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Hi there,

It's usually a combination of both. The strength and relevance of the domain as a whole is important and usually, the search engines will measure this through a combination of links pointing at the domain and the overall quality of all pages on your website. For example, if you have 1000 pages and half of them are low quality, then that may affect the strength of the domain as a whole.

Generally, individual pages are what matters when it comes to specific keyword searches because the search engines want to provide the best result and a result is an individual page. So if your page is most relevant and best quality, it has a good chance of ranking for that keyword. However, if it's a competitive keyword (many are these days!) then the search engine will also look at the strength of the domain as a whole to see if it should rank your page.

I hope that helps and makes sense!

Paddy

Hi Will,

The previous reply is a good one - these are answer boxes and are becoming more and more common. Here are a few more resources for you that may help:

http://searchengineland.com/library/google/google-onebox-plus-box-direct-answers

https://moz.com/blog/more-google-answer-boxes-with-bonus-experiment

https://moz.com/blog/101-google-answer-boxes-a-journey-into-the-knowledge-graph

It's definitely worth following Dr. Pete on this topic, he tends to spot these new features pretty early and often talks about what they could mean for the future, as he has in the blog posts above.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

I know this isn't the best answer but it may be worth getting in touch with the guys who build Pro Sitemaps and seeing if they have suggestions for how to debug the issue.

My other suggestion would be to try another tool such as Screaming Frog and see if it has the same issue?

Hi there,

Would you be able to share what tool or software you're using to create the XML sitemap? If you could also link to the actual sitemap, that would be useful so that we can take a closer look.

Have you changed your website structure recently? If you use an XML sitemap generator which crawls your website, there is a chance that changing your website structure may have blocked off certain pages and now it can't find them.

Is there any pattern to the 3300 pages that are still working ok? For example, do they belong to a certain category? This may help you figure out where the problem is.

I hope that helps a bit.

Paddy

Hi Shahar,

Thanks for the question.

As the other guys have said, it's hard to predict how the search engines will react to hidden content. In this case though, I highly doubt that this form would cause a penalty. You're not hiding this content with the intent of manipulation or anything like that and if a Googler were to look at this, they'd see that you're not to hide anything bad.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi Tarek,

Thanks for the question.

Where does your client currently rank for the franchise keyphrase? If you rank well on page 1, it shouldn't be too difficult to push yourself a bit further up once the established website has gone.

However, it really depends on what happens to the domain of the franchise. It may be closed down by there still be some form of holding page / parked page which means it stays in the rankings for a while. Do you know what is going to happen to it?

On a related note, is there any chance you could acquire the domain?

In terms of what you can do. Here are a few suggestions:

• Make sure the brand name features prominently in your on-page SEO elements and internal links
• See if you can realign links that are pointing to the franchise site and see if they will point the links to you instead - if the franchise site is closing down, this could work very well and if you can make the anchor text the name of the brand, it should help your rankings
• Make sure your company name and citations / local links are all using the company name correctly

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi Dylan,

As Patrick said, you can use the category mark up in Offer from Schema.

Aggregate rating is another one that may be useful as this can be used for a collection of reviews and ratings rather than for individual products.

While we're on this topic, I thought I'd link to this excellent guide on microformats which may come in handy as you're working through this for your client:

http://builtvisible.com/micro-data-schema-org-guide-generating-rich-snippets/

Cheers.

Paddy

Hi,

Thanks for the question.

Here are some relevant sections of the Schema.org vocabulary which should be useful for you and confirm that the example you've given is correct:

https://schema.org/MedicalEntity

https://schema.org/MedicalSpecialty (Plastic surgery is linked from here)

This may also help:

http://moz.com/learn/seo/schema-structured-data

In terms of productontology - this looks sensible but I'm not sure if Google recognise / accept them as a vocabulary to better understand your content. However, Schema.org doesn't cover everything you're trying to markup, so it should work fine for now but I'd recommend running your code through the rich snippets testing tool to see how Google respond to it.

Hope that helps!

Hi Chris,

Thanks for the question.

It's tough to give an answer without more detail but it really depends on what you're trying to achieve and includes considering things such as:

• Your target market - are you only looking to target the UK or multiple countries? Is this likely to change in the future?
• What resources do you have to manage multiple websites from a technical perspective? Do you have resources to create unique content for example?
• What resources do you have to market multiple websites? Separate websites will each need good marketing in order to succeed.
• Re Google Plus (and other social accounts) do you have the resources to manage multiple accounts?

The key thing is the first one and is important to get right from the start. Having multiple websites to target different areas can work fine, but you need to be able to put the right amount of time and effort into each one to make it a success. If you don't have many resources, you may be better off going for a .com domain and having a subfolder to target the UK.

I hope that helps a bit!

Paddy

Hi Michelle,

As Robert has said below, it's hard to say for sure if those links are hurting you without having a closer look at your website. However it does sound like an unusual amount of links to have if you're not aware of any kind of a partnership between your website and Booksie.com.

I did notice that on pages such as this:

http://www.booksie.com/young_adult/novel/suzannee/beating-the-player/chapter/1

There are comments which link back to profile pages. Without looking at your site, I'd venture a guess that these are the types of pages that the links are coming from? If so, it may be that someone is automatically creating the profiles and linking to you from them. If this is the case, then these probably are links that Google are not going to like.

If you can determine that they are definitely low quality links, then you should try to remove them and if you can't, you should disavow them using Google Webmaster Tools. This blog post may help you learn more about this topic:

http://moz.com/blog/guide-to-googles-disavow-tool

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi Ivan,

Thanks for your question. To answer each of your points:

1. Google Webmaster Tools and Open Site Explorer will often report different numbers of links from each other. They both use different crawlers and different methods of sorting the data, so they will never match up 100%. The same is true of other backlink tools such as Ahrefs or Majestic. I wouldn't worry too much about the numbers being different.

2. It can be hard to say why you're not ranking but it usually comes down to:

• The quality of your content
• The quality of your links
• The technical setup of the website

The quality of content generally seems to be fine and unique. However you don't seem to have many high quality links and as others have pointed out, there aren't that many. You may want to take a look at the following guide:

http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-link-building

You may also want to carry out a technical review of your website to ensure that there are no major problems, here is a very good checklist:

http://moz.com/blog/technical-site-audit-for-2015

It can often take time for traffic and rankings to grow, particularly in the industry you're targeting which looks a little bit competitive. So I'd advise taking a look at your competitors and seeing if you can learn anything from what they do. It does look like you're making progress though, I found this example of where you rank pretty well:

http://screencast.com/t/jRiE4BRllcd

I hope the above helps!

Paddy

Hi there,

There are plenty of really good resources online that cover this area, so I'd like to point you towards them rather than copy and paste their guidelines here!

Google has a good guide here with lots of visuals on how they crawl AJAX -

https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/getting-started

They also have a short video here covering some of the basics of Google crawling AJAX and JavaScript:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6mtiwQ3nvw

You should also become familiar with pushState which is cover in lots of detail, with an example implementation in this blog post:

http://moz.com/blog/create-crawlable-link-friendly-ajax-websites-using-pushstate

The guys at Builtvisible have also put together a few good blog posts on this topic which are worth a read:

http://builtvisible.com/javascript-framework-seo/

http://builtvisible.com/on-infinite-scroll-pushstate/

Essentially, you need to make sure that Googlebot is able to render your content as you intended and that this looks the same to them as it does to users. You can often test how well they can render your content by checking the cache of your page or by using this feature in Google Webmaster Tools.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi there,

I'd agree with the comments from Richard and Jim below, the types of techniques you mention are not really the ones that I'd endorse when you're trying to build a business online. Social media links using Fiverr and link directories aren't as effective as they used to be and can cause link problems if you use them now.

Instead, I'd recommend trying to make your website link worthy and using your business USPs to try and generate links. Here are some good guides to help you with this:

• http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-link-building
• http://moz.com/blog/10-illustrations-on-search-engines-valuation-of-links
• http://moz.com/blog/link-building-101-the-almost-complete-link-guide-updated-for-post-penguin
• http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies

These guides and tactics focus on more sustainable methods of link building which should help you in the long term,

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi there,

I'd recommend keeping these links going to the homepage of your website and not worrying about commercial anchor text. It should be the name of your company as the anchor text and going to the homepage. This may seem very cautious but I've seen these links cause issues over the last couple of years so it's worth being careful.

I'd agree with you that the value of these is pretty low and I'd echo what Dennis says below re not making this the only way that you get inbound links.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi there,

I've never seen this happen to a client so I'm only speaking from a theoretical point of view. My feeling is that it is possible for a penalty to be passed via a 301 redirect. One core reason is that if it didn't, then it would be a very easy way for low quality websites (who don't care about their brand / company name) to just keep switching websites. I don't think it will happen in all cases, but I certainly think it's possible.

If this were to happen to you, my feeling is that you should create a disavow file on the new domain which contains the links to the old domain but go through the 301. This feels a bit messy but I don't see an obvious alternative. The absolute best outcome is to get the links totally removed which can be tricky sometimes.

I found this blog post by Dave Naylor which talks a bit more about this subject if you'd like to read more:

https://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/what-to-do-with-your-disavow-list-when-301ing-an-old-domain.html

This Moz Q&A thread also talks about the same situation and has some additional information:

http://moz.com/community/q/can-i-dissavow-links-on-a-301-d-website

Cheers.

Paddy

Hi there,

As has been pointed out, the rel=canonical tag is just a suggestion to Google that you don't want a page to be indexed or to rank. They can choose to ignore the tag if they want to. If you want to keep pages out of the index, there are a few options:

1. The rel=canonical tag as you've tried

2. Adding a noindex tag as pointed out above

3. Use the URL parameters configuration option in Google Webmaster Tools

Give that you've tried the first one, I'd recommend giving the second two options a try and seeing what happens.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi,

It is worth remembering that Google may change the way your page title is shown in search results whenever they want, so it can be really hard to control them. You can read more here:

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2342232/Why-Google-Changes-Your-Titles-in-Search-Results 

In terms of how to write good page titles, there are a couple of things to bear in mind:

• Write them with the user in mind - what would be most appealing to someone?
• Include keywords but don't include too many so that the title doesn't read well
• Keep them short and to the point (see link below)
• Don't duplicate them across pages, make sure they're all unique

Moz wrote the following guide which you may find helpful. There is also a tool so that you can preview titles:

http://moz.com/learn/seo/title-tag

Cheers.

Paddy

Hi there,

I've seen and heard a few examples similar to yours where someone has tried to remove a Google penalty by redirecting to a new domain. In most cases, it hasn't really worked and as you've described, it seems to take a bit of time for the negative links to the old domain to take effect on the new one. If you think about it from Google's perspective, this makes sense. If you could just remove a penalty by moving to a new domain and doing a redirect, then that would be far too easy in most cases.

If I were going to move to a new domain in order to escape a penalty, I think I'd probably not redirect the old pages and manually attempt to realign any good links I had so that they pointed at the new site. But this would definitely be a last resort, I'd rather do as much link removal and disavow as possible before trying to move to a new domain.

Cheers.

Paddy

Hi Jason,

It sounds like when you moved to the Hubspot CMS, the URLs of your website changed? If so, 301 redirects are needed from the old URLs to the new ones. Unfortunately, redirecting all of your pages to the homepage is not optimal and is the likely cause of the traffic still remaining very low on your website.

It has been some time now since this work was done but I think it's worth a shot removing the 301 redirect from all your old pages to the home page. Then you should 301 redirect every individual old URL to the most appropriate new URL. This makes for a much better user experience, it stops 404 errors and it helps maintain traffic.

I'm honestly not sure if it's too late to fix the traffic, but it is worth a shot I think.

For future guidance, here are some good guides on moving your website:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6033049?hl=en&ref_topic=6033084

http://moz.com/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos

I hope that helps!

Paddy

As the other guys have mentioned, implementing 301 redirects correctly is the key when moving over to https. Adding to Google Webmaster Tools is a bonus and something you should do if possible.

However this recent article on Marketing Land highlights a few issues that have been encountered by websites moving to https, so it's worth reading through this too so that you can avoid the issues mentioned:

http://marketingland.com/snags-googles-ssl-vision-sites-can-get-tripped-quest-secure-web-97266