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Ranking depends on a lot of factors. Run a test with Google PageSpeed and see what it tells you, it will be actionable. All of that affects ranking to varying degrees. DA is just one of the factors and high 30s is not necessarily considered a very good or high DA from what I know, it goes up to 100.

Also, there are other factors for rankings such as personalization, demand/market changes in keywords from a few years ago to now in some markets (example: SEO ninja.... SEO Guru.... growth hacker)

And how is he checking on his ranking that he knows is bad? Rankings that moz provides? Google console? his own attempts to search for it?

One last thing, what is their backlink profile like anyway? Those may have been nerfed by Google in their value, but they still count to a degree. There is competition too, he may have found new and aggressive competition... one market like this is photo booth rental market. 3 years ago it was a new market relatively speaking, now it is saturated heavily and there are just too many hands. This will certainly impact ranks.

Also who is the guy lol name them if you suspect wrongdoing or unethical behaviors! I know of at least one page 1 ranking site around my locality that ended up converting a student organization domain with a lot of .edu backlinks and then just ran with it for seo and represented itself in multiple irrelevant and across the country large cities.

They even blatantly dared to SELL backlinks on their site... in broad daylight! in 2016! Needless to say I reported them to Google and saw them get kicked down a notch to page 2 for my test keywords from earlier searches.

I would look at the bottom line, which one do you sell more? Which one makes more profit on average per months worth of sales? Whichever one that is, use the old category URL for it and 301 redirect to the new URL for the more profitable URL. Then for a temporary period, keep a banner or a little link or something like that on the new URL that clearly directs users who are looking for the less profittable product's new URL to the right location.

That's the best I can think of. I had done this on a car rental company where they lost some of their cars and had to take down the URLs but we instead 301 redirected to the next closest choice and made some changes to "feature" the other related cars as well.

Those seem to be Google+ and Instagram CDN sources that are https originally from what I can see doing a quick crawl of your site.

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How is it that signed in and signed out users get different urls for the same page, I have never actually seen this practice in any CMS I have seen or used before. Client should not decide these things... you as the developer or the seo should provide the right way of doing things and explain to them why. To say the least you are dealing with duplicate content as as risk and in that case you can use canonical tag to specify the primary page.

But I would not listen to the client for what they demand, a lot of times clients have no friggin clue about this stuff and ask the vendors to shoot them in their own foot... good vendors will counter with proper reasoning and explanation and if you are the SEO in charge in this case, know that their insisting decisions will have major implications in the results you get and the treatment and longevity of contract you get from these clients... just my 2 cents from few years of doing this as a freelancer, but now I am running my own team and agency and client says this does not mean anything to me anymore when it comes to technical decisions. I ask them about their end goal and find the right way of achieving that.

directory links are still a very much required part of the deal for major directories to say the least. Sure, a lot of them do not pass any link juice or Google may discount a lot of those links in its ranking factors, but you just want to be present where people actually check and where data aggregators grab their source data from.There has to be a reason why Moz local still is as service that charges people for exactly these "directory" listings...

Alan,

Google was sued back in mid-2000s, the judicial system has affirmed (and Google won that case) that Google search results are protected first amendment OPINIONATED speech and Google has every right to do as it pleases with its results. So be it if their wishes are politically biased.

Having said that, Google will never utilize one factor to penalize a site, if all factors are looking mighty well for a Rush L. site or fan site but the Google Chrome user blockage stats, then I strongly doubt that will have any significant impact on rankings, if any at all. After all, Google nowadays considers such abuses when introducing a factor and may do away with a factor if it becomes abused as such. Especially, on such a little known thing as Chrome site blocking. I mean, I have been doing SEO on and off for a few years now and consider myself fairly updated and tech savvy, and I just found out about this option smh doubt the bast majority of Chrome users even know this exists, let alone try to use it. As such, any potential abuses of this should for now easily stick out to Google.

Let us not forget Google does have manual review and appeals in place as well and if they find their automated code screwed up, they will re-evaluate and readjust the rankings again.

So interestingly enough, and without trying to identify the people involved, I have found a local SEO company that has somehow acquired a fully unrelated domain which supposedly used to have something to do with students and kids lives and was a resource of sorts back in the day.

This site has FOLLOWED backlinks (with the student resource context) from the United Nations, from cbs.com, and from a wide range of websites mostly referencing it as a student and kids life resource.

Given the looks and feels of their site, they seem like a shabby SEO company with rather grey or dark themed SEO tactics.

This company ranks on page 1 for City+ SEO combination of keywords for three to four MAJOR cities in the US.

I want to find out what you all think of this...

Is this ok?

How is this ok?

Is this going to cause them to be flagged eventually automatically for a penalty or purge?

Does Google have anything against this sort of thing at all?

Danke