Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I would say the most important is that you only have 1 link and I always say it like this: you need to be listed where you need to be listed. Local sites, wedding sites, where are your competitors? search their URL in Google or using a tool like Moz and find their links. See what you can easily mimic and expand from there.

Content & blogging will come and need to be done - but the "in between times" are great for link building. (Or, hire a wedding/photography link builder and do the blogging/content yourself.)

Anchor text on backlinks will help Google sort it out, as will the content itself. Generally you won't want to rank two pages for any keyphrase but say in the SEO example - because you're pushing those pages so hard sometimes one falls. It's not that they replace each other in a bad way, it's because one is "sort of" being pushed too hard that it may fall and get replaced by your backup.

In a plumbing example, you'd target the homepage to say "Melbourne plumber" because of Google My Business but over time you may add services and swap it to another page.

If your site is only in English you don't need to use hreflang tags at all.

Well, you have two .com.com in there ... so that's in general wrong.

But yes, it's en-gb, not en-UK.

You just have to have all the tags on all the pages. You can use Flang to see what's wrong as well.

Hi Jon,

Former wedding photographer here myself so I know exactly what you're going through. It can be hard to watch someone jump ahead of you or start to make huge progress when you aren't.

That said, let me address a few differences on the sites to help you a bit more.

He has 185 pages of content indexed, you have 19. That's 90% more content. Most of this is long-tail keyworded traffic going to things like Waimea wedding photography blog posts, Poipu beach blog posts, etc. That sort of content really helps and fleshes out your site more. It definitely establishes him right off the bat as more experienced / expert in the area.

His homepage title is much better & cleaner. Yours has two pipes - one of which leads to nothing. | <- that thing.

Many of his titles include the word "photography" where most of yours include "photo & film."  Spamming the same keyword over & over isn't necessary but since he's varying the locations & all that, it's working well for him. In several cases your over-use of the photographer/y keywords actually get you into some trouble.

According to Majestic, I see exactly one live link for you: https://majestic.com/reports/site-explorer?folder=&q=balihaiphoto.com  That's not much authority to rank you for anything.

Your domain also has some old Chinese spam/links attached to it. http://2.1m.yt/KSwroiP.jpg mostly from it's history: https://web.archive.org/web/20020926015757/http://www.balihaiphoto.com/

You have some duplicate content going on:

• http://joshuagrantrose.com/nicole-ryan/
• http://joshuagrantrose.com/gallery/nicole-ryan/

Which will be problematic when you have this little authority & this few links.

Anyhoo - that's quite a lot of info to start with. If you want, add me on Facebook where I share quite a few industry-specific tips including this marketing guide for photographers which is a bit outdated now but the concepts should still apply. Happy to help if you need more.

Generally when you get the no return tags error it means that you put a hreflang for one page but not the referring page.

Let's say your pages are:

• website.com/en
• website.com/es
• website.com/fr

If you put hreflang tags on /en but not the rest, you'll get the no return tags error.

So just put the full hreflang tag set on every page that uses any one of the languages and you'll solve this error. Also see Webmasters Support for more info.

Well ... are you checking based on the same keyword? That's the first question. They both use 27 data points and I do think there's quite a lot of overlap, if not 100% ... so they should be fairly similar in terms of what's missing/what you should fix.

I just don't think they're graded the same way with the weights. As an example:

If I check my site http://mattantonino.com/ in the Page Optimization tab for my name, I see a score of 79 because I have addressed 22/27 factors.

Using the on-page grader I have also addressed 22/27 factors but ... I get an "F" for optimizing this keyphrase.

But the grader rates the importance of each factor - Critical! My title doesn't include my name. And two of the factors are "high importance."  The grader says that as well - "We weight the items graded by their importance level, which we determine by our industry experience and correlation research."

I think the Page Optimization is not weighted the same way - it's more of "how many boxes did you check."

As long as your SEO is done fairly well, the on-page grader AND the Page Optimization should only be used as a guide. I used the above example to illustrate the point as I'm currently ranking #2 behind my well-optimized LinkedIn profile for my name. Yes, if I put my name in the title I would shoot to #1. But #2 and the page got an F on the grader.

I chose the #1 ranking site for "SEO" here locally and it receives a "B" grade with the keyword used 193 times. The sites ranked #2 & 3 get an A and the one ranked 90th gets an A as well.

A link can't be direct to your site, then refer back to shareasale, then redirect back to your site unless you've set it up that way somehow.

So if someone builds a shareasale link like:

Link to your product

This is going to shareasale. If you quit shareasale and they said it would still go directly to you, they're just not planting their tracking cookie on the intermediate step. Everything else would remain the same.

If the link is something like:

Link to product and somehow that goes from your site, to shareasale, back to your site - well that's definitely not helping you very much for SEO and if you quit, yes that would then go directly to your site - but only if you reconfigured how the links were working since this type of linking would require a lot of special work to make it happen. It's more likely it's the 1st example.

In any case, they both pass through Shareasale and, per Matt Cutts, Google is attempting to not give you credit for that link. Whether or not they do, I can't say - but they're attempting not to. I'm not sure which part of my previous answer may not be "completely true."

I've seen many pages optimize both the homepage and an inner page. Think about how most SEO agency pages are organized. Homepage has some SEO content - and most pages that rank for "SEO" are homepages. But then you have the same sites also inevitably have an /seo/ page on them or /services/seo as well.

So doing both is sort of standard operating procedure for some businesses but it really depends.

• Best for ranking would be as Eric said. Optimize as if you're writing a book. Homepage should be optimized for the title / main topic.
• Best for conversions may be to have a dedicated landing page for each topic and use your homepage to tie them together.

These type of links are generally demoted/do not pass juice in the first place.

Matt Cutts said in the past in an interview with Eric Enge:

Matt Cutts: Typically, we want to handle those sorts of links appropriately. A lot of the time, that means that the link is essentially driving people for money, so we usually would not count those as an endorsement.

To me, Shareasale is a huge provider of affiliate links so I would assume Google is well onto those links and doesn't count them. You aren't going to get a ranking benefit from these links, IMO.

Most of your internal links come from the header menu and all the submenus under that. I agree with everyone else that this isn't something you need to do but if it is, consider using filters and parameter selection (for things like price, holiday/occasions, etc. )

But again ... why?

I see the exact match domain #1 - plantas de casas .com so that makes sense.

According to Majestic, you have 958 live links and 135,000+ historic links. That's a HUGE drop off in links. You used to have 1363 referring domains and now have 244. Those drops are cause for some worry.

montesuacasa.com.br has 46k links and 731 historic referring domains - many more links than you and many more still alive.

If I look through your historic links you were getting 128,000 from one site jeso carneiro.com.br - this site has pretty good authority itself but your link is now not found. So that was helping you to #1 - now it's not.

Yes, the move to HTTPS takes a while sometimes to fully swap over to your new versions. In the meantime, you may see some dips in ranking even though Google swears this doesn't happen. We have verified several times that it does.

In the meantime, check your website in Google using site: and you'll see that there's a mix of https and non-https.

https://www.google.com.au/search?q=site:www.thepresentfinder.co.uk/&gws_rd=ssl

Fetch your site in Search Console, check your sitemap for https links and then resubmit sitemap in Search Console. Then it's just a waiting game on Google's end.

OSE seems to be locating your links - up to over 3500 from the other day when I saw was like 300. So I would say when the index refreshes next, you'll see this return. If not, hopefully tech support can help more because it's definitely a weird issue. Headers look fine, robots is ok, no meta robots blocking it & I can crawl with Screaming Frog ... so yeah. No reason other than the glitch that I can see.

You have products that get sold at Valentine's and impressions dropped after Valentine's but avg position went up? Yes, that's related. I would say you can't really judge impressions on time-specific events like Valentine's Day if you sell things related to that holiday. You should see them go back up around Easter if you sell candy, at least.

Give it a month or so, see if things normalized away from the holiday. If so, you're good to go.

Not only can you but you should.

Pruning non-performing pages that you don't intend to rework and get ranking is very useful. I would definitely 301 the pages though, even if you 301 them all to the homepage (not really recommended if there's any better option.) Get a full site crawl with Screaming Frog, your sitemap or some other tool, import to Excel, add a column for your new URLs (homepage or other) and then just concatenate them into a long list of 301s.

Or do some wildcard magic and make it simpler. Depends on the url structures for that, I suppose.

But yes, I would definitely redirect and get rid of the tens of thousands of non-useful pages. It should actually help your other 100 as well.

This is one of the biggest issues I see with ecommerce sites these days. Automatic feeds of data, titles, descriptions, product info, etc. right into the store. It never ranks all that well without massive authority.

To be honest, the more you can change pre-import the better. Add something to the titles, change them up manually with an intern - whatever it takes to create unique value. For a while I was outranking Polyvore, David Jones & Amazon for the word "skirt" just because my product and category descriptions were massively different than anything on Google at the time (longer, more detailed, more useful.)

In this type of situation, don't be afraid to experiment. You're not going to outrank eBay, Amazon or the OEM for most products individually but if you try mixing things up you may find weaknesses that are easy enough to exploit. Whenever I imported, I'd alter the CSV files directly and then import. Made life so much better (and drastically improves rankings on long tail searches.)

(A small, small e-tailer won't do this but a mid size to large one always should be.)

Pretty impossible to answer without seeing the site but things that I could think about:

Links, as discussed below, mainly pointing to the homepage. The "link juice" (I hate that term but it fits) flows down through the homepage to the main categories (such as Tyres) which then filters (again) down to "Honda Tyres" - but the Tyres page (or homepage) could also have a TON of outbound links, internal links to filter to, etc.

You could also have duplicate/non-existent content on the internal pages and Google may just not value them as much. Your URL structure could affect this. The backlink anchor text pointing to one or two of your category pages could affect this.

Again, without a URL we're just shooting mosquitos with a shotgun.

When did you make the change to https? Could that be a recent change?

Love your robots.txt but the sitemap is wrong/invalid as well. That can't help many search engines find you.

I would think you're right and that the crawl lost your data and then hadn't re-found your info yet. If you look at Just Discovered links it shows a bunch from the last few days but nothing before Jan 1.

If the HTTPS is brand new, I could see that being it ... but yeah, does look like you got lost in the system. Weird glitches need squashing!

There are a few parts to this:

1. Is overall search volume going down for the terms? You may see an increase in ranking for, say, "Jeb Bush campaign" but after this week, traffic is going to plummet so even if you got to #10 last week and #1 next week, you'd get more views last week.

2. Were the views before somewhat excessive? Do they fit what you believe the search volumes should be? For instance, I have a client who's on page 3 of a main term. He looks at page 3 every day. I don't think he ever clicks page 2 though. So he's responsible for at least 30-50 views per month on that term on Google. But he never looks at page 2. So if you were on page 3 with him, you'd get many more views than if you then improve to ranking on page 2.

3. Average position is often manipulated by your social graph on G+. If you have more than 500-1000 people on Google+, you could definitely see average rank go up (as more friends & connections see your link) but views go down (if they've already clicked your site and know what it is.)

4. Similarly, you could see views go down as people become familiar with your brand. I know most of the SEO brands in my market. But if a new one comes in, they'll get a lot of clicks from me & other competitors in the next 2-3 months. But over time those views will decrease.

I don't put a lot of stock in average position to be honest. I like "Views" as a leading metric but only when clicks start following behind. If they don't, check meta descriptions. But avg is just too ... weird. Five views from friends and 5 views from non-connections can move your average up quite a lot from 10 non-connections.

Also, the volumes you're looking at - are you talking about 50 views? Where "big" changes are still really just 10 people not looking? Or are you talking 1500 where yes, it's that significant?