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I must second Dirk's suggestion of screaming frog, great tool and I use it daily, a license is well worth the cost. Although spider crawl of the site will only point out 404's that have are links from an existing page, so if the hosting company cleaned up the not all of these 404's will surface.

One approach I would suggest is run the current 1000 404's in GWT through Screaming frog as a manually added list, (do it in 2 batches if you have the free version), start a spreadsheet of the resulting 404's and start working through that list. Once you have the 404's mark those as fixed as GWT tools set a reminder to check back in a few days and after a few days export the new list of 1000 404's and run these through screaming frog adding the resulting list to your spreadsheet. Keep doing this until you get the 404's errors in GWT down a manageable level.

I hope that helps, good luck.

You are being paranoid, we have had almost all of our accounts in Moz and connected to Analytics accounts for as long as I can remember and never had an issue.

Hi Luke,

If these 301's are old, then any indexing robot has already compensated for them and updated their index with the right URL. What you have to worry about is backlinks from other sites, this should surface GWT (Google Webmaster Tools or Search Console these days).

What I would be more concerned about is 301 redirecting the current URL structure to the new one as that is what most likely is being indexed currently. If I were you I would make a backup the old redirects (just in case), and start clean with a new list of redirects. To create this new list of redirects I would crawl the current site, take that list of URL's determine if any of that old content is going to exist on a new URL when launching the new site, set up the new redirects. Once launched I would monitor the new site in GWT over the next few weeks/months to see what surfaces and redirect any 404's that surface

Moz is currently indexing and had to cancel last months crawl, so the 1.5 month delay is to be expected. You can monitor the progress at https://moz.com/products/api/updates and it looks like they should be releasing the results tomorrow. Check back at the end of the week and you should see your metrics.

https://moz.com/products/api/updates

I believe you are doing this to deal with individual property pages that no longer exist after they have sold. A fear to consider with using the 410 to deal with these pages is that f this property ever comes back on the market you have permanently marked this URL as gone and might have issue getting a URL with the same structure back in the index.

I have a similar issue with a client who offers travel deals with a specific time frame and the way we have handled it is we have a custom 404 handler, that when visiting a travel deal that longer exists before the 404 page returns the http status of 404 it 301 redirects the user to the man travel deal page. The reason we took this approach was so any legacy backlinks to travel deals will still give the user a list of deals that are relevant to why they followed the link in the past. We can also bring back annual specials without having to make changes to the .htaccess. This approach helped us maintain existing Authority from previous backlinks, significantly reduced 404's (which in turn let us focus on the more specific real errors)

BTW, there is no reason why you can't have a search page on a 404 page. In fact I would recommend it.

We have found adding Schema via JSON-LD pretty straight forward and easier than inline, see: https://developers.google.com/schemas/formats/json-ld

Normally we would put this type of schema in via GTM but Squarespace has issue adding custom code in the body tags. That being said you should be able to add your JSON-LD script of schema directly in the head with no issue.

Good Luck

Hi Peter,

I'm going to assume that you have the Google My Business profiles all claimed and verified. If not that is your first step.

If so, for the third location that has the same address add the suite or office number to address line 2, this will help separate the listings from the others that share the same address. Try that and give it 48 hours to propagate on google maps and try your search again. Check out https://support.google.com/business/answer/2853879?hl=en for more details on the guidelines.

I hope that helps.

https://support.google.com/business/answer/2853879?hl=en

I agree with Martijn, but I also feel you are not using the Q&A as it was intended. You ask a question in your subject line and instead of elaborating on the question in the body, you post your own answer twice. How are you proving this info?

If you are looking to start a conversation about this topic I would suggest writing the body as if it was your opinion and see what others have to say. You might find some research/opinions that you haven't considered.

Hi Becky,

If only it was that simple Open Graph, although is picked up by other platforms, is mainly for providing structured data to social platforms (mainly facebook). Plus, when you view source the open Graph tags do not reference the paragraph that Google uses for the "answer" it uses the intro paragraph which doesn't answer the question. The title is the question, so that is a step in the right direction. The answer is the second paragraph which is not referenced in any structured data that I could see.

Like many things in the search landscape we do not have direct control on how Google interprets the data and display results. What we can do is place our site in the most optimized position to be interpreted properly and provide results, things like descriptive titles and meta descriptions, Schema, etc. will help position your site for interpretation. But in the end the Google Bot analysis of all of the info on your site is what determines what results are displayed. for me more details check out: http://searchengineland.com/optimizing-google-quick-answers-box-215037 it's a year old, but most of the facts stand true.

I personally prefer the language subfolder closer to the domain e.g. www.example.com/en/example-ny.html but really it would all depend on what parts of your site you provide in alternate languages. If you provide only pages past the sub-directory **/example-ny/ **I would place it after this directory. But I highly doubt you only offer alternate languages on only the pages that provide details about the property.

** I www.example.com/en/example-ny.htm**l

Hi Icourse,

The issue seems to be that because you offer the individual reviews in the schema, the crawler sees the most recent review in the Search Results. I would suggest removing the schema markup on the individual reviews but keep it on the aggregated rating content.

As an example if you look at http://www.microdatagenerator.com/aggregate-rating-schema-generator/ in Google schema testing tool it only has an aggregated review data and that is the only thing to show up in a search for the page, try a site search site:www.microdatagenerator.com/aggregate-rating-schema-generator/ in google.

Good luck and let me know if this results in what you were hoping for.

lcourse

Have these URLs been blocked by your robots.txt? Can you post some examples?

7 Backlinks isn't really a lot, but I'm sure they are all high quality, keep at it, backlink building is a long game.

The first red flag that your site sets off for us is that in your robots.txt (see: http://www.wattsandco.com/robots.txt) you reference a sitemap that is not your domain http://www.wallpapered.com/sitemap/sitemap.xml. Update that to reference the proper sitemap http://www.wattsandco.com/sitemap/sitemap.xml.

Also we would suggest dealing with your 404's we started crawling your site, 35% done and already seeing 91 404ing links.

You might want to consider exploring using Moz Local, although we have found the majority of converting traffic come from Bing Places, Apple Maps, Google My Business and Facebook business listings, the rest of the listings in Moz Local serve as great backlinks.

I hope that helps, good luck

http://www.wattsandco.com/robots.txt

Hi Snowflake, although we do use Moz for some tracking, we don't pay particular attention to the keyword ranking aspect of the tool. If I remember correctly it is based on inputted keywords, if rank has dropped but traffic is steady it tells me that the keyword list might be need of updating.

What region is your key market? When I run your site through looking at Google US I don't see any keywords in the converting 1-3 position, although I do see a 67% increase in first page rankings, mostly lower on the page. When running the site through Google UK I do see 2 keywords in the 1-3 position, (french summer school, french summer camp) combined monthly searches of 80. Historically these didn't rank at all before this month, so that is a plus. Plus there is some pretty good intent with those terms.

How does your organic traffic look in Google Analytics? Or you seeing the same dip?

The Moz forum is a great place to ask questions. But if you have more specific questions, DM us and maybe we can help you out. If anything we can offer you a "Rubber Ducky" to bounce ideas off. We have also found explaining our theories and experience to others helps us understand our info better, so we would be helping each other.

I have also found the community at http://onlinegeniuses.com/ very handy for asking questions/bounce ideas around.

BTW, are you located in eastern North America? We have explored hiring local junior folks to train up in SEO.

Hi Tymen,

The first thing I notice is that you have very few backlinks. So to start I would claim and verify your Google My Business profile (see: https://www.google.ca/maps/place/Eppinga+hout+%26+bouwmaterialen/@53.111369,6.143882,17z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m2!3m1!1s0x47c84e457e3c04ad:0x237e27544c5c0614) After that I would set up profiles on some of the major social media platforms.  (I see you have a Facebook profile, look into Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, etc.) this will give you a backlink and also platforms to promote the business. A local listing campaign would help too, claim and verify your Yelp listing for an example.

I hope that points you in the right direction, Good luck!

https://www.google.ca/maps/place/Eppinga+hout+%26+bouwmaterialen/@53.111369,6.143882,17z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m2!3m1!1s0x47c84e457e3c04ad:0x237e27544c5c0614

Hi Tom,

The first flag to me is the markup for Webpage/mainContentOfPage/WebPageElement/Name is literally all of the text content of the page. I would change that to the name of the page.

You also use the markup for https://schema.org/CreativeWork which is meant for creative works, I would not consider Travel Insurance as creative work. Again, you are cramming all of the pages content into the text, so another flag to me.

And the duplicate Local Business Schema that offers no other information except the name (but actually the website) and the Aggregated review data. Local Business Schema is reserved for business that have a physical location (see: https://schema.org/LocalBusiness) which it appears you are based on your footer, but you do not markup in the Schema. I would suggest marking up the address info in the footer for Local Business.

I hope that points you in the right direction.

WebPage

Odd, are you seeing any errors in Google Search Console (use to be Google webmaster tools) under Search Traffic/International Targeting. It will show any hreflang errors, I would start there and fix any errors.

Hi Nancy,

Have you explored your page speed on mobile devices? I noticed a big drop in the spring of this year (although it does look like you are slowly regaining a lot of first page results). This would have been right around google's algorithm change to favor mobile ready sites.  If you look at https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thecpapshop.com%2F&tab=mobile you will see that although the user experience score is pretty good the speed score is pretty low. See what opportunities there you can fix.

Good luck,

Your Google Maps profile does have a link to your site (without the www, but it properly redirects to the www version, so no issue there) if you update the URL for your website in Google My Business to the www. version, it will take 24-48 hours for the change to reflect.

BTW, if you are looking for more high DA authority pages to add links back to your site on, I found this article which lays out some additional options: https://www.serpwoo.com/blog/experts/increasing-your-domains-trust/ They might not all be applicable, but worth checking out.

https://www.serpwoo.com/blog/experts/increasing-your-domains-trust/