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Have you updated the dev sites robots.txt to disallow everything? It is up to the bot to listen, but that combined with removing all of the dev URLs from Google Webmaster tools should do the trick.

Hi Peter,

Very odd issue, Moz Local in the UK is fairly new and issues are bound to arise. This should be brought to the attention of the Moz Local support team, they have been very quick (within a day mostly) in responded for every issue I have had with my UK clients.

To contact them navigate to your profile page, and click the question mark in the bottom right-hand corner.

I hope that helps, let me know what they say the issue is, I'll watch for similar issues with my other UK clients.

Hi NancyH, I wouldn't use ebay.com as a comparison, with a DA of 95 any page speed issues are trumped by the backlink portfolio. I'm not seeing anything else that sticks out as an issue, I did notice that the peak of first page results was in Mar 2014, during the summer of 2014 there seems to have been the biggest dip and you have rebounded a bit since this summer of this year, sitting at about 769 first page results. Do you remember if anything changed with the site in the spring/summer of 2014? Have you dug into your analytics to see if any of those metrics changed around the same time? That is about all of the insight I can give without doing a full audit of the site. Maybe someone else in the forums can offer additional insight.

Hi Nick,

There could be many factors affecting this, are you able to provide more details (Key term, what page is ranking, etc) you are having the issue with? With a little more detail some of the intelligent folks here could offer some suggestions/theories.

Hi Danny,

Are you using a tool to measure your rank/search volume or are you relying on Google search result to determine where you are ranking? As I'm sure you are aware your results are skewed by various factors, geographical location, search history, etc. When I look up that page, I see you ranking on the first page for 3 terms:

• custom macbook pro case
• mac book covers
• personalised macbook case

Each with a search volume of 90. The term "personalised macbook cover" only has a search volume of 10. If I were you I would explore higher search volume terms that you current rank on the second page for, like:

• macbook case (SV=2,400)
• macbook cases (SV=1,300)
• macbook covers (SV=880)
• macbook cover (SV=590)
• macbook pro covers (SV=390)
• custom cases (SV=260)
• mac book cases (SV=210)

I only really dug around the UK search results. But a similar approach could be applied to the other languages.

Hi IssueTrak,

I do agree with Dr. Pete, anything done is merely a suggestion, I like to think of it as farming, you create the most ideal situation for your organic search results to grow but unexpected influences will cause you to change your approach and some of these unexpected influences will be beyond your control.

One thing I would mention that is a bit of a red flag for me is that your structured data offers no additional organizational info on the home page. So when the google bot crawls the home page they see you are trying to push the Name, Url and the social accounts, this could be considered a bit scammy. I would suggest expanding on the content and add a description, mailing address, etc anything to make it your info more robust. In addition explore the adding the schema for https://schema.org/SoftwareApplication since you folks seem to be a software application company.

The Knowledge Graph info is pulled from multiple avenues, if these suggestions for Schema changes don't start producing better results, start looking outside of the Schema, for an example submit a request for a Wikipedia entry to be written (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requested_articles/Business_and_economics/Companies)

I hope this helps,

VERB

https://schema.org/SoftwareApplication

Hi Snowflake,

I'm not familiar with this outputted graph, so I'm going to assume the colors in the stack columns are various ranges of ranks (if you can clarify which color means what that might help for those of us that use a different product for tracking keyword rank). Assuming the line is measuring organic traffic it looks good, a slight dip in the shortest month of the year doesn't set off any red flags for me. Can you provide the URL of the site, I'd be curious to run it through my research tools to see if I can't spot a pattern.

Hi Lukas,

This is a very broad question, one to which there is no simple answer. You need to ask yourself "what kind of a market would want my services?" and search for bloggers within that market that have a decent DA (although not an accurate measurement currently due to Moz updating it, should have it's accuracy returned in November).

Use a tool like Buzzstream to collect these blog sites and let the software dig for the contact info. From there reach out to the individual bloggers and see what they would like to write about your services. I would steer away from straight up offer money, but they might something in return, maybe a social push or some advice about the service you offer.

I hope that helps.

I think Alick300 makes a great point. Unless you wish to expand your international market, then the .co.uk might be the best option. You could have your cake and eat it too by setting up both and using Hreflang to serve up the co.uk to your searches in the UK and your .com for the everyone outside the UK.

Check out: https://moz.com/learn/seo/hreflang-tag for more details.

I would suggest that either you make the fabric and finishes part of the long description (making each one unique) or approach this as one product (and therefore one page) with different fabric and finish options.

If you do end up going with the similar description, could you make a main page for the product with sub-pages for the various different page for the fabrics and finishes and use the canonical tag to point at the main page.

Hi Snowflake,

I think you need to find a keyword tracking tool that lets you know search volume, Moz's keyword tracking does not. For example "french course morzine" has no search volume in the states or the UK. So it doesn't matter where you rank for it since no one searches for it and there is no chance of click through.

You need to determine the search volume of your tracked keywords so you can cull the herd and put your efforts into battles you that are actually worth winning. You could look for a keyword tracking software that offers search volume (my current tools are at the enterprise level, so will not be cost efficient for just one site, a tools I used a few years back was SEOprofiler, and it worked rather well) or you could use the built in AdWords keyword planner tool and look up individual keywords and record the monthly search volume and competition level for each term. The first option will have a monthly cost + time, the second will have a monthly time cost.

In short, your organic traffic is up YOY so you are doing things along the right path. The only issue is the what you are tracking.

I hope that helps, good luck!

Hi Lukas,

If it was easy then everyone would do it and it would return little to no value. Are you familiar with search operators? They can help refine your google search, in particular I was thinking you could use inurl: as most blogs exist in the subdirectory /blog/. So if your services were about fishing you could do a search like

inurl:/blog/ fishing

Install and turn on the Moz bar in chrome and you will see the DA score for each site in the results. This should cut down on the dead ends.

Good luck

Hi Michael,

We like all in one SEO, but have also used Yoast and lots of people swear by that plugin. I see you have yoast set up are you having issues with the it not including URL's?

If you are finding your site is too big for either, look into pro sitemaps. It's a paid service, but crawls pretty deep and is automatic so it will keep your sitemap up to date. The initial setup is a bit involved but once set up and providing an decent indexation rate very little tweaking is involved.

I agree with Tim, the option selecting would make the most sense, but I can understand how 300 choices would be rather overwhelming in a drop down. Is there a way you can sub-divide the color options down?

Here is the actual job description https://verbinteractive.workable.com/jobs/115252 If we were to fill the role with a junior it would have to be a local person for training purposes (Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada). And since we are in Canada we would lean towards someone who can legally work here. Might not work for hiring, but my offer still stands for bounce ideas off.

Good luck with the research!

https://verbinteractive.workable.com/jobs/115252

Hi Matthew,

It is totally possible, especially if the top spot is held by a site with such a low Domain authority. Do you know what kind of Search volume this keyword has? No point in ranking in the top position for a term no one ever searches, it will never convert. Have you explored any additional similar keywords? I wouldn't focus on just one, but explore 10-20 with high intent and a decent search volume and try to get in the top 3 for as many of those as possible. How are you tracking keywords?

We agree with Eric, I would also explore setting Href Lang tags. Check out https://moz.com/blog/hreflang-behaviour-insights and use Search Console to trouble-shoot the effort.

Hi RIc,

I believe your first step would be blocking via robots.txt something along the lines of:

Disallow: domain/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/TopCategoriesDisplay?*

But I think you are mistaken that you can make this change within GSC, you can test in GSC, but this doesn't change anything on your site. You will still have to reach out to a dev to get this change complete.

Out of curiosity are these 404's being marked as soft 404's?

Hopefully we will see you in there, Good luck!

You could try using built with see: http://builtwith.com/?https%3A%2F%2Fwww.searchenginejournal.com%2F if you explore the widgets area it will give you an idea what they are using.