I think this is good question even for those who are more experienced. We all know what worked in 2010, 2015, etc. But what are your most recent recommendations?

From what I see, backlinks still do their work. PR, social media mentions, google for business. It all works - at least for us. If we add good navigation structure, HTTPS, mobile friendly design, that's good enough to bring pages up for most keywords in general. However, when it comes to more competitive keywords, you need something more to get on the first page.

Share what works for you.

That's weird, because organic is high quality traffic source and it converts well. But you might be spot on actually. The amount of ad units could be the reason for some issues. I just don't think they would mark it invalid traffic.

There are guidelines for Google ad network, so I'd definitely suggest checking that document out and reading through it. It will save you potential headaches (Adsense ban etc.).

You can check it here: https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/6008942?hl=en

Google Search Console is indicating that my has been blocked by robots.txt file. While testing it, through the robots.text testing tool it says ALLOWED.

Wondering why Google mentioned the sitemap contains URLs which are blocked by robots.txt. How to resolve this issue?

For example, if you search Google for > SEO checklist

you'll likely see rich answer as I captured on the screenshot below. It's now pretty common top result for frequently asked questions on Google, and from what I know, the CTR is really good for these results.


One thing I don't really understand is, how do you make your site appear like this? Does it have something to do with microdata like schema.org, or is it Google parsing the answer somehow from information on your website and you can't really affect how does it look?

I have few well ranking pages for question queries that receive thousands of impressions, but they don't appear as a rich answer, so they are sitting on 2nd or 3rd position.

What is your most significant source of traffic? Can you specify amount of traffic your site is receiving?

Are you using any traffic generation services? If your traffic is auto generated by bots (high bounce rate, low time spent on site, zero interactions, etc.) there is not a good signal and you should take some steps to make sure your Adsense account is not going to be banned.

I am running a blog http://www.aspmantra.com from last 4 years. But not getting good traffic. I want to earn money. Also adsense is approved for this domain. From last 3 or 4 months not getting 100 % earing. I am only getting 2 % of it, other all are deducted as invalid traffic.

So, how about now? Do you have any stats? Would be interesting to see how it affected your site rankings, but my guess is, that few hours outage doesn't have too much impact on it. Chances are Google hasn't even found out.

But really, who knows?

I need some help and guidance regarding Hreflang tag.

We are working on a website, say example.com. We are planning to launch the same website in the german language with different domain - example.de. The content should remain the same on the .de website.

We don't want to get into the Google penalty for duplicate content. How can I use hreflang tag on both of the websites?

I am confused using the hreflang tag on both websites. Should I need to add both tags on two domains?

I'd appreciate your thoughts. Thanks guys

There is no point to implement such a redundant URL structure. It's over-optimization, and it could be bad for your site, even though this isn't ordinary keyword stuffing.

I'd suggest using simple URLs. Make em easy to read, short and descriptive. Do not overuse keywords just for sake of optimization. Think visitors-first, just like Google does, and you'll be good.

It's honestly bad looking URL structure, and I'd avoid it if possible.

Can duplicate keywords in URLs boost page importance on that keyword? Or is it potentially subject to penalisation?

Think of some-product.com/some-product/some-product-{specific} where product specific would be either color, size, model, version or so.

To me, it looks quiet spammy, but saw that on a site. They do well in G's SERP. I would rather not post their actual website for now, but you know get what i mean.

Hello guys, my domain expired and I didn't know about it. It took my like 10-12 hours to fix it. During that time, my site was down. Is it possible that my site has been penalized or at least down ranked due to domain expiry? It happened recently - yesterday, so I have no stats from search console yet.

It's keyword stuffing - make sure to get rid of that shit.

@Sophia - nice forums ;)

@priyaverma so what's the point of your post? Do you prefer subdomain or a brand new domain?

Is Let's Encrypt certificate equally good for SEO as any other certificate money could buy? I am about to launch my new website, but I am still not decided whether should I use Let's encrypt or buy something from certification authorities like Comodo?

If you are asking, because you are considering https over http, then the answer is https, regardless the certificate. Read more details about https vs. http.

If you're comparing any paid vs. Let's encrypt the more important question here is, what is the acceptance of the Certificaton Authority (CA), that issued your certificate.

Talking about Google an their Let's Encrypt, these days you're good to go with it. And yes, it does equally good job securing your website as virtually any other certificate, assuming same parameters.

If you are a bank or other financial (security critical) organization, there are better options though. However, I don't think that's the case.

Simply use Google's Let's Encrypt and never look back :P I use it for my affiliate websites, and they are doing pretty well in Google. There is no point overpaying fancy certificates to make Google love you. Think users first. As far as your users can transport their requests over to your server and vice-versa securely, that's all you should care about. I think that's also what Google cares about. To make their users secure in first place. Whole point of Google forcing you to use SSL certificate for your website is not about making it harder for you to rank. It's all about users and their security. That's why I think it's fair and we should accept that.

I read many opinions that search engines do not pass nearly any of main domain authority to a subdomain, because it's basically different domain. Some people say that subdomain receives SOME of its main domain authority.

I have no real experience with this, at least nothing measurable, but I think that it makes sense that subdomain is much closer to the main domain and therefore should take at least some advantage over newly registered domain.

What do you think?

That will surely get penalized as it is nothing but keyword stuffing

one time in the url is enough and using it more than once doesnt have any extra effect

Once again, welcome to SEO Forum!

It's a pleasure for me to welcome you here, in our own tiny piece of the internet where we meet to brainstorm and exchange our experience with nearly anything, but mostly connected with internet marketing, search engine optimization and related topics.

To make sure you enjoy your stay, this is thread for you - guys with ideas. Feel free to suggest new features, changes and edits to the site, so we can grow together and make this even better and nicer place to be.

I will personally try to go through all of your requests, and prioritize them according to how you upvote.

Don worry to post anything. Really.