Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Patrick nailed it, but I'll add that when you see a drop in DA, the first thing you should do is look up your competitors in Open Site Explorer. If they've dropped too, then it's very likely you're just seeing the effects of an index refresh.

Happy Friday, everyone! This week's Community Discussion comes from Monday's blog post by Everett Sizemore.

Everett suggests that pruning underperforming product pages and other content from your ecommerce site can provide the greatest ROI a larger site can get in 2016. Do you agree or disagree? While the "pruning" tactic here is suggested for ecommerce and for larger sites, do you think you could implement a similar protocol on your own site with positive results? What would you change? What would you test?

I would absolutely recommend canonical in this case, and I'm afraid you're working on a bit of a misconception about indexed pages and the effects of duplicate content.

When a user searches Google, Google tries to serve them the most relevant, useful pages and resources based on their perceived intent. If multiple pages on your site appear to potentially fit the needs of the searcher, then Google is likely to do 1 of 2 things—rank one of the pages (potentially the wrong one), or determine that the appropriate page isn't clear and skip your site entirely. What canonical does is let Google know what you consider the appropriate result.

Having these duplicates is likely to do the opposite of what you're expecting. More pages indexed ≠ greater visibility.

Hi Deacyde! I just want to make sure—is "laptop bags" the keyword you're optimizing for in the tool? Because unless I'm mistaken, it sounds as if the tool is trying to optimize for "leather shoulder laptop bags."

Yeah, you guys have pretty much nailed it. So sorry, again, for the delay!

Honestly, maybe both? For me, it would depend on how useful those old posts are. Are they getting traffic? Are there valuable links pointing to them? If so, it may be worth it. If not, 301 redirect them to new, relevant, optimized posts.

For what it's worth, I also wouldn't recommend "churning out" blog posts unless they add value for your visitors.

Hi Jonathan,

I can't say I'm very familiar with those particular companies, but generally affiliate marketing is promoting someone else's products or services in exchange for a commission, and remarketing is the practice of serving ads to people who've already visited your site, bought a product from you, etc. It's why ads for certain products can seem to follow you around the internet.

Hi Gowtham!

May I ask, how long has it been since you removed SSL?

It's entirely possible that Google simply hasn't reindexed your site yet. If that's the case, I'd suggest resubmitting your sitemap in Webmaster Tools to draw their attention to it.

It looks like there have been a lot of responses concerning the issue you're having. At this point, the work remaining is more than enough to justify hiring an outside consultant if you don't feel up to solving the issue yourself based on the information you have. The experts here volunteer their time, and so outlining every step you'll need to take is a bit beyond the scope of what they can be expected to provide.

I definitely understand how frustrating it can be, and how big of a task it seems. We have a list of recommended companies if you do decide to hire outside help.

Thank you so much for understanding. Good luck!

Hi there!

I'm not 100% clear where licensing fees come in. From the post, it sounds as if you're just looking to duplicate and localize content you already own for other markets, yes? Who would you be paying for licensing? Was the content licensed in the first place?

Just a heads-up, everyone, there's another potential response to this thread here: https://moz.com/community/q/i-ve-lost-my-google-referral-international-traffic

You got it! We're focused on the blog for now, but it should be responsive as of this afternoon (Seattle). We're all pretty excited.

Hi Rich!

Another thing to keep in mind is that listings don't necessarily update as soon as you make changes in Moz Local. Depending on the partner, it can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks for the changes to be made. The issue has to do with how each directory updates their listings.

Hope that helps a bit!

Hi Steve!

I've spoken to one of our Moz Local engineers about this, and they're actually working on a fix right now. We're hoping to have a fix out in the next couple weeks.

In the meantime, he assures me that these very slight inconsistencies are not a problem.

Does that help?

Hi Kieran!

That's a great question! The issue is that Google's API no longer provides us that sort of traffic data, so we simply don't have it to show. We substitute Bing's data in order to give you something to work with.

When you have Google selected as your search engine, though, you will see accurate Google rankings. It's just the search volume that's missing.

There's a bit more information in this thread.

I hope that helps!

Matt

I'm afraid that there isn't currently an option for a single-campaign subscription. I'll definitely note the feedback, though!

Awesome! The talks were amazing this year.

Might've gone a little endorse-happy there, but the three of you hit all the points I was going to make.

Interestingly, I'm not seeing E Appliance Repair's Yelp listing in the results for any of those keywords. Is it possible you're seeing personalized results? Have you tried searching in an incognito window?

Hi there!

I'm so sorry for the inconvenience! You can read all about this particular issue in this thread:

http://moz.com/community/q/loss-of-google-adwords-api

Matt