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If you indexed a new page and it ranked first for a bit, you got lucky. It looks like Google caught up to it and gave your page a proper ranking. Keep working on building links and optimizing your content to be as user friendly as possible and you may get back to that 1dt slot eventually.
Your best bet is following Google's guidelines: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en
Google has some great guidelines on how to deal with this (with search console).
It should not have any effect on SEO. From a UX perspective you may want to see if you can just detect their location instead of interrupting their consumption of your site with a pop up.
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.
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.
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.
Charlene,
Your question does not make any sense, what block are they talking about? If your website provider is not allowing Google to crawl your site you should go look at getting a new provider straight away.
Kirk, 301s are the correct choice, and there is nothing wrong with having multiple 301s point to a url, it is very common. IF you are doing a full set of new urls, make sure you go back to any old 301 redirects and point them directly at active pages, you will lose out if you are creating long 301 chains.
No, you should not be stuffing KW or worried about density, make your content user friendly and useful based on the KW phrases that you want to attract visitors with.
All three advantages only require a 2nd wordpress instance, you can put them on the same domain level as your current wordpress site. Always use 301 redirects when you are changing, however there still could be a loss of ranking that occurs when you make the switch.
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.
Title Tags are very low on the list for ranking on keywords, you will want to look at other factors to determine why they are ranking and you are not, such as domain age, page copy and image relevance etc.
Always go with a 301 redirect as long as your other urls do not have spam links associated with them, I consider it best practice to always do 301s.
Do you have the links set to your listings set to nofollow or the actual listing pages set to noindex? Are their canonicals set on them pointing back to a main page? There are a number of technical reasons that could cause this problem, but it is hard to say without seeing the site or code.
Google Analytics will only work if it is installed on an actual website, just a domain cannot be linked to a GA account as there is no site for its code to be placed on and measured.
Google does not reduce the effects of hidden copy, it is actually a huge negative. Copy like this is considered a trademark of older, spammy sites so when Google finds it (and Google will) it can reduce your page's visibility a little all the way to being a factor for your site to be delisted from Google. There is no point in placing any copy onto a page if it is not displayed in a user readable fashion.
Make sure you have all of your new urls plotted and are ready to implement 301 redirects for each one. Also make sure to go back and update your current 301s so that they are pointing to the newest pages, not creating chains of redirects.
Also, don't be surprised if you take a small hit from moving many of those pages further from your root directory, as long as your content is relevant you should be able to bounce back within 90 or so days, but expect drops even with full 301 redirects.
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.