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Do the reviews appear anywhere else on the web? Are people leaving reviews on the reviewer's site, and they're visible there, and then you're pulling them in via this widget? Or are they only visible on your site, through the widget?

If the reviews are elsewhere on the web (for example on a review site such as Yelp or Angie's List), Google is going to understand that that content belongs on that site. Pulling it in via this widget probably won't send much in the way of a unique content signal; it's unlikely that it would be seen as duplicate content, though, as long as the page it appears on also has its own unique content. Appearing through the widget also means you likely won't be able to mark up the reviews using schema.org.

If they appear somewhere else, and Google can easily associate those reviews with your product, you'd probably be better served having a function on your own website where people can review your products there. Then, let those reviews live on your site, and the third-party reviews stay on the third-party reviewer site.

Hi Lawrence,

I do think RickRoll's advice was good, and the first thing I would say is that you should leave those 301 redirects in place, on a page-to-page level, for a good long while - don't change them again. It looks like there are still some pages from boston.renthop.com in the index, which indicates that Google may not fully understand that these pages have all moved. There are only a few still in there, though, so I don't think that's the only issue.

One thing that can happen when pages 404 for a while is that even if you 301 them later, the link equity of the original pages can disappear (it doesn't always, but it can). So you probably want to spend some time building links to these pages/site sections, and where you can, I also recommend reaching out to sites that linked to the old subdomains and asking them to update the links. I'd recommend trying to get new links from local-specific sites (i.e. sites about Boston or Chicago, vs. nationwide/non-local sites about apartment hunting), and here's why:

In my experience, Google usually treats "{keyword} in {location name}" searches differently depending on whether or not you're actually in the location you're searching for. If you're not in the location, it treats {location name} as a keyword, but if you are in the location, it treats {location name} as a location. So for example, if you search "apartments in Boston" and you're not in Boston, it will show you pages that rank for the term "apartments in Boston" - but if you are in the Boston area, it will show you pages that rank for the term "apartments" and that have strong local indicators that they are in Boston, or more specifically, are near to you.

So since you rank nationally but not locally for this term, it sounds like the signals you need to focus on improving are local signals. You can do this by building links from local sites, by adding e.g. "Boston, MA" to title tags on individual apartment listings, and by building out some unique, locally-focused content like neighborhood guides to add value to searchers from that area.

I hope that helps!

Hi Garrett,

I agree with Dave - getting some inbound links and other press will help. Bing and Yahoo tend to rate keywords being present in the domain/URL more strongly than Google does, which may be why you're seeing it come up there. It looks like https://feello.com is now ranking on page 1 for "feello" - an incognito search I just did saw it at position 8, under the image carousel.

One thing you might want to do, if you haven't already, is use Organization markup in schema.org to try to improve Google's Knowledge Graph entry for the business. That will help Google understand that Feello is a branded term, and that that brand is associated with your website. You should also use the "sameAs" schema.org property to link to your LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook pages, since Google is currently ranking those higher than your domain - that will help Google understand the relationships between those pages. Good luck!

Hi Dan,

If the sites don't have many links, you probably won't get much SEO value from redirecting them to your site. However, if they're getting traffic right now from the users of the intellectual property, you'll want to signal to those users (and to search engines) that they need to come to your site now, instead of the old sites. So I would recommend shutting the sites down, and 301 redirecting the old sites to the new site for at least 6 months to a year, at least until the URLs for the old sites are no longer in Google's index and all of the old sites' users know where to go from now on. I hope that helps!

Hi Taylor,

I'm not totally familiar with SEOQuake as a tool, so your best bet would probably be to talk to their customer service people, but let's give it a shot!

It's fine for your /sitemap.xml page to display a message that it doesn't have any style associated with it - many XML sitemaps are just raw XML documents that don't look pretty on a browser but that search engines can crawl just fine. It looks like the Site Compliance function of SEOQuake just checks to see whether or not an XML sitemap is present. Do you have an XML sitemap at yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml? What does the SEOQuake tool say about your sitemap? Have you submitted your sitemap in Google Search Console, and is Google Search Console reporting any errors?

There are a few different things this could be, none of which are that much cause for concern, thankfully.

Some questions to ask:

• Where are you seeing the rankings fluctuate? In the Google interface? In a ranking tool? In multiple tools? Since Google is testing things all the time and results are more and more personalized, it's pretty common to see keyword fluctuations, especially in rank tracking tools. I would check the keyword in a second ranking tool, and also Google it in a private window, to see if you can duplicate the results - if not, it may be a quirk of the tool and not of the rankings.
• Along those same lines - do you see your organic traffic to that page fluctuate along with the fluctuations in ranking? Since you're on page 2, you may not be getting a ton of traffic from that specific term, but it's worth checking on.
• If that's not the case and the rankings really are fluctuating, what other changes can you note in the SERPs during the changes? One example from my own life: I had a client who was targeting a term that Google seemed to be trying to figure out whether or not it was appropriate to show local/localized results. The presence or absence of that local pack changed that SERP a lot.

Ranking fluctuations like this are pretty common, especially once you drop off the first page. If it's not seriously impacting your traffic or conversions, I wouldn't be too concerned about it. Your best defense here is a good offense - try to bolster that page's rankings and authority to get it on page 1. I know that's easier said than done, but it's a lot easier to deal with ranking fluctuations when they're between spot 4 and spot 7, instead of page 2 and page 5.

This is fine, as long as you don't want to exclude robots from crawling any part of your site.

Hi,

Can I ask what leads you to believe search engines aren't crawling/indexing the site? When I search site:www.bugsanonymousil.com in Google, I'm seeing 62 pages from the site showing up in the index.

One BIG problem with the site, though, is it looks like when someone requests an estimate, a webpage is generated for them - and these pages are being indexed with customers' names, addresses, email, and phone numbers. You should definitely remove those URLs from the index in Google Search Console, and update the site so that those pages aren't crawlable/indexable.

I think it's unlikely your competitor's linking is affecting this issue, but agree with CleverPHD that disavowing those domains would be a good precaution to take. Self-canonicaling, then doing a Fetch+Render on your core pages, would be the first thing I would try as well.

Since the .fr domain has higher authority, you may also want to reach out to the highest-authority sites that link to your .fr domain and see if they will update their links to point to the .com version instead - it sounds like Google's idea of which of the two sites is the "real"/authoritative version has been reset, so everything you can do to shift authority to the .com domain will help.

Dmytro is correct - the risk you run isn't a penalty per se, it's that the piece of content will rank on a partner site rather than on your own site.

If what you really want is for both pieces of content to rank for the same phrase, or to ensure that your site continues to rank even without partners using rel=canonical, I would recommend making sure that the content on your site is substantially different from the other sites'. I empathize with your desire for a hard-and-fast rule on exactly how different, but whether or not two identical or very similar pages will both rank is really going to depend on the query and the other pages competing to rank for that term. Again, I would recommend making them substantially different - that is, more different than they are the same. Google is now sophisticated enough at detecting spun content that simply switching out some words for synonyms or adding or subtracting a sentence here or there likely won't be enough to keep it from being flagged as duplicate content for a more competitive query.

Adding a meta noindex tag can mean it takes a few weeks for a page to fall out of the index. These pages probably aren't doing you much harm, so if you wanted to just wait for them to fall out, that's probably fine (although I would update the tag content to "noindex, follow" to help Google crawl to the other noindexed pages). If you really want them out of the index faster, you could use the "Remove URLs" function under Google Index in Google Search Console, which will temporarily remove them from the index while Google is registering the noindex tags, or you can use the Fetch + Render tool and then Submit URLs in Google Search Console, which will cause Google to come back and crawl your pages and find the noindex tag.

It's unlikely that changing title tags would have an impact on traffic to pages whose title tags hadn't been changed; and adding a few characters to the end of a title tag isn't something I'd expect to have a negative impact on traffic, either. It's likely that they are unrelated.

I agree that it doesn't make a lot of sense for Google to require the image itemprop - it's not the only example of Google requiring an itemprop that doesn't really make sense (for example, OperatingSystem is required for the WebApplication property, which doesn't make sense since it's...you know...a web application).

For what it's worth, even though the documentation says it's required, BreadcrumbList code that doesn't include the image attribute validates just fine in the Structured Data Testing Tool, and pages without the image itemprop in place are still getting breadcrumb snippets in the SERPs. So it may not be as "required" as Google says it is.

The first thing that stands out to me on these pages is that you have all of the other products that the page links to under "Related Items" marked up as well. So there are multiple values for Product and for Offer on the page. The first thing I would test would be removing this markup for the Related items, so that all the Product markup on the page applies only to the product that page is about. I suspect that Google may have gotten stricter about requirements for this, or otherwise changed the way they generate price/review snippets. So that's what I would test first. It can work to have multiple Product schemas on a category page, but on a page that is specifically about one product I would try to have all of the Product markup on that page be about that product.

The other thing you may want to update is your height and width properties. It looks like you're currently using the type "Intangible" for these, when their expected types would be either QuantitativeValue or Distance, so I would update those too.

You may also find this blog post useful: https://moz.com/blog/search-marketers-guide-to-itemref-itemid

Good luck!

Hi! So my first question would be: Are other websites in the same SERP displaying rich product snippets? If not, it may be that Google has decided that other forms of rich content are a better fit for those queries.

One frustrating thing about the structured data testing tool is that it doesn't get updated nearly as often as the algorithm itself does, so occasionally something will validate just fine in the tool but be running up against stricter requirements in the algo itself. The tool was updated pretty recently so I don't know for sure that that's the case but it is a thing that can happen.

If you'd feel comfortable sharing a URL or two (or want to PM them to me), I can take a look.

I agree that it's probably not a huge problem, but still something to clean up if you can - it would be best if crawlers weren't trying to access these pages.

If Moz and Webmaster Tools are showing the 403 error, it means that they are able to crawl to the URLs that are returning the 403 - so somewhere on your site or on the web, pages that are accessible by bots and crawlers are linking to these pages that don't exist yet. Having a bunch of errors on your site can impact Google's ability to crawl it well, which can impact your rankings, so it's best to get those cleaned up. In Webmaster Tools you should be able to click on the pages and see which pages are linking to them, so you can remove those links; you can do the same using a tool like Screaming Frog if you'd prefer. Good luck!

This kind of thing definitely happens. It is often the result of a link injection malware that finds vulnerabilities in websites and then posts hundreds of links on them. Usually, link spam will not affect your rankings, but it can. Fortunately, Google provides a tool to help you tell Google that you weren't the one who built those links. Moz has a guide to using it here: https://moz.com/blog/guide-to-googles-disavow-tool.

It can take a while for links to get disavowed, so in the meantime, do whatever you can to build high-quality, relevant links to your site and make sure your site is optimized for search as best you can.

It looks like the pages that you're referencing in the Webmaster Forums post do have some indexed duplicate content on them. It may be that Google is trying to figure out which version of the page is the canonical version, and then reporting all the duplicates as links back to the page that they deem the "original" page. I don't know why they would report this as a "link" when it clearly isn't a link in the traditional sense, but link reports in Search Console often contain some weird stuff that isn't really links.

What's clear is that Google understands that these pages are related, which makes sense since it's the same content, on pages with very similar design - the two subdomains are even using the same Google Analytics account. My assumption would be that the "links" are a byproduct of Google trying to figure out which of these pages are the duplicates and which should be treated as the original.

It may be that this is nothing to worry about - if you're happy with the pages' performance, I doubt you will see these "links" coming through anywhere besides Google Search Console. If you do want to keep the client sites more separate, I would recommend separating them out into their own Google Analytics accounts at the very least.

Are you seeing this with any other link discovery tools, like AHREFs, Majestic, or Open Site Explorer? Or only in Google WMT?