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Hey Mozzers,

Recently we have had a series of agencies in to pitch for work, one group mentioned that due to our association with a possibly penalised product review website, any links and activity associated with the brand would hinder our SEO.

We currently have a  good rating, but we are now no longer pushing our customers to the site as we move to a new platform. The current link back from this website is also no-followed.

Any thoughts on how this could impact us? And how the agencies determined the site was penalised and causing us problems.

Cheers

Tim

Pretty much what Greg said - there are so many things to look into including but not limited to the below..

• Enable Compress with GZip etc
• Serve scaled images and try SVGs.
• Reduce and minify scripts, HTML and CSS
• Possibly serve images from a content delivery network
• Load scripts asyncronously
• Avoid redirects where possible, reduce DNS look ups and http requests
• Set up caching correctly.
• Use a fast server and install  SSL certificate. Intially it maybe slower but you can optimise bestter and in the end should produce faster speeds via HTTP2.0.

Plus lots, lots more.

Your CSS does look to be doing a fair bit of render blocking. Maybe look to combine and reduce to essential needed items.

Hey Lee,

I work in the insurance sector and pretty much all serp listing lost their aggregate rating stars here in the UK in the Sept update you mentioned (many other niches also affected).

I have managed to keep our Stars going a little longer by switching from aggregate reviews to individual product review ratings within the product scope. You will lose the total review counter, but atleast you get a genuine review and still some stars to aid click through.

I cannot be certain you Shopify plugin will still perform with aggregate reviews, you may need to hard coded until it is updated - do they have a support section for the plugin?

I don't think Aggregate review ratings will be returning in the near future.

Cheers

Tim

Could it be related to this?

https://www.seroundtable.com/rumors-shortnames-google-my-business-suspensions-27861.html

Where I work we currently have two profiles for the same address and we have not been penalised. Have you made sure the account content is totally different and also verified the listings?

Thank you for the tips guys, I am going to try and play with departments and see if that has the desired effect on search intent without negatively impacting our overall GMB profile and the knowledge panel.

Hey All,

I am not sure this is possible but here goes...

I've a phone number pulled in from "Google My Business" for the company I work for Caravan Guard Insurance.

We have different numbers for specific functions e.g. claims, renewals, quotes.

Currently If I type in "caravan guard claims number" into Google Search it shows our general tel number which is clearly pulled in from GMB and the Knowledge Panel. Can this be influenced or have multiple options?

For example If I were to search "caravan guard number" it would continue to show our default customer number like present, but if I were to search for "caravan guard claims number" it shows our claims number.

Not sure it is possible, but thought I would ask.

Cheers all

Tim

Z6iaU9a

They are two very different groups and definitely worth using. Your exact will work well for users obviously typing in very specific keywords and could possibly be a bit more expensive to start with and your broad match keywords will help to find much more long tail requests.

I find +BMM is great for researching intent around the keyword and mopping up those not quite meeting exact rules. I would suggest then using the common longer string +BMM terms as exact to drive down the CPC in time.

Also of note - there seems to have been an algorithm update on the 1st - this could have had an impact.

Was it a fundamental rebuild from the ground up? Did you do anything new? SSL etc...

Not sure if related, but Google also had an Algo update on the 27th October which may have impacted your organic traffic. Google said it was a small update, but those hit complained of quite large drops in organic traffic. details here

Having a full screen popup or interstitial could potentially have some negative effects.

From customer experience perspective I would imagine it is also having a negative effect on those visiting, many may not return.

I personally would leave the website up and running happily on your day of rest, simply with a disclaimer of your order will not be fulfilled until the following day. Despite Sunday being a day or rest for some faiths that does not mean you cannot gain sales or allow people to browse your website even when not actively working.

OK so the review sites are certainly great for improving your click through rate and influencing your customers etc, but do not assume they will benefit you totally.

Review sites (see list of google approved partners here) only automatically benefit Google adverts (CPC) by default and you will need a minimum number to qualify for the star rating. You may get a boost from a high traffic and quality review site organically but like Garrett says - opt for a review site that meets your needs and is also frequented and trusted by your users.

Should you wish to benefit from star ratings in the organic results you will still need some technical knowledge to apply aggregate ratings schema to your site and even then it is not guaranteed they will show.

Hey there,

I am not entirely surely this is 100% the case, but quickly looking over a couple of articles it sounds like CloudFlare may share  IP's with some questionable sites that may be on a watch list. Getting static IP's and CDN SSL's may help.

Using a CDN for the reasons above is a good move, could you try switching to another provider to see if any impact is seen.

Cheers

Tim

I am certainly interested to see how the new DA correlates with rankings and competitors. exciting time

In theory as per Joe using a CDN can certainly influence your site speed load, however I found their are a few caveats to this.

Firstly are you serving content in the same country/content to your audience and does your CDN have a node in this location to allow a faster pull of content. The speed gain may only be helped if this is the case.

Second, can your CDN serve content via SSL be it an installed or shared SSL.

And can your CDN serve via HTTP2 for simultaneous loading of files in parallel with one another. All of this can certainly affect your SEO, but hopefully the gains are enough to actually have a positive influence.

For Videos - my favourite is still actually Youtube, it can boost your own following and don't forget Youtube is the second largest search engine that I am aware of. Hosting and having content here can only be an added benefit.

Cheers Tim

Hi there - any chance you can share the url?

Some great items from John,

This example does look particularly nice and the luxury lifestyle video and brand name helps to portray their image of retiring to golden sands through effective financial planning pointing you in the right direction.

To support this video they do have an easy to find menu and clear call to actions to learn more or get in touch (shame the links didn't work on my browser).

Below the video and fold, they also have more content which will still be crawled to aid SEO. Many landing pages use videos to really hook the user and generally will convert quite well.

The site is still clearly in its infancy as the contact page has wrong fake details etc, but overall it's ok. With some strong quality content you would expect the sub pages on specific topics to be the primary landing pages in time. Unless they anticipate most of their traffic being PPC or brand organic.

Cheers

Tim

I am not sure if it is pulling everything in, but I was able to do a search here - https://www.eurodns.com/whois-search/co-domain-name

For me Option 1 with 301 redirect from the old structure makes sense. After all the pages re-indexed I would imagine they should keep their rankings ok. Like you said having custom urls does have additional benefits.

SEMRush also offers outreach too but I am not sure if it is automated as such. It seems to be a bit more manual.