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This is a very generic question not really suited to the Q&A forum. We can help with specific questions and certainly if someone is feeling extremely generous or has a lot of time on their hands they can help but this is too broad for the forum in general.

You should probably start with the Beginner's Guide to SEO and let us know specifically how we can help. Also, depending on your current knowledge you may want to find someone to hire who can give you a jumpstart toward your marketing goals while you catch up on the basics.

I don't want to spend a lot of time on a generic question but just as a starting point, your homepage title is super spammy and needs to be changed.  It also looks like you've purchased links in the past or had an SEO company who treated your site very badly.

Good luck!

For me, I've always had something "on the side" of my marketing/agency life. I want to have personal experience with ecommerce. How does it feel to sell clothing online? What are the concerns? How can I help clients? What are the hiccups with certain sources of traffic (Stumble, Reddit, Pinterest, even Digg back in the day). When does that traffic help?

I like to always have at least a couple side projects so I can keep a bit of "skin in the game."  If I'm spending MY money on Adwords, I get better at it. If I'm spending MY time building a site or generating links, I find ways to maximise the resources I have. If you don't have your own site, maybe split/share one with someone. Just a simple side project and always have at least a little stake in the outcomes.

That goes back to how I learned - I learned marketing by owning a business. I learned SEO by ranking #1 for my own keyword. I learned Adwords after wasting thousands & thousands of dollars. I learned CRO after wasting thousands & thousands of website hits. Make it PERSONAL somehow.

Massive update and excellent to see such great growth in the index. Fantastic work & congrats to the team for putting those previous crawl issues behind you. Happy holidays!

A couple years ago I wrote an article that may help:

https://moz.com/blog/going-beyond-moz-metrics-to-answer-why-is-this-site-outranking-me

(I disagree now with a few of my own ideas of what else may matter ... but the idea remains the same.)

Metrics aren't everything and can be skewed by things like volume, spam, and things that affect ranking that have nothing to do with link metrics. Keep in mind - link & domain metrics are one small part of ranking. Age of the domain, website speed, content of course ... all these things could play into rankings.

What does the content look like? Page titles related to KWs? H1 & H2s used similarly on both sites? Duplicate content on one?

Just keep in mind that these metrics are just a piece. You wouldn't think you bought a car if someone just handed you a steering wheel, right? Check the tires. Check the engine.

Thanks for the link via PM.

• You have 20,000 links from Chinese spam.
• Your main anchor text is like 56%.
• Your main homepage is a country selector page.
• Meta titles are almost all related to the same 3 keyphrases.

I'll PM you - but yes, I see more than a couple problems.

Remove the trailing slash and it shows some links. Not "many" but it definitely shows up in OSE.

If you want to post or PM me the link I'd like to take a deeper look at the specific domain in question. We're often shooting in the dark when we don't have the link as there could be 100 reasons it isn't working the way you want.

You should definitely start with an intense discussion we had on Inbound about subdirectories/subfolders. Not because you're asking the subfolder question but rather there's a LOT of really good info about subdomains for SEO.

In general, most people (but not all) agree that subdomains act as their own separate websites. Since all 3 of your options are basically the same (subdomains) then we can just jump ahead a bit.

Choice 2 seems ... redundant ... to me? I don't see the benefit.

Choice 1 vs 3 comes down to do you use your own domain or a throwaway. I would suggest that since you don't know how Google will treat them in the future, a throwaway is probably preferable. I know Wordpress uses a simple subdomain, as did a lot of older CMS' but I think the trend now is to not give Google hardly ANY chance to mess up your SEO by combining it with others. Even though that's not how it seems to currently work, that could change tomorrow. If it's on a separate, throw away domain it really can't be.

The only concern with that is to make sure you don't interlink all your client sites to yours through things like a footer link. You could very quickly and very artificially bank up tons of external links with a simple Theme by Our Company link. It's on a separate domain so those would add up very quickly as external links.

If you have goal tracking set up, it may make sense to compare conversions as well. While I like to use meta desc to improve CTR, I'd much rather improve conversions. If I can get someone to click through AND take action, that's the best meta desc.

Step 1 - CTR

Step 2 - Conversion/Goal Conversion

If your CTRs are super-low, improving them may not help conversion a ton. If they're already decently high, you may only see a small increase but you could double conversions. I think using the two together makes the most sense.

If you only have about 10 of these, I would just copy & paste it in.

The biggest thing to keep in mind is to keep the URLs the same. So yoursite.com/blog/your-post should still go to the same place. Otherwise you do have to do 301 redirects and all that stuff. If possible skip that by keeping the same URL/permalink.

I would attempt to get the US site reindexed by whatever means necessary and then check it.

First, I would add unique content to the US page and fetch again. Also make sure the homepage is in the sitemap - I'm not sure it is.

If you can get the US homepage reindexed, cache should work but I think in this case the cache issue is much smaller. The main issue is that your US homepage has been completely deindexed.

Well ... I gave this as thorough a check as I possibly can. Guess what?

It's happening because your www.us.allsaints.com homepage is NOT INDEXED.

• site:fr.allsaints.com (1st result)
• site:es.allsaints.com (1st result)
• site:www.allsaints.com (1st result)

site:www.us.allsaints.com  - Nope. You have subpages indexed but not the homepage.

Now, whether that's duplicate content or the massive amount of IP-related spam links to the site is hard to say. But your homepage has been deindexed and because it's not indexed, doesn't show up in the cache.

If you have the site claimed in Search Console, check for penalties. Check that you haven't removed the URL through Google Index > Remove URLs. Check that you haven't done a site move on https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/change-address?hl=en&siteUrl=www.us.allsaints.com

Once the homepage gets indexed, you should be good to go.

Duplicate page titles

Duplicate meta descriptions

A number of page titles in the 80-100 character range = too long.

Many WAY too long meta descriptions.

Meta KWs usually act only as a negative ranking factor, if anything. You have a LOT of the same KWs & KW spam.

Anchor text issues for all 4 words: newport, beach, plastic and surgeon. All way over optimised.

Majestic historic shows a HUGE number of referring domains but a much, much smaller level of IPs - typically a spam signal so there may be even more in Search Console that needs clean up, removal or disavow.

I would assume this site dropped initially during a Panda algo update at some point. It has a lot of content-quality issues and some anchor problems.

Martine,

I remember speaking with you earlier this year about your site and SEO. I don't remember why we didn't move forward as I've moved away from the agency I was working with and don't have access to those emails anymore. But you really do need to hire an SEO. I'd love to chat with you again about this if you want to PM me.

Your SEO drops mainly because everyone in your niche is constantly moving. They are spamming, rising, falling, dropping you, pushing you up -- until you get enough of the right authority, you're going to be pushed around quite a lot in the search results. They have A LOT of authority and push you around because your own is mostly limited to dollforum.com if I remember it right.

Also, it looks like you changed your website a bit. I would have to dig into the specifics but if URLs changed and were not handled properly on the change, you could lose a lot of authority that way. Not sure how much the change was simply aesthetic.

When you do hire someone, do hire someone who enjoys working within this industry as they're going to have to do competitor research and the such. I understand why you got the NSFW tag given your site but there are plenty of people who are happy to work on adult SEO and adult clients. You should use someone who has enough experience and doesn't think it's "ew, squishy."

I would echo what Dirk said and add to that.

1. Did you do 301s from the old URLs to the new URLs?

2. Are the new URLs crawlable by Google? These type of links are notoriously bad for SEO because they're almost always implemented improperly.

3. How long ago did all this happen? Has Google caught up?

4. What URLs are in your sitemap now?

5. Again, it's probably related to not being setup correctly. I have seen 100 of these clients and maybe only 1 or 2 that was done with any intent to make sure it still ranks. Check: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/getting-started?hl=en

Finally, you said you just introduced these as new pages? Consider this: http://searchengineland.com/google-has-deprecated-their-ajax-crawling-scheme-233402

If Google is going away from these pages and you're going toward them, that is something I would seriously think about for the future of the site.

My first instinct is obviously to say "if you lose 50-75% of your links, will your rankings drop" - well ... yes? I mean that seems fairly obvious?

But I didn't want to be that obtuse so I thought about it a bit longer. And really, the question is much more teachable than that over-simplified answer.

What you are talking about is domain-level vs. page-level link factors. ANY link to your site affects the whole domain (domain factor) but a direct link to an inner page has more page-level effect. If you look at the Moz Ranking Factors Survey you will see this:

Domain-Level, Link Authority Features: Based on link/citation metrics such as quantity of links, trust, domain-level PageRank, etc.

And that, right there, is your answer. On the domain-level, we assume quantity of links, trust & PR of those links affects the domain as a whole. If you have poor quality links it can also tank the whole site even if they all direct to one inner page. So yes, the long answer is "quantity and quality of links can affect domain-level metrics and thus affect your rankings."

This is a really huge question - too big for Q&A but I would suggest you Google a few names/keyphrases. Try:

• aleyda solis international seo
• gianluca fiorelli international seo

They have a LOT of great info - too much to compile links for in one reply, honestly. You also want to check into things like hreflang tags:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

Be aware of claiming each URL in Search Console and setting the correct country targeting as well, if you're using a subfolder structure like: /en/, /es/, /de/ structure or a subdomain es.site.com en.site.com structure. Either way, claim ALL versions and set targeting. (I prefer the subfolders myself.)

Strongly recommend this article as well.

http://martinkura.com/international-seo-56-point-checklist/

"Why not do parent category by type of clothing - "snowsuites", "sweaters" and so on and then have boy-girls filters inside?"

"I acknowledge that implementing a filter for "boys" and "girls" would be the best way to solve this redundant categorization, but that would simply be to expensive for our client."

That being said, canonicals will help direct the juice to the right (/outwear/) page and away from /outwear/girls and /outwear/boys.

The only other option I can see is to have an overview category (/outwear/) and then deindex the subcategories in robots.

disallow: /outwear/girls*
disallow: /outwear/boys*

But that only helps Google with what you already have. If someone directly links the /outwear/boys/ page, that will get lost. So canonicals would seem to be the way to go in the absence of filters.

The image you posted a link to doesn't say UK anywhere I can see? Google is returning the x-default from your hreflang tags.

Also, from here I see your .com in both the cache and the SERPs. You don't have an Australia language setting so it seems to be working right.

I'm not sure where you're seeing the issue, though. You have three things highlighted in that pic and they are right, right?

When you say you want an audit that goes beyond the basics, you're eliminating tools from the equation. All tools have a certain list of things they check, regardless of how big or small or accurate or necessary that list is, it's always operating from a basic list: titles, headers, meta desc, robots & sitemaps, etc. The best one-off for that is Screaming Frog, especially if the site is under 500 pages.

Then you have manual reviews - those usually start from a tool of some sort to get an overview then dig into other things that tools don't pick up. There are no audit tools that will tell you if your 1100 links are good or bad, just that you have 1100 links.

As far as the price spread, it depends even within a company if they're smart enough to do a quick peek at your site before pricing it. I do a LOT of audits and some are 10 page sites, some are 10,000 page sites. If I priced those the same I'd be out of business fast. Size of the site matters. Complexity matters (ecommerce vs portfolio, etc.) and what your goals are matters. I can do a technical audit on a small page in about 20 minutes. A complex audit on a well-developed site could take a week.