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Are these non-relevant links spammy? What are their DAs? Did someone buy these links? (Hope not!) If you do have a large number of backlinks from suspicious sources pointing to a page, this could negatively impact that page and the rest of your domain.

Hi Dan-Louis – all depends on what content these modals are serving, and how your modals are being served.

1. Have you checked to make sure that some resource your modals rely on isn't blocked in /robots.txt (you can also plug a URL with a modal into Search Console's robots.txt checker)? What about meta robots noindex?
2. On mobile, do you have pop ups that are obscuring content on the page?
3. Have you checked any pages with these pop ups/modals in Search Console's fetch and render tool? What resources, if any, are blocked?

TBH I don't like relying on SEMRush (or any singular SEO tool for that matter) for ID'ing technical SEO problems. When was the last time you performed a tech audit?

Keep me posted on what you uncover...

Hey vtmoz–I'd recommend you resolve the issue _at the source. _Meaning, fix the broken links at their link location (where they're being linked to). You could 301 these 404s to another location on your site, but then you'll just have a bunch of expired, internal links that 301. If these 404 links don't have backlinks, as you say, then there's no page authority to keep.

You can find this in GSC (webmaster tools). LMK if you have any questions.

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Nikki–if you feel comfortable sharing one of the sites, that would be helpful for further investigation!

It seems like there's a lot you're blocking in your robots.txt that you might need (though that's hard to suss out without knowing your site):

• Disallow: /blogs/+, Disallow: /blogs/%2B, Disallow: /blogs/%2b

• assuming /blogs is the primary page path for any other blog content (e.g. /blogs/blog-title-goes-here)

• Disallow: /design_theme_id

• assuming this is one of your stylesheets, you should probably remove this.

• Disallow: /gift_cards/*

• no idea what comes after /gift_cards/[here], but this may be unnecessary

There may be other reasons Google doesn't reliably see your site as mobile friendly–if you can provide an example site, then we can dig deeper

Hey JuanWork–_it depends, _but if the subpage is a more appropriate new location for the old domain (e.g. old domain's company was acquired by a new company, and is now a _service _on new company's website, it'd be more fitting for old domain to be 301 redirected to the service page on new company's site).

You mentioned that it's a "good old expired domain"–is the domain actually expired, or do you still have ownership of the domain name? If the former, TRY TO BUY IT BACK! If the latter, no worries

Hey KentH – it's such a pain to deal with linking penalties, and I'm sorry you're facing that now.

Onto your problem: Google definitely prefers that you make the request of the linking website's webmaster to remove the link to your site, or at least add a "nofollow" attribute to their link (pointing to your site). That said, they understand that it's not always possible to accomplish that. Here's what I recommend:

1. First, reach out to the webmaster/host of the website (you can find this by looking up their domain on WhoIs)
2. Then, if they respond and have "resolved" the linking issue (either by removing the link, or adding a nofollow attribute) you can consider that link/linking root domain addressed
3. If you don't get a response, or the webmaster refuses to alter their link to your site, you can go ahead and add their domain to your disavow file.

It requires a bit of patience–don't wait too long to hear back from the webmasters (I'd personally give it no longer than a week). I hope this helps!

+1 on Tim's response

Also noticed that you're missing "" around your review text ("reviewBody": Fantastic firm. We immediately felt welcome, relaxed, and confident about our case.,)–if there are any errors in your schema markup, that'll prevent Google from displaying it.

+1 on James' response regarding the fact that positions 73 and 90 really don't make much of a difference (few-to-no people will go that far to look for results).

There are a few reasons the right page (or any page at all) won't rank for your keyword.

1. Other results have greater page authority (or come from sites with greater domain authorities)–you can ID these in Moz's Open Site Explorer, or with the Mozbar extension for Chrome, by looking at the top results (top 7 or 10) for "mobile column lifts."
2. Other pages provide more/better information that fits users' search intents–while this is largely subjective, take a look at the top seven-to-10 ranking pages for your keyword term and ID the differences in content (compared to yours). Are they longer? Do they link to valuable follow-up information (either on or off the publishing domain)? Is the quality of the writing better than your own? What about any featured imagery or multimedia/video content?
3. Your competitors may have more linking root domains pointing to their whole domain or to their ranking page. You can check this in Moz's Open Site Explorer, as well as AHREFs.

Hey Alex–building from David's note. Without more information (like your site), it's hard to see exactly what's going on, but a few things come to mind:

• Are you using hreflang tags? If you're not, the 302 redirects may be a workaround that a content editor or dev put in place to get users to their appropriate location on your site. In addition to resolving these redirects, I highly recommend you implement hreflang tags in the of your site's pages so that crawlers know that these different international TLDs are all related.
• You should definitely remove these redirects, especially if there are versions of these URLs that exist with 200 status codes. There may be a rule in your site's htaccess file (you'll need to talk to your developer and/or server manager to update this), or within meta directives in the tags of your pages.

Hey Trazo--yes, you'll need to add the different variations of your domains to GSC. You should create separate properties for these URLs, then make a set of them (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6338828?hl=en).

In order to indicate to Google the primary URLs (www vs non-www), you'll need each url to be set up as a property. As for your SSL question, are you serving both SSL and non-SSL URLs on your domain? If you're not, and all the URLs on your site are SSL, you should make sure any non-SSL url counterparts are forwarding to the correct SSL version.

Hey Jonathan! Definitely don't recommend blocking your US site in robots.txt--you want to preserve any authority and pass on equity from your US site to your CA site if possible, so let's leave that out of robots.

Are you fully deprecating your US site, or will it continue to exist alongside your CA site? If you're deprecating it, I'd recommend 301 redirecting the domain to the new CA one. If not, you should preserve the US site, as-is, set up your CA domain, and implement hreflang tags (information here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en). That'll tell Google that these sites are linked, but that they serve different regions.

I do recommend also having a link in your nav or somewhere in your header (like flag icons) that can let users choose which site to navigate to. This will allow for internal linking between both domains.

About three different homepages: This is my reasoning: Wordpress based website uses index.php as a home page if you use "latest posts" as your home page, Even index.php is not displayed in the url address bar. Does that mean WP sites always have 2 homepages? I have removed index.htm at the moment, but I see that as a problem as I am losing PA value for that page.

Zee: So it sounds like you should create a "dynamic" front page (this link should help you: https://codex.wordpress.org/Creating_a_Static_Front_Page). If for some reason you are unable to remove both duplicate homepages, I'd say deprecate one and 301 redirect it to your main homepage, and implement a rel=canonical tag from the duplicated homepage to your main one (e.g. example.com/index.php -301-> example.com)

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I can see that this is a bit messy.. I did this as I wanted to preserve
original htm based site URL's. Are you saying that search engines see
www.example.com/dir1/dir2/page.htm and www.example.com/dir1/dir2/page as
identical URL's.

Zee: I can't say for sure, without seeing your site, but if they're indexed (discoverable by search engine crawlers), you could definitely be penalized. If your .htm pages have built up link equity, you'll need to 301 redirect them to their corresponding pages

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With my old htm based website I had too many subdirectories. I have
removed some of the subs to make URLs shorter and used 301 redirects in
.htaccess file. I probably should have removed .htm appendixes as well
at this stage, but I did not.

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Is there a point to do 301 redirects again? 90% of my pages have been 301 redirected as I have removed some of the old subdirectories. Are you saying that I should again 301 redirect my newly 301 redirected pages?

Zee: No, that'll result in a 301 redirect chain--you should ALWAYS 301 redirect to whatever the most appropriate, final destination is (think of 301 redirects as nonstop flights, never layovers). If I 301 redirect A --> B, but then B needs to be redirected as B --> C, you must update A's to reflect this as well, A --> C, to avoid a redirect chain.

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I would like to use example.com as my home page only, I am just trying to transfer PA value of my index.htm page to example.com. Not sure how to do this.

Zee: You may want to canonical this one, in that case (especially if you can confirm that these pages present the same information)--you can implement a rel=canonical on your .htm homepage that points back to your main homepage.

Hey gozmoz--I might need a little more information from you in order to help here. It sounds like you've got potentially THREE different homepages (see below). First of all, is that right?

1. example.com
2. example.com/index.htm
3. example.com/index.php

Big red flag to me is the Wordpress plugin you're using that automatically appends .htm to the end of every URL you've transferred to your new WP CMS--why were you unable to keep the URLs as-is, without the .htm? My rec here would be to undo that, and keep the original URLs (without .htm).

**Question 1: **As far as this question goes, I do think you'll need to clarify the above before I can make a solid rec for you. Again, my preference would be for you to use your original URLs as the main ones and deprecate these .htm versions if possible. That _may _require you to 301 redirect the .htm versions to the non-htm counterparts.

Question 2: what do you mean, example.com/index.htm no longer exists? Have you deleted this page entirely? If so, you may not need to do anything here. I do however, think you need to establish a singular URL to be your homepage, and see no reason you shouldn't use example.com (on its own) as your home, instead of appending /index.htm or /index.php

Hey there! I took a look at this--it is definitely possible that search engines might have flagged this QR code & copy to your pages as being duplicative content, but it doesn't seem like a large enough issue to have caused a continuous downward trend to your traffic.

Are there any other things you've done to your website since December, or things you did around the same time as this QR code addition?