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It looks like you're not the only one: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-dropping-pages-out-of-the-search-index-27369.html

No response from Google yet.

Someone else in the forum has posted a very similar question to you! My response there:

"It looks like you're not the only one: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-dropping-pages-out-of-the-search-index-27369.html

No response from Google yet."

Hi Dilip,

You have a chain because your original site redirects from http to https, before the redirection kicks in to take the user to the new site.

It could be that you have two separate systems creating redirections, I suspect one that is handling your http -> https that is set up on the web server software, and then further ones in your CMS or htaccess.

I wouldn't worry too much, to be honest, a chain of that nature isn't a big deal. If you are concerned, you just need to ensure that the specific redirects are processed first and are configured so that the source is relative, redirecting to an absolute path.

Wildcard will work, that means that "http://old_url/anything_here" will redirect to "http://new_url/anything_here". However, it looks like you can set up individual redirects using the box next to the slash, and the box underneath labelled "Redirects to".

For example:
/contact.asp
Redirects to:
https://bimcosupply.com/contact/

I note you say you have changed it to redirect to https now, but I am still seeing a redirect to http. I also see that you are using CloudFlare. If you haven't already, I would suggest turning off caching for the moment, as this will make testing more difficult (Otherwise, after each change, make sure you flush the cache for both domains)

At the moment I am still seeing the same behaviour resulting in all of your redirects going to the home page. Given that other random urls give a 404 (https://bimcosupply.com/sdfdsfs -> 404), I think your individual redirects must be broken. Which plugin are you using? I'm a fan of Redirection by John Godley https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/redirection/

Regarding the toggle switches, I would imagine they should be turned off. Your site is currently indexable, but that could be caching perhaps.

You've done everything that I would have suggested, but I don't think your redirects are configured quite correctly.

At the moment, you have a redirect chain that causes anything that hits the old domain is redirected the root of the new domain. (E.g. http://www.bimcoplumbingsupplies.com/contact.asp -> http://bimcosupply.com/contact.asp -> https://bimcosupply.com/contact.asp -> https://bimcosupply.com/)

Either, set up individual redirects on the old domain to new pages (including the https), or set up a redirect that keeps the rest of the URL and then managed your redirects in Wordpress; the latter way will create a small redirect chain, but likely will be easier to configure and monitor.

That said, I don't think that issue would be causing any massive issues, and going back to your original question, I think it's now just a matter of time to be honest.

I guess it depends on how long term you're thinking.

For a shorter term (and less risky) project I would definitely stick with URL 2; Carefully improve the content using elements from URL 1 and then redirect from 1 to 2.

If you're in it for the long term and are open to a (hopefully) short term reduction in rankings, (and therefore traffic) you could do it the other way round. The redirect would pass any link juice across, albeit slightly diluted, and it would not be unreasonable to expect URL 1 to start to rank in a very similar way to URL 2 over time.

If this were a new piece I would certainly guide you towards the longer, more descriptive URL but, given the performance of the existing page, it is a more risky strategy. Your current results clearly show that URL isn't a massive factor!

I don't think there is a definitive answer here, but I hope I have helped a little.

Sorry, by link profile I meant how many links and of what quality did you have towards each page.

1. I don't think it will, Google has got very good at ignoring these spammy sites. Creating large disavow lists isn't technically that hard, but I don't think I would spend the time doing it seeing as you haven't seen any impact.

2. I don't think either of the response codes you're returning are appropriate.
403 for the indicates that the client doesn't have permissions and therefore it could be inferred that the file does actually exist and therefore the link is valid, which is definitely not something you would want Google to think.
While you have disavowed the links you are 302'ing, I still don't think 302 is the right response. For a start, 302 has been superceded now anyway, but 302 indicated moved temporarily. That is certainly not the case. The page doesn't exist and never has. The only reason to 302 is if you are expecting traffic from these links, but I think that also sends a bad message to Google.
I would definitely suggest 404 for both cases.

What do the link profiles for each of the pages look like? And what is the traffic source breakdown for the two pages?

What kind of citations are you talking about, and how were you planning to generate them? The expense involved in changing them shouldn't be that much...

Not traffic on its own. CTR and low bounce have been demonstrated to have an impact, but that's traffic and behaviour from organic results, not PPC.

Moz won't take it into account as, when you use the disavow tool, you send the file directly to Google, so Moz will have no visibility.

Your DA has no direct impact on your ranking, so if you've disavowed the links, I would simply make a note of it and carry on about your business.

In all fairness, Google is pretty good at ignoring that kind of thing now, so unless you've had a manual action (or it was very recent and you're anticipating one) it may not be worth the effort of creating and uploading a disavow file.

Answering your question title directly, ignoring your PPC extension. The traffic a page gets organically can affect rankings. People have carried out research in the past that demonstrates that CTR and bounce rate can affect future rankings. That said, Google may have adjusted that out now that people are aware as it could potentially be manipulated...

An interesting question...

Directly, no, Google state that PPC spend won't affect rankings. However, it's an interesting concept, if Google knows that a term you are using as a PPC keyword is driving traffic with a low bounce rate, that would indicate the page is relevant... therefore should it not rank more highly organically... who knows... Even if it has an impact, I wouldn't expect it to high up the list, so I wouldn't include those pages/terms purely for that reason.

That said, Google Ads can give you some useful insight into Google's opinion of your pages for specific keywords. If your Ad Rank is low for a page/keyword combination, then it is unlikely to rank well organically. You can look at "Landing Page Experience" and to a lesser extent "Expected CTR" to get an idea of which areas to target, improving those metrics on Ads could, based on the actions you would have likely had to have taken, improve your chances organically too.

The short answer is no. A single knowledge panel listing cannot have multiple options, and you can't get a single listing to serve up different numbers based on the department inferred.

You can add additional numbers (https://support.google.com/business/answer/3370250?hl=en#addlphone) but they will not display. My opinion on this is so that Google does not get confused if other citations (and your website) list other numbers for your business.

Also, within Google's guidelines you can create separate listings for multiple departments (https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en-GB#departments) but I don't think that is really aimed at what you're doing, and I think it would upset Google, so I wouldn't recommend it.

I see you use Google Ads, so one (possibly costly) alternative, if you're very worried about customer experience, is to use Google Ads to offer up the phone number. The CPC should be relatively low as I don't think there'd be much competition for the specific keywords and your landing page/phone number would be super relevant.

You would not want out of date citations out there, and certainly not on the big players. To be fair, from a local point of view you wouldn't want information to be out of date either!

You can use something like Moz Local to monitor and update this for you, but it won't do all the many smaller directories out there.

As a side note, I would be wary of spending money for citations directly, they don't help much (if at all) with SEO in my experience, so make sure you believe they will be directly driving traffic before you invest.

Depending upon how you've set up your previous redirects, it could be a problem, but I suspect you'll be fine.

In my experience, a small redirect chain won't cause a massive issue and unless you already have some multi-step redirects going on, your new plan won't put you at risk of more than two steps anyway. Obviously, a loop would cause serious issues, but I don't think you are at risk of this.

Your redirects should be relative to absolute, i.e. /oldpage to https://siteImanage.com/newpage. In this case, you would just need to update your absolute paths to the new url. If you ensure these are matched first, then you would only have one redirect regardless of whether the client hits the www or non-www domain. If the full domain redirect is matched first, you'll end up for two steps for those people hitting only pages on the old domain

If your redirects are matching based on relative links and redirecting to relative urls (as some plugins do), i.e. /oldpage redirects to /newpage, then you'll end up with a two-step process if someone follows an old link; First, the site will redirect from non-www to www, and then it will redirect to the correct page.

If you have redirects such as "https://siteImanage.com/oldpage" redirecting to "https://siteImanage.com/newpage" then you would create a two-step process again, first to the new page and then to the new domain. Of course, your redirects wouldn't work on the new domain as they wouldn't match, which may or may not be a problem for you.

The measurement is different, and based on the datasets that ahrefs and Moz maintain; there is no value in comparing the metrics directly between the two tools.

I would suggest when using either of these metrics that you only compare within a single tool, and between sites/domains in similar (if not the same) niche.

I still have a "Go to old version" link on the menu on the left, just above Privacy and Terms.

In addition to the above, you can request removal from Google's index in Search Console

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663419?hl=en

As noted, the removal is temporary (90 days), but if you've removed the pages and any links to them, then they won't reappear.

What I would do is just check that your sitemap is up to date, and there aren't any legacy sitemaps hanging about that might still reference the pages, and also run a crawl of your site to ensure that there aren't any remaining links to these pages hanging about.