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It might be that your updated title tag language is decreasing clicks through to your site - so you're still ranking the same, but not as many people are clicking. Since you're wanting to target a more qualified audience, this dip in traffic might not be a bad thing if you're seeing a higher conversion rate or more qualified leads. If you're running AdWords, it might be worth testing both versions of the language from your title tags in ads to see if that is impacting your click-through rate.
I understand how hard attracting links can be, especially in a niche market. Building a solid inbound link profile often takes (even) more than being the best - it requires a lot of outreach and promotion. This is another area where an SEO professional might be able to help, because link outreach can be really time-consuming. I would recommend that you vet someone VERY carefully before engaging them to build links. Some things to watch out for:
Red flags:
Basically you want someone who is going to promote your business online with an eye toward attracting great links. It can be a very outreach- and relationship-based approach similar to PR in a lot of ways. Moz' Recommended list is a good place to start, and I personally recommend Jon Cooper from Point Blank SEO as person I know who is the best at this.
I think Miriam has some great suggestions. Some other things to try, if you're not quite ready to move your site (or in addition to moving your site):
Good luck!
I would recommend taking a look at your historical referral data, to see what sites have sent traffic to this site historically that aren't anymore - that will give you an idea of where the links were that went away. Even if you can't get the old link back, you may be able to form a new relationship with those sites' owners, which could result in future link opportunities.
It sounds like, whatever the cause, the site has had a bunch of inbound links to it disappear. This is frustrating, but without knowing where the specific links were, it's going to be hard to get them back. I would focus on getting some new, high-quality, high-authority links to the site. Since you've got this new aggressive competitor, you could use Open Site Explorer to see where they're getting links from, and see if any of the sites that link to them would be good candidates for link outreach from your team as well.
The competitor should have no way to disavow links to your client's site. Even if they had somehow managed to disavow the links, the links themselves would still be in place. Have you checked the linking pages? Do they still exist? Can you tell why the links were removed? Do you have a good enough relationship with the owners of any of the linking sites to be able to reach out to them and see if you can get the links put back, or at least see why they were removed?
Since most of your searches will be city specific, I would definitely recommend having landing pages for each city. There, you can go into more detail about the specific widgets for each city and what makes them unique.
It's fine to have some localized content served up on your home page, but I would recommend having some static, non-dynamic content there as well. Spend some time thinking about what the "default" version of the page would be. A good question to try to answer is: what should a user see if they're coming to the site from an IP you don't have content for, or even an IP outside of Canada? A home page is a great place to show who you are in a broader sense, and give users and search engines an idea of what you're about and why they should trust you. You can include that information along with a modicum of local-focused content that appears based on the user's IP address, that encourages them to click through to the local-specific landing page where they can get more in-depth information. I hope that helps!
It looks like the links were on the pages when Moz' crawler crawled them, but have since been removed. The site you link to above mentions that they're having some WordPress problems, which is a clue.
What I suspect happened is that links to your competitor's site were part of some kind of link injection malware that was abusing some exploitable WordPress feature common to comics blogs. Often when a bot is injecting links to a bunch of sites onto vulnerable pages, some of those links will be the bot's "customers" - that is, people who have paid for their links to be put on a bunch of sites and aren't too picky about how they get there - and some will have just been pulled in to the mix so that the spammers can mask their client list. So it may not be that this is something your competitor was doing on purpose; it's hard to know for sure. Either way, it's far more likely to be bad news for their site than good news, but probably just won't have any effect one way or another. Since the links aren't there anymore, it's likely that the site owners caught and fixed the bug so those links disappeared.
If this was happening to your site, I'd recommend disavowing the sites in question and keeping an eye on your backlink profile for future weird links like these. Since it's happening for a competitor's site, though, you can just ignore those links entirely and focus on the backlinks of theirs that are actually relevant that you might want to pursue.
A WordPress developer should be able to help you get your blog looking more like the rest of your site, yes. I would definitely recommend having your blog at sininlinen.com/blog rather than at blog.sininlinen.com - if your blog is a subdomain, Google will have a harder time telling that it's part of your overall site and not its own, separate site.
I find WordPress' blogging functionality a lot easier to use and a lot more customizable. Not only that, if your blog is currently a significant driver of organic rankings/traffic for your site, I would recommend against moving your blog if you have the option to keep it where it is, especially if moving it would mean an overhaul in URLs/URL structure.
If you have more than one link to the same page on a given page, it won't be considered duplicate content necessarily - but it also won't pass any additional page equity.
Hi,
1. In general, the closer to the top of the page a link is, the more link equity it's going to pass. Links in the header are at the top and appear on every page, so they tend to pass a lot of value. That said, the more links you have in your header, the more that link equity should be diluted, so really think about how your users are going to use your header for navigation and which pages should be in there. Links in the footer tend to pass little to no value and should be used for navigational purposes.
2. I would not recommend adding links dynamically to your header or footer at a page level. Links to related pages should go in the main content section of each page.
Hi!
The guideline about trying to keep your links per page under about 100 (and it really is a guideline more than a rule) says that once you have more than about 100 links on a page, the likelihood of those links passing any internal link equity is pretty low. I also like to keep headers as small as I can to reduce page load time and make them easier to use. It looks like your header and footer are pretty small right now. The reason many ecommerce websites have lots of links in their headers is that they need them in order to help users find what they need on the site - this is a more important consideration than how many links you have per page for SEO purposes.
A good rule for headers - your most important pages should be included in your header. This includes your major product categories and sub-categories, but shouldn't include every single product. You want your users to be able to use the header to navigate deep into the site without the header being confusing for them to use. For example, it might be useful for you to expand the drop-down under "All batteries" to include your top categories, so Google gets a bigger signal "these pages are important" and users can easily find the type of battery they're looking for.
As far as your "Recommend For" section, I can see why you would want to have it for your users so they can easily tell whether or not the product will work with the machine they have. I would recommend re-formatting the list so that it's easier to read - right now it's just a big block of links. You may want to try breaking the list up into the same categories that you break up batteries into. That way, you could link back to the category page with the category name and then have a bulleted list of products below it that aren't links. That would reduce the total number of links on the page and make the whole list easier for your customers to ues.
Hi David,
The proliferation of links throughout the sites you left comments on is probably just a function of some weird trackback settings on their part - not a whole lot to be done besides disavow the links, which you've already done, although you might also try to delete the link from the original comment and see if that helps.
Your site sinking from 4th to 7th is not an indication of a penalty - if you'd been penalized, you wouldn't be anywhere near the first page (although I do think you are describing link building behavior that puts you at risk for a penalty - more on that in a minute). Instead, what I suspect happened is that the sudden influx of low-quality links has diluted your page's authority. Since a lower percentage of the total links pointing to the page are high quality, you have gone from sending the signal "great links, with some not-so-great ones too" to sending the signal "LOTS of not-so-great links, a few good ones" which sends a lower quality signal to Google.
Your question has a couple of big link building red flags in it, and I think it's likely you're at risk for a manual link penalty or a Penguin smackdown. Blog comments and directory links are classic examples of low-quality/spammy link sources. You have recently seen how blog comment links can result in a deluge of link spam to your site. Basically, anywhere that you can put a link on a site that you don't own, without a human person approving and curating the link, is going to be a link source that, at best, isn't valuable; at worst, it could actively work against you. I know that it's tempting to go out and grab these easy-to-get links, and sometimes it seems like it could be OK if the site is topically related to yours, but these are tactics that have been heavily abused by spammers and are beyond useless in modern SEO.
Instead, focus on getting higher-quality editorial links to your content. It takes a lot more work but is a much lower-risk strategy in the long term. These links have the added bonus of potentially being a source of converting referral traffic to your site as well. Here are some resources to get you started:
Good luck!
It sounds like you are already doing as well as you can - since there's no clear canonical page, noindexing the duplicate pages would probably be the way to go. Don't panic if you see some duplicate pages still sneak into the index after you've noindexed them; this is common and it's unlikely that Google will see this as a Panda-worthy problem on your part.
The one drawback to noindexing the pages is that when unique content is up on them, and they are ready to be indexed, it may take a while for Google to get the message that this page is supposed to be indexed now. I've seen it take anywhere from an hour to a week for a page to appear in the index. One thing you can do in the meantime is make sure each site is accruing some good links - not an easy task with 80 websites, I know, but the higher authority will help out once the unique content is ready to go. Sounds like a herculean task - good luck!
Google should be able to understand that all these are variations on your brand name, so you shouldn't need to worry much about that from a link building/organic search perspective. On the paid search side, you'll want to bid on as many variations of your brand as you currently see driving traffic or mentions to your site.
No, AdWords spend has no impact on your organic rankings. Running AdWords can give you other good insights, though, such as how well different keywords convert when they drive traffic.
I have definitely seen this before - it's been happening more frequently in the last ~3 years. Here's a piece from Search Engine Land a few years back on it: http://searchengineland.com/google-title-wrong-157819.
It's fairly common for Google to rewrite the displayed title of a website to more closely match the searcher's query, if Google thinks it would be helpful to do so - it's like an extra signal "yes, you're in the right place." When your query is your domain name it's not unusual for Google to display that instead of whatever the actual title tag is. I'm not sure where the apostrophe is coming from; it may be that a high percentage of inbound links use the apostrophe, or it may be that your entry in a data provider like Localeze has an apostrophe. I'd use the Moz Local testing tool to make sure your business name is consistent across data aggregators. Other than that, I wouldn't worry too much about the snippet changing, since it will give people searching for your brand/domain a strong signal that they're where they're supposed to be. Hope that helps!
Category pages are useful to help users browse deeper into your site; however, I doubt you are seeing significant SEO impact from not having your category folder in your product URLs. In general, it's usually better to keep a page at the same URL rather than to move it, and having a slightly more "SEO-friendly" URL wouldn't provide enough SEO benefit to be worth the risk and hassle that moving all of your product pages would take. I think it's fine to leave it how it is.
Google can definitely choose to ignore the canonical tag, especially if they think that the page in question is a better solution to a query. I agree with the other respondents that the best possible solution would be to fix this at a code level, so the duplicate content isn't an issue on your site anymore. In the meantime, some things to try:
Are any of the duplicate pages receiving organic search traffic? If not, it may be that Google has indexed them but understands they're not as important. Again, though, the best possible solution would be to fix this at a code level.