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That certainly could be causing problems. It'd be best to delete that line.

Using a 301 redirect from the old location page to the new website would help kick start the traffic and rankings of that page and also indicate the expansion of services / business.  As for best practices, you'll want to go through the typical setup in local listing, and business listings with the new location. Beyond that, it's more in the same as you've done in the past. Cheers!

Hi Joseph. Try comparing your backlink profile to some of the larger competitors that Google is ranking ahead of you in Open Site Explorer. That will give you an idea around the strengths Google is measuring that could be giving those sites higher rankings.

Also check out: http://moz.com/search-ranking-factors to get an idea of how the numbers in OSE are broken down. Being in the ticket business you'll want to compare against a couple of the large ones like Stubhub and Ticket Master.  Cheers!

Hi Julie. Have you added your site to Google Webmaster Tools? From there you'll be able to submit a site map as well as run crawl and render tests to ensure Google is able to access and see your site.

If you have already done that, perhaps include the domain here that is having trouble so you can get more specific recommendations. Cheers!

Moz just recently pushed their latest update: http://moz.com/products/api/updates which tends to affect these numbers. The important thing is to check how you're comparing to your competition. Often they see fluctuations as well. With the previous update, Rand put out this post regarding fluctuations: http://moz.com/community/q/have-questions-about-the-jan-27th-mozscape-index-update-get-answers-here:

...we crawled a massively more diverse set of root domains than ever before. Whereas our previous index topped out at 192 million root domains, this latest one has 362 million (almost 1.9X as many unique, new domains we haven't crawled before). This means that DA and PA scores may fluctuate more than usual, as link diversity are big parts of those calculations and we've crawled a much larger swath of the deep, dark corners of the web (and non-US/non-.com domains, too). It also means that, for many of the big, more important sites on the web, we are crawling a little less deeply than we have in the past (the index grew by ~31% while the root domains grew by ~88%). Often, those deep pages on large sites do more internal than external linking, so this might not have a big impact, but it could depend on your field/niche and where your links come from.

Cheers!

Ha! I think you might be missing a psychology degree in order to solve this problem. Actually, it's probably something simpler, Store Manager of Bob's Widget's isn't performing as well as Store Manager of Bob's Widget's South and he's looking for outside reasons as to why.  Bob on the other hand should be ecstatic that both his stores are ranking so well in the engines for a branded search.

I'd go beyond the keyword explanation though and say, "We're going to get ALL of Bob's Widget Stores to rank as highly as possible, so Bob can sell more widgets to more people.  More people going to either or both stores is the opposite of a problem."  Something along those lines.  Good luck!

In general it's a best practice to noindex the thank you pages as people landing on them from outside of your conversion funnel will trigger false goal completions. No following them is fine as well since they're a low value content wise, but ideally you want to make them as hard to stumble upon as possible. It's a good idea to remove them from the sitemap too if they've propagated there.  Cheers!

Hi Sindicic. This sounds like a good way to go about your redesign as you'll want to redirect the pages that you're deleting anyways to prevent them from generating 404s. If the content of your homepage is covering the previously deleted content then that sounds like the best match as well.

In terms of PA this change won't bring about a dramatic shift, but should be positive for the homepage. It's important to remember though that, "Page Authority is difficult to influence directly. It is made up of an aggregate of metrics (MozRank, MozTrust, link profile, and more) that each have an impact on this score. The best way to influence this metric is to improve your overall SEO." Cheers!

Two's company, three's a crowd. Getting third-party connections to always play nice can be aggravating from time to time. Hopefully it gets cleaned up for you soon Ruben. Cheers!

You're on it. Redirecting to the new image source and submitting a new sitemap pointing to the URL 3 location for your images will be big steps in the right direction.  Be sure to follow the instructions here for your sitemap: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/178636 as well as reviewing image publishing guidelines: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/114016. Cheers!

I see strategy and principles as separate things. To me principles are things like crawler accessibility, lack of errors, mobile accessibility, black and white sorts of issues. Every site should follow those.

Strategy on the other hand can be widely different. You could develop a strategy where you're competing on educational terms and creating content around specific training or aspects of a swing similar to how bodybuilding.com breaks down exercises into video, descriptions etc. The tie-in to your current site in that example would be course pros that are best at teaching certain aspects of the game, or courses that emphasize being able to shoot a draw or fade.  That sort of content would really lend itself to blogging and community.

For the basics of SEO, Cyrus had a great webinar a little while back covering the steps involved in researching and developing your strategy into your site here: http://moz.com/webinars/seo-basics-the-fundamental-signals-used-to-rank-our-content-higher  Cheers!

Hi Dino. You can look at the code of each page that would be affected by the plugin selection of "noindex" and check for the same "noindex" in the meta entry there on the public facing page. That will give you the absolute answer as that is what the search engines will be checking for when they crawl the site. See: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93710 and the following:

To prevent most search engine web crawlers from indexing a page on your site, place the following meta tag into the section of your page:

To prevent only Google web crawlers from indexing a page:

Right. Not everything is going to be served from cdn. It's most likely setup for your images so your sitemap will still reside on www. Make sure to point to the front end files though as those are the publicly accessible ones.

Hi Angelos. I agree. Having a 301 redirect that's always in place for going to /en is a bit redundant. If /en is the default option the default should be the root.

Other redirection should be handled via 302 to the various languages with all the proper href-lang and alternate attributes. Per Google, "For language/country selectors or auto-redirecting homepages, you should add an annotation for the hreflang value "x-default" as well: "  Cheers!

Right. I get that they don't exist on your site currently, but when they did Google indexed them so they exist in some form within Google, but Google had never been told they had permanently moved (via 301). The good news is that you don't have to resurrect the entire site. You can simply modify the appropriate file (htaccess if you're on Apache, IIS if Window's server) and make certain that Google knows any page it's looking for at devsite.yoursite.com is now at www.correcturl.com.  Cheers!

Hello Lora. Yes, it is certainly possible although the SERPs are going to vary based on current news, personalization, localization, and so on. Each type of site is going to have it's own strengths and weaknesses and the search engines are going to try and match their results to search intent as much as possible. The less you try to shoehorn into phrases that have a clear intent of looking for the celebrity / pop-culture item and instead play to the strengths of the global company, the better.

Hi Tamir.

A) I think you'll still want to redirect the new site back to the old domain because it's been created and is a better user experience for people who started going to it to get pointed back to the correct site. Redirecting it will also eliminate duplicate content issues.You can probably use one line of redirection if the traffic and links are very low so that people just go to the new site's home page since the new site hasn't been interacted with that much, but in addition to links you should look at the Analytics to know if that's the case. If the new site is getting thousands of visitors it'd be a better user experience for the page about X to redirect to the old domain about X.

B) You have to have an exact match for a page to work, i.e. you have to have the .html at the end if you want to completely mimic the old site. Otherwise, yes, you'll need to redirect from http://www.old-domain.com/our-destinations.html to http://www.old-domain.com/our-destinations

D) Adding the blog folder is fine, and helpful in a lot of cases (when you just want to analyze the blog separate from the website, for example). Cheers!

Hi Landon. Google has written several support documents on what could be the reasons for them sending you the note in webmaster tools. From https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2604719...

Here are a few common examples of pages that often have thin content with little or no added value:

• Automatically generated content
• Thin affiliate pages
• Content from other sources. For example: Scraped content or low-quality guest blog posts
• Doorway pages

And https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66361 is another checklist. If your site falls under any of those descriptions you'll likely have on-going issues. Rand did a great White Board Friday recently outlining what your content goals should be, in short 10x better than anything else you can find out there: https://moz.com/blog/why-good-unique-content-needs-to-die-whiteboard-friday  Cheers!

Thumbs up to Doug. This is also what I said in one of your earlier posts, "D) Adding the blog folder is fine, and helpful in a lot of cases (when you just want to analyze the blog separate from the website, for example). Cheers!"

Hi Cayenne. This can happen in cases where Google views the mobile site as a non-mobile or as the only available result to a desktop search query.  Here's a recent blog post from Google during at the time of the change: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2015/04/faqs-april-21st-mobile-friendly.html

What you'll want to check is the mobile friendliness and load speeds of both the mobile and desktop sites. At times people have seen very slow loading desktop sites with lots of PageSpeed issues get outranked by the lighter mobile versions. Next, use the various checks mentioned on that page to ensure that mobile.domain.com is indeed viewed as mobile by Google. And here's Moz's guide to provide an overall picture of what the mobile site should accomplish: https://moz.com/learn/seo/mobile-optimization

Cheers!