Welcome to the Q&A Forum
Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.
So, why do you consider the result inaccurate? If they are coming up that close to the top then perhaps a number of people are using that keyword to search specifically for those businesses. Google believes that their content is good, and, that you may have been looking for them, albeit with them on the 2nd page Google hedged its bets that you were not.
You are correct, the more user readable friendly (short, easy to understand, without long alpha-numeric strings) your urls are the better they should perform, as long as your on page content is considered relevant by Google for whatever terms it is using.
This is not an SEO function, this has to do with how your site is coded and how that code interacts with the app. You will need to bring in a Dev to troubleshoot your code and find a solution.
There is nothing wrong with unlisted pages, it is even recommended for any content behind login screens or procedurally generated pages like carts. If something it not listed, Google will not see it so it will have add no value to your site from a search perspective.
Set up Canonical tags and use Google's UTM codes to track your non-internal links (as your internal links will be tracked just fine by Google Analytics without any need for using redirects).
Google is all about serving the best experience with the best content. When you put tabbed content on a website, especially if the tabs serve multiple topics, you are watering down that page. Also because a portion of the content starts at hidden, it makes a worse UX experience for a user to directly get to your content (because they have to click).
Without knowing more I would guess the issue is tabbed content does not perform as well as content that is always displayed on a page. Always look to your content first, then worry about things like title tags.
That sounds rough. What you will want to do is alter your content for your single city based website to reflect that you serve that city, then when Google is looking for a match for a person near that city, it should see that site as the best match do to the weight it puts on geolocation. In the long run, you will want to re-write all of your content on one site so that your two sites will not be hurting each other or look like copy/paste spam sites.
Jon,
If there is no content and these pages are just the download link then instead of putting a canonical link on them, set them as noindex. I assume you have a landing page that directs people to your downloads, this is where you should optimize your content to get organic traffic, the direct download pages (with 0 content) will have no real value from a search perspective.
Each domain should have its own robots.txt and sitemap.xml and you should only reference that domain in its sitemap.
IT will really depend on your area and the language your customers use. I have seen the same CTA wording, in the same region perform both amazing and far below expectation, and it had to do with what the end product was and the language that people in the area used when looking for those services. Your best bet it to run an A/B test yourself and see which CTA responds better to your potential customers.
Alan,
I work with a number of different B2B companies that use email marketing regularly. You are correct that Mondays and Fridays are bad days to send as we have done a good amount of send time testing and those days always perform poorest. We have found, across almost all of our clients, that Tuesdays between 11am-1pm EST are the best time to send in the US for our clients, but as Kelly mentioned, you should conduct your own tests to find out when your audience is best engaged.
It could, but it also could help your ranking. The amount of text is not important as much as how relevant Google sees it compared to the search query, so if you are removing superfluous words and redundant passages they you should see an increase as your pages are more user friendly. If you remove good copy that was considered helpful then you would expect to see decreases.
The point of a sitemap is to tell Google what is on your site so it can index it easier. There is no way, nor any reason why you would want to put external urls onto your sitemap.
I think you would see an overall decrease in your ranking for your key search term. While the function and rank of a page are important, that page's ranking for each of your websites takes into account many domain level attributes which would not be replicated on a new site that only had your calculator. You better bet would be to work on optimizing not just your calculator page, but also each website as a whole to help increase your position on that keyword.
If you are just building small websites to pump up your main site and not offering quality content, Google will eventually figure this out and you will see a hit for it. When you are creating content and websites to rank, ask yourself "is this useful to a searcher?" if the answer is no, eventually Google is going to find it and at best just remove it, if you are not lucky you could see a penalty. I have had much better results taking time to create good content on my main site and promote it rather then trying to trick Google by making low quality content to try and boost up my main sites.
That sounds rough. What you will want to do is alter your content for your single city based website to reflect that you serve that city, then when Google is looking for a match for a person near that city, it should see that site as the best match do to the weight it puts on geolocation. In the long run, you will want to re-write all of your content on one site so that your two sites will not be hurting each other or look like copy/paste spam sites.
Have you created new pages since then that need to be indexed? If you have not created any new pages in sections that are open to be crawled than Google does not need to index any pages. If you have created pages, make sure that your sitemap is automatically updating and that you can see those pages there, then submit and see what happens.
Correlation does not equal causation, is that the only change you made? Did your competitors step up their game recently? Did you loose some backlinks recently? I would dig deeper into why there was a decrease in your ranking while looking at what you can do to improve it with general best practices.
So there are different answers to different parts of your question,
Rank: Without having any content there is nothing to rank, so there is no way of looking into where it would rank for keywords.
Traffic: If you are redirecting from that domain to your new one you will be able to see that traffic in your Google Analytics as referral traffic.
You also should check that domains backlinks, while it may have been strong and good in the past Google has made a number of updates to what it considers spammy links, so what was a good idea back then could be a negative factor now.