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Just to add to Ross' answer - I wouldn't worry that those competitors are getting an edge in Google because of the links they are putting on YouTube. Links on YouTube could (feasibly) make Google aware of a page if links to that page don't appear anywhere else but if anyone is relying on that for discovery of pages then there's deeper problems.

If you think that the links from YouTube will be passing authority to your site, perhaps particularly high authority because it's a Google property - that's not how Google interprets that kind of thing and, as Ross points out, the automatic no follow is a sign of their attitude to that kind of user generated link.

Hope that helps!

Heya, when you say "not appearing" do you mean you're searching for keywords you hope to show up for? Or are you searching for the urls of your site specifically? If you write "inurl:the-url-of-your-page" into Google - what comes up?

I agree with you both that "blog" in the urls is valuable in terms of segmenting Analytics data. The only thing I'd bear in mind is that changing the URL isn't actually just changing the URL. To Google - you are deleting one page and creating another, and it takes time to understand that the new page should replace the old page, even if there's a redirect in place.

Given that you've presumably already done this once and you're reversing it, the risk should be lower, but I'd still approach this change as though it's a migration. I'm not saying "don't do it" just "take precautions".

In terms of tracking in the interim - you could consider using a custom dimension to identify blog posts. Use Google Tag Manager to determine the page is a blog post then send the dimension along with the page hit. Not ideal but it's something if you find you don't have other options.

Good luck!

Hi there, nofollow links shouldn't harm your site's performance in and of themselves - they should just be ignored by Google when trying to rank your site. If you're finding that 99% of the links to your site are nofollow then perhaps you would want to have a look at how you are marketing the site - do you think the links are driving value in terms of getting real customers coming to the site to buy?

If so then great, if it looks more like they are artificial and not driving value then even aside from whether they'll harm your rankings they could be harming your business in that time and money is being spent on something that isn't helping it grow.

Long answer short - wouldn't worry about nofollow links too much, but wouldn't specifically go out to get them unless there is a non-SEO strategy behind it.

Hope that helps!

Totally agree with Kate, Google doesn't have access to this information, an uptick in messages is a good thing if you can tie that back to your business being more popular but I definitely wouldn't pay to have bots send messages for the sake of SEO.

Happy to help Good luck!

I think seoelevated has your answer - if you can overlay the text on the image as actual text that should tick all the boxes for you

Thanks, yea I had a look at the site using the domain you posted above. As I say - best way to answer this question is to look at the numbers for your site. If you see pages that are less valuable then you can consider handling linking to them in another way

Hi there, always good to be thinking of ways to improve.

In my opinion you're hitting a good balance in terms of your attitude - if the links are driving value for customers then great. The 100 links threshold is a rule of thumb to avoid pages which are laden with links that aren't helping, particularly because if we have that volume of links on a page it becomes much more likely that we've added links to less valuable pages which are distracting from the more valuable ones.

Before you start considering taking links out for the sake of it, I'd have a look at user behaviour across the site. Are any of the linked-to pages less frequently visited? Can we find anything out through click tracking on the homepage or through page view numbers in GA? I think those numbers could make a lot of the decision for you.

Hope that helps!

The international targeting setting is deceptively powerful and I have seen it wreak havoc.

I wouldn't expect it to cause problems with US rankings if you change it to be more focused on US so if you made other changes around the same time it is probably a good idea to look into what you can test/roll back.

The good news is when I have seen this setting cause problems I've seen the problems reverse pretty quickly after switching the setting back so if you do determine that there wasn't anything else around the same time then it could be worth testing switching that back.

Hope that helps!

Hi Chantelle, this sounds like it's been quite a concerning situation. There's a lot of information here and it looks like Effect Digital may have given some responses and have followed up on email.

This question is currently marked as "unanswered" and I don't want to mark it as answered unless you have got an answer. Would you be able to share any anonymised solution here to benefit other Moz users? If you haven't got a solution then post the latest development and we'll see what else we can do

Hi SvenRi, that's an interesting one! The message you're getting from Google suggests that, rather than not finding the canonical tag, the system has reason to believe that the canonical is not representative of the best content.

One thing I'd bear in mind is that Google doesn't take canonical tags as gospel, but rather guidance, so it can just ignore them without there necessarily being a problem in how you've implemented that tag. Another is that while Google says that their crawlers can parse JavaScript, there's evidence that it doesn't parse the page content perfectly.

What happens when you fetch and render the pages in question using Search Console (both the page you want to rank and the page Google is selecting)? Can you see all of the content? Google uses the same JavaScript rendering as Chrome 41 (see here) have you tried accessing with that? You could also try a tool like Screaming Frog with JavaScript rendering switched on to see what kind of page content comes back. It could be worth making sure the canonical is generated properly but I'd also be checking that the page content is being rendered properly to make sure Google is seeing the pages as different as you describe. I'd also check to make sure there isn't a second, conflicting, canonical tag on the page. I know some SPA frameworks can have issues with double-opening HTML tags when one page is accessed after another, that could be something that would confuse a crawler so you could double-check that.

As ever, there are the rumours that Google will start giving much more weight to mobile in terms of indexing. Given your question about things changing recently - does your site have desktop and mobile parity?

If it looks as though everything is kosher, is it possible that the page Google is suggesting is much more heavily linked to internally or externally? If internally you could consider reviewing your internal linking (Will wrote a post about ways to think about internal linking here). You could use a tool like Majestic to look at who is linking to these pages externally, it may be worth double checking that all the links are genuine.

TL;DR I would start with the whole page content, not just the search directives, to make sure that's always being understood properly, then I would look in to linking. These are mainly areas of investigation and next debug steps, hopefully they'll help narrow down the search for you!

I have a slightly different perspective here, based on one core assumption so feel free to tell me if this is off the mark - **I am assuming you want the products you are linking to on deeper paginated pages to still be found by Google so that they can rank. **

Google has said that noindexed urls are, over time, treated as noindex nofollow. Likewise, if all of the deeper paginated pages are canonicalised to the first page Google may not pass authority down to each of them. Pagination is common across the web, unless you are seeing massive conflict problems (which would be unusual) I would not robots block them, noindex them, or canonicalise them. I'd just leave them as they are and trust Google to figure it out until you have evidence that it is  causing problems on your site in specific.

Hope that helps!

HI resourcerep, it's great that you're asking questions on the community.

Have you been using this help article? I'm just going to check some assumptions here:

• Have you set up a search console property for the new site so you can select it during the site move operation?
• What errors (if any) do you get from search console?
• What happens when you try to access the old pages, do you just get a warning?

It sounds like the SSL cert is the issue. Unfortunately due to the way HTTPS works it needs a SSL certificate before you can send and receive data.

However, you could find the cheapest SSL cert you can buy, and put that on the old page to allow the redirect to work. To be honest that'll be valuable for more than just this, as having working 301s will help both searcg crawlers and users trying to access the old site.

Hope that helps!

Donald is right, here's an article on the Search Engine Journal website that might be helpful in getting you started, it was published about a year ago but should still hold true. It talks mainly about the potential secondary benefits of adopting IA, in terms of having a cleaner setup and therefore potentially ranking better, but those improvements also give some clue as to the hoops you may need to jump through.

Hi there, so just to confirm - you have a page that is redirected to your homepage (I'm assuming not with a JavaScript redirect) and your Google Analytics is reporting that page is getting traffic from 12-reasons-for-seo.com?

This sounds like Measurement Protocol spam, I'll explain why I think that based on the way GA works but to reassure you - if that's the case then all it's messing with is your analytics. Google doesn't use Google Analytics data to inform search rankings - in terms of "bounces" Google just uses data about whether a searcher, on a Google page, clicks one result and then comes back to the search results page and clicks on another.

• Google Analytics records page views based on receiving a message from some JavaScript code that runs on (ideally) every page of your website
• If the page is redirected before it loads (as in not a JavaScript redirect) that code won't have time to run, so Google Analytics won't see you having a page view on that page, even if someone tried to access it
• Measurement Protocol is a way you can manually send hits to Google, it's a way of recording all kind of things that are difficult to reflect in terms of pageviews and events on your site (i.e. someone bought a product over the phone or someone viewed the same page on your app)
• Anyone can get your GA ID by looking at your page code and once they have that, they can send fake pageviews to your Google Analytics.

If it's true that all of these pageviews are landing on a page that doesn't even load before it's redirected (that's important, because if it's a JavaScript redirect your GA code might have time to run) then the best solution for this is probably to find what all of these hits have in common (sounds like you've already found a couple things) then create a Google Analytics filter for your reporting view which excludes this traffic as specifically as possible (to reduce risk of accidentally dropping real traffic)

Hi, I think you've already got a couple of good answers here but just to throw in my thoughts; to me this would all come down to how much value you're getting for the volume of content you're creating.

It sounds to me like you have 1.3k product landing pages, and you're producing 80 articles a month, plus maybe you're indexing the review pages too?

I think frequency here becomes secondary to how much each of these things are adding. If you are indexing the reviews pages for specific products, those pages could just be diluting your site equity. Unless they are performing a valuable function I'd consider canonicalising them to the product pages. As the others have said, having product pages that regularly update with new reviews shouldn't be a problem but with all the content you're adding to the site you could be relying on Google indexing these changes far more quickly than it actually is.

If you're adding a large number of articles every month - are those articles cannibalising other pages, or each other? The way I'd try to gauge if it's too much is whether the pages are getting traffic, whether you're having a lot of flip-flopping in the keywords you're targeting, and whether you're starting to get issues with Google indexing all of your pages. Similar to the review pages, if the articles are providing value to your readers, getting you links or getting you a decent amount of traffic then grand, if they aren't generating much I'd consider producing less or removing/redirecting poorly performing articles after a little while to preserve site equity and help focus Google's crawl.

On the note of posting frequency, I would agree with Gaston that it's about what's right for your readers. If a lot of article-worthy content comes out at the same time, I'd post about it then and there, if this is just content you're coming up with and adding and timing doesn't matter, spreading it throughout the month makes sense in terms of staying fresh, getting the articles indexed, and honestly not having to rush deadlines/delay release.

Good question! So you're saying that the text is part of the image? Not written on the page? In that case definitely put it on the text of the page - Google can't read text out of images so you don't need to worry about repeating yourself and it's showing Google important content for the first time!

Hi there, unfortunately we can't really rely on any one tool to know all of our backlinks, even Google!

When someone links to your site, they could be doing it from the New York Times, or they could be doing it from a tiny site which they just created. The only way any tool (Google, Moz etc.) can get a list of backlinks is by continually accessing a page, finding every link on that page, going to all the linked pages, finding all the links on those pages etc.

With something like the New York Times, these tools know the site, they know to keep coming back to check every so often, so it's more likely they identify the link going to your site. With a tiny site someone has just created - it's much harder for these tools to even know the site exists, never mind know the specific page on that site which is linking to yours. Even if a tool has a massive database of the internet, there are trillions of web pages and no one database will have a record of them all.

The next best thing is for us to use as many tools as we can to get as complete a picture of the issue as we can.  I often try to check;

• Moz
• Google Search Console (this will only give you the first 1K)
• AHrefs
• SEMRush
• Majestic SEO.

You'll need to dedupe the different lists but between them, they should stand a better chance of finding backlinks to your site. If they don't find anything then it's likely that the pages linking to your site are either quite out-of-the-way or they are in some way blocked from crawlers.

In terms of tracking keywords, Moz does allow you to include a keyword list which it'll give you ranking information for over time, you can also track keywords in Stat (search "getstat"), and SEMRush and AHRefs will give you ranking information too.

Hope that helps!

Hi there! What's the purpose of these landing pages? Are they designed to be findable on Google? Or are they just separate landing pages? It's not uncommon for sites to have landing pages developed for PPC, for example, that aren't indexed because they don't serve a purpose in search.

**If you want people to find these pages on Google - **why are they orphaned? The fact that they aren't getting internal links will be harming them at the very least.

If people finding these pages on Google is not part of the strategy - how many quality links are these pages getting? If not many pages are getting quality links why are they indexed? Adding a noindex tag to these pages could be a clean way to solve this problem.