Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Yes, that is what I was referring to regarding Search Console.

It's _possible _that Moz isn't recognizing the H1 because it's below the H2 tag and  there are two H1 tags. Those two issues should be resolved whether or not it's the cause of Moz not registering your H1.

Hi Tiffany,

Have you rendered the page in Google Search Console to see how Google will render the site? In most cases, this will answer any question you have about Google's perception of a page element.

As Johnny said, you definitely want to qualify your keyword more. Let's say for the sake of discussion that this link was the magic bullet that got you to rank #1 for "towing" - presumably it's a local service so if you rank that well for such a generic term, you would get a lot of traffic sure, but 99.99% of it's going to be very unqualified.

The effort required to do this is relatively high and you'll see zero impact - actually, maybe a decline since you'd be redirecting all your current URLs. Google doesn't care about trailing slashes or file extensions on URLs. The most important thing is that URL variants all resolve to a single address. For example https://australiatimenow.com.au/category/health/ should always resolve instead of https://australiatimenow.com.au/category/health

Canonicals will help with the trailing slash issue, but that's not the sole reason for your traffic loss. Read up on Angular and address those issues first. It's definitely going to be a boatload of work, but the impact you'll see from that will far outweigh any smaller optimizations you're able to make.

Google has stated more than once that accordioned content will be crawled, indexed, and weighted the same as any other content on the page. This wasn't always the case, but as mobile usage grew and accordions became commonplace for good mobile UX, they pivoted their stance on this type of content. In your example, I would especially not be worried about it since the primary content of the page is in the Overview section.

It was wise to kill one of those pages. If I were in this position, I would use as much data as possible to inform the decision. I would look at:

Google Search Console for impressions, average position, CTR

Google Analytics: entrances, page value, bounces

You see that because the site is built to be a progressive web app, as seen in their Lighthouse Report.

When did the redesign occur? I looked at the wayback machine and it looks like it was well over a year ago. It's concerning that you're still seeing rank/traffic issues.

I noticed that MozBar isn't able to grab a status code from the site, which is concerning.  From the looks of things, you're using a version of Angular that isn't Google-friendly. When I click links on the site, none of the data in MozBar changes, which means Google likely isn't seeing anything different when they follow links either, effectively making your site a single page.  Read more here: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/angular-seo-guide/303849/#close

You should read Google's Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines. This document includes details of what they call E-A-T (Expertise, Authority, Trustworthiness). It's a long read and relatively dry, but there is some really good material in there that will help you better understand how Google evaluates a page. DA and PA are much simpler metrics than what Google actually uses in their algorithm, they're meant to help you make decisions and gauge competition, but these numbers are not provided by or used by Google.

And for what it's worth, I've seen countless instances of sites with great content and no links outrank mediocre content with a decent link profile. As Google gets more advanced in their ability to understand the content (using NLP), searcher intent, and engagement signals, links become less and less important.

Hi,

You can use bit.ly for backlinks, but keep in mind, they are 301 redirects, so you lose a bit of link juice when search engines step through them.

If you chose to do this, you'll also want to tag the URLs before you shortlink them, otherwise your Google Analytics reporting will show all that traffic as Direct/(none) in the Channel report.

Are you talking about the incentives for Mozpoints? If so, they can be found here: https://moz.rankious.com/_moz/community/mozpoints

Hi,

Putting 3 city names in your title tags is going make them way longer than the recommended character count for titles. This will probably also look a bit spammy to search engines. I'd recommend reading through Moz's guide to local SEO, which can be found here: https://moz.rankious.com/_moz/learn/local. One thing to note though, it's very difficult to rank for local keywords in a city that you don't have a physical presence in. For location-based queries, search algorithms tend to show results for based on geographical proximity since it better matches the intent of the searcher.

Happy optimizing!

Hi ,

Did you follow all of Google's Change of Address instructions? If redirects are in place, chances are you missed something else minor that can have a big impact.

Hi,

Google Analytics is pretty good about assigning proper attribution to channels. If you had been sending out emails prior to tagging the links, that traffic was falling under either Direct or (Other).

PPC is the only medium that would cannibalize organic since you can have impressions in both spaces at the same time. The drop in organic traffic could just be the ebb and flow of your business. Since most businesses have seasonality, year over year comparison is  often a better yard stick for performance.

Is there a particular search engine that you can attribute the traffic loss to? Or perhaps a piece of content received more entrances last week simply due to the timeliness of that content?

Hi,

Duplicates of this nature can only be fixed by adding canonical tags to one preferred version of that product. When you have multiple instances of the product throughout many categories, search engines aren't sure which to show, so they'll usually not show any of your results. For more on canonical tags, read this Moz article.

You cannot remove it from the Moz report, as that's part of its purpose - to show you instances of duplicate content.

Hi Daniel,

SEO requires a great deal of patience. Your site is only 8 months old, and depending on your industry, it could take much longer than that to achieve good organic visibility. I would not recommend moving to a new domain, that won't solve your problem, it will only confuse the search engines more. You've had a lot of ups and downs it sounds like, so hold tight. I just migrated a site from HTTP to HTTPS and it took 3 months for Google to completely drop the old HTTP URLs out of the index. These things take time.

It sounds like your site could benefit from some on-site optimization. Build out a keyword map (pairing each KW with a specific URL), you don't want to have too many topics on one page, and you don't want to have too many pages for one topic (one piece of content = one URL).

Hi,

You definitely want to avoid redirects where possible, so scratch option number 2. Redirection causes you to lose about 10% of the authority that page has built up. Google tends to prefer pages that they have known about for a while.

If you were to do option 2, you'd also have to update all of your internal links to point to the new page, as well as outreach to any external linking sites to have them update.

All you need to do is take the source code for the variation page and make it the source code for the original.

It sounds like you may have used Google Content Experiments. If that's the case, the additional URL created for your variation doesn't need to be excluded from crawls or disallowed, Google knows it's there and there's no other way to get to it other than the code snippet they utilize to send your sample to the variation.

Becky,

The best scenario would be to roll out secure to the whole site and then apply a 301 redirect rule directing all http to https. But since you can't do that, your next best bet is going to be canonical tags. Canonicals are 'soft 301 redirects' and search engines treat them very similarly to an actual 301 redirect. I would go that route in the meantime until you're able to go secure site-wide.

This guide that Cyrus Shepard put together will be helpful when you get to the point of fully integrating HTTPS: https://moz.rankious.com/_moz/blog/seo-tips-https-ssl

Hi,

First things first, it's a common misconception that the robots.txt disallow: / will prevent indexing. It's only indented to prevent crawling, which is why you don't get a meta description pulled into the result snippet. If you have links pointing to that page and a disallow: / on your robots, it's still eligible for indexation.

Second, it's pretty weird that the noindex tag isn't effective, as that's the only sure-fire way to get de-indexed intentionally. I would recommend creating an XML sitemap for all URLs on that domain that are noindex'd and resubmit that in Search Console. If Google hasn't crawled your site since adding the noindex, they don't know it's there. In my experience, forcing them to recrawl via XML submission has been effective at getting noindex noticed quicker.

I would also recommend taking a look at the link profile and removing any possible links pointing to your noindex pages, this will help future attempts at indexing.