Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey K3,

Looks like you have bigger fish to fry, your host domain is throwing a 503 server error. No server = no content = no robots.txt  will be able to be found until that is resolved. Error still happening as of this post: http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/https://k3syspro.com

Hey Roman,

Broad question - but this site - MOZ.com is the right place to start looking. The Yoast plugin is good house keeping, so if you are looking for a cooler plugin to give you a bigger lift, I'd say the house is clean enough if you are using it properly.

The next phases are to move through the on-page factors with an audit and make sure things are passing, then consider the off-page work you can do to generate links with guest blogging and general hustle. If you still want to play with the site you can work on building up better taxonomy that matches target keywords to build link relevance and landing pages that structure concepts more. That is how we built up our navigational verticals on WholeWhale.com/resources

Properly configuring Google Search Console through Google Analytics is also a great move to better understand the phrases driving traffic and how they are performing. As you max out the potential of the organic traffic around terms, the next phase is creating better ways to convert that traffic to emails/sales - sumo.com and optimizely.com are interesting tools to do this with.

Forgive the wandering answer, happy to refine if you have specific questions.

Hey Ben,

This is a big 'it depends', but here are some things to consider:

• What is best for the user? Google will tend to favor this over time.
• Is this part of a larger regional strategy that you will be rolling out for other locations. In this case, keeping things on the primary domain would be a better idea over time if you are doing properly structured sub-folder urls
• If it is a physical location use Google Biz to register and link it properly to the main site you want
• use Schema.org to properly tag the info of the location

The regional site should naturally win out for a local search and using the main site to direct users to the regional _should _give it a bump in relevance. As long as you don't duplicate too much content on that sub-folder page it shouldn't compete. So I would go with that strategy, but then monitor MOZ and Search Console to see if it starts to cannibalize. In this case you can quickly remove your main site page from the index.

Hope that helps.

Hey Ryan,

Welcome! In short - yes - I have seen rankings shift quickly, but time frame is important. Huge shifts overnight might just be due to the crawls updating if you just started your account. Since I can't see your account, keywords, or time frame I have attached our chart of how rankings and traffic change. You will have a sense of how this is seasonally affected.

What we have seen is the higher the search volume, the higher the MOZ rank volatility.

https://moz.com/blog/ranking-fluctuations

kNxUz

Super frustrating!

Hard to say what the exact issue is without a link to the page you are trying to optimize. Could be a cacheing issue if you are testing before images have propagated. More likely, there may be other background images on the page that are still getting flagged.  Also, don't let this automated checker replace common sense, they are combing and automatically throwing out suggestions - if you have compressed an image per their guidelines: https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/optimizing-content-efficiency/image-optimization 
then start to focus on the other low hanging fruit if you know that image is already optimized (usually they will call out your JS loading - Google Tag Manager GTM can help with some of this).

You can also use this tool from Pingdom for page speed suggestions: https://tools.pingdom.com/
And if you are serious about performance, look at New Relic for the actual performance stats on the server side for your web app.

GL!

As a best practice for paid ads, you should definitely follow Google's stated best practice for links: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/96569?hl=en
This clearly states that nofollow should be used for advertising relationships. In your specific case it may be that your site isn't presenting ads in a way that would automatically be flagged but it is a big gamble for little reward to assume they won't catch this.

Your confusion is warranted though, as more links from a reputable source around relevant keywords should be something that would help them. However, if the links/keywords and site show patterns of a link scheme, then a potential penalty could be incurred - see Google's statement on this:https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en&visit_id=1-636413527986263403-257027443&rd=1

TL;DR - go with nofollow for advertising links.

Hey ThreeDrops,

I had issues with this too when I started dealing with moving from print to web images. Here is a quick guide to help you understand the difference between pixels and DPI:  https://99designs.com/blog/tips/ppi-vs-dpi-whats-the-difference/

The quality level you need to maintain for web is basically 72dpi and if you use the right types of compression and file type you can greatly reduce those JPEGs you're probably using. Here is a quick tool to do this: https://tinypng.com/

Best of luck!

Big topic!

Great that you are thinking intentionally about this now, rather than jumping on here asking why your organic traffic has flatlined post launch. I have attached an internal doc we have that gives a checklist of things to do a consider to mitigate disaster.

Big picture, MOZ is great for keeping an eye on the keywords that drive traffic and see where you are losing ground post launch. More details in the attachment. GL!