so on. This is also a high indicator of link manipulation. The site at #1 doesn't have this issue at all.
The vast, vast majority of your backlinks come from images and the anchor text is your brand, not anything to do with men. 45% of your links over time have been deleted, also a very bad quality sign: https://majestic.com/reports/site-explorer?folder=&q=yellowoctopus.com.au
The site I see at #1 is roundly kicking your site's tail at every corner. The site I see at #2 loads a slightly larger page than you but does it in much less time: http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/dW9TDy/hardtofind.com.au Most of the sites above you also have a better (clean) backlink profile. Hardtofind has over 23,000 links showing up in Majestic, which is huge. Only about 15% of their links are images where yours is closer to 80%. Only 20% of their links are nofollow while 50% of yours are.
Your page is the only one in the top 6 that uses meta keywords and you use them a little bit "old school" - they can generally only be a negative ranking factor and it seems they aren't helping you.
The content across all 4 pages is quite the same so it shouldn't matter that much.
I would say your slightly spammier link profile, slightly slower load times and slightly fewer dofollow, good links are pushing you down. Their stuff is, frankly, better at the moment. And I see DJs and Kmart above you - bad luck about that but if they want your category you're going to have to spin miracles to beat them.
I would check Search Console for a penalty notification although this is most likely an algorithmic adjustment. Those links aren't counting for you. If someone did a disavow on them they may have also gone "too far" with it. It's hard to say. I would check search console settings, including claiming all versions of the site and make sure the HTTPS and www version are your preferred versions.
Then I would try to draw non-image links to the page, maybe add some new content above or below products, work on your link profile overall and push the domain as a whole as well.
PM the URL or post it here so we can take a look. Generally this is a case of:
No indexed links yet
Duplicate content
Robots meta tag or robots.txt
Content not actually in the site (iframes, other coding issues)
Content in an image/flash/other unreadable or nearly unreadable format.
It's a very tough question and one that is common with a lot of e-commerce.
The only really complete solution I have for you that addresses each of your needs is to not base the page "content" on the specs.
Make specs a table on the page but put in enough unique content about each model and variation that it has its own truly unique content.
I know this solution means writing at least say 200-300 words of unique content for every model but 100k words solves the whole issue. It just depends if it is worth them all ranking. But this solution gives you:
a) unique content
b) chance for every page to rank & no canonicals back to one page
c) much more long tail search volume
d) specific searches for every one of your potential customers.
That's really the best I can do ... it takes the duplicate content issue away and solves every problem except the one of having to create this much content in the first place.
Generally a huge difference in local vs organic rankings is one of citation authority. You need to build more citation strength with full NAPs (name, address, phone) - things like what Moz Local does.
Doing that type of citation-building should help move you up the local charts. Make sure your GMB page is optimized for the location, you've added photos to the listing, the keyword is prominent across the description and such ... consistent NAP on other sites that list the business, and then just build more. Should rank fine after that.
I would have a main page about each service topic and then link off from that.
Bathroom remodeling page
Bathroom remodeling content
We do bathroom remodeling in: blah blah blah, linked page, linked page, linked page.
Or naturally in the content if possible, of course. Or even a list at the bottom:
Our service area includes: town(link), town(link) etc.
This works very well for clients I've had in the past with many suburbs & locations.
If you do more than one type of thing per location, I would silo them:
You likely won't outrank them just with the MLS contents. But can you put unique content around each result?
If you can make your page look more like:
then you can definitely compete. Using this formula and strategy I was outranking sites like Amazon, Ebay & Polyvore for clothing-related searches. It's fine to have some duplicate content. It's not fine to have ONLY duplicate content if you want to rank against some top sites. The good news is they aren't doing much in the way of unique content so if you do, you have a good shot.
Agree with Jordan - block the parameter for search in robots.txt and forget it. It won't bring search traffic in, it shouldn't get crawled but if it does, it's always a negative.
