Mar 13, 2024

Site Issues and Errors

Martin Senko replied to thread Site Issues and Errors

Thanks @binayjha !

Fixed.

Mar 12, 2024

Should I pay to fix those issues ?

Martin Senko replied to thread Should I pay to fix those issues ?

This is an audit from Ahrefs. A little bit of work with site structure and content. Can't comment on price but if he can fix it for you to no errors, it does sound fair.

Mar 11, 2024

SEO Directory is now live

Martin Senko published thread SEO Directory is now live

Part of the spam issue we used to have on SEOForum was promotional posts and links by either individuals or agencies, trying way too hard at promoting themselves on the forum.

Unfortunately, to maintain clean discussion we had to delete all of that so sometimes they tried again or abandoned their accounts completely. Now, we have great option for those who are building their SEO business and want to reach out to potential clients - SEO Directory.

We have plans for both Individuals and Agencies, so you can list your service with us no matter the entity size.

As always, looking for feedback.

Have a great day! Martin

Sitemap show is corrupted

Martin Senko replied to thread Sitemap show is corrupted

Please, explain what do you mean by Sitemap show is corrupted.

Is it a syntax error? Or 404 error?

Mar 9, 2024

Parasite SEO ?

Martin Senko replied to thread Parasite SEO ?

Honestly, this happens on the Seoforum too. Some people try to take advantage of reputable websites by publishing their content there and driving traffic away to their money page... That's why you can't link from posts, so there is little motivation to do that.

Back to your question though. I don't think niche directory listings qualify. It's actually valid way of let people know about their options and choose from them. Unless you're exploiting third party platform authority to gain traffic from unrelated websites by spamming, we're likely not talking about parasite SEO.

Mar 6, 2024

Domain Authority Increase Question

Martin Senko replied to thread Domain Authority Increase Question

First thing first, I'd stay away from Fiverr links.

If you want good quality links, you need to "earn" them. You'll have to offer some sort of value in return. So maybe you can write an article for them or just keep improving your website until you can offer value on your website. Paid traffic can alway help you accelerate, but you need a plan. Budgets drain quickly with current CPCs.

Mar 5, 2024

Google Search Update March 2024

Martin Senko published thread Google Search Update March 2024

Let me share the latest Google Update news.

https://blog.google/products/search/google-search-update-march-2024/

And a little bit more info: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2024/03/core-update-spam-policies

There are 3 common practices this update is looking to fix

  1. Expired domain abuse
  2. Scaled content abuse
  3. Site reputation abuse

Let me highlight this part: Occasionally, expired domains are purchased and repurposed with the primary intention of boosting search ranking of low-quality or unoriginal content. This can mislead users into thinking the new content is part of the older site, which may not be the case. Expired domains that are purchased and repurposed with the intention of boosting the search ranking of low-quality content are now considered spam.

Any SERP movements on your websites? Good or bad?

Feb 28, 2024

Midjourney SEO

Martin Senko replied to thread Midjourney SEO

It's too early to tell as the images are getting better and better rapidly.

As a rule of thumb, Google will always fight easily scalable content with zero added value. So if you're asking if it's good idea to generate millions of images in order to get them to rank in Google's image search, I'd say it's not worth it.

Feb 22, 2024

Opening several pages about the same city - SEO

Martin Senko replied to thread Opening several pages about the same city - SEO

This is the kind of keyword Google understands well thanks to LSI.

So if I look for "residential plubming phoenix" for example, In suggested searches I can see:

  • cheap plumber phoenix
  • commercial plumbing contractors phoenix, az
  • best plumbers in phoenix
  • plumbers phoenix
  • emergency plumber phoenix
  • phoenix plumbing and drain service
  • plumbers near me
  • plumber scottsdale

So I wouldn't be worried about context. I would still mention those on the website anyway, from the potential client point of view; they need to know if you do both commercial and residential plumbing, and maybe also if you can work after regular hours when something breaks (emergency).

But Google can figure out those relevant keywords.

Unwanted traffic

Martin Senko replied to thread Unwanted traffic

How does the traffic look in the access log? If it's same IP address, just block it on the NGINX/Apache level and move on.

I'd be careful about blocking wider IP blocks though.

Feb 20, 2024

Let me introduce our new sponsor and partner

Martin Senko replied to thread Let me introduce our new sponsor and partner

Thanks @binayjha we're moving forward together!

Duplicate website

Martin Senko replied to thread Duplicate website

Lost, doest that mean you are no longer registrant of the domain name? If so, you can't redirect the traffic as you no longer control the domain name.

Let me introduce our new sponsor and partner

Martin Senko published thread Let me introduce our new sponsor and partner

Dear SEOs!

February is coming to its end already and we have some exciting news for everyone working on our platform, but specially for you – our users!

This year will be a special one, as we are currently working on an update, which is going to bring bug fixes and new features. However, the most important update that I can finally announce is our new forum sponsor. We have started discussing potential deal in September 2023 and it took us some time to finally adjust the details, but here we go.

Let me introduce a new SEOForum sponsor: Almabet Partners. Almabet is in the gaming industry and even though it may sound like a weird fit for our forum, let me tell you that they offer such interesting conditions for their affiliates that you don't want to miss out on this.

Our friends at Almabet Partners are trying to create a friendly and profitable environment for their affiliates and one of the biggest benefits is definitely great revenue share. They offer 50% rev-share for new affiliates!

If that doesn't sound good enough, they also offer the Lifetime Revenue Share model. So you earn commissions from all the purchases your referred user makes.

Cost per Acquisition with Almabet is among the highest in the industry. They offer over 10,000 unique and trending games and their platform is localized for every region so no matter where your audience is located, Almabet should work.

Add convenient payment methods including wire transfers, Bitcoin and USDT, real time tracking for affiliates and you have an ideal platform to promote.

Why are they promoting here? Our friends at Almabet know that our forum has some of the best webmasters coming here to either learn or share their SEO knowledge and we wanted to share this opportunity with you. Chances are you are in the industry, looking for a competitive platform to promote. In such a case, here you go. If not, enjoy the updates coming to our forum that we will be able to bring up thanks to our partnership.

You win either way.

Martin

Feb 8, 2024

Advise asked

Martin Senko replied to thread Advise asked

Those H1's, it's a valid fix anyway, good catch! But I'd expect there is something more to the ranking difference mentioned above. Did you check their backlinks, if there isn't one really strong link or something like that? By the number of links we're talking relatively small websites so one great link could possibly make big difference...

I'd definitely try to score great link(s) and wouldn't care about quantitative metrics. This is definitely quality over quantity game and if there is a potential business on that website, there should be a budget to gain authority in search too.

Feb 7, 2024

Advise asked

Martin Senko replied to thread Advise asked

Did you check Ahrefs DR? They have quite complex data collection, so it's not a bad idea to check if you want to compare the easy and quick way (although it doesn't mean it's accurate, and the less data/smaller link profile etc, less correlation to actual rankings).

Would be interesting to compare GSC of your client and competitor :)) I think this would help to understand what's going on. But yeah, I know...

Jan 31, 2024

DA not changed yet

Martin Senko replied to thread DA not changed yet

Can't tell exact numbers and it also varied for us in the past, but several months sounds like way too long to update. How about Ahrefs? Have you checked their DR development? If not, this is a good way to cross-validate if your links are getting recognized.

Jan 22, 2024

Low traffic on my cooking site

Martin Senko replied to thread Low traffic on my cooking site

Who gave you negative backlinks? There is no such thing as "bad" backlink in terms of negative context. For example, "I don't like www.example.com" doesn't mean the link is negative as Google claims they don't look at sentiment.

The only way to earn bad links is from bad, very low quality websites known for spamming etc. It could hurt if well targeted but again, Google is now pretty good at understanding such practices so you only need to worry for specific negative campaigns. Most of the automated spam doesn't need to be disavowed, Google will ignore those links automatically.

Make sure to publish great content, keep up the regularity and frequency of your posts. It will work for you.

Jan 18, 2024

Important Title and H1 header question for everyone?

Martin Senko replied to thread Important Title and H1 header question for everyone?

You don't need to stuff keywords in their exact search form. Actually, you don't even need to use all of the keywords.

Search engines now use LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) so they can recognize the topic if you don't use the exact keywords. We mentioned LSI in our Base too - check Keywords.

What are the most common link building techniques that have never worked for you?

Martin Senko published thread What are the most common link building techniques that have never worked for you?

I constantly see lists of the best practices like X proven linkbuilding methods that WORK, but I always see something that I can't believe works for someone. I know we all have something that works for us and we will not share (at least in public).

But let's share something that's not worth trying, specially if the linked resource is of lower quality.

For me, number one failed method is Broken backlinks. I've never talked to a webmaster in my life that would consider linking to a random website suggested by a random stranger in an email. That's just not happening. I wouldn't do it either.

Do you have any?

I'm getting /ourwebsite.com/redirectUrl=Y.com type of backlinks from university website.

Martin Senko replied to thread I'm getting /ourwebsite.com/redirectUrl=Y.com type of backlinks from university website.

I am not sure if there is any potential benefit - it's obvious exploit, with the goal of website Y baiting webmasters to visit the site curious about those inbound links OR there could be a harmful script that takes visitors of given URL to Y.

Feel free to share full, real URL in a code tag, so we can check what's going on in there. But chances of it being beneficial are slim to none from my perspective.

I'm getting /ourwebsite.com/redirectUrl=Y.com type of backlinks from university website.

Martin Senko replied to thread I'm getting /ourwebsite.com/redirectUrl=Y.com type of backlinks from university website.

This kind of links will not help your website grow its authority. In some cases, it may have negative effect on the target site while most of the time they are being ignored by Google by default (they can easily recognize bigger link "attacks" when millions of new links appear over night following the same schema).

Jan 9, 2024

SEO - Google Search Results

Martin Senko replied to thread SEO - Google Search Results

So you didn't have any title there, and fixed it later? It may help to either wait for Google to recrawl OR force recrawl/reindex either by requesting in GSC or earning a backlink to that page, just like @binayjha suggested.

How about the URL change? What's the story?

Jan 8, 2024

SEO - Google Search Results

Martin Senko replied to thread SEO - Google Search Results

Your question is not clear.

Have you moved your site from example.com to sub.example.com?

What is not showing correctly? Page titles? If so, what can you see on such a page, when you check the title tag in the code?

Jan 5, 2024

Delete, or Delete or Redirect?

Martin Senko replied to thread Delete, or Delete or Redirect?

@jaap I agree with that, but by making it simple and redirecting all the deleted pages, is there anything harmful, other than getting your redirects more complex?

If there are no hits, there are no redirects either way. If there are hits, you want them redirected no matter where is the request coming from. imho

Re: SEO 2024 Strategy

Martin Senko upvoted Re: SEO 2024 Strategy

It's nothing unusual in 2024. On-page SEO, off-page SEO - step-by-step and its done.

Jan 4, 2024

Delete, or Delete or Redirect?

Martin Senko replied to thread Delete, or Delete or Redirect?

Definitely redirect if that page existed for some time. Chances are it has some traffic and/or authority, and why would you drop that? Redirect and you should be fine.

How to build a quality backlinks

Martin Senko replied to thread How to build a quality backlinks

You can check SEO Base, where we have some basic methods of link building listed. It is a good start to better understand the basic and you can go from there. Try some of those methods that work for you and feel free to ask along the way.

@ali_mohammad if you want to build an authority as a SEO or a dev you can't just copy&paste from ChatGPT like that. Sorry, but it doesn't work like that.

Which one is better, Google or Bing?

Martin Senko replied to thread Which one is better, Google or Bing?

This is actually funny, because on my very first attempt I received the same page as a top result.

Still believe Google is much more complete and therefor better in serving requests, mostly due to much bigger user base. They have much more data from users, know their behaviour and been adjusting their service accordingly for years.

Re: Wish you all the best in 2024

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Wish you all the best in 2024

Happy New Year to All!

Dec 31, 2023

Wish you all the best in 2024

Martin Senko published thread Wish you all the best in 2024

Hey SEOs,

First of all, thank you for being part of the forum in 2023. We appreciate your questions and even more those helpful replies that helped not just the OPs, but many more who landed in the threads and found what they were looking for.

Wish you all the best in 2024. Hope you have prosperous year and reach all your (not just SEO related) goals.

Hope to see you here in 2024, even more active.

Best of luck everyone!

Martin

Dec 25, 2023

Re: Give me solution about yoast seo setting

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Give me solution about yoast seo setting

It is under Taxonomies tab in the Yoast SEO plugin. Go to,

WP Dashboard >> SEO >> Search Appearance >> Taxonomies > Tags > Show in Search Results > No.

Dec 14, 2023

Re: What will Happen to Ranked Pages When I Turn on Canonical Links

Martin Senko upvoted Re: What will Happen to Ranked Pages When I Turn on Canonical Links

I would advice to turn them on. Duplicated content is a SEO killer. The crawl budget will be used more effective. Internal links will have more value.

It'll take some time, but then your rankings should go up.

Dec 9, 2023
Dec 6, 2023

Re: Not seeing any traffic or ranking improvement after 9 months of doing SEO

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Not seeing any traffic or ranking improvement after 9 months of doing SEO

Do you have visitors?<br><br> Do a technical audit<br> Use a heat map.<br> Use Search Console to see exit page, bounces.<br> Check CTR <br> Check load times of every page.<br> And don't forget high quality backlinks, backlinks, backlinks.

Nov 30, 2023

Traffic Drop

Martin Senko replied to thread Traffic Drop

Extreme? Not sure what qualifies as extreme but for most of ecommerce sites we see increased traffic. Seasonal traffic went down, but that's standard.

What's your niche?

Nov 28, 2023

Not seeing any traffic or ranking improvement after 9 months of doing SEO

Martin Senko replied to thread Not seeing any traffic or ranking improvement after 9 months of doing SEO

For the past 9 month, i was doing SEO for a website

Share more details about what the SEO you have been doing on the site.

Also, can you share niche/keywords, and maybe check your GSC for possible issues? If you seen any, post a screenshot. Thanks

Nov 25, 2023

Spam on forum

Martin Senko replied to thread Spam on forum

Removing quite a lot of spam and trash every day + banning users posting, but they just keep coming so we currently have automated spam solution in progress on our local dev branch. Need to fix few bugs as I don't want it to be greedy and remove lower quality yet authentic questions from real people. Hopefully this will air in two weeks, as I absolutely feel you @jaap

Coming back and seeing all the trash makes me crazy all the time.

Nov 20, 2023

How to prevent spam visits lowering the average visit duration?

Martin Senko replied to thread How to prevent spam visits lowering the average visit duration?

With my magic SEO hat on, I'd say there's a chance Google can see your data as long as you're using GA. HOWEVER (and this is important), I don't think it's possible to put your site down with low traffic quality (bot spam) using bounce visits. What could be more effective strategy would be generating Google searches accessing search results and bouncing back to search (it's called Pogo Sticking). If attacker could generate real traffic from real user agents with realistic (variable) behavior, while generating significant amount to dilute your overall numbers, I can imagine this causing serious harm. Because coming back to SERP from an already visited result is quite strong negative signal for Google.

How to prevent this issue in general? Honestly you can't prevent that. It's up to Google to identify such behavior and make sure that the artificial harmful traffic doesn't affect their rankings, which is their ultimate goal.

Nov 11, 2023

Algorithm Updates and Strategies

Martin Senko replied to thread Algorithm Updates and Strategies

Very broad question without tiny bit of a detail.

What kind of site are you talking about?

Nov 6, 2023

Re: Godaddy to wordpress hosting

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Godaddy to wordpress hosting

Have a look, if this is helpful -

https://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-move-godaddy-website-builder-site-to-wordpress/
Oct 27, 2023

Re: Page Click

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Page Click

Google finished rolling out the October 2023 spam update. Might be the reason.

Page Click

Martin Senko replied to thread Page Click
Oct 25, 2023

Re: News Aggregator

Martin Senko upvoted Re: News Aggregator

For SEO there's no value. Keep also in mind that you make a lot of effort to get visitors to your site. Offering links to leave are not always very helpful.

I would rewrite interesting news and publish it at your blog. So visitors will stay where you want them to be.

Oct 18, 2023

News Aggregator

Martin Senko replied to thread News Aggregator

This will be opinion based, as it always depends on so many factors, including implementation. Anyway, I think it won't help nor hurt your site itself. If you pull all the content, it will be duplicate content and you won't rank with it (unless competing with very low authority websites). If you pull just the titles and excerpts, it's not enough content to rank with...

So it's more about your visitors though - will this extra source of information help them? Is it something they're looking for and why they visit your website?

If it's beneficial, go ahead. If it's just a clutter to have one more feature on the site, I'd avoid it.

Oct 6, 2023

Google released October 2023 core update

Martin Senko replied to thread Google released October 2023 core update

I'd wait until the rollout is officially complete.

@DeadGroom for which countries you're seeing movements?

Google Update: Released October 2023 Spam Update

Martin Senko upvoted Google Update: Released October 2023 Spam Update

An algorithm update to check spam was released globally on 4th October 2023. More information -

https://status.search.google.com/incidents/NzcEhGMDhbQEdXCS35xL

Google released October 2023 core update

Martin Senko published thread Google released October 2023 core update

On Twitter (or X if you will): Today we released the October 2023 core update. We'll update our ranking release history page when the rollout is complete

Do you see any SERP shakedowns for your websites?

Oct 4, 2023

How to submit subdomain's sitemap file in search console?

Martin Senko replied to thread How to submit subdomain's sitemap file in search console?

Why it doesn't work? What's the error message?

Did you trying submitting under xyz.abc.com property? Seems like you should submit it there if you have created it already.

Oct 2, 2023

Re: Where to Buy Instagram Followers?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Where to Buy Instagram Followers?

Buying users is pointless. Better to spend your budget on natural user acquisition. This will have a positive effect on your Instagram profile.

Where to Buy Instagram Followers?

Martin Senko replied to thread Where to Buy Instagram Followers?

See the post above^, it doesn't make sense...

Sep 25, 2023

Re: How can I get Organic keywords on my site?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: How can I get Organic keywords on my site?

It takes time, keep doing the good work.

Sep 16, 2023

Impact Of August 2023 Broad Core Update

Martin Senko replied to thread Impact Of August 2023 Broad Core Update

So what's your personal experience?

Sep 6, 2023

How to Block SEO Tools to check my website?

Martin Senko replied to thread How to Block SEO Tools to check my website?

robots.txt is helpful if the bot you want to avoid respects it. However, there are too many crawlers and bots that don't give a s*, and blocking them is challenging. IP/IP range comes to mind, but those bigger ones use multiple hosts and locations so you'd have to block way too much of a range that could lead to site unavailability for some of your visitors.

I feel your pain though.

Sep 5, 2023

Re: International SEO Duplicate Content Issue For Same Content On Different Cctlds In The Same

Martin Senko upvoted Re: International SEO Duplicate Content Issue For Same Content On Different Cctlds In The Same

Hreflang tags etc. used on the sites are fine. Check the content part, the more similarity in the content will be regarded as canonical despite an otherwise declaration.

Aug 26, 2023

My site is faltering inexplicably

Martin Senko replied to thread My site is faltering inexplicably

I'd focus on quality. Several quality backlinks should help your site. Content without links will work on high authority sites, but if you don't have authority (just low quality links, doesn't matter how many) it will be tough.

Aug 23, 2023

My site is faltering inexplicably

Martin Senko replied to thread My site is faltering inexplicably

I see charts like that all the time.

There is not much data (clicks/impressions) so it fluctuates a lot. Once you get to higher levels, it will smoothen up a bit.

As for the clicks/impressions ratio, depends on your positions. if you don't have any (or too few) top 3-5 positions, it's pretty tough to get a click from those impressions. Nothing unusual I'd say.

Aug 14, 2023

Negative seo and hack website

Martin Senko replied to thread Negative seo and hack website

Google should not have issues with domain update as long as you do it right.

Check this Google Developers guide for URL/domain name changes here

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/site-move-with-url-changes
Aug 1, 2023

New here

Martin Senko replied to thread New here

Welcome to SEOforum, @Usman

Re: Removing AMP from webshop

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Removing AMP from webshop

Redirection is fine,

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/amp/remove-amp
Jul 23, 2023

Forum downtime

Martin Senko published thread Forum downtime

I am sorry for the recent forum downtime. Our hosting provider was moving our stuff across their infrastructure so we had to accept some downtime on our end.

It was planned, I just forgot to let you know in advance 😇

Jul 10, 2023

BING penalty

Martin Senko replied to thread BING penalty

Check this old article: https://blogs.bing.com/webmaster/2009/03/19/getting-out-of-the-penalty-box/

BING penalty

Martin Senko replied to thread BING penalty

They used to have old form here https://support.live.com/eform.aspx?productKey=wlsearchcontentremoval&amp;ct=eformts to request reinclusion into the Live Search index.

It shows server error on my end and I am not sure if it's temporary or they moved it to their Webmaster Tools interface already.

Jun 19, 2023

Creating articles on website or create more backlinkes, which one is priority in the begin

Martin Senko replied to thread Creating articles on website or create more backlinkes, which one is priority in the begin

This is an easy one.

First create content, THEN build links to the content.

It doesn't work other way around - without content you have nothing to link to (except your homepage, which is not perfect target for your backlinks).

Jun 13, 2023

What Is the Ideal Blog Post Length for SEO?

Martin Senko replied to thread What Is the Ideal Blog Post Length for SEO?

Exactly this ^

Nothing like ideal length. Length doesn't matter. Topic coverage and content quality/relevance does.

You can write tons of fluff and even if it worked for Google, all you'd get would bounce.

Re: What Is the Ideal Blog Post Length for SEO?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: What Is the Ideal Blog Post Length for SEO?

There is no such thing as an appropriate entry length. The entry must exhaust the topic.

May 19, 2023

Seoforum Ads - June 2023

Martin Senko published thread Seoforum Ads - June 2023

Hi everyone,

we will have spots available for your Ads starting June 1st 2023. That's less than two weeks from now.

If you're interested, hit me up or reply here in thread and we will sort it out.

Martin

May 17, 2023

Re: GMB has crashed my site

Martin Senko upvoted Re: GMB has crashed my site

I had a situation like this once.

Publishing regular images and news at GMB helped also to regain trust.

Website relaunch with "old" texts or with new ones

Martin Senko replied to thread Website relaunch with "old" texts or with new ones

Keep the old content as long as it's still relevant and up-to-date.

There is absolutely no reason to dump your old text just because it was created some time ago.

May 8, 2023

2 Shops how to gain more visitors?

Martin Senko replied to thread 2 Shops how to gain more visitors?

These are all artificial metrics though. Google doesn't use DA or some rough number of backlinks to calculate ranking position. This is just third party approximation of how Google as a blackbox could potentially think about websites and rank them.

From my own experience DA of either 17 or 14 is very low number to be relevant and therefore to compare on a given metric alone. If you were comparing DA50 site to DA20, that would be statistically significant difference, but 17 or 14 does mean nothing.

From my perspective, overall number of backlinks is worthless number (at all). Topical high quality backlinks are likely the ones that make the difference here.

As for the performance, it's about the same. So yeah, it's not unusual that site B outranks site A, even though A beats B in common metrics (by small difference though).

The quick win here would likely be a strong backlink from reputable source in the niche/topic.

May 3, 2023

Are No-Follow links good?

Martin Senko replied to thread Are No-Follow links good?

nofollow links are part of natural backlink profile.

I you have thousands of inbound links and none of them are nofollow, it may smell fishy to Google.

How to Master the Rank Tracking Game

Martin Senko published thread How to Master the Rank Tracking Game

Keywords play a critical role in SEO, and in order to keep track of where your site stands, you should stay up-to-date on your keyword rankings. Tracking keyword rankings will help to ensure that your site is visible, takes up valuable search engine real estate, and drives incremental traffic to your site, consequently increasing your sales, conversions, and revenue.

With the right tools - such as Rank Tracker - as well as platforms and processes in place, you will be able to monitor your site performance effectively. This, in turn, will help you create an effective keyword strategy that will yield results over time.

![Rank Tracking](https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1542744173-05336fcc7ad4?ixlib=rb-4.0.3&amp;ixid=MnwxMjA3fDB8MHxzZWFyY2h8NXx8d2ViJTIwYW5hbHlzaXN8ZW58MHx8MHx8&amp;auto=format&amp;fit=crop&amp;w=500&amp;q=60 "Google Analytics tracking")

Why is rank tracking important?

Effective rank tracking helps you determine your traffic level, and what you need to do to increase it. Staying on top of keyword trends also helps keep you aware of changes in your industry in general.

When you look at your rank tracking history, it gives you an indication of how successful your SEO efforts have been over different periods and allows you to make changes accordingly.

You also need to ensure that the keywords you’re using are the right ones. You could be using strong keywords for selling Coca-Cola products, but if you’re in the apparel industry, that might not be helping you at all.

Make your search comprehensive

In conducting your rank tracking, there are additional factors that you should keep in mind in order to make sure that your search is truly comprehensive.

Cross-device check

When using your Google rank tracker to track your results, you want to be sure that you cover all of the areas where your search results might end up. For example, results might appear differently depending on the type of device you’re looking at.

Google offers a mobile-first index, in addition to the one it has for PCs. This index is distinctly different from the PC one, so it’s a good idea to track your rankings on both of them. Results can also be personalized for different users, so determining the defining features of your target demographic is critical, as well.

Searcher location plays a role

Unless you are Walmart, you’re probably operating within a specific geographical area. Therefore, your rank tracking efforts should include results from different levels of geographical groupings. You should be looking both at local results, as well as larger, regional results to see how well you fare in different areas. This way, you can target your marketing efforts more accurately depending on where you get the most traffic.

Mastering the keyword ranking game

The process of figuring out exactly what keywords you should be using can be tricky. But there are techniques you can use to simplify the process. One thing you’ll want to be sure of is that you use the right platform. Be sure to choose a platform that offers unlimited keyword rankings, or you may well find yourself limited in number.

Once you’ve determined which keywords to track, it would be a good idea to put them into groups to simplify the process. You can do this in order of importance, with primary keywords being in one spot, and different tiers being lower on the hierarchy.

You should also be familiar with the difference between keywords that have brands attached to them and those that don’t. This depends very much on your industry, of course, but it is something to keep in mind. And you should also stay on top of where brands stand in the rankings, because of course if you’re using a name that is itself going downhill, it will be to your detriment as well. Conversely, using brands that are doing particularly well will help you in the rankings.

Another thing to keep in mind is that generic keywords are ultimately more important than branded ones. People who conduct searches are usually looking for features, so you want to be able to speak to this as much as possible.

Make note of ranking distribution

Another thing that you should pay attention to is what exactly your ranking distribution is. Which ones end up in the top 10? Top 20? You should look at your results in terms of number and see which keywords that rank in mid-tier positions, for example, might better help your cause in the future if utilized more effectively.

In addition, results often include a “People also ask…” section. It is a good idea to look through these results as well as they are indicative of what types of things a given target group is probably looking for.

Keep an eye on the competition

Another thing that you should be doing is keeping an eye on the ranking of your competitors. This is as much the case for SEO as it is for sales statistics. In figuring out how strong your competitors are, you should assess not only the place that your competitors occupy in the SERP, but also the source of their traffic and any other particulars that might be relevant to your own efforts. Are there significant differences in the use of keywords between you and them, for example?

You can also analyze your competitor’s search traffic.Once you have identified your competitors, add their websites to your Google Search Console account. To do this, go to the "Add Property" section and enter the URL of your competitor's website. After adding your competitor's site to Search Console, you can analyze their search traffic. Go to the "Search Traffic" section and click on "Search Analytics." Here, you can see the search queries that are driving traffic to your competitor's site, as well as the pages that are getting the most clicks.

What to look for in a rank tracker

Obviously, a critical part of your success will be the quality of the tool you choose. There are a number of programs out there now. You should look for one that allows you to look up any site you wish and check keywords. Better programs should also indicate where pages stand vis-a-vis one another so that you can assess where you rank in comparison to others.

Depending on your industry, you should do this with different degrees of frequency. For certain industries where numbers tend to fluctuate rapidly, you want to carry out the process on at least a weekly basis.

Another good idea is to set up alerts so that you can be notified on a regular basis and not have to consciously think about scheduling in the process.

It is also a good idea to use Google Search Console as it will give you a more accurate idea of which key phrases are truly helping your business. Not all keywords help business growth, so this will be a more effective way to figure out which ones are really helpful. Use different SEO tactics

In order to keep your website fully optimized, you need to keep on top of several different things in addition to keyword ranking: content optimization (both text and other media), meta descriptions, etc. It is a process that you should repeat regularly in order to stay on top of things.

Re: Short but rich content better than skyscraper

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Short but rich content better than skyscraper

Everything depends on the topic of the site, for example, for an online clothing store, a text of 3,000-3,500 thousand characters will be enough, and for an online store of generators, this text length may not be enough. But more often I focus on competitors and choose something in the middle 🙂

May 1, 2023

Short but rich content better than skyscraper

Martin Senko upvoted Short but rich content better than skyscraper

As a content writer, I've learned that long articles can often have a negative effect on user experience. Many users will simply scroll through the page, missing important information or becoming frustrated with the amount of content they have to sift through. That's why I decided to compress my articles - not by deleting information, but by revising them and removing any extra or unnecessary information. The results have been amazing. My articles are now more concise and easier for readers to digest, and I've seen a noticeable improvement in my SEO ranking on Seopartab (seopartab.com) as a result. As a content writer, it's important to always be thinking about the user experience, and compressing articles is just one way to do that.

Apr 30, 2023

Conversions in GA4 without amount

Martin Senko replied to thread Conversions in GA4 without amount

Maybe last part of this answer could help you: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/11053133?hl=en#

A new way to represent conversion values
In a Universal Analytics property, you can assign a value to the goals you define. Goal value is the basis for calculating metrics like Page Value and Per-Session Goal Value.

A new way to represent conversion value in Google Analytics 4 is to add a value as a custom event parameter (for example, event_value) to an event, create a custom metric (for example, Event Value) for the event parameter, and then include the custom metric in your reports and explorations.
Apr 28, 2023

Re: Website redesign without redirects - huge break-in in impressions and ranking, why?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Website redesign without redirects - huge break-in in impressions and ranking, why?

Backlinks. The key to getting your website to rank high again are backlinks. Technical SEO is important, but It won't increase your ranking near as much as backlinks. Things like meta descriptions and title tags will really only influence your CTR.

So, create high quality content for your blog, build relationships with bloggers in your industry and take a stab at getting backlinks

Apr 21, 2023

Duplicate content concern with having two stores at one domain

Martin Senko replied to thread Duplicate content concern with having two stores at one domain

If you redirect old store pages to new equivalents, there will be nothing left to be treated as duplicate content by G.

Also, you're not going to redirect all those pages one by one, manually. Ask your programmer to do it for you - it could take 3-4 redirects instead of full HTML responses.

For example, you have a route /product/product-a-1 instead of returning product view for the given product, you will redirect it to newstore.tld/product/product-a-1 and one such redirect will treat all your product redirects at once.

Do the same thing with your categories, static pages, tags.... whatever you have there and you should be good to go.

Apr 19, 2023

Sudden drop in my website rankings

Martin Senko replied to thread Sudden drop in my website rankings

There are some shakedowns going on in Google in April. That being said, going from mostly #1 to whatever but #1 sounds worse than any update would cause...

Can you tell us, how many pages are we talking about? How many keywords are you ranking on? (round estimates would be enough).

Also, you're saying I didn’t receive any notification for a manual action? Does that mean there is nothing in your GSC under Manual Actions?

Duplicate content concern with having two stores at one domain

Martin Senko replied to thread Duplicate content concern with having two stores at one domain

Subdomains are generally treated as a separate sites.

There is no point to run this kind of backup. You can turn the other one off and just keep it on your server in case you need it in the future. Running both at the same time however causes exactly what you're concerned about (duplicate content) which could be bad for both sites. Some role can also play customer confusion, as the sites are living on the same root domain but they look different so where should I order from? What kind of scam is that?

Get rid of one (keep it in the background, backup on your local computer... whatever works for you), redirect those URLs to the other one and your store should do better in search eventually.

Apr 14, 2023

Indexing Issues: What could be the reason?

Martin Senko replied to thread Indexing Issues: What could be the reason?

Can you please describe in detail what "Indexing issues" mean in this case?

If you have an image/screenshot, upload it to image upload of choice and link it using fifth formatting icon in the editor.

Site Audit

Martin Senko replied to thread Site Audit

What kind of data are you looking for?

Suspicious content on SEOForum

Martin Senko replied to thread Suspicious content on SEOForum

No worries @binayjha this doesn't apply to seasoned users like you. What I am talking about is something like that (the last post by @aklththegirl )

https://seoforum.com/thread/how-do-build-backlinks#3735

It doesn't seem like a direct answer to the question, and I am wondering why would someone reply that way other than generating the answer somewhere, somehow...

Apr 13, 2023

Ad spots available on Seoforum - from May 1st 2023

Martin Senko published thread Ad spots available on Seoforum - from May 1st 2023

We will have Ad spots available on the forum starting May 1st 2023.

Feel free to hit me up in advance so we can prepare everything and start serving your ads in ~2 weeks.

Suspicious content on SEOForum

Martin Senko published thread Suspicious content on SEOForum

It happens quite often that a new user with fresh account and no history at all starts posting long paragraphs of texts.

Typically, it looks like ordered/unordered lists, many words, often even formatted. There are some concerns that some of those long questions/replies are AI generated and we have seen and deleted quite a bit of such content.

General rule of thumb: It's a forum. Users not looking for lengthy articles and hidden answers to their questions. Please, reply only if you can bring any value to the thread. If you are also interested in this topic/question, your upvote and subscription to the thread is enough.

We will continue to delete those seemingly valuable lengthy paragraphs, that are actually not helping anyone. No matter if it's AI generated or user written.

As always, your reports of such threads are welcome and thank you for your help!

Martin

After editing the title- before and after the title now stay on google

Martin Senko replied to thread After editing the title- before and after the title now stay on google

@aklththegirl I believe the Title has been successfully edited on the site, however it's not yet updated in Google SERP.

Which is likely going to take some time, specially in case we're talking small website with irregular new content.

How long does it take for an on-site 301 redirect to take effect?

Martin Senko replied to thread How long does it take for an on-site 301 redirect to take effect?

This is individual from site to site, depends on how often Google visits your website so when they first see the change.

Recently, Google indexing got slower so I'd expect even recognizing redirects could take few days.

Apr 11, 2023

Re: Thank you for reporting suspicious threads and replies!

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Thank you for reporting suspicious threads and replies!

Thank you for your hard work in cleaning up the forum and for helping to fight spam. We really appreciate your efforts in keeping the forum a safe and secure place for users.

Apr 7, 2023
Apr 5, 2023

Re: Duplicate Contents in Order Pages of Multiple Products

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Duplicate Contents in Order Pages of Multiple Products

I do agree, after looking at your site, with @binayjha. One order page should work best.

Try to make per product a unique landing page with rich content. Well-optimized titles and metadata can avoid duplicate content warnings.

Why not a landing page for PowerPoint Recovery How to recover your Powerpoint presentation?

And for PDF Repair Easy repair all your PDF files

There's enough to write about all the tools you offer.

Apr 3, 2023

Google Search Console

Martin Senko replied to thread Google Search Console

What's the average position for the keyword in GSC?

Sometimes you have to dig deeper.

Mar 30, 2023

Hey Everyone can you suggest me Indexing tricks (:

Martin Senko replied to thread Hey Everyone can you suggest me Indexing tricks (:

All I can suggest is speedy website, Google Search Console and fresh Sitemaps.

Links will help the most though.

Mar 23, 2023

Cluster page URL structure

Martin Senko replied to thread Cluster page URL structure

Just guessing; Are you using WordPress?

So is your question WordPress related?

My Client's website is not getting indexed on Bing search?

Martin Senko replied to thread My Client's website is not getting indexed on Bing search?

How long has the site been online?

Bing is undergoing huge changes so it could take more time than we were used to.

Mar 22, 2023

Why my website is not ranking?

Martin Senko replied to thread Why my website is not ranking?

General piece of advice: Do not seek correlation between Bing and Google Search results.

Apples to Oranges.

Latest in SEO: Google has added disclaimer for reviews in local searches

Martin Senko replied to thread Latest in SEO: Google has added disclaimer for reviews in local searches

Thanks for posting. Weird thing is, I am seeing these disclaimers even in the super small local index where we receive updates much later normally.

So Europe - yes!

Mar 20, 2023

Duplicate Contents in Order Pages of Multiple Products

Martin Senko replied to thread Duplicate Contents in Order Pages of Multiple Products

Do you need unique per product order page?

It doesn't sound like optimal approach. It's like e-commerce store having order page per product. Why not use just one order page. Select product and continue with the order process. Isn't that possible for any reason?

Mar 17, 2023

Google Considers Reducing Webpage Crawl Rate

Martin Senko replied to thread Google Considers Reducing Webpage Crawl Rate

With thousands of websites and loads of AI generated content popping up every day, I definitely understand...

How to Import Data From Ga3 to GA4

Martin Senko replied to thread How to Import Data From Ga3 to GA4

That's pretty common question these days as UA is approaching it's sunset. However, Google has not provided much advice regarding historical data and I am pretty sceptical at this point.

There is a notification in Analytics right now, saying:

On July 1, 2023, this property will stop processing data. Starting in March 2023, for continued website measurement, you should create a new Google Analytics 4 (GA4) property, or one will be created for you based on your original property and reusing existing site tags.

But I guess new property means new property and new data. They will likely link your tracking code so you don't have to do anything and it will start capturing data on July 1st automatically, however, it won't import historical data to the property. That's what I am thinking right now, according to information provided (and there hasn't been much of it so far).

Re: How to Import Data From Ga3 to GA4

Martin Senko upvoted Re: How to Import Data From Ga3 to GA4

Directly there is no such data import or export facility has been provided in the Google Analytics. GA4 allows import data from external sources. This can be used to import historical data somehow. For more information,

https://www.gtechme.com/insights/migrating-to-ga4-how-to-save-your-historical-data/

Re: How to improve SEO ranking for my site?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: How to improve SEO ranking for my site?

What have you already done for this? It's hard to answer if we don't know your goals.

How to improve SEO ranking for my site?

Martin Senko replied to thread How to improve SEO ranking for my site?

We're deleting tons of questions like yours.

You have to provide details. The better description of your question => the more helpful answer you can get.

Mar 12, 2023

Re: How to increase Domain Authority in a short span

Martin Senko upvoted Re: How to increase Domain Authority in a short span
  1. Write an in-depth high-quality article about your nice to become an authority on the subject
  2. Start a newsletter subscription
  3. Share your articles on social media (good content will be shared)
  4. Internal links to relevant content (siloing works great)
  5. Start with number 1 again
Mar 11, 2023

Google Update: Favicon & Sitename on Result Pages

Martin Senko replied to thread Google Update: Favicon & Sitename on Result Pages

Thanks, missed the announcement, but saw it live in Search.

Re: Google Update: Favicon & Sitename on Result Pages

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Google Update: Favicon & Sitename on Result Pages

Hi @ms, It has been announced 2 days ago, on 8th March 2023. Before they were testing as, I could see it sometime and sometime not. Now they have officially announced it.

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-introduces-updated-desktop-search-design/481871/
Mar 10, 2023

Google Update: Favicon & Sitename on Result Pages

Martin Senko upvoted Google Update: Favicon & Sitename on Result Pages

Google has rolled out it's update for desktop searches too like the mobile searches. The search results will show favicon and the sitename. This is to enhance the user experience of organic search results. More information:

https://blog.google/products/search/identify-information-sources/

Google Update: Favicon & Sitename on Result Pages

Martin Senko replied to thread Google Update: Favicon & Sitename on Result Pages

When did they roll this one out?

I can already see it in my local Google, which normally takes weeks.

Feb 20, 2023

Changing domain while keeping backlinks and authority ?

Martin Senko replied to thread Changing domain while keeping backlinks and authority ?

Changing domain name is inevitable sometimes and Google understands it. What you want to do is 301 (or 308) redirect all the pages to their new URLs.

so basically:

example.paris -> example.com

example.paris/article-1 -> example.com/article-1

etc.

Once you're done with that, you should be able to capture all the direct traffic immediately and while you will see some changes in SERP, Google should figure it out. Can't tell how quick - it also depends on the site itself.

Feb 16, 2023

Re: Why different website showing different result.?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Why different website showing different result.?

GTmetrix offers a free account where you can change the location. A paid account offers even more locations.

Feb 8, 2023

How to Increase my Youtube subscribers?

Martin Senko replied to thread How to Increase my Youtube subscribers?

That is not enough for a valid question here on Seoforum.

At least tell us what you've already tried and how it worked for you. Always be specific.

Feb 7, 2023

Re: Google's Reply to ChatGPT: Bard

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Google's Reply to ChatGPT: Bard

Don't you think that because both ChatGPT and Bard scrap information, traffic to websites will decrease? We already see this trend through the Google 0 position and this development will reinforce it.

Is Free Directory Submission useful?

Martin Senko replied to thread Is Free Directory Submission useful?

Not much, but the bigger, well known directories (within niche) could be a bit useful. Just don't build your entire SEO strategy on directory submissions...

Feb 3, 2023

Duplicate H Headings?

Martin Senko replied to thread Duplicate H Headings?

The phrase is on the page once, but inside h2 which is inside h1 (super weird and absolute non-sense).

Is it necessary to make backlinks on those website which is from same niche

Martin Senko replied to thread Is it necessary to make backlinks on those website which is from same niche

Links within your niche (topical backlinks) are always valuable and more valuable than links from random websites.

Feb 2, 2023

Re: Backlinks

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Backlinks
Feb 1, 2023

Re: How to get listed in Google News?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: How to get listed in Google News?

Hope you are following guidelines and using,

  1. Google News Sitemap
  2. News Article Schema
  3. Robots.txt to allow Googlebot-news

For more information,

https://rankmath.com/kb/google-news-requirements/
Jan 31, 2023

Re: What to do with deleted product pages

Martin Senko upvoted Re: What to do with deleted product pages

Just deleting products is a tricky business. If they have backlinks or were indexed I always prefer a 301. Or to a related product, otherwise to the homepage.

What to do with deleted product pages

Martin Senko replied to thread What to do with deleted product pages

You're missing out on the potential rankings and traffic your old product pages had.

As @jaap pointed out in his reply above, make that traffic and pages work for you. Either offer new(er) product/model or redirect that old product page to the old products category page, but never cut off your potential customers. It's not a great business decision. Those are people you're trying to acquire at the same time, so it makes no sense, right?

Other than that, those pages likely earned some backlinks over time.

Jan 30, 2023

What to do with deleted product pages

Martin Senko replied to thread What to do with deleted product pages

I'd say, it depends...

Are those pages old products that used to be for sale and are not available anymore? If so, chances are you are still receiving traffic on these products - people still search for them. Deleting those pages, you are getting rid of all that traffic that you could potentially convert offering new models etc.

Different scenario are products that should not be published - errors, mistakes, something that doesn't and shouldn't exist. Those pages are normally subject to removal, however, it shouldn't happen really. When you publish something by mistake and delete it in minutes/hours, Google has very-low to no chance to crawl the page.

So what kind of product pages are we talking here?

Yandex ‘leak’ reveals 1,922 search ranking factors

Martin Senko upvoted Yandex ‘leak’ reveals 1,922 search ranking factors

Interesting for a better understanding of search engines,

searchengineland.com/yandex-search-ranking-factors-leak-392323

Jan 29, 2023

Yandex ‘leak’ reveals 1,922 search ranking factors

Martin Senko replied to thread Yandex ‘leak’ reveals 1,922 search ranking factors

Thanks for sharing this, I totally forgot.

Came across this yesterday evening and there are some interesting ones.

Full list available here:

https://webmarketingschool.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/factors_gen.txt
Jan 27, 2023

Re: Does doing SEO Activities in Day or Night affect a USA-based website?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Does doing SEO Activities in Day or Night affect a USA-based website?

SEO activities are a long continuous process. Changes made will only be implemented in search results once a bot has crawled the site. Compare it to placing a backlink, which is only valuable for the SEO after a bot has visited. The time for optimizing is not important at all.

Jan 25, 2023

Re: Top resources to create backlinks

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Top resources to create backlinks

It is always better to prepare your list on your own. Just not the categories and search for lists in Google. Here are a few backlinks categories for your reference.

Jan 22, 2023

post keeps disappearing from the search result

Martin Senko replied to thread post keeps disappearing from the search result

Hey @ngff998722 how does is your advice relevant without even knowing website URL? Genuinely curious.

@nasilgezdim you should at least post URL to a SERP, when asking for a local search advice.

Jan 18, 2023

Looking for SEO Vocabulary contributors

Martin Senko replied to thread Looking for SEO Vocabulary contributors

I have updated some of the basic SEO terms in our Base and you are welcome to contribute as well.

Feedback appreciated!

Jan 15, 2023

Keywords cannibalization issue

Martin Senko replied to thread Keywords cannibalization issue

Why you can't change product color on the same product page (same URL)? Would something like this work for you?

/product#color
Jan 12, 2023

USA country rank not showing for the website

Martin Senko replied to thread USA country rank not showing for the website

Please, be more specific. Country rank could mean whatever, even SimilarWeb uses term country rank.

Jan 11, 2023

Re: Off page strategy

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Off page strategy

The best way to make your own list for backlinks is by following your competitor's backlinks profile. Find more here for backlinks building.

Jan 5, 2023

Website Ranking

Martin Senko replied to thread Website Ranking

Don't forget about importance of search intent in SEO, specially in 2023.

Even good backlink profile won't be enough if your content doesn't perform.

Jan 4, 2023

Why the pages of my site are not indexed

Martin Senko replied to thread Why the pages of my site are not indexed

What is your question?

Dec 29, 2022

Re: Crawling placeholder titles/desc until loads, indexing placeholders

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Crawling placeholder titles/desc until loads, indexing placeholders

This might help you,

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/javascript/dynamic-rendering
Dec 21, 2022

AdWords gone over budget

Martin Senko replied to thread AdWords gone over budget

Normal. Some days can go over budget but average daily spend should be <= your max daily budget.

Dec 20, 2022

Redirect or canonical?

Martin Senko replied to thread Redirect or canonical?

Well, I think one redirect is fine, while 2+ could be harmful.

Anyway, I'd make sure that the new content is not being published on the old style URL, redirect all existing ones (already indexed) and from now on, only have one piece of content accessible on single URL.

301 redirect doesn't have to be resource expensive, as you can redirect visitor on webserver level.

correct canonical tag?

Martin Senko replied to thread correct canonical tag?

Just set the canonical URL to the given URL without parameters.

https://www.wipfelglueck.de/Baumhaus.php
Dec 17, 2022

The AI SEO problem

Martin Senko published thread The AI SEO problem

Let me be the first one here to open this can of worms. The AI content is here - is it here to stay though?

If it's now so easy to generate the content, how hard will be to back track it's origin? Are you generating content for your money sites already or just playing around safely?

How do you think the trend of AI generated content will affect Search engines and SEO?

Let's discuss.

Dec 16, 2022

Menu restructuring and SEO

Martin Senko replied to thread Menu restructuring and SEO

Don't use ton of HTML to build simple navigation. Use necessary markup, make it accessible for users navigating your website using screen readers and keep it semantically correct.

Sometimes, ^this alone helps a lot.

Dec 5, 2022

Noindex millions of ads pages for real estate website

Martin Senko replied to thread Noindex millions of ads pages for real estate website

What is the core content of your website, if not the ads?

Dec 1, 2022

How much value have links today?

Martin Senko published thread How much value have links today?

This article by Barry Schwartz got me thinking... How do we know what is ~real value of a link in the Google's black box?

How do you guys evaluate links? What are the type of links still worth going after and what those sites or certain pages typically look like? High DR low amount of outlinks? Or very specific pages that ranks exactly for the topic you aim to rank higher?

Nov 21, 2022

back link knowledge

Martin Senko replied to thread back link knowledge

Most users correct typos/add more details/links etc. using Editing. If new thread was created each time they update their question, we would end up having so many similar threads with very little difference.

Doesn't sound like possible solution to this issue.

Price or Rate in the Title/Description

Martin Senko replied to thread Price or Rate in the Title/Description

If your goal is to display the price of your product, you should use appropriate "rich snippet" property. Price may change and with the snippet, you can define timeframe during which the price is valid.

On the other side, you can't control when Google finds out your description has changed and updates your SERP appearance.

back link knowledge

Martin Senko replied to thread back link knowledge

I've been looking into that - your answer seemed weird given zero amount of details by OP.

Not sure what would work here. Either edit log so you can see older versions of the question or no editing at all, which sometime could be pain.

Either way, I can clearly see the issue with this one.

Nov 17, 2022

Re: Thank you for reporting suspicious threads and replies!

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Thank you for reporting suspicious threads and replies!

We users take it as our duty to keep this platform clean. So, no need to mention it.

Nov 14, 2022

Discovered - currently not indexed

Martin Senko replied to thread Discovered - currently not indexed

Thanks @binayjha seems the issue is the content. These are all product pages imported from merchant feeds into a product aggregator, so could be easily flagged as thin/duplicate content.

I wouldn't expect Google to come back and index these pages unless I make some changes to the content, which is pretty much impossible top edit thousands of pages... Curious how others do that - I see many product pages like mine in the index, even in top3, sometimes even topping original merchants they pull products from.

Discovered - currently not indexed

Martin Senko published thread Discovered - currently not indexed

After deploying new website on an old domain, only up to 20% of pages are crawled and indexed. GSC showing more than 60% as Discovered - currently not indexed.

I thought it's okay, as their docs say: The page was found by Google, but not crawled yet. Typically, Google wanted to crawl the URL but this was expected to overload the site; therefore Google rescheduled the crawl. This is why the last crawl date is empty on the report.

However, even after 2 weeks, nothing has changed. Does that mean Google won't ever look at these pages again for some reason?

Do you Disallow Ahrefs/Semrush and similar bots?

Martin Senko replied to thread Do you Disallow Ahrefs/Semrush and similar bots?

I personally use Ahrefs so I don't block their bot, however I do block Semrush as I don't use it. Why allow it to consume my server resources just to give my competitors extra data about my website..

Nov 11, 2022

Re: All 404 Pages 301 Redirect To Similar Pages are good or not?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: All 404 Pages 301 Redirect To Similar Pages are good or not?
  • Too many redirects are harmful to SEO. Too many redirects make server slower.
  • The inactive job posting pages should not be deleted. Keep the pages with a status like, "Not accepting applications anymore".
  • Show relevant active jobs on the inactive job pages to minimize the bounce rate.

Hope the above might help you.

Nov 10, 2022

All 404 Pages 301 Redirect To Similar Pages are good or not?

Martin Senko replied to thread All 404 Pages 301 Redirect To Similar Pages are good or not?

Hard 404 is like a hole. Something that was supposed to be there and it's missing. Regardless of Search Engines, it's bad user experience.

You don't have to match the deleted job with another one. Even redirecting user to the same category (or whatever soft 404 with hint) is much more beneficial than hard 404.

If you don't utilize these redirects, it's not a SEO issue primarily. You're missing out on relevant traffic though.

Internal Links Issue

Martin Senko replied to thread Internal Links Issue

Dashboard of... ?

Nov 8, 2022

Do you Disallow Ahrefs/Semrush and similar bots?

Martin Senko published thread Do you Disallow Ahrefs/Semrush and similar bots?

Tricky question SEOs.

Do you Disallow those bots (which according to their docs respect robots.txt)? If yes, why? If not, why?

For example, to prevent your competition from getting data about your site/business...

Nov 5, 2022

How to remove a social media profile from google business listing?

Martin Senko replied to thread How to remove a social media profile from google business listing?

Sorry @kailashhc misread your question.

The only way you can affect social icons is:

If you find a social profile in your Business Profile that isn’t related to your business, you can request to have it removed by clicking Feedback in the bottom right corner below the Business Profile.

All 404 Pages 301 Redirect To Similar Pages are good or not?

Martin Senko replied to thread All 404 Pages 301 Redirect To Similar Pages are good or not?

You should really care what happens to those visits after the redirect. If they drop out immediately, there is no benefit to SEO in general. Imagine someone hitting your page in SERP, being 301ed to irrelevant offer, navigating back to search... it's obvious pogo sticking which is bad signal.

10K+ 301s a day in absolute numbers is irrelevant - depends on number of indexed pages and how much of that number it is. Even at 10k it could still be a fraction.

All 404 Pages 301 Redirect To Similar Pages are good or not?

Martin Senko replied to thread All 404 Pages 301 Redirect To Similar Pages are good or not?

Hey Gaurav, leveraging your traffic is always very good idea, and your case is good example of that.

However, as a user, I'd like to know that the page I am landing on is not the page I was intended to visit - something like:

The job offer you are looking for has been removed, but we have plenty of similar job offers active right now

showing the list of active offers based on the non-active offer.

This approach would use the traffic to expired offers while giving your visitor chance to choose from various offers.

Nov 3, 2022
Nov 2, 2022

I want sites to do guest post.

Martin Senko replied to thread I want sites to do guest post.

@seomaker Sometimes it's not possible to recognize paid/natural links. It's a two step process.

  1. Try getting the link the natural way
  2. If 1. fails, you can still approach owner and try to buy

How to remove a social media profile from google business listing?

Martin Senko replied to thread How to remove a social media profile from google business listing?

I am pretty sure I removed company profile in the past. You need to own it (obviously) and should be able to delete the profile from your Google Business admin dashboard.

I remember the process was pretty straightforward.

Oct 28, 2022

Need no follow links

Martin Senko replied to thread Need no follow links

+1 @Gamerseo I also prefer to acquire links manually and have full control over the links/process. If buying service, I'd make sure they will provide full report where and when the backlink was published so I can check (now, and also over time, if it's still there).

Unfortunately, I have no contacts in Netherlands, so can't help with sourcing.

Re: Need no follow links

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Need no follow links

Backlinks should always be sourced manually.

Oct 27, 2022

Subdomains and subdirectories

Martin Senko replied to thread Subdomains and subdirectories

Should not be an issue at all if the content of those pages is different.

Domain Name Same but URL are Different?

Martin Senko replied to thread Domain Name Same but URL are Different?

I don't understand your question.

xyza.com and xyzb.com are not the same.

Re: How to companies build millions of backlinks?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: How to companies build millions of backlinks?

Spy your competitors. Choose for quality and relevance not for quantity.

Oct 21, 2022

Need help to get organic traffic

Martin Senko replied to thread Need help to get organic traffic

That site is trash. Loads forever and all I can see are ads all over the place.

Move on, enough link hunting. Another thread with live link will mean ban for you @alecia

Oct 17, 2022

Re: Best Google Indexing Tool??

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Best Google Indexing Tool??

Good backlinks will definitely help with indexing.

Oct 14, 2022

Thank you for reporting suspicious threads and replies!

Martin Senko published thread Thank you for reporting suspicious threads and replies!

During the last few days we went through all reports and cleaned up the forum a little bit. I was surprised how many spammy/promo threads (with links) still made it to the forum and aged without being deleted.

Your help with fighting spam is highly appreciated! Thank you.

Google Update: Refreshed Guidelines for Site Owners

Martin Senko upvoted Google Update: Refreshed Guidelines for Site Owners

The new additions and notable modifications are:

  • New deceptive behavior related-topics such as misleading functionality
  • New section on other behaviors that can lead to demotion and or removal, such as online harassment, and scam and fraud
  • Consolidated topics related to link spam and thin content

For more,

https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2022/10/search-essentials
Oct 12, 2022

Migrating a page to different domain on multiple pages and keeping the authority

Martin Senko replied to thread Migrating a page to different domain on multiple pages and keeping the authority

What @jaap said - table of contents (better navigation) should help if your only concern is TLDR.

Re: Migrating a page to different domain on multiple pages and keeping the authority

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Migrating a page to different domain on multiple pages and keeping the authority

A long text doesn't mean you should break it up into pieces. What is the benefit you try to achieve with this?

What a long text need is an index after the introduction. So visitors will find fast the needed information.

After publishing you give the old page a 301.

Oct 11, 2022

Migrating a page to different domain on multiple pages and keeping the authority

Martin Senko replied to thread Migrating a page to different domain on multiple pages and keeping the authority

I see potential duplicate content issue there.

Technically there is no reason to have two exactly same pieces of content living on two different domains. You either link to the resource or write article on that topic yourself.

Maybe someone can help how to sanitize your approach to avoid potential penalties, but I would either keep it where it is or move it and 301 from old location to the new one.

What is the first things you look when taking over a website?

Martin Senko replied to thread What is the first things you look when taking over a website?

I usually check

  • authority of the website and where it comes from
  • backlinks and backlinking opportunities
  • index status
  • speed (prefer tools.pingdom.com as you can choose from various locations)
  • all the smaller on-site blocks, from internal linking through rich snippets support, meta tags, open graph, canonicals to markup itself to leverage maximum potential out of the content.

Anyway, always look for issues first, then fix them ASAP, then move on to improvements.

Re: What is the first things you look when taking over a website?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: What is the first things you look when taking over a website?
  1. Technique
  2. Content
  3. Popularity

Some tools/info to start:

Oct 10, 2022

How to speed up the success rate of this SEO forum by 5x?

Martin Senko replied to thread How to speed up the success rate of this SEO forum by 5x?

What is the motivation for random visitor to publish high quality unique content on a forum? In 99.99% cases it would be exploited to spam for links therefore a lot of work for mods. We have to take in account AI generated / spun content and how hard it actually is to identify.

I don't think it's a good idea and would stick with earning the option to publish articles first by posting on the forum. After reaching certain score, users would be allowed to post their blogposts.

Oct 8, 2022

How to speed up the success rate of this SEO forum by 5x?

Martin Senko replied to thread How to speed up the success rate of this SEO forum by 5x?

There are some updates coming for the forum during the winter and I am thinking about blog posts, but it won't be for everyone. Only really good standing members would be allowed to blog in order to avoid leveraging long-form format for backlink strategies without providing value for our users.

Oct 4, 2022

Re: Why does some lower Authority Score websites rank higher?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Why does some lower Authority Score websites rank higher?

Well for google the content mean more than the High DA/DR or PA of a website. If your website has a high matrix but the content is very low quality then google will never show it in SERP.

Sep 29, 2022

Re: Why does some lower Authority Score websites rank higher?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Why does some lower Authority Score websites rank higher?

Backlinks are not everything. One of the most important factors is the quality of the content on the website. Also pay attention to the quality and topic of backlinks, not their quantity.

Re: Why does some lower Authority Score websites rank higher?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Why does some lower Authority Score websites rank higher?

I guess I was mistaken in one way, a high Authority score does not mean that you will rank higher is that correct? I am still confused with why the competitor 1 arrives in first position, it has lower quality backlinks, no content on it (just presenting the business), the competitor 2 should be ahead by all metrics on my book. But maybe they got a crazy high bounce rate who knows. The third one makes sense tho cause a lot of shitty backlinks.

Why does some lower Authority Score websites rank higher?

Martin Senko replied to thread Why does some lower Authority Score websites rank higher?

Competitor 2 could be fairly new in the SERP, so maybe he is on his way to the top position. Who knows...

Anyway, you're definitely right with this one: > a high Authority score does not mean that you will rank higher

Can't emphasize this enough. Authority score is approximation, based on how SemRush thinks Google formula looks like. The thing is they don't know because they can't know. So it's their best, fairly educated, yet still just guess. Even if we knew all the variables (we likely know most of the signals, if not all of them), we still don't know weights. Therefore, each and every rank and score is a guesstimate.

How many days Google takes to crawl Referlink and Backlink

Martin Senko replied to thread How many days Google takes to crawl Referlink and Backlink

Depends on the site they are linking from. Could be quick like 24 hours and sometimes it takes much more time - specially for smaller sites with lower update frequency. Google typically crawls those websites less often and therefore link discovery takes more time.

Why does some lower Authority Score websites rank higher?

Martin Senko replied to thread Why does some lower Authority Score websites rank higher?

It doesn't make sense, because we don't have exact formula.

Anyway, as already pointed out by @Gamerseo, while links are super important today, it's not the only metric. Links alone are not worth much when you're content is weak. Could be also seen as an outlier (normally, quality content get quality backlinks) so it could indicate link buying/selling etc.

You better keep it up on all fronts mixing great content with high quality references.

Sep 27, 2022

Is it possible to change or pivot the type of content for a website?

Martin Senko replied to thread Is it possible to change or pivot the type of content for a website?

Why pivot at all? Keep the content that obviously works for your site, and add more to cover additional keywords/topics.

Re: Is it possible to change or pivot the type of content for a website?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Is it possible to change or pivot the type of content for a website?

Yes, it is possible to change and pivot the content type of the website. But you have to think twice before doing it. As your website is already ranked on google for that particular and has a good position so why do you want to change the topic, you have already selected the niche for your website.
If you want to change it then you need to follow some tactics: Make it when you need to pivot the content type. Before doing it make sure that you always put your audience first. You need to change your content length according to your needs. Be ready to experiment with the content type. You can experiment with such changes to know better about your audience and how it is useful for your website.

Sep 26, 2022

Word count

Martin Senko replied to thread Word count

This is common misconception in SEO. It's not about length at all.

Always keep in mind your visitors and their search intent. Fine tune your content accordingly.

How to improve the ranking of a top page back to No1?

Martin Senko replied to thread How to improve the ranking of a top page back to No1?

Do you see any difference in visitors behaviour? Like lower avg time on page, higher bounce rate, ...

If for some reason large number of visitors bounce (pogo sticking in this case), it's good enough reason for Google to re-evaluate your page and move it (down).

Sep 22, 2022

Can refunds in a Ecom store hurt SEO rankings or the PPC results?

Martin Senko replied to thread Can refunds in a Ecom store hurt SEO rankings or the PPC results?

Avoiding Google products (specially GA4) would be the only way to ensure they can't see your data. That being said, it doesn't mean they use your data against you...

Sep 21, 2022

SERP Character Hack on Wordpress website

Martin Senko replied to thread SERP Character Hack on Wordpress website

@binayjha it seems to work OK now.

New Member Introduction

Martin Senko replied to thread New Member Introduction

Welcome to SEO Forum! Enjoy.

Sep 14, 2022

Re: Getting Noindex tag When Enabling Cloudflare

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Getting Noindex tag When Enabling Cloudflare

This link might help you,

https://developers.cloudflare.com/pages/platform/headers

Or, contact your developer to fix the issue. It's easy, just need to send a header information.

Sep 13, 2022

Server upgrade

Martin Senko replied to thread Server upgrade

You're welcome!

Happy it works.

Server upgrade

Martin Senko published thread Server upgrade

We are migrating to a new server today.

The process may cause website unavailability for some so please, be patient. We will be back shortly ;)

Server upgrade

Martin Senko replied to thread Server upgrade

Does everything work for you @binayjha ?

Sep 2, 2022
Aug 30, 2022

Services Website Question

Martin Senko replied to thread Services Website Question

New hierarchy sounds better if you asked me. What I am not sure about is; Do you still have TOWN x SERVICES number of pages?

I'd probably keep that, because most long tail searches will likely be service in town (I remember that from times when Overture Keyword Selector was a thing) so you'd definitely want to target those while having really good on-page experience browsing either from service to town and from town to service.

If I were you, I'd focus on proper interlinking of the pages so as you said TOWN -> services SERVICE -> towns

That should generate relevant pages with relevant internal links.

Aug 28, 2022

How to remove spam links? I tried disavowing links. Is there any other option to delink?

Martin Senko replied to thread How to remove spam links? I tried disavowing links. Is there any other option to delink?

Not sure what "it shows the negative links in the first page of the google search" does mean.

Can you get little bit more specific about your issue?

Aug 25, 2022

Google Update: Helpful Content Update has been Rolled Out

Martin Senko replied to thread Google Update: Helpful Content Update has been Rolled Out

Can't wait to see how's this update gonna work for quality content vs. shitty/cheap content. Would love to see Google dump those scraped/spun review sites to 128th page.

Aug 23, 2022

Re: Why My blog not ranking on google?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Why My blog not ranking on google?

The backlinks profile of the domain is poor and at the same time the spam score is at higher side.

Work on off-page SEO with more intent to be a better place holder in SERPs.

Aug 16, 2022

Bounce Rate is going high

Martin Senko replied to thread Bounce Rate is going high

Without knowing the site we can't tell you the reason. Sorry.

Re: SEO Score on pure HTML/CSS/JS Website

Martin Senko upvoted Re: SEO Score on pure HTML/CSS/JS Website

Yes, you are at losing end in terms of SEO. You should keep the old blog pages and for new one, save as the old page into a new page with a new file name as per your blog title. And then update the new content. This way you will have old blogs too on your website.

Once your web page is crawled by Google, it gives a trust score, depending on various factor. Say, it starts ranking in top at the SERP and then you changed the whole content of the page. This will make the page lose the rank. So, please find a way to correct the things.

Aug 14, 2022

Re: What is first step in SEO, keyword research or audit?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: What is first step in SEO, keyword research or audit?

The starting point is a fast and optimally designed website.

Aug 4, 2022

Re: Why isn't Google Indexing My Page

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Why isn't Google Indexing My Page

Work on page performance and backlinks. I will not judge the quality of the texts for obvious reasons :D

Aug 1, 2022

Re: How to improve page experience on mobile of my website?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: How to improve page experience on mobile of my website?

Scale down big images, eliminate CSS & Javascript where it is possible, switch your server.

Re: How to improve page experience on mobile of my website?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: How to improve page experience on mobile of my website?

Check your loading speed of your website this also plays an important role in page experience of a mobile site.

Re: How to improve page experience on mobile of my website?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: How to improve page experience on mobile of my website?

Chnage the font of dark text to light text when you have dark background. Section "Our debt collection methods and approach" is hard to read.

Re: How to improve page experience on mobile of my website?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: How to improve page experience on mobile of my website?

There is a need to follow the insights provided at the below link,

https://pagespeed.web.dev/report?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mnscredit.com%2Fdebt-collection.html

How do build backlinks

Martin Senko replied to thread How do build backlinks

I created new base we can reference in the future, so we don't have to repeat our selves again and again https://seoforum.com/base/building-backlinks

Your suggestions/edits are welcome. Feel free to email me.

Re: Backlinks

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Backlinks

Follow the backlinks of competitor websites and try to win backlinks from those for your website.

How do build backlinks

Martin Senko replied to thread How do build backlinks

Don't start very broad topics like this one with vague or no description at all. Will be deleted in the future.

Jul 30, 2022

Why isn't Google Indexing My Page

Martin Senko replied to thread Why isn't Google Indexing My Page

Post your URL in code tag. Otherwise, your thread will be deleted.

Jul 29, 2022

Price or Rate in the Title/Description

Martin Senko replied to thread Price or Rate in the Title/Description

If the content on all of those URLs is identical, I'd redirect it. I'd also fix the issue as this obviously is an issue - there is no reason to have both /ladies and /ladies.html showing identical page at the same time.

Jul 28, 2022

Price or Rate in the Title/Description

Martin Senko replied to thread Price or Rate in the Title/Description

Personally, I would not use price in the title. Often it also means having price in URL and as we know, prices are subject to change.

Would you redirect old price URL to a new price URL? Or simply show a 404 for the same product just because its price has changed?

Titles are indexed and are crucial in SERPs. If you change price, you want serp to reflect it ASAP but you'd have no control over it.

It's up to you, just don't do it ;)

Jul 27, 2022

Re: What are the details plan of SEO?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: What are the details plan of SEO?

Provide a link to your website. The absolute basis is a fast and optimal website with well-written texts.

Jul 14, 2022

Lost the ranking for my websites in last 15 days, Please Help ?

Martin Senko replied to thread Lost the ranking for my websites in last 15 days, Please Help ?

@skumar881212 you have provided zero context. If there wasn't response from @binayjha already, I'd delete the thread right away because of no value at all.

Please, either elaborate a bit about your issue or don't post at all. Looks like straight link hunting.

Jul 9, 2022
Jul 6, 2022

Re: SEO Forums

Martin Senko upvoted Re: SEO Forums

Internet forums are often a fresh look at the problem but also a lot of free knowledge. It is even worth participating in several internet forums.

Re: Ongoing SEO activity & use of keyword research

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Ongoing SEO activity & use of keyword research
  • Check GSC on daily basis for any error associated with the website
  • As many blog posts you can have that much benefit, try to make your website content rich.
  • Use other blogging sites to post unique and quality content to get backlinks to your site
Jun 29, 2022

Re: Updating Publish Date - News Articles

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Updating Publish Date - News Articles

Changing published date will not benefit in search engine rankings or so. Even it should be avoided to do so frequently. Google gives a trust score to a site, manipulations or unnatural acts might lower the trust score which can be fatal in the rankings.

Jun 28, 2022

Updating Publish Date - News Articles

Martin Senko replied to thread Updating Publish Date - News Articles

I would not touch publish date once the article has been crawled. I prefer to use "Last update" for the date of recent update than changing information that technically should not be changed.

Jun 27, 2022

Re: Twitter and Google ranking

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Twitter and Google ranking

When Google sees your website's strong social signals, it rates your website as a reliable resource for the search keywords your content is vying for. Twitter is a top choice for a social media platform to boost your website because of its active users' wide range.

https://semupdates.com/how-twitter-helps-boost-your-websites-seo/

Jun 25, 2022

How to speed up the success rate of this SEO forum by 5x?

Martin Senko replied to thread How to speed up the success rate of this SEO forum by 5x?

Do you have more specific proposal?

Not sure what you mean, but we can't open blog posting for general public. That would mean 99,99% of blogs being spam (either hidden or all-out links).

Googlebot Documentation has been updated today, what's your take?

Martin Senko replied to thread Googlebot Documentation has been updated today, what's your take?

15MB is a LOT of data.

Imagine 15 million characters X number of sites available on the Internet...

Jun 23, 2022

How to get latest updates about SEO world always?

Martin Senko replied to thread How to get latest updates about SEO world always?

Searchengineland, Searchenginejournal, Seroundtable, Google SearchLiaison on Twitter, ...

and Seoforum, of course ;)

Introducing new post type: Blog

Martin Senko replied to thread Introducing new post type: Blog

Yes, that would be nice. Would require a little bit more exposure for someone credible to write valuable post and publish it on Seoforum I guess.

Jun 22, 2022

Re: SEO Certification 2022

Martin Senko upvoted Re: SEO Certification 2022

First of all, you need to gain experience. Maybe do some project.

Re: Organic Traffic Drop

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Organic Traffic Drop

Content of your web pages are plagiarized. Use unique content on the web pages of your website to take leverage of organic SEO and improve traffic on the website.

Jun 19, 2022

Re: SEO Certification 2022

Martin Senko upvoted Re: SEO Certification 2022

I agree with you @ms.

Jun 17, 2022

SEO Certification 2022

Martin Senko replied to thread SEO Certification 2022

There is nothing like meaningful certification. Just experience and measurable results. That should be your ultimate goal.

Re: SEO Certification 2022

Martin Senko upvoted Re: SEO Certification 2022

Refresh it from online sources and get Google certifications. Take the job at your earliest and keep upgrading yourself in parallel.

Jun 14, 2022

Re: Which platform for a blog?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Which platform for a blog?

The two platforms are equally important in terms of SEO. It is advised to make your own domain content-rich for better results.

Jun 13, 2022

Twitter has dropped rel=nofollow from links

Martin Senko published thread Twitter has dropped rel=nofollow from links

It's been just days, but maybe you have already noticed; Twitter has dropped nofollow from links across their site, so basically all the links are now so called dofollow.

But why? This is the part we don't know. I think nofollow will be back shortly, but who knows. Twitter has been using nofollow sanitized links since 2008, and even if they dropped it, major search engines would likely still consider those (huge amount of) links as nofollow.

What is a nofollow link?

Since 2005 (Google), you can tell search engine that a link should not be followed by tagging it using rel="nofollow". Those links should be less valuable or pass no juice at all.

Jun 9, 2022

Do paginated pages need unique H1 tags?

Martin Senko replied to thread Do paginated pages need unique H1 tags?

If you're not using link tags with rel attributes it could be an issue, but I assume you have those in place (header) and correct.

Otherwise, can't see an issue really.

Do paginated pages need unique H1 tags?

Martin Senko replied to thread Do paginated pages need unique H1 tags?

It doesn't matter. Effectively, it's the same page, just longer therefore divided into multiple pages. So it doesn't matter if you are on the page 1 or 5, the title of the paginated page still applies and makes perfect sense. If you want to add Page X of Y or something like that, I think it's all fine, just make sure you append it in the very end of the title so it doesn't affect tab recognition in browser.

Just a side note - if someone bookmarks page 5 because of a product they like and potentially might buy in the future, meanwhile you add more products that will take place before it, desired product could easily move to page 6+. Visiting bookmarked page 5 looking for the product could be little bit confusing then.

403 Forbidden Issue for Ecommerce Website

Martin Senko replied to thread 403 Forbidden Issue for Ecommerce Website

So you have basically turned off/removed old products and those are not available anymore when visiting the URL?

If so, I'd highly recommend different approach - never remove old products and pages. Either redirect such pages to new products that are similar/equivalent or use soft 404 at least. If you remove the page and make its URL unavailable, you're losing traffic and potential customers.

Jun 8, 2022

MUST READ regarding May Broad Core Update

Martin Senko replied to thread MUST READ regarding May Broad Core Update

One more thing here, if you're building/buying links, focus on quality, not quantity. Don't go after cheap spammy links just to have links.

Google Local places SEO: How to actually rank?

Martin Senko replied to thread Google Local places SEO: How to actually rank?

Yeah, we can also start a blog directly on our site. That's not a huge head-ache for me.

Just wondering why is this happening, as our competitors don't have blogs and fresh content either. Plus they have much less content, not original (copy&paste from XML feeds) and also don't add new products continually (more like once or twice a year).

Google Local places SEO: How to actually rank?

Martin Senko replied to thread Google Local places SEO: How to actually rank?

Thanks for the response @binayjha

It is an e-commerce website, and what makes this really weird is the fact that we have much more products than anyone else, pushing custom descriptions and often even custom shot photos. The site does well in the search, but fails miserably in the Places.

We don't post other than long-term content, so we don't have a blog or magazine .

Re: Some Questions About Some Odd SEO Behaviour

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Some Questions About Some Odd SEO Behaviour

The page is loading slowly. eat too much content on your home page. The texts are underdeveloped. There is a lot of work ahead of you.

Jun 6, 2022

MUST READ regarding May Broad Core Update

Martin Senko replied to thread MUST READ regarding May Broad Core Update

It's tough. You can't tell what kind of websites will be the next victim before it all happens. So I'd say read Google's guidelines, push out great content on regular basis, always try to beat your competition and if you do something "grey hat", make sure you don't leave footprints. AT ALL.

Can't compose better overall answer, because it depends on so many attributes.

Help! Huge drop in coverage :(

Martin Senko replied to thread Help! Huge drop in coverage :(

@corrado feel free to drop your URL. Just use code, not live anchor.

Thanks

Ad spots available

Martin Senko published thread Ad spots available

Hello SEOs.

Today, I want to announce that our long term partner and advertiser - Zutrix will leave the Ad spots at Seoforum.

After 17 months, the top spots will be available for your advertising again.

While the price of the ads is on the low end, it help us pay our expenses like moderation, hosting, domain renewals and future development of the forums. We are looking for a partner with product that will be good fit for our members, so both parties can leverage max value out of it.

Feel free to hit me up using our contact page and we will work out a deal that will work for you.

Thank you for being part of the Seoforum!

Google Local places SEO: How to actually rank?

Martin Senko published thread Google Local places SEO: How to actually rank?

This is completely weird to me; our store is the biggest in the city, we have 5-10x more reviews, 4.9 star average, rank first for the query in the regular results (those are below the Local places snippet), but at the same time, for this query, we are ranking somewhere deep in the list, like #5-6 in the snippet.

Is there anything specific about the snippet I am missing, or is it just a random Google pick and I can't do damn about it?

Any help is appreciated!

Jun 2, 2022
Jun 1, 2022

Help! Huge drop in coverage :(

Martin Senko replied to thread Help! Huge drop in coverage :(

Didn't happen to me, but the latest Google update caused coverage drops for some people I know. 3rd of May however doesn't sound related to it.

May 29, 2022

My site is not ranking

Martin Senko replied to thread My site is not ranking

Very good point by @binayjha

Re: My site is not ranking

Martin Senko upvoted Re: My site is not ranking

For the key phrase, IMG worlds of adventure, this website is pointing to another site. This means, this website is telling to search engines and page visitors that if you are looking for this phrase then the linked website is the right place. So your website is not getting ranked for this phrase as per your instruction to the search engines.

May 26, 2022

Re: Proxies for SMM?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Proxies for SMM?

Feeling nice by knowing that you people require to use proxies for social media marketing. I never needed it and doing the needful in natural way. I needed proxies at times for a small time that too for browsing only. I find it free to use. hide.me.

May 25, 2022

Re: how to build quality backlinks in short period?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: how to build quality backlinks in short period?

You can't .. You need time to build, for example, forum accounts from which you can get links. All because it looked natural.

Re: how to build quality backlinks in short period?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: how to build quality backlinks in short period?

Backlinks through blogging is a good way to excel. It looks time taking but it is worth of it.

Re: How to Create Free Quality Backlinks?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: How to Create Free Quality Backlinks?

Currently, the no-follow attribute is only a recommendation, so it is worth getting such backlinks.

Re: How to create Backlinks

Martin Senko upvoted Re: How to create Backlinks

You can follow this thread, https://www.seoforum.com/thread/how-to-create-free-quality-backlinks, for a better understanding.

May 23, 2022
May 19, 2022

On Page SEO Audit Tool

Martin Senko replied to thread On Page SEO Audit Tool

Since you received replies already, I'll leave it here, but please, do not post links to your services directly in your posts. We generally delete posts like this one, since it's considered link promo/link spam.

May 15, 2022

Re: avoid duplicate content product page

Martin Senko upvoted Re: avoid duplicate content product page

This duplicate content is not harmful in terms of SEO. Keep some unique content too on the pages besides the duplicate content.

May 9, 2022

What will happen to the webmasters if Alexa stops working?

Martin Senko replied to thread What will happen to the webmasters if Alexa stops working?

Alexa has always been meaningless. They don't have relevant data to rank sites reliably and what you get is very rough guesstimate based on who knows what...

May 2, 2022

How to setup RSS feed for the website?

Martin Senko replied to thread How to setup RSS feed for the website?

Can you please provide more details @menonsarath ?

This is pointless..

Apr 27, 2022

What is the definition of schema?

Martin Senko replied to thread What is the definition of schema?

Schema is a dictionary word.

You are likely asking about Schema.org, right?

Apr 25, 2022

Register expired domain for links

Martin Senko upvoted Register expired domain for links

Hi, I have googled this but get conflicting answers. I found an expired domain that has some links from important websites in my niche. The domain used to be in the same sector as I am. Is it useful for SEO to register the domain and set up a 301 redirect to my site to get some additional link juice? Some sites say this could be helpful, while others mention that google will notice a change of ownership and will not take the link into account. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts...

Register expired domain for links

Martin Senko replied to thread Register expired domain for links

As long as the juice is there and possibly some traffic is still there, it's well worth the small investment. Check my post https://seoforum.com/blog/ms/how-to-earn-backlinks-expired-links I mention expired links/domains.

Apr 13, 2022

Re: Find YouTube Videos that links to your site/page

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Find YouTube Videos that links to your site/page

If you want to find all incoming links to your site, use an attack tool like ahrefs

Apr 7, 2022

Can anyone Suggest me free Guest Posting Sites of US ?

Martin Senko replied to thread Can anyone Suggest me free Guest Posting Sites of US ?

This is a forum - we discuss SEO related questions here.

We don't do homeworks and research on demand.

Apr 6, 2022

Non-user friendly product urls

Martin Senko replied to thread Non-user friendly product urls

Actually, Its some url open with .html/without html/ with slash & without slash. Is it good?

Keep your website consistent - either use .html or not. Trailing slash doesn't matter.

Re: Non-user friendly product urls

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Non-user friendly product urls

The navigation must have a clear structure. Look at the users and search intent and adjust your URL structure accordingly.

  • Are the keywords included in the URL?
  • Do the most important search terms appear in the URL?
  • Can the URL be shorter?
  • Are there other URLs that also have these search terms?
  • Don't do keyword stuffing
  • Is the URL clear ?
  • Is the URL no more than 3 layers deep ?

Re: Which one of the following websites tends to rank higher?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Which one of the following websites tends to rank higher?

This is just one factor that you analyze. It is impossible to answer this question unequivocally.

Which one of the following websites tends to rank higher?

Martin Senko replied to thread Which one of the following websites tends to rank higher?

No correlation there. Focus on what really matters. The core.

Pixel length of a page means nothing, unless it causes bad user experience.

Apr 2, 2022

Re: Why Google not showing the meta description ?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Why Google not showing the meta description ?

My new and not well ranked blog reliably has all meta descriptions showing properly in Google. I would look over technical requirements like character length. Find a good article that contains all the rules. Make sure your meta is also completely related to the content. Also make sure you have quality content that doesn't produce bounces. If people are bouncing then Google might get signaled that your meta isn't telling people what is in the content. Also I thought I read there is no guarantee that your meta data will be displayed. I would start reading all the guides you can find.

Re: Bing hates my content and I can't figure it out

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Bing hates my content and I can't figure it out

I kept googling for answers and I think I found the next step for people in a situation like me. In the Bing webmaster tools there is a help option. From there you can get advise and if not relevant you can open a support case with Bing. I'm waiting for some feedback from Bing to guide me on how to resolve this. Hope this helps anyone else in the same situation.

wordpress page index

Martin Senko replied to thread wordpress page index

No live links to your website please. Thanks.

Mar 30, 2022

Re: Website is not getting indexed:

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Website is not getting indexed:

Is there any original content?

Re: avoid duplicate content product page

Martin Senko upvoted Re: avoid duplicate content product page

Yes, it will definitely be detected as duplicate content. Better to create a new subpage with content where the user will be able to go.

Mar 26, 2022

Whenever i try to edit my home page or any page ERR_HTTP2_PROTOCOL_ERROR occur

Martin Senko replied to thread Whenever i try to edit my home page or any page ERR_HTTP2_PROTOCOL_ERROR occur
  1. we use code for links to user's own websites
  2. too many possible reasons causing ERR_HTTP2_PROTOCOL_ERROR like
    • server (mis)configuration
    • GEO/IP restrictions
    • firewall/antivirus settings
    • ...

We can't help with the information provided (nothing except the error). It's most likely internal error/configuration issue on your server/host.

Mar 25, 2022

Which SEO method is better?

Martin Senko replied to thread Which SEO method is better?

@smestreet you did tell us literally nothing at all.

Which SEO method is better?

Martin Senko replied to thread Which SEO method is better?

No, we can't tell...

... without context.

Some companies work with thousands / tens of thousands of keywords and it's perfectly fine. For a small business/individual, even 10 competitive keywords could be too many to start with.

Seo can't get to the top for 2 years

Martin Senko replied to thread Seo can't get to the top for 2 years

You need to get links to your website from other websites (without spamming of course).

Do not use live links to your website here on the forum. Always use code, when referencing your website.

Seo can't get to the top for 2 years

Martin Senko replied to thread Seo can't get to the top for 2 years

How exactly do you expect Google to find those newspaper backlinks?

How To Rank Keyword On first page?

Martin Senko replied to thread How To Rank Keyword On first page?

I wouldn't say you'd need lot more backlinks than your competition. Even thousands of "fiver" backlinks won't help. You just need the right backlinks.. Check where your competition have links, try to reach out to those sites and find new, better opportunities for high quality backlinks. There are plenty, just not as easy to get as paying $5 for a next day backlink delivery...

Mar 24, 2022

How To Rank Keyword On first page?

Martin Senko replied to thread How To Rank Keyword On first page?

Kind of question that can not be answered clearly. We don't know what your strategy is and how you're doing. Anyway, I assume you are talking about Google ranks..

Basically, if you are on page #2, Google thinks it is the spot where your page belongs [at the moment]. Because of content metrics, visitors behaviour, references from other pages/websites (backlinks), etc.

Generally, you need stronger signals, to let SEs know that you belong higher.

Mar 21, 2022

How an Indian Company Can Target USA without an USA based address?

Martin Senko replied to thread How an Indian Company Can Target USA without an USA based address?

Physical office existence isn't much of a SEO question.

As long as your site is accessible from the target country, your content is in target country language it should be indexed like anything else.

Does one post on multiple categories affect my SEO?

Martin Senko replied to thread Does one post on multiple categories affect my SEO?

One post within multiple categories is perfectly fine, as long as it's a good fit. Make sure the post only exists once (only one URL per article).

Best practice is avoid category in your URL.

example.com/article instead of example.com/category/article

How to use permalink is main keyword?

Martin Senko replied to thread How to use permalink is main keyword?

Very unclear what you want to achieve.

Please, describe your question better.

Mar 18, 2022

Re: Continuous backlink spam

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Continuous backlink spam

If you do SEO for a business, you should know? Disavow the links.

Mar 14, 2022

Re: How to increase more traffic?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: How to increase more traffic?

-Content

  • Relevant high DR backlins
  • Siloing
  • Guest posts
  • Social marketing
  • Google Core Web Vitals
  • etc, etc, .... Like @reepress told already, if you have no knowledge get it or buy it.
Mar 3, 2022

Re: url is not indexed?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: url is not indexed?

Hi there!

I'm Zara from the digital marketing team at The Klyne Group, we have several websites for all our companies such as Doona, CuddleCo and Pets Love Scruffs. As we have many products, we run quick audits to identify any broken pages etc.

Download Screaming Frog if you haven't already. It's free. Run it for your site. Look at the status code. The status code should say 200. Let me know if it says another code.

If it does say 200, then pick a URL and put it the search bar at the top of Google search console. If it says 'URL is on Google' there isn't an issue. If it says 'unknown to Google' then you can click request indexing.

Re: url is not indexed?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: url is not indexed?

There can be many reasons for this. Add url to search console? Benefit from indexing programs? Enter this url, we may be able to help you.

Feb 25, 2022

Re: What this SEO technique is called? Will this get penalty?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: What this SEO technique is called? Will this get penalty?

These are back-end pages of really low quality. Such links are of little importance. The most important links are those that generate traffic to the linked page.

Has anyone used this page to buy backlinks?

Martin Senko replied to thread Has anyone used this page to buy backlinks?

I'd say, never buy backlinks on Fiverr and similar marketplaces. First, you don't know WHERE exactly your link will be published OR, if it's publicly available, that website will likely be Google banned/de-ranked in no time. You don't really need/want links like that.

If you want high quality backlinks, well, sometimes you have to pay for it but you should always reach out to the site owner directly after doing your research and understanding that this particular website is exactly where you need your link to be.

Feb 18, 2022

Re: Increase amount of traffic

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Increase amount of traffic
  1. Your performance in Lightspeed is 63, improve it.
  2. Improve internal linking
  3. Make your blog articles more in dept
  4. Explain the problem you solve and give the best answer so you appear in Featured Snippet results.

Re: Update old articles or create new ones?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Update old articles or create new ones?

Rewrite your articles and link to other relevant articles. If dwell time improves, your rankings will too.

Feb 17, 2022

Seoforum's unavailability on February 16th

Martin Senko published thread Seoforum's unavailability on February 16th

Hello everyone,

I want to apologize for our server outage yesterday. It took nearly two hours for our provider to fix it, but there was no way for us to do anything else than wait. The error was on the architecture (BGP) not server/website itself.

Sorry for the inconvenience and hopefully we won't see those for a long time now.

Have a great day!

Feb 1, 2022

Re: Clothing website

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Clothing website

Backlinking is a strong way to increase the domain authority of any website. But, it should be optimized and legally done. There are others who are doing a big spamming at the time of creating backlinks. for that, Google has created strict rules related to backlinks and other SEO factors.

Jan 25, 2022

One of my websites is not ranking in first page

Martin Senko replied to thread One of my websites is not ranking in first page

Just give it some time, while continuously working on your backlink profile and exposure. Ahrefs metrics are nice, but have nothing to do with actual Google algorithm, so you can't compare the two. Google puts emphasis on user interactions in SERP - always make sure your page takes care of user intent in a better way than competition.

How to manage multiple facebook accounts on a computer?

Martin Senko replied to thread How to manage multiple facebook accounts on a computer?

Do you need to manage multiple user accounts or pages/groups?

For multiple user accounts, you can use multiple browsers. For pages/groups, you don't need that if admin is the same person. You can manage them from your account.

Jan 18, 2022
Jan 14, 2022

Re: What kind of backlinks are these?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: What kind of backlinks are these?

Backlinks must be thematic, not from spammy sites. These must be good thematic websites like internet forums or blogs.

Jan 10, 2022

Buying a domain - Can see it's history on wayback has some NSFW related content

Martin Senko replied to thread Buying a domain - Can see it's history on wayback has some NSFW related content

You should be good I'd say.

That's a long time, not strongly linked to that content, many links already expired. Always check for Google ban.

Do not assume reputation gains.

Jan 5, 2022

Should I replace all redirection to the final destination URL?

Martin Senko replied to thread Should I replace all redirection to the final destination URL?

It's a good practice to eliminate redirects. So if you have redirects a -> b -> c redirects, a -> c will work better.

Also, Google won't follow more than 3...

Jan 4, 2022

Re: No index tags

Martin Senko upvoted Re: No index tags

Thanks so much for the replies. And apologies for the slow response. My email had sent the notification that I'd received a reply to spam.

Yahoo gives me next to nothing in traffic, so not too concerned about them.

So to clarify - no indexing tags having indexed them for 7 years shouldn't be an issue?

Not sure how I know if I have links to the pages related to the tags or not. Is this something that would be automatically done in wordpress? I'm not overly technical with websites and just use Wordpress. Anyone who is wordpress savvy, is there a way I can stop linking to tags, if Wordpress is in fact linking to tags?

Sorry for the 20 questions! Any help appreciated.

Clothing website

Martin Senko replied to thread Clothing website

Hey @timbates

SEO Forum is the place to learn HOW/WHY build links, not building links from here directly. That would be too easy and of course, it won't work as needed, as your website is in a completely different niche.

Please, do not post live links. Thanks

Dec 30, 2021

Best approach for blog in corporate website

Martin Senko replied to thread Best approach for blog in corporate website

If you want to leverage your domain authority, use /blog.

If you want to separate it, use subdomain.

Subdomain basically means different domain, while /blog is part of the domain.

Whatever works for you.

Re: List of URLs indexed by Google

Martin Senko upvoted Re: List of URLs indexed by Google

If you haven't hooked up Google Search Console, you're out of luck. If you have, you can navigate to the index stats. All your answers are there.

Re: List of URLs indexed by Google

Martin Senko upvoted Re: List of URLs indexed by Google

Oops sorry, found the others in another report. Thanks again !

Dec 23, 2021

guest posting sites

Martin Senko replied to thread guest posting sites

Most of free services will bring zero value. Focus on quality, not quantity.

Dec 21, 2021

Any advise? SEO not working right

Martin Senko replied to thread Any advise? SEO not working right

Yes, it is #1

Number 1 result in Google for me is

http://jesusdramatized.com
Dec 20, 2021

Any advise? SEO not working right

Martin Senko replied to thread Any advise? SEO not working right

I don't see a reason, why would someone type-in domain into Google.

Anyway, I just did, and the domain is #1 result (http:// though)

Dec 17, 2021

Catching expired domain on your own for SEO.

Martin Senko replied to thread Catching expired domain on your own for SEO.

Even after a year or so, yes it does work.

However, drop catching good domain right after it expires it's nearly impossible with services specifically targeting it as a service.

You should check who does that and submit your order with them because if the domain is good enough, someone will put a backorder on it - you can't compete with thousands of registrars attempting registration in a split second.

Dec 6, 2021

Where to add more contents to hompage to make it not "thin contents"?

Martin Senko replied to thread Where to add more contents to hompage to make it not "thin contents"?

I have same experience across multiple niches as @jaap.

It also depends on the domain (how credible the website in general is). Specially from the start - when you publish new page. If Google previously had good success serving your pages, even with 10 word content, they are likely to push your new page much higher, even without any real world data for the page itself.

Re: Where to add more contents to hompage to make it not "thin contents"?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Where to add more contents to hompage to make it not "thin contents"?

You don't have to agree. I've several nr. 1 postions with pages like this.

If your page is technical optimised, gives the best answer to a question and has enough good backlinks it works.

Re: Where to add more contents to hompage to make it not "thin contents"?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Where to add more contents to hompage to make it not "thin contents"?

If you can explain in 10 words what you offer on the homepage, 11 words are too many. The visitor's intention is to find the right information. If you offer it, it will be good.

Just make sure that visitors from the homepage click through to the next page for more information, or for the product. To avoid bounces.

Google will then see that you have a low bounce rate and will rank you higher in the search results.

The only drawback of low content is the low dwell time.

Nov 28, 2021

Re: Zero Traffic

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Zero Traffic

With this amount of visitors it's a new website I suppose? Just go on with adding high quality content. Check Google Search Console for mistakes. Check your site speed with https://gtmetrix.com Add a lot of quality back links And your vsitors will return and grow

Zero Traffic

Martin Senko upvoted Zero Traffic

My website suddenly went Zero Traffic today. Need to understand the reason. In past days I got 9 - 20 What could be the reason

Nov 27, 2021

Re: How To Build Backlinks For My Blog or Article

Martin Senko upvoted Re: How To Build Backlinks For My Blog or Article

get backlinks related to you niche and adopt a strategy and variation to build links and make sure to not build links on high spam score sites

Zero Traffic

Martin Senko replied to thread Zero Traffic

Welcome to SEOForum @seobaby (great username btw.)

Do you mean 9 - 20 unique vistors a day?

Nov 25, 2021

Title categories separations

Martin Senko replied to thread Title categories separations

Yes and no..

I don't find it easy to read at all.

Nov 19, 2021
Nov 3, 2021

how to do easily off page seo?

Martin Senko replied to thread how to do easily off page seo?

Your BIO starts with: I am an SEO professional and Digital marketer.

Why the question? Inviting SPAM?

Oct 26, 2021

How to select the domain name for Affiliate Marketing

Martin Senko replied to thread How to select the domain name for Affiliate Marketing

@pledisg always do your own research. Check if domain is banned by Google. If not, analyze backlinks, look at web.archive what was on the domain before...

If you like the name itself, domain authority is high enough to even bother (good backlinks), not banned by google, I think you're good to go.

Oct 24, 2021

Cheap domain names?

Martin Senko replied to thread Cheap domain names?

Doesn't matter if .com, .net or .co.uk for example?

I think it does make big difference, unless you're looking for spam use.

Oct 19, 2021

Cheap domain names?

Martin Senko replied to thread Cheap domain names?

Are you looking for cheap TLDs, or particular TLD?

.com price is going up again, btw.

Oct 16, 2021

SEO not Improving.

Martin Senko replied to thread SEO not Improving.

Honestly, I don't see many authority websites linking...

Looking for SEO Vocabulary contributors

Martin Senko published thread Looking for SEO Vocabulary contributors

Hey!

Weeks ago, I have deployed SEO Base, which is meant as an SEO knowledge base. So we will be adding content there, specially for common questions asked on the forum, and simply link users to specified topic instead of explaining same things again and again.

Part of the Base will be SEO Vocabulary, that should work as a dictionary. Term and brief, to the point explanation.

I am looking for your help with that.

If you can explain some terms, I'll be happy to use that and give you a credit for your contribution in a Thank You post.

If interested, please, hit me up.

Keywords diluting traffic question

Martin Senko replied to thread Keywords diluting traffic question

Dilute the traffic, in which way? Like you have page where your company offers service A and you publish blog post about topic A?

Yeah, those two pages could eventually end up competing against the other but you can rank for more keywords/phrases and drive more traffic to in general. You can convert visitors from your blog post to customers by explaining why you're good at providing the service and link them to your service page.

Meta Description displayed in Google

Martin Senko replied to thread Meta Description displayed in Google

@TimTom keywords meta tag is basically completely ignored this days. It was the easiest thing for webmasters to stuff keywords for SEs when they trusted meta keywords back in the day...

Google is smart enough to do their own content analysis and decide which keywords are relevant for the page.

How badly will this damage me in SERP's? 1650: 301 redirects.

Martin Senko replied to thread How badly will this damage me in SERP's? 1650: 301 redirects.

New site = new domain?

As long as you redirect correctly and use 301, Google specifically should be fine with that. I'd expect small dip, but nothing terrible if done right.

In their Search Console Help, Google has article about Change of Address Tool, which is basically guide on how to properly move your site from one domain to another. I'd recommend checking it out.

meta tag keywords

Martin Senko replied to thread meta tag keywords

I'd go with the second option. It's more specific, therefore more targeted. Regardless the fact that meta keywords are not relevant for SEs anymore, I bet you don't want to rank for "used" or "cars" which is very common keyword and says almost nothing about user intent - you can't serve those visitors well without knowing what they actually came for. Most likely, you have nothing for them, as your site seems to be about used cars in London.

Google will remove your Business Listing if you ask them to

Martin Senko replied to thread Google will remove your Business Listing if you ask them to

I am pretty sure this is something, they wouldn't want to spread out loud and clear. However, I asked to remove the company from their snippet and they did. Which is often times the best thing you can do, specially when you're being bullied with competition. Remove and move on to your core business. This is not for everyone and every business though.

Oct 13, 2021

Urgent for help! About crawel request sudden drop

Martin Senko replied to thread Urgent for help! About crawel request sudden drop

Response time seems higher, but if it hasn't changed recently, it's not gonna be the issue. Anyway, I see multiple drops to similar levels in the past. Which means, they likely have signals telling them when to crawl more/less intensively.

I checked the same report for seoforum, and it's much more balanced, but still has peaks in both directions. It's definitely normal and I haven't ever seen a straight line in Crawl stats.

Also, if Google's crawler gets blocked by robots.txt, that request still counts for totals, so it won't be robots.txt.

How to contact .gov and .edu backlink sites?

Martin Senko replied to thread How to contact .gov and .edu backlink sites?

I'd look up owner using WHOIS and contact them directly.

Oct 12, 2021

Urgent for help! About crawel request sudden drop

Martin Senko replied to thread Urgent for help! About crawel request sudden drop

Where do you have these stats from? Can you post a screenshot?

Can i use 2 HA1 Tag on single page

Martin Senko replied to thread Can i use 2 HA1 Tag on single page

Again, there is no problem, the syntax of multiple H1 is correct, the question is why would you need that. And if you need two H1s, use them. I just suggest a little bit of thinking before you do so, because normally, you don't need more than one H1.

Oct 7, 2021

Can i use 2 HA1 Tag on single page

Martin Senko replied to thread Can i use 2 HA1 Tag on single page

For 99% of cases, I don't see any reason to use more than one H1.

Each page should be about something. The main topic - page title, should be your H1. As long as you need two H1s, you are probably merging two topics, that would better work separated (each has its own page and H1). H1 has the greatest semantical weight on the site, while weight of H2 is lower and so on. Heading structure in HTML is a tree (with single root - H1). What would be your semantical root if you had two H1s? Doesn't make much sense to me.

Feel free to drop a link (in code) to show us the page where you're considering multiple H1s. But again, as long as you feel you need two H1 headings, you should split the page into two separate pages.

Sep 30, 2021

Google will remove your Business Listing if you ask them to

Martin Senko published thread Google will remove your Business Listing if you ask them to

I found this quite interesting, because they own the data and most of the time the content they show for your company related queries is publicly available anyway. So, even though they won't remove fake reviews if you report those, you can still ask for compete removal of your business.

I know you can remove your business in your Google Business account, but that won't remove the snippet, reviews, etc. It will just remove the link between your account and the listing. If you did that, you will have to reclaim your business and receive the verification code again if you want to manage the listing in the future.

However, they will remove your company listing if you ask them. I found this very useful, and it has helped multiple companies to stay alive after endless attacks from anonymous "reviewers".

Just a quick tip. Hope you won't need it.

SEO for E commerce

Martin Senko replied to thread SEO for E commerce

There you go https://www.google.com/search?q=seo+for+ecommerce

Please, do not ask for link spam. Thank you!

Sep 29, 2021

Google Crawlers - how do they work?

Martin Senko upvoted Google Crawlers - how do they work?

Hello, I am new to SEO and I've got some doubts about how the crawlers work. I tried to look up for info but I couldn't find an answer to this specific question. As for my understanding, page speed is important to Google in order to index pages, and core web vitals like First Contentful Page (FCP) are important for a good ranking.

I know as well that server response affects the FCP performance.

If I want to serve an audience in two specific countries and my traffic comes predominantly from these two countries, in order to speed up the server response, how should I choose the server location? How does Google detect the page speed? Is that via crawlers? When Google crawlers analysise web pages, where do "they come from?". If Google sends its crawlers from the US, as an example, and my server is in the UK, it'd detect a slower server response.

Please, if anyone can help clarify.

Thanks

Google Crawlers - how do they work?

Martin Senko replied to thread Google Crawlers - how do they work?

Hi @fabrizioas, welcome to SEO forum.

If you want to optimize your server response for two countries, your responses should be quick specially for these countries. That means

  1. you should host locally
  2. optimize your website speed - minimize number of requests, their time, size of assets client has to read/download (scripts, images, videos, ...)

I assume the two countries you're optimizing for are close geographically, which means you don't necessarily need CDN and having server connected to a local backbone will be well enough.

In other cases, if you need to optimize for larger audiences across the world, CDN or anycast are both great ways to speed up for people from different places.

As for Google Crawler, I wouldn't be worried. They have virtually endless resources distributed across data centres all over the world and they can tell your target index by various signals (including content itself, of course), so it's safe to assume that they just know...

Sep 23, 2021

Can I submit a unique content to 2/3 of the blog sites by changing the image?

Martin Senko replied to thread Can I submit a unique content to 2/3 of the blog sites by changing the image?

Changing just thumbnail still means 100% content match.

Think about it... if I wanted to steal your content and publish it on my site, just by changing thumbnails. How easy would that be for me? At the same time, how stupid would SE have to be to not find out?

Definitely no go, if you asked me.

Sep 17, 2021

Request for Reindexing on Google

Martin Senko upvoted Request for Reindexing on Google

Hello,

I have a page "Latest photos" which is being updated everyday. The page contains a list of photo entries and each photo has get their own page/link.

https://explora.mu/hd-photos/latest

Am requesting Google search console to reindex the page everyday. Will Google index the individual links to each photo entry ?

Thanks !

Request for Reindexing on Google

Martin Senko replied to thread Request for Reindexing on Google

5-20 photos (new pages) a day is perfectly fine, I wouldn't be worried about crawl budget at all in this case, even though your website is fairly new.

The linking situation: while it might be ambiguous, think about it; It's OK to link live anchors across the forum - related thread or thread that already answered someones' question. Yet live links to third party sites could be potentially harmful (for both parties). When linking to a source which contains spam/malicious content, it is harmful for the forum, while often times, when for example discussing penalties and grey/black hat strategies, as an OP, you don't want your site being linked directly with (which Google could easily find out...). BUT we still need to leave room for users to link to a highly reputable sources to back up their opinions like studies, white papers, Google documentation, etc.

To add on this whenever you insert a link here, it ask you for link description i.e. I know, yet most of the users would just copy paste the link without using the editors link button.

If you have any suggestions how to make linking better/more effective around here, I'll be happy to discuss.

Thanks

Sep 16, 2021

Request for Reindexing on Google

Martin Senko replied to thread Request for Reindexing on Google

It depends on how much resources Google have for your site (crawl budget). If it's new site and you have thousands of new photos everyday, I would not expect they will crawl them all and refresh their index on daily basis. Just part of it at best. However, if you gain better ranking positions, CTR etc., they will do eventually.

Also, please, do not link-spam the board. We use code for URLs. Whenever someone uses nice anchor text, it's a red flag and your post may be deleted. So, just use links and sanitize them.

Sep 4, 2021

Re: Issue with URL Parameters

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Issue with URL Parameters

Sorry don't understand the question.

Is it about dynamic links or content?

Aug 27, 2021

Re: Help! Image SEO for ecommerce?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Help! Image SEO for ecommerce?

If you use multiple product photos, this is a good way to use different synonyms in your ALT texts. In this way you not only make it clear to the search engine exactly which product you offer. This also improves visibility in Google image search.

Aug 26, 2021
Aug 20, 2021

Link Pages

Martin Senko replied to thread Link Pages

Unless the links are something your users are really looking for, I don't see a clear benefit of having "Link page". Of course, I don't know what exactly you mean, but would expect a page with links to multiple sites, mostly unrelated, purpose being linkbuilding. Well, this is not a great strategy today and I would avoid it. It's actually red flag when you think about it - no content just links to various websites.

I wouldn't expect high CTR either...

Aug 18, 2021

Re: What's the difference about doing National SEO vs Local SEO?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: What's the difference about doing National SEO vs Local SEO?

The SERPS are different in local rankings. It is possible that you can rank national.

category pages v pages

Martin Senko replied to thread category pages v pages
  1. Both URLs only have backlinks from threads (namely from this thread on SF and one from WarriorForum). This means, URL rating is roughly equal = doesn't matter which one you keep and which one you merge&remove.

  2. Check your analytics. If you find one of the categories (URLs) performing significantly better, therefor it receives more traffic from search, referral traffic, ... keep that one. The rule of thumb here is, you want to keep the bigger, more used page and merge smaller, less significant.

  3. Why would you merge two distinct category pages with no semantic overlap in the first place? Doesn't make sense to me.

Side note: something seems broken - from time to time a page doesn't load for me (randomly).

Aug 15, 2021

403 forbidden error

Martin Senko replied to thread 403 forbidden error

Impossible to help without further details.

cms trouble to enter

Martin Senko replied to thread cms trouble to enter

As @jaap mentioned, the easiest and quickest way to recovery your password is through Lost Password recovery form.

Side note: please, use relevant tags - this thread has nothing to do with marketing... Thank you.

Aug 10, 2021

Re: Are gambling links relevant to a videogame website?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Are gambling links relevant to a videogame website?

Did you check the spam score and toxic score of this sites? They are really famous for it.

The relevance between gambling and gaming is discussable.

Aug 9, 2021

Re: Duplicate content issue for medicine active ingredient

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Duplicate content issue for medicine active ingredient

It's not actually thin content though. It answers a specific query and has a obvious search intent too. Being a small page by word count does not inherently mean the page is bad.

I think profusely repeating yourself on each product page would likely be worse. Plus, how many users actually want/need/use this information? If less than a majority, you're just stuffing a page with information most users will not want.

I believe if there's a choice, you should chose a positive user experience before 'search optimization'.

Re: Duplicate content issue for medicine active ingredient

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Duplicate content issue for medicine active ingredient

It's also worth noting that the internet is mostly duplicate content. Very few people have original thoughts, very few sites are original concepts, very few blogs have original content, and very few pictures are of original objects.

Loosen the definitions a bit when considering best practices. Google has succeeded when it hands a searcher to a website which fully and accurately answers their query.

Quit wasting time on checking boxes and simply offer the best/most complete answer on an easy to navigate page which loads quickly on both mobile on desktop? You'll have better long-term success.

Aug 7, 2021

Re: confuse about my web

Martin Senko upvoted Re: confuse about my web

Create and submit a 'disavow' file to Google to ignore those links.

Aug 5, 2021

SEO link strategy for five article posts I purchased

Martin Senko upvoted SEO link strategy for five article posts I purchased

I purchased five article posts to five different websites. All technology related and the DA for each is: DA72, DA69, DA66, DA66 and DA60.

My goal was buying the posts (I am providing the unique content to each site) to build links back to my main site. Here is the Question:

Should I create content for each website to point back to my main site, individually?

OR

Should I have each article point to the next article website, to the next article website, with the last article website pointing to the main site?

Re: SEO link strategy for five article posts I purchased

Martin Senko upvoted Re: SEO link strategy for five article posts I purchased

Absolutely agree,

Common mistake is to link mainly to the homepage. Relevance is very important. A sudden grow of high authority backlinks is bad. They'll be useless, because they'll be considered as paid ones.

Welcome Me

Martin Senko replied to thread Welcome Me

Welcome to SEO Forum @zwilliam

We hope you can share something interesting as well.

Enjoy!

Aug 3, 2021

SEO link strategy for five article posts I purchased

Martin Senko replied to thread SEO link strategy for five article posts I purchased

Technically, it would be of greater benefit to your site if you had all the articles linking to your site.

However! As always, there is a catch.

If you have smaller/newer website, which has not been getting new backlinks from high DA sites at such pace, it will be red flag if you get 5 super strong links from 5 different websites at once.

Other issue here is, that you'd probably link to the same URL.

I'd prefer getting links gradually over time, each article linking to a related page, not homepage.

Jul 26, 2021

Re: SEO URL title is it important

Martin Senko upvoted Re: SEO URL title is it important

> I cannot use the camp sites name as they will not all be unique.

In fact I would try really (almost) anything to have good looking URL's. Not only for SEO but also UX.

If there are 3 campsites with the same name, why not make your URL's like: website/the-pilot-inn-kent website/the-pilot-inn-derby website/the-pilot-inn-boston

Jul 19, 2021
Jul 15, 2021

Re: How can I get people to participate in my Expert Round-up Post?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: How can I get people to participate in my Expert Round-up Post?

Why should an expert take time to add content to your blog? Are there good reasons for this? If you can find this reasons then perhaps you can find somebody.

Jul 6, 2021

How can I reduce my websites' alexa rank?

Martin Senko replied to thread How can I reduce my websites' alexa rank?

which off page SEO make powerful backlinks?

I don't understand, sorry.

Jun 30, 2021

How can I reduce my websites' alexa rank?

Martin Senko replied to thread How can I reduce my websites' alexa rank?

Why do you care Alexa rank? How is that number meaningful to you as a webmaster?

Just asking, you know, learning something new every day..

Jun 23, 2021

Keyword dropped 50 positions in one day (7th of July)

Martin Senko replied to thread Keyword dropped 50 positions in one day (7th of July)

@chr15athone this is really terrible situation. You should never start/run a business that depends on the mercy of google, because this is exactly what happens sometimes and you can't do anything really. It's their SE, their algos, they can modify them whenever and however they want.

What sort of traffic levels used your site to receive before?

Jun 15, 2021

Re: No rankings from 6 Months

Martin Senko upvoted Re: No rankings from 6 Months

It always depends on many factors. You cannot successfully compare one keyword with another that has a good position in the search results. Where one word has only little competition, this can completely differ for another word, so that the approach for ranking will be different.

Quick solutions are often fairytales. Seo is a long road without end.

Re: SEO problem

Martin Senko upvoted Re: SEO problem

common sense

Jun 13, 2021

my website is rank 25.how to rank top 5

Martin Senko replied to thread my website is rank 25.how to rank top 5

This is non-sense question, but I'll leave it here for others that would like to know... With question like this one, there is no way.

Re: my website is rank 25.how to rank top 5

Martin Senko upvoted Re: my website is rank 25.how to rank top 5

At least I can't answer questions that contain so little information. It's like someone asks me, I drive an old Volvo now, how can I drive a Maserati?

In general, you rank higher if you offer more value to your visitors than the competition. Because there are hundreds of ranking factors, it is impossible to give a comprehensive answer to your question. This requires a thorough analysis of the website, keywords, competition, technology, etc.

Jun 11, 2021

Re: No rankings from 6 Months

Martin Senko upvoted Re: No rankings from 6 Months

Your "supplements to boost immune system" is in 3 alt tags only. Google can consider this as keyword stuffing. Try to add it also in your decscription. and in one H2 tag. If this is the main keyword for the page, add it in your meta tags too. Then link from another page with the exact text to your page. And if possible with some varitions from other pages.

A few backlinks from relevant high authority domains will do the rest.

Jun 9, 2021

No rankings from 6 Months

Martin Senko replied to thread No rankings from 6 Months

Any particular keywords you're targeting?

Internal Link Indicated as Referral or Direct on GA?

Martin Senko replied to thread Internal Link Indicated as Referral or Direct on GA?

Internal link clicks do not contribute to Acquisitions.

Acquisitions are incoming visitors (either directly or over a channel).

Keyword dropped 50 positions in one day (7th of July)

Martin Senko replied to thread Keyword dropped 50 positions in one day (7th of July)

If no changes were made on the site and you have not received manual penalty, there is a chance, you've been hit by the Core Update, that was announced June 2nd:

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Later today, we are releasing a broad core update, as we do several times per year. It is called the June 2021 Core Update. Our guidance about such updates is here:<a href="https://t.co/e5ZQUA3RC6&quot;&gt;https://t.co/e5ZQUA3RC6&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;This will be followed by the July 2021 Core update. Here’s more information about that…</p>— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) <a href="https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1400135428909371398?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&quot;&gt;June 2, 2021</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js&quot; charset="utf-8"></script>

It takes some time to roll out all over the search results, so 7th of June sounds like a good likelihood. <blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">The June 2021 Core Update is now rolling out live. As is typical with these updates, it will typically take about one to two weeks to fully roll out.</p>— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) <a href="https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1400220291922481152?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&quot;&gt;June 2, 2021</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js&quot; charset="utf-8"></script>

span class in keyword

Martin Senko replied to thread span class in keyword

Markup is just a markup. It's bells and whistles on top of the content, but span/div/etc are basically stripped, so your content is fine.

Jun 6, 2021

URLs for ecommerce site

Martin Senko replied to thread URLs for ecommerce site

I have 1 position for particular product on google rank, but, the url is not for the product, but for the category, in which the product is. So it is not domain.tld/category/sub-category/product-name, but domain.tld/category/sub-category.

Category may receive much more traffic, because it's more general, covering many products... Potentially much higher search volume - so yeah, lower conversion rate, but still could be the same or better in the end. Also depends on products you have listed.

With products, you get higher conversion rate but just a fraction of category volume. Which one is better? Who knows.

Would you rather be #1 on "iphone" or "iphone [whatever the current model is]"? I think you should build links and aim to rank as high as possible for both categories and core products.

Jun 2, 2021

URLs for ecommerce site

Martin Senko replied to thread URLs for ecommerce site

domain.tld/product-name is (should be) better, as you're prioritizing your keyword and have no clutter in your url. However, your path is OK - there is nothing you should improve. The /product-name is part of a so-called "flat" URL structure, which is good for SEO, but not so great for user experience - on a product page, you can't tell where exactly in the structure you are. However, you probably have breadcrumbs, so virtually no one will be looking for it in URL...

It's also not trivial to bind those routes...

As you can see, it's more of a preference than good/bad practice. Maybe better fit for one project while not ideal for another.

Jun 1, 2021

Re: Can PageRank drop significantly after server error?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Can PageRank drop significantly after server error?

Can PageRank drop significantly after server error? Yes, it's the perfect recipe for a 100% bounce rate.

A signal for Google your content isn't what people are looking for. So your rankings will drop.

Recovery takes serious time. Change the publication date of some articles to today. Giving 1 or 2 articles a lift in this way every day can contribute to a faster recovery.

May 31, 2021

How to Fix 406 Issue from my website?

Martin Senko replied to thread How to Fix 406 Issue from my website?

the Drive file doesn't seem to be publicly available... just saying

Re: URLs for ecommerce site

Martin Senko upvoted Re: URLs for ecommerce site

A semantically accurate URL is the best. There's nothing wrong with yours. ![SEO best practices for URLs](https://moz-static.s3.amazonaws.com/learn/seo/URLs-page/Anatomy-of-a-URL-cheat-sheet_170316_122433.png?mtime=20170316122435 "SEO best practices for URLs")

May 30, 2021

Re: Looking for a reviews service?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Looking for a reviews service?

Why not use Google reviews?

May 24, 2021

Re: Tried Everything, Google Will Not Index WordPress Site, (DNS Issues Highly Likely)

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Tried Everything, Google Will Not Index WordPress Site, (DNS Issues Highly Likely)

In your https://gro-usa.com/page-sitemap.xml are 2 links. Your https://gro-usa.com/post-sitemap.xml is empty.

Add more informative, high-quality content for you visitors. So there is a reason to index your site. And relevant back links will do the rest.

May 21, 2021

Re: Indexed, not submitted in sitemap

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Indexed, not submitted in sitemap

When you submit a site map it indexed all the pages of your website but it will not index the pages which are not allowed to index e.g they are disallow in robot.txt file .

Re: HTTPS Coverage

Martin Senko upvoted Re: HTTPS Coverage

There's a tweet about your issue from John Mu. https://twitter.com/JohnMu/status/1387874087045844996?s=20

Unfortunately there's a bug there in Search Console. When we we show "Failing / Insufficient HTTPS coverage" in the Page experience report, that can just mean we don't have the full data (instead of saying "not enough data" we incorrectly say "failing"). We're fixing it.

May 19, 2021

Why is my Doman Raiting so low?

Martin Senko replied to thread Why is my Doman Raiting so low?

I wouldn't focus on meaningless metrics in the first place, but majority works about the same; measuring authority of source websites, calculating authority of links and then calculate authority of destination websites, so kind of multigraph with nodes being websites and edges being links...

As per ahrefs, you only receive 78 links from 16 websites. Without looking further how topical and authoritative those links are (which you should always take into consideration) this is clearly not enough to move the gauge up. So according to ahrefs algorithm, your domain is scoring only 0.4/100 (log scale).

How to improve? Get links. Not just links, but quality, topical, meaningful links that will also bring some traffic.

Anyway, you should be checking your SE traffic, keywords and search positions rather than meaningless numbers...

May 11, 2021

Indexed, not submitted in sitemap

Martin Senko replied to thread Indexed, not submitted in sitemap

Those pages are in their index. They are missing in your sitemap. So those are OK. Generally the problem would be if you had pages Google doesn't know about. Sitemap is a way to tell.

But 19M pages? Seems that would be way off crawl budget for your website, and I am wondering what could potentially be on those 19M pages... I don't think we are talking unique content that does make any kind of sense.

May 7, 2021

Page is not mobile friendly error

Martin Senko replied to thread Page is not mobile friendly error

Alright, so your question is?

May 3, 2021

Re: Can speed of a website / load time impact on SEO of a website?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Can speed of a website / load time impact on SEO of a website?

Yes, Website speed can have an impact on your SEO results, as Google has stated that site speed is one of the factors while ranking pages on search engine results. Therefore, Pages that take longer to load tend to have higher bounce rates and the audience spent lower average time on the page.

Apr 27, 2021

Product description - are product parameters as internal backlinks duplicities?

Martin Senko upvoted Product description - are product parameters as internal backlinks duplicities?

Hello,

I have an ecommerce store. From many reasons I am thinking about generate little part of description from product parameters. Mainly, because lots of products have these parameters, so right now I am putting it into description manually. Considering I am going to make some language mutations it would be not effective to keep doing it manually.

Lets say I have pants. The pants have this specifications:

  • color: US camouflage
  • material: 50% cotton, 50 %nylon Rip/Stop
  • membrane: Gore-Tex
  • and so on...

What I want to do is, that I would put these specifications as parameters to the product and Description would look like this:

  • (H1 Product title) (If possible little bit different from meta title)
  • (H2 Description of "Product name") Some short and as uniqe as possible text description
  • (H3 Specifications) here would be automattically putted higher specifications (every product would have these specifications as parameter in our system) and it would be interactive. So for example, you could click on "Gore-Tex" or "Ripstop" and it would get you in new tab on blog, where is glossary and there is article about Gore-Tex. From this artcile you can also clik back on store on dynamic category with all Gore-tex products. Here is my question. Would those parameters be considered as duplicities, when lots of products have the same parameters? Is it good from internal backling perspective, that those parameters would be interactive and it would take you f.e. on glosary and so on?
  • (H3 Benefits) Some short text about benefits and use of product.

Thanks guys.

Product description - are product parameters as internal backlinks duplicities?

Martin Senko replied to thread Product description - are product parameters as internal backlinks duplicities?

As long as it makes sense for the users/potential buyers to go through the generated paragraphs to find product details, it sounds alright.

The question here is, isn't much more convenient for the average visitor to find minimal product specs possible and learn exactly what they're looking for when it comes to product page? I mean, these paragraphs won't harm your SEO - those are common attributes and can't be completely unique anyway. But from user experience standpoint, I'd probably go with spot-on descriptions, unordered list of attributes rather than hiding important details into fluff.

Then again, you won't get SEO advantage (too short, not unique) or disadvantage (it is what it is, same attributes and specs for many products). So all you should probably take care of here are your vistors, should I say potential buyers..

Apr 9, 2021

Canonical URLs Error and Deindexed Pages

Martin Senko replied to thread Canonical URLs Error and Deindexed Pages

Once you fix the issue, your pages should be re-indexed in reasonable time. Due to high number of pages, it will probably take longer, but Google should be able to recognize them again without any further manual pushing.

Request indexing in GSC is always good idea if you need to make sure you made use of all the levers they give us.

Apr 5, 2021

How to Remove Posted Comments from Articles, If there Is No Option To Delete?

Martin Senko replied to thread How to Remove Posted Comments from Articles, If there Is No Option To Delete?

No, there is technically nothing you can do yourself.

In most cases the only option will be getting in touch with site admin/webmaster. Or even better, think twice before spamming...

I want huge traffic on my directory (health) site

Martin Senko replied to thread I want huge traffic on my directory (health) site

We all want huge traffic to our websites...

Mar 30, 2021

Re: Clicks and Users.

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Clicks and Users.

It means Google don't want you to use Facebook Ads, hahaha...

Mar 24, 2021

Re: Rank my website

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Rank my website

One of the most important things that can influence the SEO ranking is the quality of the content. Therefore create unique, relevant, and high-quality content. Then optimize the content using heading tags and keywords. Then you can do link-building techniques to increase site ranking. Because the number of inbound to a page can help that page rank higher. These are just some basic methods. There are so many other effective SEO strategies are available.

Mar 17, 2021

how to increase the number of search words

Martin Senko replied to thread how to increase the number of search words

Use code for links. Thanks.

In the editor:

http://...

SEO the pipe opener site

Martin Senko replied to thread SEO the pipe opener site

No live links please, specially with those KW anchors. We consider it link spamming the board and remove such posts, eventually ban author.

Mar 13, 2021

Features of choosing a domain registrar

Martin Senko replied to thread Features of choosing a domain registrar

Unexpected price increases also come from Verisign price increases, which is something registrar don't have under control...

Anyway, I am talking about well-known, big registrars.

Mar 10, 2021

Features of choosing a domain registrar

Martin Senko replied to thread Features of choosing a domain registrar

There are differences, of course.

GoDaddy is well known registrar, the biggest out there. They provide great marketplace solutions, and their domain management interface is quiet straightforward, easy to use.. However, you pay premium for that. The pricing is quiet extreme compared to competition. As long as you don't have Domain Discount Club subscription, it doesn't make sense to register and and manage higher volume there.

Personally, I prefer Dynadot with their much more affordable pricing policy. You can also try Namecheap, Name.com, whatever that fit's your needs. Every big(ger) player on the market offers high level of service. At least from my personal experience.

Mar 2, 2021

Help me rank for keyword

Martin Senko replied to thread Help me rank for keyword

Start with few high-quality backlinks.

Mar 1, 2021

Digital Marketing

Martin Senko replied to thread Digital Marketing

What kind of answer would satisfy you?

It IS fundamental for nearly every niche out there and one can guess it will be more and more crucial in the future. However, such question has nothing to do with this forum.

Feb 27, 2021

How many listing you can create under one Google account? What's the maximum limit?

Martin Senko replied to thread How many listing you can create under one Google account? What's the maximum limit?

From what I understand, there is no limit right now.

  • If your profiles were created before October 2017: You can own up to a maximum of 100 business profiles, including Google+ brand pages and YouTube channels.
  • If your profiles were created on or after October 2017: You can own any number of business profiles.

https://support.google.com/business/answer/3452778?hl=en

How to increase ranking on my website.

Martin Senko replied to thread How to increase ranking on my website.

Unless you give us details on what EXACTLY your goal is, which keywords do you target, who you compete with, there is no way for us to help.

What is best way to do seo is not an answerable question. Do your research and try to ask "smaller" questions at a time. It is so broad, that even set of books won't answer all it takes to get it done perfectly.

Feb 17, 2021

Seoforum Rules and Moderation

Martin Senko published thread Seoforum Rules and Moderation

In general, there is no explanation to how we moderate this board. Not that we have to explain it in any way, but I personally really appreciate every single visitor here, so seems fair to let you know...

Links

Do not post live links in general. Use block code or inline code instead.

People (or should I say spambots) generally use live links to spam sites and we can identify it easily by checking for links in posts.

Such posts are sometimes recognized automatically, and sometimes we edit or remove manually. There is never lift ban included for most cases, so make sure you avoid posting live links.

If you need opportunity to pitch your product/service, feel free to hit me up, using link in the footer. We are happy to show off great product and useful services here via banners, or blogposts.

Weird content

From time to time, we see a post or reply that doesn't look like natural language. It's either generated or made totally unclear by author using useless description of their issue.

In 95% of cases we delete those.

Copy paste content

Sometimes really nice, lengthy post shows up. It's weird, because it has no links in it and we don't see why would someone post such an exhausting piece without being rewarded in any way.. So we check it in Google and web plagiarism checkers and there is almost always a match.

Please, don't do that. You will get banned (never lift ban).

It's obviously duplicate content, we don't like it, our users don't like it, search engines don't like it.

How the reputation points work

Every time you post or reply (or your post/reply receives upvote) your reputation is going up.

When we delete your post/reply, you are getting minus points. So you're basically losing your hardly earned reputation.

That's about it. Make sure you email me with whatever you are not sure about. Most likely, if you are unsure, it's probably no-go.

Thanks and enjoy the board.

How to handle ALOT of similar landingpages for local businesses

Martin Senko replied to thread How to handle ALOT of similar landingpages for local businesses

Is it going to be like GEO directory? So for example you have page for Dallas and there are 15 painters on the page in a list. You click some and that takes you to a painter landing page?

If so, it does make sense to me. Even if similar, you should create page for each of them. Can't see possible aggregation options there.

Feb 16, 2021

Using a Freelance Bid Site Profile on Your Website

Martin Senko replied to thread Using a Freelance Bid Site Profile on Your Website

Not sure right now; do you mean BIO in here, on SeoForum?

Yeah, these are indexed, and also length limited - not sure if you can copy all the info you want.

How to get traffic from Blogsite

Martin Senko replied to thread How to get traffic from Blogsite

That's fairly broad question @Kaushik21

If your content is valuable in general, you should promote it in places, where your target audience is. If it's more competitive niche, you will likely need to pay for the promotion (Ads, PR, million options here).

Feb 11, 2021

Re: What is the importance of SSL Certificate in the website as per SEO Point of view?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: What is the importance of SSL Certificate in the website as per SEO Point of view?
  • Impact of SSL Certificate on Digital Marketing Aspects- SEO & Google Adwords

Earlier, SSL certificate was needed, just to collect private and sensitive data like payment transaction in ecommerce website. As the cybercrime ratio increased and growth in hacking activities, it has now become important get protection in place. Google have announced that amongst all other factors in line, Enabling SSL certificate in the website is one important factor for a slight boost in SEO ranking. It is a small reward for the website using secured site. To be in Google good book, it’s important to convert website from HTTP to HTTPS.

  1. If the website is not secured, it will display a warning sign.
  2. This eventually leads the visitors leave the site.
  3. Due to which competitors having secured website will be benefited.
  4. It’s now a vital as well as good SEO practice that can be implemented.

Now, Google is also making it a mandate to have secured website, or it will remove product listing ads, if it’s not SSL Certificate enabled.

  1. It secures the payment data and other sensitive information.
  2. Hence, it’s must for ecommerce website.
  3. Payment transaction will be done with secured website only.
  4. It’s Google’s policy that the product listing or account shall be compliant with local laws.
  5. If certificate is not linked with shopping cart sites, it may be considered as rules violation.
Feb 4, 2021

How can I Rank my website in search Engine

Martin Senko replied to thread How can I Rank my website in search Engine

@javesh Your post doesn't help really. Next time, make sure you read op's question before answering it. Thanks.

Re: How can I Rank my website in search Engine

Martin Senko upvoted Re: How can I Rank my website in search Engine

This is a very expensive tool everyone can not purchase this at this price. Please suggest to me other tools.

Feb 3, 2021

I have published 25 blogs, promoted over social media still No crawl by Google

Martin Senko replied to thread I have published 25 blogs, promoted over social media still No crawl by Google

@nesim so what do you think would be appropriate approach to links in posts? Most people register and post just to get a link to their site.

Like Hey my website xyz is slow. What should I do?

This is not something we can leave here. No real benefit to anyone.

So I suggest to post more details - just answer the question, if you have anything to say. That's it.

Jan 31, 2021

My website's organic traffic stopped improving suddenly

Martin Senko replied to thread My website's organic traffic stopped improving suddenly

Your traffic may be seasonal. We don't really know.

Anyway, 2000 to 1800 is not a sudden drop in traffic. I wouldn't call it drop at all. Each day is different and 10% day-to-day difference is not a big deal.

Jan 26, 2021

SXO optimization of my website

Martin Senko replied to thread SXO optimization of my website

Hello and welcome to Seoforum.

So what exactly would you like to know about SXO?

Jan 24, 2021

how to fix keyword cannibalization?

Martin Senko replied to thread how to fix keyword cannibalization?

What exactly happened to you? What's your issue?

Keyword cannibalization problem is not exactly about multiple pages fighting for higher ranks. That would be fine, if you could get monopoly of a kind. But you can't. Google will display 1-2 results from the same domain, sometimes maybe even third page... but that's it. So if you have 10 pages potentially ranking, you only will get 1-2 of em to serp.

Jan 22, 2021

Which is best tools for seo onpage ?

Martin Senko replied to thread Which is best tools for seo onpage ?

@Adnan Khan

yeah, if you use Wordpress, it can help.

In general, all you really need is read through Google Guidelines and update your site accordingly. There is no magic formula. Help Google better understand your content and your results will get to relevant places.

Will adding another business w/ same phone # different domainto GMB account affect SEO?

Martin Senko replied to thread Will adding another business w/ same phone # different domainto GMB account affect SEO?

Same domain/IP/IP block/hosting provider/phone number/physical address/... is always linking point. I can't tell if Google does use phone # to connect domains and therefore dilute ranks, but it's possible connection. Depends on why you're asking.

Jan 17, 2021

Can anyone tell me which tool is better and free?

Martin Senko replied to thread Can anyone tell me which tool is better and free?

If you haven't noticed yet, Zutrix is running their Ad campaign here on SeoForum. Definitely check them - should be exactly what you're looking for.

Recover from 14 Jan Core Update

Martin Senko replied to thread Recover from 14 Jan Core Update

Nice, congrats on recovering your site. 2020 was rough, and looks like 2021 will be even crazier. Get ready for it.

Jan 13, 2021

Re: How should i recrawl my website ?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: How should i recrawl my website ?

You must remove the URL of the old site through Google Search Console, one by one.

Re: analysing a website

Martin Senko upvoted Re: analysing a website

dear, many free tools are available online like seoptimer [dot] com, rankwatch [dot] com, etc., but they provide little information about the site. If you are looking for a tool to make your site better at SEO point of view, checking backlinks or other aspects, then you should go with paid.

Jan 12, 2021

Point domain

Martin Senko replied to thread Point domain

Of course. Redirecting another domain to your primary domain is good idea, specially if the redirected domain has traffic/backlinks/ranks.

With 301 redirect you're basically passing all the juice to your primary domain.

Common approach is to buy expired domains and redirecting them.

Jan 11, 2021

page speed error

Martin Senko replied to thread page speed error

Try optimizing images (jpeg compression, lower resolution, ...). Lazy loading may help too, if you can't bring the size of thumbnail down to a reasonable size.

Slow loading won't get you a ban, but could play role in ranking, and it's more obvious in highly competitive niches.

Jan 8, 2021

Removing my mega menu a good idea?

Martin Senko replied to thread Removing my mega menu a good idea?

At first, hundreds of links in a single menu seems like something people can't navigate easily. Also, the juice is getting diluted by adding links...

In the end, doesn't sound like a navigation with so many links. Does it really help your users navigate?

Take a look at your users first, imagine their experience. SEO is nice thing to have, but learn to treat your users well first. Otherwise, they end up bouncing and your efforts might be worthless.

Dec 21, 2020

Re: page loading time

Martin Senko upvoted Re: page loading time

You have to work on the properties of your website such as images, CSS, JS, etc. Apart from that eliminating render block is also an important thing to consider here. If you are an expert then you will come to know about the properties from Google PageSpeed Insight. On the other hand, you can hire a web developer to get the task done.

Dec 17, 2020

Re: Confused about SEO

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Confused about SEO

Google Does not care about the score given by SEO Inspection tools, and DA, PA, and other determination factors created by several companies like Moz, Ahref, and many other tools. Focus on your referrals, Citation, and review creators which is the most important factor.

Dec 16, 2020

what affects your SEO ranking?

Martin Senko replied to thread what affects your SEO ranking?

Yeah, doesn't make much sense to me.

.COM vs .CC domain names for SEO

Martin Senko replied to thread .COM vs .CC domain names for SEO

Yes, you can rank with any domain. As long as your website and content do perform well, it's all fine. However, you may see lower CTR, as most people don't know exotic extensions and they are used to .com. Also, expect some traffic leaking to the .com.

what affects your SEO ranking?

Martin Senko replied to thread what affects your SEO ranking?

What do you want to discuss?

How is my website increase rank on google search, help me!!

Martin Senko replied to thread How is my website increase rank on google search, help me!!

@congtysos

1000 backlinks mean nothing. Focus on quality instead of quantity.

what affects your SEO ranking?

Martin Senko replied to thread what affects your SEO ranking?

So, what's your question?

Dec 15, 2020

Handling .com and .net extensions

Martin Senko replied to thread Handling .com and .net extensions

So you have a website on your .com domain and then you have .net domain, that has traffic? 301 (permanent) redirect is what I'd do in such case. It will drive traffic to your .com, but also let the juice flow from the .net, so in case it has good backlink profile, your website (.com) will benefit from it.

Dec 8, 2020

Google December Core Algorithm Update 2020

Martin Senko replied to thread Google December Core Algorithm Update 2020

Every update aims to filter spam/improve quality of search results.

So @macrew-tech you can say that about them all.

Dec 7, 2020

Google Ranking vs Ahrefs Ranking

Martin Senko replied to thread Google Ranking vs Ahrefs Ranking

Another option comes to mind - your rankings have recently changed (like very recently) and Ahrefs shows older cached data. But the difference is huge, so I don't really think that's the case.

References in articles

Martin Senko replied to thread References in articles

It's good practice in real world to reference reliable sources that was used to create an article/book etc. Same situation in the online space - it's good practice, specially from moral point of view.

If you strictly look from SEO point of view, your "link juice" flows to referenced pages. It doesn't hurt your website, but it helps referenced websites.

For me, it's like giving credit and showing respect to your sources.

Google Ranking vs Ahrefs Ranking

Martin Senko replied to thread Google Ranking vs Ahrefs Ranking

Not entirely sure which SERP you're talking about. Anyway, you can't replicate Google's SERP for obvious reason: you (we) don't know their algorithm/formula. We know some parts that are being considered during the ranking process, so Ahrefs is approximating their ranks and metrics to be relevant and reflecting Google's SERP, but there is still too much of a guesswork to correlate with the SERP 100%.

If you're asking, why do you see different rankings when Ahrefs checks for you vs. when you check directly yourself, chances are your results are GEO specific, your profile specific (specially if you're logged into your account), or adjusted for you in some other way.

Dec 6, 2020

Traffic decreasing despite my site is at #1 positing

Martin Senko replied to thread Traffic decreasing despite my site is at #1 positing

Do you use Search Console? You should be able to see exact search impressions and clicks. That would answer your question immediately.

Google December Core Algorithm Update 2020

Martin Senko published thread Google December Core Algorithm Update 2020

Recently, Google rolled out their new algo update.

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Later today, we are releasing a broad core algorithm update, as we do several times per year. It is called the December 2020 Core Update. Our guidance about such updates remains as we’ve covered before. Please see this blog post for more about that:<a href="https://t.co/e5ZQUAlt0G&quot;&gt;https://t.co/e5ZQUAlt0G&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&mdash; Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) <a href="https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1334521448074006530?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&quot;&gt;December 3, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js&quot; charset="utf-8"></script>

Do you see any movements already?

Dec 5, 2020

Ranking in another country

Martin Senko replied to thread Ranking in another country

There are many things to consider. From domain, through actual content all the way to backlinks and other references.

Provide more information about your website, niche and your goals. There is no help without further details

Traffic decreasing despite my site is at #1 positing

Martin Senko replied to thread Traffic decreasing despite my site is at #1 positing

Keyword traffic is seasonal for most keywords. Check Google AdWords (now Google Ads), you'll see keyword trends there. I bet your traffic is copying the trend.

How does ranking system actually work?

Martin Senko replied to thread How does ranking system actually work?

"Ranking system" is so complex, that it would take weeks to get through every single bit of it. The good thing is, we don't know how exactly ranking works, so we don't need to explain in so much detail. It is blackbox, obviously, so we have to use reverse engineering to understand it.

As for your question; if you write content about "white coffee mug", you can rank for "white coffee", "coffee mug", even for "coffee" etc. It all depends on your content, LSI (related) keywords, domain authority, your authority as an author... Google take much more into consideration than you might think. And it works vice versa; you don't have to write content aiming for exact keyword density, limiting your content to particular keywords, etc. You are not (fully) controlling your ranking and SE appearance by using or not using particular keywords.

The best thing to focus on from my perspective is user intent, so imagine what would someone looking for a coffee mug want to find on your site. And give them all the information they could be possibly looking for. Make sure that they don't have to go back to search and find another website/article just to get additional information on that topic.

You're definitely not overthinking, more likely "underthinking", if that's even a thing :)

Nov 25, 2020

Redirect in the link?

Martin Senko replied to thread Redirect in the link?

I don't see a valid reason to do that.

You either want visitor to visit google.com or yahoo.com. But visiting yahoo via google doesn't make sense to me.

What's the use case for such a redirect?

Replacing URLs: what's at risk?

Martin Senko replied to thread Replacing URLs: what's at risk?

What you've described (new URL structure, no redirects from old URLs) would be indeed very harmful for your site. Well, to be precise, it would do harm to each individual page relocated to a new URL.

Keep in mind, that your visitors often come to particular pages, not directly to index and navigating from there. If you don't let their browser know what used to be here is now there they will not simply find it and will end up stuck on 404. Maybe even more important aspect however is, that your ranks will remain on non existing URLs and actual content pages will be blank sheet...

Sanitize every single URL change using 301, or don't change URLs. Otherwise, YES, it will kill your SEO, at least for some time.

Moving country-specific traffic and domain to .COM domain

Martin Senko replied to thread Moving country-specific traffic and domain to .COM domain

If you go for the .com, it would be interesting to revisit this change in one month or so. Keep us updated!

Moving country-specific traffic and domain to .COM domain

Martin Senko replied to thread Moving country-specific traffic and domain to .COM domain

That's a tough one.

If you keep it on .co.in, it will probably negatively affect your CTR for western countries. If you move it to .com, it won't feel so domestic for indian visitors, this could affect CTR in India.

If the content is primarily focused on India, I'd probably keep it on .co.in. If you feel like there is much stronger upside in going international and bringing the content to .com, go for it. 301 is a must in such case. Also, it will take some time for your ranks to settle.

Ahrefs DR Drastic Change

Martin Senko replied to thread Ahrefs DR Drastic Change

I think that this is pretty common situation. At least, it happened to me multiple times already.

DR is not a real-time metric. It takes time to spider all the links, do the math and repeat that to keep numbers updated. Also, their algorithm is not fixed and they might be changing it more or less when needed. Sometimes, you can acquire great link, that is deleted in a month or so, and it could be reflected in your DR the way you're describing.

I'd say it's not a big deal. Nothing is perfect and your domain is sitting around 50. Small differences doesn't matter - it's not Google formula, that it has direct effect on ranking.

Nov 21, 2020

Can anyone tell me which tool is better and free?

Martin Senko replied to thread Can anyone tell me which tool is better and free?

Exactly ^

I think Ahrefs will help not just for checking ranks but they also have much more data to work with.

Nov 18, 2020

SEO of an Accounting website

Martin Senko replied to thread SEO of an Accounting website

Exactly^

High quality links only, the more the better. We are talking extreme competition, so you need much more than just a random link. Also, link from forum like this one won't help. You need relevant links from highly reputable & relevant sources.

Re: SEO of an Accounting website

Martin Senko upvoted Re: SEO of an Accounting website

Consider doing guest posts on relevant sites and forums. And while at it, make sure you use relevant anchor texts. Finance is a very sensitive and highly competitive niche therefore quantity is important. Quality is not optional either.

Reduce initial server response time

Martin Senko replied to thread Reduce initial server response time

Check your code. It's basically all about your app, database queries and how quickly you can send response for a request.

If you can't improve optimizing your app and database, you can always upgrade to a better hardware, but from my perspective, there is always room to improve the app. It's cheaper, makes more sense, specially long term and you should focus on that.

Pro tip: do not spam the board with your website links.

Nov 11, 2020

Need an help

Martin Senko replied to thread Need an help

I think it's perfectly fine to create separate website for USA, as long as you need to serve different content to your USA (potential) customers.

For SEO, you can definitely link those branches in your footer, have a "flag switch" that would redirect to their local branch website. Many options.

Primary consideration probably is if you want to split your juice to multiple websites, but gain language specific, therefore more relevant and higher quality backlinks, or you want all links pointing to a single site.

Nov 10, 2020

Is Directory submission still beneficial?

Martin Senko replied to thread Is Directory submission still beneficial?

In general, no one can give you relevant answer to such a general question. Obviously, each directory is different in terms of ranks, quality, relevance to your niche/website, etc.

It means, you can benefit from listings published on some, while others may be complete waste of time.

Just my 2 cents.

Does tld extension affect domain rating

Martin Senko replied to thread Does tld extension affect domain rating

In the past, TLDs used to affect ranking quiet a bit. Nowadays, TLD bias should be minimal to none, but it still significant CTR driver. When searching locally, people are likely to visit result that it's on their home ccTLD.

How to get index my website?

Martin Senko replied to thread How to get index my website?

Other ways of indexing? What do you mean?

Nov 3, 2020

Duplicate Home Page URLs

Martin Senko replied to thread Duplicate Home Page URLs

You don't need two pages with the same exact content. Specially when talking about homepage. Do the right thing, pick one and stick with that. Better for linking, more practical, and in the end - easier to work with and understand correctly for search engines (it's not just Google).

Oct 30, 2020

Why my site is not ranking?

Martin Senko replied to thread Why my site is not ranking?

You haven't posted any information.

So, we can't help you find your (exact) mistakes.

Oct 26, 2020

What influence does contextual relevance have on rankings?

Martin Senko replied to thread What influence does contextual relevance have on rankings?

Hi Julian, welcome to SEO Forum.

  1. For me, researching links means time spent on researching context (first) and link value (second). Context is the first, because if it's not what I am looking for, doesn't have value even if the linking page has superb ranks. Sometimes I push good candidates that doesn't work for the site I am working on my so called "stack", so I check back next time when searching.
  2. Most annoying? Probably the slowness of the process... It takes time to research, acquire and finally settle and gain ranks. We all would love to see outcome right away so you can adjust strategies accordingly quickly.

How about you?

Oct 20, 2020

Tumblr keeps on banning my new accounts

Martin Senko replied to thread Tumblr keeps on banning my new accounts

I guess if you have multiple SPAM accounts there and they are linked to you in a way (IP/cookie/whatever) it's fairly easy for Tumblr to filter/ban everything you create.

Oct 16, 2020

What is Black Hat SEO

Martin Senko replied to thread What is Black Hat SEO

@maricelfrominnzone is it a bad thing?

Oct 11, 2020

Seeking SEO expert for adult sites (I offer 50% earnings)

Martin Senko replied to thread Seeking SEO expert for adult sites (I offer 50% earnings)

I am not gonna argue on this one, just consider following.

There are zillion people on the net having pipe dream about great POTENTIAL business yet no experience with such. They saw a website that works (front side) and think they can do that too. What they see is 1% of the whole machinery at best.

Building a website doesn't mean business. Making it profitable does. What you have at the moment is worth nothing. You're looking for someone who can make it profitable for you, for just 50%.

If it was making $50k and you were looking for someone to push it to $100k for 50% - now that would be generous offer. But what you're offering is nothing at all. No one works for free.

Other way around, just ask yourself; would you do the programming job for someone with an idea for 50% of future profit? I am pretty sure that you would not. And that's about it. You're trying to get yourself into very comfortable and safe position while moving all the risk on your so called partner. And that's not fair (at all).

Anyway, good luck!

Oct 8, 2020

Seeking SEO expert for adult sites (I offer 50% earnings)

Martin Senko replied to thread Seeking SEO expert for adult sites (I offer 50% earnings)

If they can bring $10k/mo, I bet they will start their own project and get 100% of the revenue.

The other point of view is, that SEO's need to pay their day-to-day living expenses. You own the business - you should take care of funding and take the risk (if you trust your idea). Pay whatever good SEO costs and make it a win-win deal.

so, Why would anyone prefer a meager salary rather than 50% of potential earnings?

Because salary is a salary, while 50% of $0 = $0. It's your idea & execution - you have all the controls (good and bad). Why do you want anyone to risk their own on it? Doesn't make sense.

Just like with startups; People get their salaries. Equity comes as an eventual bonus...

Cool looking forum. What CMS is this?

Martin Senko replied to thread Cool looking forum. What CMS is this?

Hey @webdaytona, Thank you!

This one is custom built - no common CMS/forum software used. Why do you ask?

Oct 6, 2020

Seeking SEO expert for adult sites (I offer 50% earnings)

Martin Senko replied to thread Seeking SEO expert for adult sites (I offer 50% earnings)

If you don't have money to hire someone, the only way is to learn basic SEO stuff yourself and spend your own time on optimization.

Oct 1, 2020

Selling a website

Martin Senko replied to thread Selling a website

List it on Flippa.

Sep 27, 2020

Site gets deindexed every few weeks from main keyword

Martin Senko replied to thread Site gets deindexed every few weeks from main keyword

Very first tip I have for you: do not link-spam your posts, if you are seriously looking for answer/information.

The other thing is, this is language specific, much smaller index, different behaviour. I am not aware of anyone here on board being expert on Hebrew SEO, so not sure if anyone can help. Unfortunately, I can not.

Sep 26, 2020

Problem with site clicks

Martin Senko replied to thread Problem with site clicks

So many potential scenarios/issues...

Can you provide more details? Otherwise, it would be just guessing.

Sep 25, 2020

The old days of SEO Forum - brief history

Martin Senko published thread The old days of SEO Forum - brief history

Let me take you back to 2003.

11th of December, 2003.

![seoforum.com on 11th of December 2003](https://i.ibb.co/HPMbFhM/seoforum-12-11-2003.png "Seoforum.com screenshot from 11th of December 2003")

I (re)launched SEO Forum in 2017, but let me tell you, the forum was around far earlier. In fact, it was Quincy Beeker who brought up the idea of seo forum first in 2002.

Quincy was running the forum on phpBB platform, which was gold standard for communities back in 2000's.

After some fundamental changes, in 2004 forum looked like this.

![seoforum.com in 2004](https://i.ibb.co/XWmsdpW/seoforum-2004.png "Screenshot of seoforum.com from 2004")

Forum switched platform from phpBB to vBulletin and the design changed as well.

Unfortunately, the board had quiet short lifespan as Quincy became full-time SEO consultant (according to his LinkedIn Bio). The domain was bought by seasoned domainer Adam Dicker (former owner of dnforum.com) and it was used as a redirect to dnforum, which had SEO section at the time. Since then, it was either redirecting visitors to some websites or parked.

Then, I came across the domain in 2016. I was always focused on community projects and forums, so I wanted seoforum.com badly from day one. The problem, obviously, was the price. Somehow, after long time negotiation, I struck a deal and started development of the project.

I build sites on top of Laravel framework since version 5.2 (started in 2015) so I did a fresh install (whatever was the latest version at the time - I believe it was 5.5 or 5.6) and developed the base stuff in few weeks, after work. Designed it myself using Bootstrap 4 and the site was ready to go out as a MVP.

![enter image description here](https://i.ibb.co/60SNmZh/seoforum-2017.png "enter image title here")

After some time, I realized it was about time to get custom design, so I hired designer and we have built the thing as you see it right now.

And that's it - the brief history of seoforum, 2002 - 2020 (18 years of seoforum).

Hope you enjoyed quick look back to the history of the site.

Martin

google Algorithm Update 2020

Martin Senko replied to thread google Algorithm Update 2020

I am not aware of any recent major update. Could be anything really, Google is changing dynamically, but https://twitter.com/searchliaison doesn't report changes to their algorithm. From what I can tell, not much movement for our sites.

Sep 24, 2020

How can I will be expert in kewword research?

Martin Senko replied to thread How can I will be expert in kewword research?

What is "my exact result" your talking about?

How to do Forum Posting?

Martin Senko replied to thread How to do Forum Posting?

Hey jp. If you think posting inappropriate links everywhere across the board is what helps with ranking, think again. This is very much the opposite. Not only you will be banned just like I am going to ban your account very soon, but your links will fluctuate - being registered by SE's than not found on next crawl. And this is bad. Means your links are not welcome, therefore you're spamming - which is what you essentially do.

Forum posting approach aims for completely different, long-term goals.

Sep 18, 2020

Google to crawl sites over HTTP/2 from November 2020

Martin Senko published thread Google to crawl sites over HTTP/2 from November 2020

According to this article published yesterday, Googlebot will support crawling selected sites over HTTP/2.

The reason is reason is simple. Newest major release of HTTP protocol is faster and more efficient, therefore using less resources while crawling (on the server side). So it's webmasters wish becoming reality.

However, seems like a test on some selected websites. Google will be crawling more sites over HTTP/2 in the future.

This Googlebot update will have no effect on ranking.

Fluctuations in real-time traffic

Martin Senko replied to thread Fluctuations in real-time traffic

Are you buying cheap bot traffic or using similar services?

Sep 13, 2020

Need help to make Sitemap

Martin Senko replied to thread Need help to make Sitemap

Depends how it's generated. If sitemap items are ordered by last modification, you will get your newest articles/pages first (or last), but it doesn't matter. There is no correlation in sitemap order and ranking positions (at all).

So no, it won't affect. The only thing it may affect is WHEN given URLs will be processed. Your site is given crawl budget, and if your sitemap has too many records for single crawl, only portion of it will be crawled at once - likely from the beginning...

Sep 8, 2020

what does recursive="true" mean in meta title

Martin Senko replied to thread what does recursive="true" mean in meta title

There is no valid attribute named recursive in HTML. Check the HTML atributes reference here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Attributes

It's complete list of HTML attributes with descriptions.

All I was able to find regarding recursive="true" was a Umbraco CMS forums, where they mention this, but it's different context - not being used directly in HTML.

> If recursive is on, it will look at the parent for existing meta info and if the parent doesn't have anything, it looks in the grandparent, and up, all the way to the highest node in the tree.

That's about it. Can you tell us where did you see that?

Does blog commenting help generate backlinks?

Martin Senko replied to thread Does blog commenting help generate backlinks?

Generate... well, maybe not generate, but most webmasters motivate users to leave comments giving them benefit of backlink to their site. The problem is, that "dofollow" link is not the same as nofollow link. So, while it's pretty good way to get target audience to your website, you should primarily aim for dofollow links.

That being said, nofollow links have their weight too, even unmarked urls (no anchor) are being recognized. Definitely needed in a healthy backlink profile.

Re: Does blog commenting help generate backlinks?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Does blog commenting help generate backlinks?
  1. First, confirm the blog is at least DA 50+ with a low spam count.
  2. Before you post your link on another blog, ensure you follow the rules. Don't spam.
  3. Reddit is a good place to get quality backlinks, but you have to be an authority with many Karmas. Quora is also good. But you have to be an authority in what you are commenting about.

Instead of random blog commenting that may only give you loads of NF links, why not consider Guest posting. GP will give you quality Do Follow backlinks. I'd rather get 1 DF than 100 NF backlinks.

My 2 cents :-)

Re: Does blog commenting help generate backlinks?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Does blog commenting help generate backlinks?

Blog commenting has been an SEO strategy since the first time anyone opened up comments on their site in the first place. ... Therefore, you can leave a blog comment with your link and have that linked indexed by Google, thus counting as a benefit to your SEO.

what does recursive="true" mean in meta title

Martin Senko replied to thread what does recursive="true" mean in meta title

Hi @elinsys, I am not sure what you mean. Can you provide us HTML example (copied from the site where you saw it)?

Thank you.

Sep 4, 2020

How to earn backlinks: Expired links

Martin Senko replied to thread How to earn backlinks: Expired links

Thank you @rafiqseo, @thietkesmarthome.

I'll try to post something more frequently.

Sep 2, 2020

Re: SEO Forum Feature Requests

Martin Senko upvoted Re: SEO Forum Feature Requests
  1. Help me change my username to bomb @ms
  2. Common Keyboard shortcuts like Ctrl+B (bold), Ctrl+I should be enabled/activated.
  3. Maybe it is just me, but I love breadcrumbs!! :-)
  4. Can we have a switch for Dark and Light mode? ooops....these are more of features than errors!!

Re: How to earn backlinks: Expired links

Martin Senko upvoted Re: How to earn backlinks: Expired links

Great. This is well said. I would also add: Related Forums Join forums that discuss things related to your niche. But dont just go and spam forums. The beauty of forums is that they are highly moderated. Therefore, you dont want to be kicked out because of your first spammy post. You should establish yourself as an authority in that niche. The members will start following you and reading your post. When appropriate, you can then post your link. Also, check the DA of the forum before you post.

Some forums have well-established article/blog sessions. Prepare high-quality content and share on the blog. Consider long-form articles on a zoomed-in component within the niche. Why?

Most probably the members of the forum know about the broader concepts in that niche. So you need to be very specific to what is really missing or lacking in the current strategies/products being offered. Then drop your link in the article (organically).

How to earn backlinks: Expired links

Martin Senko published thread How to earn backlinks: Expired links

This one is more of an idea for those of you who are clueless when it comes to earning new backlinks. The method itself isn't new, it's actually one of the well known, well working efforts, but there are few additions to improve it and extract more value quickly.

Basic Idea of Expired Link strategy

The basic idea is obvious: Find a website in your niche, that has broken links - it's linking to a content that no longer exists. That's the fundamental part. You have to do this. How?

  1. Google popular (or less popular) keywords in your niche
  2. Check first page results - typically looking for lists of recommended resources for given topic, but not exclusively. Check everything that seems like a good fit for you.
  3. Scan that website for broken links. There are many tools to do just that. For example, I use Check my Links Chrome extension. It works pretty good, just takes some time to scan a page with too many links.

Alright. At some point, you will find a broken link. The basic idea is to contact webmaster and let them know that they have a broken link on their site (which is not good). You would offer them your website link to substitute that link. Success rate here is good. People know you're doing all that effort to earn a link, but you also help and save them some time, so they are much more likely to link to your website than to a random guy who emailed them looking for a link.

The Overhaul

Success rate is good, yet not great. You can do better.

No response, no link. What happened?

As a side note, chances are, your email has not been delivered. Make sure you do your best to make your email bombproof. Gmail is a good way to start. Need your own domain? Use G-suite. Always use mail tracking tag. There are both free and paid options. From what I used, worth mentioning is Mailtrack (free+paid) and Streak (free+paid). Thanks to these tools, you can see when/whether recipient opened your email, and get much more insight like link clicks. It's really useful and helps with decisions, follow-up emails, timing and further planning.

You don't have the spot-on brilliant content, but you want the link

Easy fix! Let's write really good article on that topic, fitting old linked resource damn well. It takes time, but you want the link. Side benefit is your newly crafted content.

The Overhaul 2

If you are in it to win it, you can pick up even bigger hammer. Check if the linked (now broken link) domain is available. If so, register it and either 301-redirect it to your matching content OR build simple supporting website on the domain, publishing matching content.

Expired domains is the topic of it's own, not only in the world of SEO. One more hint for all of you looking for valuable links for affordable price: Some domains on the market are for sale for lower amounts. Let's say in the $100 - $500 range for 2-3-4 word domains. Yet, some of them have backlinks worth much more. It's good idea to find reputable domain with old valid backlinks that is for sale and extract it's link profile value. Another option is to participate in marketplace like GoDaddy Auctions, DropCatch, NameJet or SnapNames and cherry pick ones that have nice link profiles within (ideally your niche). This way, you can get domains with high link value for low price.

Let me know if you use this strategy and how you use it.

Hope this helps!

Our Website is not coming google 1st page

Martin Senko upvoted Our Website is not coming google 1st page

Hello all , Our website not ranking on google 1st page . We have done everything , content writing , back links, comments ..etc also spent huge money on google ads and Facebook ads, but no use for it. I have checked many website and their back link has very less also website speed is very low but their website is ranking good .Now our hope is "seoforum" . I need your suggestions and guidelines. our website is

https://www.bismatrimony.com

Regards

Soniya Bis

Sep 1, 2020

SEO Forum Feature Requests

Martin Senko replied to thread SEO Forum Feature Requests

@bomb - username changed

keyboard shortcuts - sounds useful, not sure how difficult to implement. will check that with next update.

breadcrumbs - I think I can add BC, that should help people understand where on the site they actually are.

dark mode - I'll try to implement it the easy way. I'll post here once it's live.

Aug 31, 2020

Questions Related to Link Building

Martin Senko replied to thread Questions Related to Link Building

So obviously, there is no issue, you just have multiple questions regarding linkbuilding.

Threat title edited, promo links removed.

Questions Related to Link Building

Martin Senko replied to thread Questions Related to Link Building

What is the issue?

Aug 26, 2020

Improving Core Web Vitals

Martin Senko replied to thread Improving Core Web Vitals

Good thinking @stekay. Fixing stuff ASAP helps, specially with Google.

Hit me up on skype matop2 with details, I'll see what can I do for you.

Aug 24, 2020

Introduction !!

Martin Senko replied to thread Introduction !!

Hi @redientthems

Welcome to SEO Forum.

Tell us more about what you do and why you're here.

Enjoy SF!

How to improve SEO without guest blogging

Martin Senko replied to thread How to improve SEO without guest blogging

There are plenty of opportunities. Guest blogging is just one of them.

As we have no idea which niche you're in, general rule of thumb is - go find authority websites in your niche and try to get links from there. The best way to do that is to cooperate with site owners. Spamming will not help (your links will be deleted eventually so it's not worth the time). Make sure your links last, so you can increasingly progress your backlink profile.

If you don't have budget for that / you don't have anything you can offer to site owners, participating in discussions is still good way to gain some links. Just make sure you stay on-topic, help other members, bring valuable information... Link here and there (like one link in ten posts) is acceptable, as long as you can bring value to other users on the board.

Good luck!

Aug 22, 2020

B2B SEO Strategy

Martin Senko replied to thread B2B SEO Strategy

@raheelahemed not quiet.

I don't know anyone aiming for SEO, just for sake of having/doing it. Typically you want more leads, sales, whatever, and optimizing your site and content accessibility is the way to go. Links and mentions are next things on your to-do.

But again; this is super general advice, means nothing and won't help. Be creative and think goals first. SEO isn't your goal...

Aug 19, 2020

B2B SEO Strategy

Martin Senko replied to thread B2B SEO Strategy

Hey @raheelahemed

Please, be more specific. Your question is super broad, there is no answer to "How to start SEO". Thanks for understanding.

Aug 18, 2020

Re: keywords query

Martin Senko upvoted Re: keywords query

Hi...As we all know contact us page is the lead generation key in the business perspective. At the end of the day we want visitors should end up by filling the details in contact us page. when a user does a search for focus keyword for contact page, search engine scans via websites for the most relevant content which is related to that keyword.

The title tag tells the search engine and user what our website is about? Mostly SEO takes care of keywords in the title tag & the content. so, while building your contact us page make sure that your title and description should describe basic content of your website, include targeting keywords.It is also important that you must use your business name and address in title tag. There should be much more than this to contact us page with proper planning. You can also include many optimizing tags and select the best output from it...

Hope this will be helpful for you..Thanks!

Aug 17, 2020

The 14 Top Website Analytics Tools

Martin Senko replied to thread The 14 Top Website Analytics Tools

I think I know where your articles are coming from, @noury92 ...

If you're trying to hurt our forums by posting copied content from other sites changing particular words using synonyms via some b-hat softwares, you'll be banned very quickly, so you have a chance to edit and post something useful instead of copy&pasting output from whatever you're using.

Aug 14, 2020

The Top Tools and Services in Social Media Marketing

Martin Senko replied to thread The Top Tools and Services in Social Media Marketing

Nice piece of information. Did you write it yourself @noury92 ?

The Top Tools and Services in Social Media Marketing

Martin Senko upvoted The Top Tools and Services in Social Media Marketing

Marketing tools are just as important for internet companies as any other type of business. After all, marketing is marketing. Marketing done online follows the same basic principles as any other type of marketing and has some important benefits. For internet marketers, the following guidelines can help increase your chances of success.

1 Untorch

This is a fully automated referral program for email records. Untorch will allow you to create a reward for those who share, pay, and forward your content to others, and unleash a new layer of consumer interaction. All you have to do is copy and paste the Untorch tool on your website.

Untorch creates email capture forms, provides each record with a unique URL to share, track referrals, follow through with emails, and notify you every time someone signs up via your link. It will also provide you with referral information and emails.

Untorch is priced at $ 199 per campaign, per year, with no hidden fees. You pay for the service in full and not via email, which allows you to spread by gathering as many potential customers as possible. You can give it a try before you buy by creating a campaign and testing the Untorch tool on your site today!

2 What’s Trending?

“What's Trending” is the home of all the internet trends on any given day. You can visit this site to learn about current trends and what is worth including on your viral website to keep your visitors informed while generating more high-quality traffic. What's Popular covers the most popular and shareable content across the web.

3 Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo is the perfect platform for analyzing any type of content that works best for any topic or competitor. What it basically means is that by using it you will be able to identify the topics related to your business that are of the most interest.

Buszzsumo offers a visually simple yet powerful interface that you can use to quickly identify content that works within a specific sector or audience. Once you enter a keyword or group of keywords, you will be able to see social platforms such as your search terms and the number of times they have been shared during a certain period of time.

It is also ideal for monitoring your competitors. It's $ 99 for the Professional plan, $ 299 for the Agency plan, and $ 699 for the Business plan! You can start your free trial today to see how it works for yourself!

4 Tout

Tout is a video sharing focused tool that currently plays video content on more than 2,800 websites, with an audience of over 46 million unique monthly viewers, and helps publishers, content creators, and advertisers generate income through its cutting-edge technology.

Tout lets you create short 15-second videos that can be shared as status updates on social media platforms. The goal of this tool is to make a big impact with its concise and easy-to-understand videos, which work better than long videos for viral marketing campaigns.

It has a premium video marketplace and scans and analyzes text articles to help you identify contextually relevant videos. You can request a demo and see how you can implement it in your campaigns!

5 Viral Content Buzz

The Viral Content Buzz is a free social media promotion tool that helps you increase awareness of content by sharing it with influencers on social media, which can increase content traffic by 200%. Specifically, your Twitter username will be retweeted frequently per hour, which will allow you to increase your followers and your site authority!

Promoting on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Stumbleupon is free, and you will be able to generate real social interest with your best content, get certifications for real viral content, and get rewarded for sharing your content with others. Simply sign up or register with Facebook or Twitter to start using it today!

6 Google Trends

Google Trends is a great tool when you want to research popular topics. You will be able to measure statistical and graphical information on data gathered for popular topics, search data by categories ranging from business to sports, and filter results by country.

Take a look at Trending Stories now for inspiration and see the latest keywords related to recent news and events. You can enter a keyword and get stats like the interest in these keywords over time, the areas that are most interested in the keyword, and the topics related to the keyword.

Google Trends is a great tool for assessing how viral content has evolved over time and what virus is likely at the moment. To use the Google trending tool, you just need to have a Google account!

7 Similar Web

Similar web is a service that allows you to look at your competitors and see which viral site is getting the most traffic. You can see which social networks are giving them the most traffic and which are their referral sources.

Knowing which sites are the most popular is beneficial because you can visit their sites and see what they do well to attract such high traffic. So you can adopt similar strategies for your viral site!

8 Canva

Canva is a free tool that has become popular as it allows marketers to go crazy with their designs with ease. It will allow you to create beautiful layouts and documentation for your viral website or social media profiles through its intuitive drag and drop fun Thanks, canva, due to the nature of viral marketing, it will allow you to create cool designs that you can adapt to your campaign.ction.

9 TrendHunter

TrendHunter is the world's most popular trend community. Trend Hunter inspires industry professionals and ambitious and inquisitive entrepreneurs who are insatiable to go beyond their reach. They are leveraging big data and award-winning methods to accelerate the release of potentially viral content, by predicting, monitoring, and validating consumer information on any topic.

10 CoSchedule headline analyzer

A CoSchedule Address Analyzer is created to assess the overall quality of your titles. Just enter your titles in the text box and click "Analyze Now" to see how well your titles are performing when it comes to social engagement, traffic, and SEO value. You can use it for free for 14 days and then subscribe to any of their plans!

11 Readability Checker

Thewriter.com is on a mission to save the corporate world from the linguistic medium. They created a Reading Checker to test how easily your content is read. Just enter your content in the text box and click on the "Check my readability" button to see how well your content results.

Disabling Facebook Recommendations for a Business Page - Negative Impact on SMO/SEO?

Martin Senko upvoted Disabling Facebook Recommendations for a Business Page - Negative Impact on SMO/SEO?

I'm juggling with the idea of disabling reviews (or recommendations) for a Facebook Business Page. At first glance, I'd say that such a move will surely have some impact on ranking indicators and SMO/SEO potential, seeing that Facebook wants to offer users the most transparent UX possible.

I am big on staying transparent everywhere online, but in that particular situation, I feel that some reviews are blatantly unjustified.

I'd really like to know what you guys think.

Aug 13, 2020

Looking for age sitews

Martin Senko replied to thread Looking for age sitews

Hit me up on skype matop2 I might have for you.

Aug 9, 2020

Looking for age sitews

Martin Senko replied to thread Looking for age sitews

Do you have any specific requirements?

Niche, age, ranks... ?

Aug 4, 2020

Unrelated Page Visits to my website

Martin Senko replied to thread Unrelated Page Visits to my website

Hey @arpandesai, welcome to SEO Forum.

Your post is fairly short, yet I managed to get lost right in the middle of it.

Unrelated visits? What is that? Referral traffic from unrelated websites?

And second half, improve SEO of other pages... no idea whhat you mean. Please explain.

Aug 2, 2020

Help! What to do with bad pages...

Martin Senko replied to thread Help! What to do with bad pages...

I don't know. Personally, I wouldn't touch it.

You don't need to sanitize every possible parameter and it's value. I can hit any site with ?p=whatever, yet it doesn't mean the site has parametrized content for my query. Doesn't make sense to fix imo.

Aug 1, 2020

Suggestion: Basic SEO vocabulary with brief explanation of terms

Martin Senko replied to thread Suggestion: Basic SEO vocabulary with brief explanation of terms

Finally, we are working on it. First pages should air in less than two weeks.

What do you think about paid membership idea?

Martin Senko published thread What do you think about paid membership idea?

The forum would stay as is, so anyone can join for free, but if you want to have more exposure (signature with link) and become recognized by badge, you will be able to upgrade to Premium membership for low monthly subscription fee like $5 or so.

Jul 29, 2020

Need Help With My Website Authority ?

Martin Senko upvoted Need Help With My Website Authority ?

Hi, hope you are doing well! I have one question regarding my website and I'm hoping fine response from this board and I will get help. Here is a link to my website: ( bit.ly/3g5Goqd ) I'm working on it from 2 years but its domain authority is not increasing, I've done a whole lot like high authority backlinking and content writing but not getting a good response. Any SEO expert there? who can check my website and guide me on what-to-do for increasing DA/PA of my website? I'll be grateful for the support. Thanks in advance.

Jul 28, 2020

Interlinking within subdirectories based multisites - Bad for SEO?

Martin Senko upvoted Interlinking within subdirectories based multisites - Bad for SEO?

Hi. I have been surfing the web thoroughly searching a clear answer on wether interlinking sites within a multisite is it good or bad for SEO. I found info about this subject is scarce and confuse. Some SEO experts consider that interlinking between subsites could be read as a black-hat practice by Google, but on the other hand, the very structure of a multisite based on subdirectories somehow encourages -and often needs- links to the different subsites from the main site, and it might be useful to refer to contents hosted on other sites to avoid repeating content across the network. As John Mueller said, google rejects overlapping content between sites on a subdirectories mulsite, and at the same time, it tends to consider this sort of networks as one single macro-site. I think that a recap of the current state of the art could be extremely helpful.

Interlinking within subdirectories based multisites - Bad for SEO?

Martin Senko replied to thread Interlinking within subdirectories based multisites - Bad for SEO?

If you're trying to build a link wheel, it's not gonna work. Not in 2020.

What exactly do you mean by subdirectory based multisite?

Both pages,

domain.com/a
domain.com/b

are considered related, part of the same website.

Subdomains are treated as separate websites (99%, they still do share root domain obviously).

Need Help With My Website Authority ?

Martin Senko replied to thread Need Help With My Website Authority ?

Link wise, seems like you have acquired high volume of lower quality links, which doesn't help much with authority. Try to stick to your niche and get relevant links from best sites within the niche possible.

Jul 25, 2020

Help! What to do with bad pages...

Martin Senko replied to thread Help! What to do with bad pages...

I don't think it would help - as you pointed out, pages are already in G's index. Disallowing crawler access to those pages (that are responding with 404 anyway) won't remove the pages.

How to see how many related videos people view?

Martin Senko replied to thread How to see how many related videos people view?

Where are related videos on that page? I can't see any.

Jul 22, 2020

Help! What to do with bad pages...

Martin Senko replied to thread Help! What to do with bad pages...

Hi Chris, welcome to SEO Forum!

Main question here is: did the whole hack thing affect SE ranks/traffic in any way? You didn't mention it, so my best guess is that it did not.

Google says, you should NOT need to use disavow tool, as Google is pretty good at tracking down those bad links and giving them zero value. Generally speaking, you would make use of disavow tool if someone linked to your website (in a bad way, pointing black SEO juice to your site), but that's not the case. So all I think you should do is remove the pages, remove all the redirects and you should be good. Give Google some time to deal with it... It's not an instant process.

Jul 16, 2020

What is Black Hat SEO

Martin Senko replied to thread What is Black Hat SEO

@tomaskonovak serving fishy content to crawlers while having nothing on the site for real visitors seems to be pretty common blackhat practice that still works in G's marginal indexes like Slovakia.

Jul 1, 2020

301 redirect domain name and all URL paths remain the same

Martin Senko replied to thread 301 redirect domain name and all URL paths remain the same

Looks good, good to see you've got it to work.

Re: 301 redirect domain name and all URL paths remain the same

Martin Senko upvoted Re: 301 redirect domain name and all URL paths remain the same

Hi there,

I've got to sorted. I've done this:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^olddomain.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.olddomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://newdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301,NC]

Thanks anyway

What are Your Secret Tips for SEO?

Martin Senko replied to thread What are Your Secret Tips for SEO?

Essentially, you need to check domain backlinks. If the backlink profile is a good fit for your website, go for it.

Jun 28, 2020

What are Your Secret Tips for SEO?

Martin Senko replied to thread What are Your Secret Tips for SEO?

Expired domains. Not a secret, but still works pretty well.

301 redirect domain name and all URL paths remain the same

Martin Senko replied to thread 301 redirect domain name and all URL paths remain the same

Hi James, welcome to Seo Forum.

What you described is typical use case for 301 redirect. The redirect itself is quick enough. So, as long as you're not chaining multiple redirects, you're fine and single A -> B redirect is what you're looking for.

What do you mean by reducing number of redirects? How many redirects you see in your Network (Browser Console) tab?

Jun 15, 2020

Should I keep an old domain name when the website has changed?

Martin Senko upvoted Should I keep an old domain name when the website has changed?

I could use some advice. I launched "GreenChairBooks.com" (not the real domain name) as a bookselling site in 2000, but over the years, we added a lot of articles relating to the genre of the books we sold. Since 2010, the site has been an online magazine featuring many different authors, and we no longer sell books at all.

The site/online magazine's official title is now simply "Green Chair" (no longer Green Chair Books) although it's sometimes referred to as "Green Chair Magazine."

Green Chair is fairly well known, has an excellent reputation, 25K Twitter followers, and tens of thousands of visitors each month. There are about 1,500 pages. We have very good Google rankings, although, of course, I'm always working to improve that.

"GreenChairBooks.com" isn't descriptive of the content anymore. While we do publish book reviews several times a month, books are no longer the focus, and we haven't sold books in a decade.

Thinking that it may be less confusing to new visitors, I actually purchased GreenChairMagazine.com (GreenChair.com wasn't available), but haven't used it; it's just been 301 redirected to GreenChairBooks.com since 2018. I think changing the domain name makes sense, but I'm hesitant to make such a big change and worry about the impact that it might have on SEO.

From an SEO standpoint, do you think changing the domain name is a good idea?

Re: Should I keep an old domain name when the website has changed?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Should I keep an old domain name when the website has changed?

Thanks for the reply. I've heard that older domains have been favored by Google, and I've also been told before that when URLs change (even with 301s), there may be an impact on the search results for some months. Those have concerned me, as it's taken a lot of effort to get the site where it is, given the competition. :-) Just want to make sure I'm doing the right thing.

Should I keep an old domain name when the website has changed?

Martin Senko replied to thread Should I keep an old domain name when the website has changed?

It definitely takes some time, while Google handles everything correctly, but if there is no change in site structure, every bit of content is reachable after valid 301 redirect, I see no problem there and such domain swaps are happening more often than you think.

If you are 100% sure that your new domain will work better for you & your visitors, go for it and focus on executing the swap technically right.

Auto-Generated Content

Martin Senko replied to thread Auto-Generated Content

Most likely, the quality will be low and any real human being can tell it's been generated, not genuinely written. So even if there was no risk like auto penalization or manual action, I wouldn't do it on my own store. Simply because it doesn't make sense and impact on user experience would be (really) bad.

Should I keep an old domain name when the website has changed?

Martin Senko replied to thread Should I keep an old domain name when the website has changed?

TLDR; As long as new domain makes more sense to your (potential) visitors, don't worry about the change from SEO standpoint.

The domain swap should not be judged from SEO standpoint in the first place. That's just something, you have to take care of along the process, but you can't based your judgement on it.

As long as you can make the swap technically correct (1:1 301 redirects from old to new domain), you should be perfectly fine. This is very old topic, domain upgrades happening all the time, and it is Google easily acceptable for Google. The only condition is to make it right.

Jun 5, 2020

Why does Google ignore my COVID-19 or Coronavirus news posts?

Martin Senko replied to thread Why does Google ignore my COVID-19 or Coronavirus news posts?

Hi @ronhowells, welcome to SEO Forum.

This is valid question that I can't answer exactly, as I am not part of Google's Search Quality Raters team, but I am sure you know what's been going on for the last 2+ months...

Basically, most of covid related content is based on misinformation of some kind. In fact, there is no relevant number what-so-ever; no one really knows how many are sick, how many died, etc. Those numbers are based on testing. Is it possible to keep everyone tested in real-time? Heck no. So media is pushing a lot of content based on either false positive or false negative data, using and leveraging stats in ways they need. So their content is more shocking, controversial, even using it for political goals etc. Which is inappropriate for G Search - they need to stay neutral and factual.

So... I wouldn't be surprised, if they simply ignored articles on covid unless it's from (very) reliable source, based on their experience.

Anyway, if you are curious how Quality Raters evaluate quality of search results, check this document: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterhub.com/en//searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf It's long read, but definitely helps when creating search friendly content.

PS: The covid bubble seems to be bursting, so even disease opportunists should move on and start creating helpful content if they haven't already.

Re: What is the complete guide to creating content for SEO?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: What is the complete guide to creating content for SEO?

There's loads of guides out there, but as other users before me have said, it's all about producing quality, organic content.

The user experience is what Google is looking for today. Yes, there's hundreds of factors that go into increasing your Google ranking but if your content isn't good in the first place, then the other techniques are useless.

Jun 3, 2020

Re: What is the complete guide to creating content for SEO?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: What is the complete guide to creating content for SEO?

Keywords can help you write a good article. But if you do not understand the topic, then this will be meaningless. By describing only keywords, even automatic content generators can print text (articleforge, content-edge etc).

Jun 2, 2020

Why the number of external links and internal links has decreased

Martin Senko replied to thread Why the number of external links and internal links has decreased

Hard to tell, without knowing details about what happened with your site/referring sites recently.

You should know what happened with internal references across your content. Externally, analytics tools will probably help you find out. Maybe Ahrefs would be my best best for the tool...

May 23, 2020

Rel nofollow vs. sponsored vs. ugc and external

Martin Senko replied to thread Rel nofollow vs. sponsored vs. ugc and external

Combining rels where it makes sense is perfectly fine.

From the article on Moz: > You can use the new attributes in combination with each other. For example, rel=&quot;nofollow sponsored ugc&quot; is valid.

May 21, 2020

Re: Number of Keywords

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Number of Keywords

What are you referring to? How many times to repeat the targeted keyword or how many target keywords per page?

May 19, 2020

Google SERP showing wrong regional version after redirects

Martin Senko upvoted Google SERP showing wrong regional version after redirects

Situation

Our website (approx. 3000 pages) contains multiple regional versions of the same page (eg. en-US and en-GB). Correct href lang tags are setup in the sitemap.xml to inform google which version to serve in which region. This has worked fine.

Two weeks ago, we restructured the URLs on our website. All old URLs have proper 301 redirects. Sitemap.xml only contains new URLs, again with proper href lang tags.

Problem

Currently, for some pages the google SERP currently shows multiple versions of the same page. This isn’t a big issue on itself, but old URLs for the wrong region are showing (higher) than the new, correct URL, which is a problem. For example, a search in UK is showing both of these results in the SERP:

  • site.com/old-url (en-US version = WRONG)
  • site.com/new-url (en-GB version = CORRECT)

It’s only 2 weeks, so I guess it will take some more time for the old URLs to disappear from the google index, but I’m not sure if time will fix this issue.

Search Console info for the old URL:

  • Indexed, not submitted in sitemap
  • User-declared canonical: site.com/new-url
  • Google-selected canonical: Inspected URL

![Search Console status](https://i.imgur.com/R3soy6f.png "enter image title here")

I tried reindexing the old URL in Search Console. Google crawled the page again, but still chooses the Inspected URL (= the redirected URL) above the user-declared canonical (= current URL).

Possible cause

Investigating why Google doesn’t show the desired URL, I found the old URLs all seem to have backlinks. One example has only 3 backlinks, another has 136 (too much to request fixing them).

If this is indeed the reason why Google chooses to still show the old URLs, then maybe I should focus on giving google back the correct href lang signals for the old URLs. Would it be wise to re-add the old URL’s to the sitemap.xml so Google has correct href lang signals for these old URLs again? I’m not keen on serving outdated URL’s to Google. , but I don’t see any other way to give google correct signals.

That is, if there's really now way to get the old URL's out of the google SERP. Maybe, I should just be more patient...?

All help appreciated!

May 17, 2020

Does any change in the server require a change in the console

Martin Senko replied to thread Does any change in the server require a change in the console

Changing IP should not have long term impact on your ranks, unless you were assigned some bad IP with terrible reputation.

As long as your DNS is set correctly, domain showing the same content, everything should be good and Google will figure out automatically (if it has not already).

How does your traffic volume look? Any significant changes after switching to a new provider?

May 14, 2020

Redirects to anchor links a good idea?

Martin Senko replied to thread Redirects to anchor links a good idea?

Pretty good thinking actually.

I'd probably do the same - merge pages (that are not robust enough to sit around as a standalone pages) into one/few. That would basically mean H1 -> H2, writing some overwrite for the new page, eventually connecting the content a little bit and that's pretty much it.

As for your question, I'd definitely go with "anchored" links, because it makes perfect sense. For users, it's better - they land exactly where you want them. For you and Google, happy user = all good, I guess. Technically, there is no issue processing hash segment for Google. May even give them signal, that there is particular content, if they do parse hash segment of the URL and use it for whatever computing they do with links. I don't know.

Anyway, go for site.com/systems#system-a for sure.

May 12, 2020

Is there a difference between bounce rate and Alexa?

Martin Senko replied to thread Is there a difference between bounce rate and Alexa?

So you're running SEO tools website where you also have Alexa rank checker and you ask question like this?

Bounce rate and Alexa are completely different terms/meanings. While bounce rate is a website interaction metric (how many users left from the page where they landed), Alexa is a website, service, company... One of the (unique) metrics they compute from their data is Alexa rank, which is an approximate where you site ranks in their list of all websites on the internet. So if your Alexa rank was 1000, Alexa says your site is the 1000th most visited website in the world.

Now you know, what the difference is...

May 6, 2020

Site blocked at wikipedia

Martin Senko replied to thread Site blocked at wikipedia

They know why they do...

Unless you have (very) relevant references for Wikipedia articles, your links do not belong there. It's not a PR magazine/portal/directory.

Googles favourite?

Martin Senko upvoted Googles favourite?

I'm trying to analyse all my competitors using Moz, lighthouse and other backlink SEO tools to understand the pattern of what validates number 1 spot. This includes traffic, speed, alt tags, DA, PA, headers and text but can't see why one site sits at the top for a set keyword search and has done for some time. I'm still on page four after a month of ironing out issues but can't see how I'm failing, my sitemap is kicking out an error and I'm with a website platform and not sure how to fix it. It's one of the few things left on my list of things to try. Any thoughts.

Googles favourite?

Martin Senko replied to thread Googles favourite?

I'd add one more metric as an input to your analysis: age/history.

Don't expect to outrank your competition that has been around for years in days just by analysing their backlink profile, acquiring similar links in short time period and doing some on-page SEO.

Google has long track of visitors behaviour for older sites, while you are new kid on the block, so first you have to prove that you belong there (Google will eventually test you on higher positions from time to time, to see how you perform there) and in general, it take months to get somewhere for a new site & competitive keywords.

So take your time. You can't speed up the process all that much, unless your audience is getting crazy about your site.

Getting back to your subject "Google favourite"; This is super accurate abstraction.

May 4, 2020

Re: H1 tag on page

Martin Senko upvoted Re: H1 tag on page

Good SEO practice is to limit one H1 tag per page/post. In WordPress, By default WordPress, page/post will be given H1 tag

H1 tag on page

Martin Senko replied to thread H1 tag on page

Syntax-wise, you may have any amount of H1 on a page. There is no limit technically, as long as your headings are nested correctly.

Semantically however, it's a good practice to keep it one H1 heading per page, because, as we know, the weight of headings is relative. So if you use two H1 headings, doesn't mean you get double the exposure (ranking for both headings, instead of one). It will be simply divided between the two.

The other point of view is, if you have 2 H1 headings in one document, it should probably be two separate documents. If you have more topics under one parent topic, parent topic should be H1, child topics H2, and so on.

From SEO standpoint, most people see H1 as a document root element, so single top level heading per page makes perfect sense. Just like you always have exactly one HTML tag per page, if you know what I mean...

Site blocked at wikipedia

Martin Senko replied to thread Site blocked at wikipedia

Totally unclear what happened and what you need, so impossible for anyone to answer. Sorry.

Please, post more details to your question, in order to get relevant answer(s).

Thank you.

May 3, 2020

If Google changes its algorithm, will the rank of all sites decrease?

Martin Senko replied to thread If Google changes its algorithm, will the rank of all sites decrease?

Of course all sites won't go down. That would make no sense at all. After all, the first position would be empty, right?

Google's goal is pretty clear; Serving the best possible results for searching user, sorted by relevance (and of course, adding a lot of ads to make $$).

So when your site went down, some other is now where you were before. Because G thinks it's more relevant than yours. And all those changes and updates in their algorithms are aiming for better search experience.

If your site doesn't change/update and other does, it's perfectly normal that your ranks will decrease over time. It's dynamic environment and search results are changing with every single query. So keep working on your site, content, accessability and you should see some positive changes eventually.

Apr 30, 2020

Re: How Can I Indexed Or Increse My Website Keywords?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: How Can I Indexed Or Increse My Website Keywords?
  1. Publish at least 1 blog post per week. Think in the mindset of the user, They mostly search for solutions. Focus on providing value to the users.
  2. Build Natural Backlinks
Apr 27, 2020

Re: Best strategy for URL structure change?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Best strategy for URL structure change?

Thanks for the replies (and compliment :)) The downsides for Option B are very true. I'll go for Option A!

Apr 25, 2020

Which marketing reports should I use?

Martin Senko replied to thread Which marketing reports should I use?

Please, don't create questions just to inject links. Question doesn't make sense - it is so broad it can not be answered in a reasonable manner.

Thanks for understanding.

Apr 24, 2020

Footer links with seo linking to subpages

Martin Senko replied to thread Footer links with seo linking to subpages

You're probably reacting to the OP, not @shane...

Best strategy for URL structure change?

Martin Senko upvoted Best strategy for URL structure change?

Hi, first time poster.

The case

  • 4000 page website
  • 35.000 sessions per month
  • Multiple regions with separate pages per region

We are doing a complete URL structure change to better separate the regions:

![URL structure change](https://i.imgur.com/pTd3zVo.png "enter image title here")

Note that I changed the regions to more known ones. Every page will be moved to a new URL.

The Question

What would be the best strategy to handle the change?

OPTION A: 301 Redirects Simply setup 301 redirects for every old URL. This is the easy option as we already have a script which handles this perfectly. It takes existing redirects in account while avoiding redirect chains.

OPTION B: Keep both URL’s Keep both the old and new URLs. Setup the new URL as canonical and serve only the new URL to Google via the sitemap.

Option B might be less shocking to Google as it can gradually update it’s index to the canonical URLs. However, I prefer option A as this will we the quicker / cheaper solution (option B involves custom development). But I'm not sure whether there's a difference for Google between both options and if / how big / how long a traffic drop would be caused.

It’s a commercial website but not a webshop. Sales aren’t directly related to traffic, so we’re ok with a small and temporary traffic drop.

Note that even before this change, Google is already aware which version to serve to which region. This is handled in our sitemap.

Any advice is appreciated!

Best strategy for URL structure change?

Martin Senko replied to thread Best strategy for URL structure change?

Hi @dmduco and welcome to SEO Forum!

Finally a well described and detailed question, even illustrated by image. Good work.

Generally speaking, google is perfectly fine with the option A. Yeah, it may cause traffic drop, but it should be temporary and also, they are detecting changes like yours much faster than before, so it shouldn't hurt too much.

Also, the great advantage about the option A is that it will keep your app backend clean - you will be serving just current pages, nothing extra, meta-like data for search engines, which makes perfect sense to me.

That being said - Option B will work. The price is obvious though; harder to set up correctly and affecting the actual app in the future.

Good luck!

Apr 20, 2020

Most Moz Academy courses now available for free

Martin Senko published thread Most Moz Academy courses now available for free

Just a quick reminder. If you don't know already, most of Moz Academy course are now available for free. It means a lot of content for you to learn from, for free.

This is not paid advertising (it's free, right?), but I found it useful and worth sharing.

Use promo code: wegotthis

Just make sure it applies to a course of your choice. If not, it says in the overview.

Re: Need Guidance Regarding Home Page Title Tag

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Need Guidance Regarding Home Page Title Tag

"Ethical Hacking and Cyber Security | [business name]"

Ideally titles should be consistent throughout the site. I prefer "title | site name" format-wise. It allows the topic to be identified in the search results and also allows your business to be linked to those topics.

Re: Need Guidance Regarding Home Page Title Tag

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Need Guidance Regarding Home Page Title Tag

You're overthinking it. The site title won't get you ranked. Describe the site briefly and accurately. Stuffing keywords in there doesn't provide benefit. It'll only make you look spammy to users.

Re: Footer links with seo linking to subpages

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Footer links with seo linking to subpages

I don't think that people typically search for web designers in their own city. Why would it matter where the developer is located if they're good at what they do?

I've seen this strategy a lot but I'm not sure if it's an effective strategy. If you've built a website which ends up being 1,000 pages you'll end up with 1,000 links from 1 site with the same link text.

At what point does it become spammy? I'm not entirely sure. I would say it detracts from the client site though. Prioritizing the person who paid you is probably the best bet. Referrals are a web developers best friend.

Need Guidance Regarding Home Page Title Tag

Martin Senko replied to thread Need Guidance Regarding Home Page Title Tag

Exactly what @shane said ^^

I'd keep it short and simple, carrying the most information about the page possible. Also, I'd use just one separator | and prioritize as reverse breadcrumbs - leftmost being the most page-specific. One of the reasons is, that browsers show titles in tabs. More tabs you have open, shorter part of URL is visible. Also, don't forget to use favicon. If you have loads of tabs, that's the only thing you can see and use to identify the site...

Apr 17, 2020

Re: Should I connect my CRM data for offline marketing to Google Data Studio Dashboard?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Should I connect my CRM data for offline marketing to Google Data Studio Dashboard?

I don't know if I understand the purpose. Online and offline metrics are fundamentally different. ROI is the only output from both marketing activities that is truly relevant.

Comparative data is definitely useful to better understand the nature of your business but you're also giving that data to a 3rd party. I believe the connecting your dashboards would benefit their company more than yours.

Re: Linking my sites together

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Linking my sites together

I'd leave as them be unless there is a real benefit to your visitors/customers. Avoid anything that doesn't provide immediate and obvious benefit to them.

Apr 13, 2020

Re: How do I write few articles with similar SEO keywords?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: How do I write few articles with similar SEO keywords?

Focusing on the right keywords has a huge impact on growing your traffic. The added benefit of keyword targeting is that this content will bring you visitors who are more likely to convert to leads and sales.

Writing content for SEO is a lot more than sprinkling a few keywords throughout your text. Google will certainly not appreciate it very much. Not only will you fail to get your site ranked highly by it, but you also risk getting penalized.

Apr 7, 2020

Not in search on google

Martin Senko replied to thread Not in search on google

I just started my blog its my first post...

Alright. And "just" means how long ago exactly?

Don't expect instant crawl and indexing. It takes time. From hours to up to few daysin average.

Recover from 14 Jan Core Update

Martin Senko replied to thread Recover from 14 Jan Core Update

Well, 40 000 down to 800 means, it probably wasn't just about the update. From what I understand, people lost up to 50% of their SE traffic. You lost almost 100% which doesn't make much sense.

Any new messages appeared in your Search Console?

Recover from 14 Jan Core Update

Martin Senko replied to thread Recover from 14 Jan Core Update

Depends on why exactly your website has been hit. Do you know what's wrong with your site and why it lost positions?

Generally speaking, you can always recover. It all comes down to how much effort and time it will take.

Apr 6, 2020

Website ranking issue

Martin Senko upvoted Website ranking issue

First of all greetings everyone :) Thank you for creating such a useful forum for boosting SEO and knowledge about it. I need your kind advice on this one, basically I'm trying to rank my Shopify store for two keywords mainly and these are "anti gravity phone case" and "anti gravity case". Luckily for me the website is showing up in google for them, however, instead of the main page it's product pages that are popping up. The store is called OneDealBox.

So it's like this right now when I type these keywords

![Anti-Gravity Phone Case](https://i.ibb.co/zmPW8K3/Coronavirus-3-Shutterstock-1200x768.jpg "Anti-Gravity Case") ![Anti-Gravity Phone Case](https://i.ibb.co/1sXxyDG/20200311-123212-coronavirus-logo-png.jpg "Anti-Gravity Case")

But what I'm aiming for is this, but I only see it when I type my store's name etc.

![enter image description here](https://i.ibb.co/0FRKSjB/90815446-2482385752029166-2213620006850134016-n.jpg "enter image title here")

I understand that I have lots of pages that include the "anti gravity phone case" phrase and it may be the issue itself, so perhaps there is something to be changed there, something with the structure, I never used this kind of theme and platform before, mostly worked with wordpress in the past and never had such issues. I've been trying hard to let google know that it's the homepage that is the most relevant, but with no luck. Would love to hear Your opinions on this, greatly appreciated. Many thanks!

Website ranking issue

Martin Senko replied to thread Website ranking issue

Hi and welcome!

Critical question here I think is, how does it work for you right now? Is search traffic from given keywords converting on product pages? If yes, you wouldn't want to change that.

What I mean is, getting people to your homepage is putting obstacle in their way to a product page. So conversions could be lower. Right now, it makes much more sense, as long as target page (where visitor lands after SE redirect) is relevant to their query.

If you still need your visitors landing on homepage, you should consider changes in your SEO strategy - both on & off page. That means, relevant content on the homepage, 100% semantics and site navigation, and adjusted link building strategy, so anchors with given keyword links to your homepage.

It won't change in an hour of course...

Apr 3, 2020

My website isnt showing on google search result

Martin Senko replied to thread My website isnt showing on google search result

No idea how long it's been for you, but generally speaking, rule of thumb is within days, not weeks. Talking about appearance, not ranking.

You should be IN the index within hours, but there is no obligation for Google, so it may take some time. But today, they have processes so fast a smooth, that if I won't see at least some of my pages within 2-3 days, I'll be surprised...

Specially if you manually submitted.

Check your site, robots.txt, robots meta tag eventually, and also, if the site is accessible from outside your network. This is weird.

Apr 2, 2020

Re: My website isnt showing on google search result

Martin Senko upvoted Re: My website isnt showing on google search result

How long has it been? Wouldn't worry if it's only been a couple of weeks.

Apr 1, 2020

"Some" of my pages are disappeared from google

Martin Senko replied to thread "Some" of my pages are disappeared from google

What is that update about @uday508singh ? How do you know?

Mar 21, 2020

Re: Google displaying amp pages for desktop users

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Google displaying amp pages for desktop users

That is strange. I've had the opposite issue. The pages served are desktop pages not amp pages when visited on mobile.

There must be a setting for canonical preference. Just make sure that's set to the non-amp version. If that doesn't work you can implement specific markup to indicate your preference. That information can be found on the following Google Support link.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066

Mar 16, 2020

Re: What will be your approach if your SEO method doesn’t work?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: What will be your approach if your SEO method doesn’t work?

I would give it 12-months and monitor my search console.

Next I'd pick 6 different pages with similar SERP ranks and performance history. I'd make distinctly different changes to each of them. I'd monitor for an additional 3-6 months.

I'd take the tactic from the winning page and use it on the other 5 pages. I would monitor all 6 pages for another 3 months to ascertain whether that tactic works across multiple pages.

Mar 12, 2020

Re: Duplicate content issue for medicine active ingredient

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Duplicate content issue for medicine active ingredient

Well, you could link to explanations for each of the active ingredients.

[drug -> text link] Drug 1 -> ingredient 1 Drug 2 -> ingredient 1, ingredient 2

This creates a pretty solid internal link structure and encourages multi-page visits. Reduced bounce rates can have a beneficial impact on SERP ranks.

Up to you though.

SERP 1st place conversion rate expectations

Martin Senko upvoted SERP 1st place conversion rate expectations

Hi!

My name is João Antunes and I have a question for you!

Do you have any expectations for conversion rate when you have your ecommerce site ranking in very first position of SERP?

If you have specific information for Europe I would be very thankful.

Mar 5, 2020
Mar 2, 2020

Re: Sudden drop in organic CTR / clicks, but stable impressions and positions?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Sudden drop in organic CTR / clicks, but stable impressions and positions?

The most likely scenario is that your organic position has changed, but the average position remained the same.

You could have 10 pages ranking #1 for very low volume keywords which offsets the position change for a high volume keyword. The aggregate stats can be very misleading and difficult to diagnose.

Re: Will the trailing extra space in anchor text cause any problem in SEO?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Will the trailing extra space in anchor text cause any problem in SEO?

It shouldn't make a difference. It is trivial for anyone with minimal coding experience to parse and clean text, let alone Google.

You should be concerned with which direction the links will send your organic rankings. It's honestly not worth trying to game Google's algo.

Sudden drop in organic CTR / clicks, but stable impressions and positions?

Martin Senko replied to thread Sudden drop in organic CTR / clicks, but stable impressions and positions?

Exactly what @shane wrote.

For example, by publishing new content, new long tail keywords are likely popping out, and as those are low volume, easy to rank keywords, position could be #1-3 easily, distorting your aggregated data on the top level.

What to do? Start with your strongest keywords (volume is high and position is top 3) and check the data individually on per-keyword basis. You will eventually find keywords that are trending downwards.

Feb 27, 2020

I want to rank-up my keywords that are on good places but not on top positions.

Martin Senko replied to thread I want to rank-up my keywords that are on good places but not on top positions.

If you recently gained new links, allow some time to google index em and process correctly. It's not an instant process and may take some time.

To be precise about bounce rate: Bounce rate is single-page sessions divided by all sessions, or the percentage of all sessions on your site in which users viewed only a single page and triggered only a single request to the Analytics server. Bounce Rate

Progressing to payment page != bounce rate

What is best backlink analysis free Website ?

Martin Senko replied to thread What is best backlink analysis free Website ?

Semrush is good, but I wouldn't say it's necessarily the best one

I want to rank-up my keywords that are on good places but not on top positions.

Martin Senko replied to thread I want to rank-up my keywords that are on good places but not on top positions.

Hey @steaveaustin

Check backlink profiles of your competition that is ranking higher and try to earn backlinks from that sites too. Otherwise, any good links will help, but it's not just about links.

Google measures bounce rate, "pogo sticking" and more similar metrics based on user behaviour, so as long as your site does perform worse than competition, it makes sense it's ranked lower.

Feb 18, 2020

How do I get something removed from Google search?

Martin Senko replied to thread How do I get something removed from Google search?

Check this post: https://seoforum.com/thread/google-search-console-removal-tools-new

Google recently updated their Search Console, and now you can mark your page for removal. Let us know, how it works.

Feb 17, 2020

Seoforum reached new milestone today

Martin Senko published thread Seoforum reached new milestone today

We now have 500 registered users :)

Thank you to all of our members.

Feb 15, 2020

Sudden drop in organic CTR / clicks, but stable impressions and positions?

Martin Senko upvoted Sudden drop in organic CTR / clicks, but stable impressions and positions?

[Statistics](http://somedia.be/Schermafbeelding%202020-02-13%20om%2017.20.50.png "statistics")

Since december we see a sudden drop in our CTR and clicks for organic, while our positions and impressions were unchanged and very stable. We have no clue how this could be possible? Any suggestions on what we should look into? Also the average conversion rate of the remaining organic visitors made a drop of 30% as well.

Metatitles en descriptions has been unchanged during this period, so this can't be the cause.!

How do I write few articles with similar SEO keywords?

Martin Senko replied to thread How do I write few articles with similar SEO keywords?

Well, as a copywriter, that's part of your job - to get creative, finding more facts and information on given topic and write nice and unique copy.

I don't think anyone can help you with this. Just think about it - there are thousands of articles about the same topic on the internet (obviously, not all of them unique, but still...)

Feb 7, 2020

Re: need help from seo experts

Martin Senko upvoted Re: need help from seo experts

I don't recommend you waste time or resources building unrelated links. The impact of great links is minimal compared to the quality of content being linked to.

Focus your effort on building a useful resource with proper site structure.

Re: Ranking in Google image search with "labeled for reuse" filter

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Ranking in Google image search with "labeled for reuse" filter

I'm not entirely sure what you're question is. Images will get crawled and indexed in time. There is not a special tag to be included in search results.

Meta information will help Google understand what is contained in the image which will help it rank within image search.

Re: I need help with Facebook Ads

Martin Senko upvoted Re: I need help with Facebook Ads

There could be an issue if you specified the target demographic. You could have either drilled down to too few users or your bid could be too low. I don't remember the specific mechanics of FB advertising but I do recall there being a difference between community pages and business pages in regards to onsite material.

Jan 29, 2020

My youtube livestream is unsearchable

Martin Senko replied to thread My youtube livestream is unsearchable

Someone probably reported your videos/livestream and just like @seoradar mentioned, could be penalty on the channel. Who knows.

You have definitely multiple checkmarks for penalization, so it's more than possible. I don't have any experience with recovering penalized or restricted channels, so that's up to you and YouTube. Even though they have zero obligation to work it out with you.

Hope you didn't pay too much :/

Re: My youtube livestream is unsearchable

Martin Senko upvoted Re: My youtube livestream is unsearchable

Perhaps youtube penalty of some sort? For whatever happened on that channel. Doesn't look fit.

My youtube livestream is unsearchable

Martin Senko replied to thread My youtube livestream is unsearchable

Those videos are completely unrelated to crypto. Did you buy the channel?

Google Search Console removal tools [New!]

Martin Senko published thread Google Search Console removal tools [New!]

Have you noticed already?

There are new tools in the GSC! In the sidebar under Index there is new item called Removals. Once you access it, you can see three tabs:

  1. Temporary removals
  2. Outdated content
  3. Safesearch Filtering

Right now, I can only see New request button under Temporary removals tab, but that's maybe due to feature's early state. Anyway, tool for urgent content removal from Google Search seems to be very useful in some cases.

To request removal of outdated content, you can use this page https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals but the property has to be already removed. Also, you can't use it for removal of personal information legally problematic content. For such case, Google has yet another tool.

SafeSearch filtering will be probably only useful for viewing purposes, so you can see which pages of your website have been filtered due to explicit content via this form https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/safesearch

If you know more details about the tools, please, share in comments.

My youtube livestream is unsearchable

Martin Senko replied to thread My youtube livestream is unsearchable

Obvious thing that pops out the very second I land on your channel is, that you have 137k subs, yet no videos and ONLY 5k views...

Did you buy the channel, removed the videos and now trying to position it in a different niche?

Too many obvious red flags here. Even the topic itself...

My youtube livestream is unsearchable

Martin Senko replied to thread My youtube livestream is unsearchable

Can you tell us more about your channel? When it was started, how many subscribers at the moment, how many videos, views...

I mean, no one really knows the algorithm obviously, just like with Google Search. But we have to be realistic about it; successful channels get better positions and more impressions in YT Search. There is nothing to disagree about this, right?

So it's all about where your channel currently is, and all I can see is happening here is, that within ~20 minutes, there are so many livestreams started on YouTube, that you just can't find yours anywhere near top, because there are multiple that are more recent (started more recently), from more popular channels, from channels that aired better performing videos in the past... you name it.

YouTube is hard one. You have to keep working on your content & audience in order to get more popular and therefore rank higher. I don't see any proven shortcuts as of now.

Agree? Disagree?

I need help with Facebook Ads

Martin Senko replied to thread I need help with Facebook Ads

I am afraid you'll have to tell us more details about what you have tried, what type of content are you trying to promote on Facebook, what's your budget and so on.

Also, not delivering isn't very specific term, and it could be just you being happy with your results, but maybe other people in the field see similar results.

Please, provide us with more details, so we can brainstorm a little bit ;)

Jan 27, 2020

What is Google BERT ?

Martin Senko upvoted What is Google BERT ?

Hi, I am new to SEO and learning SEO. Can anyone explain to me about the latest google update bert?

Re: What is Google BERT ?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: What is Google BERT ?

BERT Stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. It is Google’s neural network-based technique for natural language processing (NLP) pre-training. For more information, you can read this blog from searchengineland, I am sharing the link with you.

https://searchengineland.com/welcome-bert-google-artificial-intelligence-for-understanding-search-queries-323976

Jan 25, 2020

Google rolled out "Brand First" update to their desktop results

Martin Senko replied to thread Google rolled out "Brand First" update to their desktop results

As of yesterday, favicons are gone from search results - they did not last for too long. Who knows what will happen to domain names and breadcrumbs in the future...

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">An important update! We’ve heard your feedback about the look. We always want to make Search better, so we’re going to experiment with new placements for favicons on desktop. Please see here for more: <a href="https://t.co/R4RjQ53cXe&quot;&gt;https://t.co/R4RjQ53cXe&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) <a href="https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1220769537513013248?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&quot;&gt;January 24, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js&quot; charset="utf-8"></script>

Banned users (list included)

Martin Senko published thread Banned users (list included)

Hello SEOs.

I am not happy to report that we already have banned more than 70 users. The reasons are various, but most often it comes down to posting spammy threads, posting lists (no idea what that is good for), posting completely off-topic replies containing unrelated links to their sites, duplicate threads and the worst think is automated spam, but I think we are pretty good at fighting this thing and eventually automating it a lot.

We don't have hard posting policies here. You can ask nearly anything, reply to any thread in a relevant way and eventually post a link if you have some history of relevant posts.

Please, keep in mind I want to keep this place clean and serving it's purpose and I try hard. Thank you for being member of SEO forum and you are welcome to use it to gain & share knowledge.

Now, list of banned users:

abnershem
airpotroyal
aladanh
Allhd
amazonhealth
atalb
avantikaroy
belkharraf
bestseoagencyinusa
Bindu
CartoAirport
Chima
digimark658
digitalcoastmarketing
digitalmarketingboy
Divyasree
electrofollows
Esacademy
evamilan
Glamupacademy
Hassan Sial
idaynyt
KiltandMore
koreanairlinevn
leathercollectionfr
licensecube
lumenpart.com
madhubalan324
mamaprofroy
marinajoy
MdAlquamaAlam
Meddco.com
mksharmaji
naven
nuochoanewly19
pradeepkg
prajwal
preethi
punjabdentistry
qcdaiphat
quangcaodaiphathcm
Rabbihossainraihan
redstarrsic
sadhana
sarkariresult
sarkariresults
sattamatka
Savisavi
Scrdsindia
sdippress
seocliniq
seounibiztec
shaikhlawfirm
shawk
shawnseoblog
shreyashinde
sioramsurgy
social.abhi
softwareplusindia
sonam
svapps
thestudyiq02
trantungbtl
uhlpetr
user22863244
user30107068
vijaya12
vivindesign
webologixglobal
webtekdigital4
whitevoxindia
xebiaacademy
Jan 22, 2020

Google rolled out "Brand First" update to their desktop results

Martin Senko published thread Google rolled out "Brand First" update to their desktop results

New search results design has been out for few days now, but maybe you haven't seen yet. It's almost surprising, Google is going back to power brands in their results leveraging favicons & clearly emphasized domain name.

Also Ads are being marked with clear bold Ad now, so it looks like Google is doing kind of disservice to their business, but giving back great tool to webmasters, which is win for all of us.

Maybe they realized that they need quality websites in long term and they simply cannot monopolize internet by answering every single query.

It's also possible, that the update is just a part of their never ending A/B/C/... testing and could change again rather quickly. Who knows? We will see.

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Last year, our search results on mobile gained a new look. That’s now rolling out to desktop results this week, presenting site domain names and brand icons prominently, along with a bolded “Ad” label for ads. Here’s a mockup: <a href="https://t.co/aM9UAbSKtv&quot;&gt;pic.twitter.com/aM9UAbSKtv&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) <a href="https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1216782591463813126?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&quot;&gt;January 13, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js&quot; charset="utf-8"></script>

Jan 21, 2020

Google's January 2020 Core Update is live

Martin Senko replied to thread Google's January 2020 Core Update is live

Yeah, already forgot that thread.

Do you guys already see any traffic anomalies? It's too early to judge, but I see some spikes on our websites. Big spikes followed by regular numbers and then again...

Jan 19, 2020

Is anyone willing to help me with SEO?

Martin Senko replied to thread Is anyone willing to help me with SEO?

What do you need help with?

Jan 14, 2020

How many times does Google release the algorithms and updates visible to users?

Martin Senko replied to thread How many times does Google release the algorithms and updates visible to users?

Seems like "several times per year" is the answer to your question, because no one really knows.

Everything important is typically being announced here: https://twitter.com/searchliaison

Google's January 2020 Core Update is live

Martin Senko published thread Google's January 2020 Core Update is live

For those who might have missed it:

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">The January 2020 Core Update is now live and will be rolling out to our various data centers over the coming days.</p>— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) <a href="https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1216766991882567680?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&quot;&gt;January 13, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js&quot; charset="utf-8"></script>

Don't forget to comment if you see any changes, positive or negative. Thanks!

What are common types of Schema’s used in websites?

Martin Senko replied to thread What are common types of Schema’s used in websites?

Please, clarify your question.

What do you mean? Schema.org?

Jan 5, 2020

Re: What is the complete guide to creating content for SEO?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: What is the complete guide to creating content for SEO?

Forget keywords. Think search intent. What does the searcher need? What can the search query tell you about their intent?

Jan 2, 2020

What is best backlink analysis free Website ?

Martin Senko replied to thread What is best backlink analysis free Website ?

Your question is way too general to answer. There are multiple free web services that will do the job, but each does it differently, based on different volume of data crawled, etc.

Maybe tell us what exactly you are looking for? What's the goal?

Also, don't forget you can check linking pages in your GSC (Google Search Console).

Dec 26, 2019

Myth or fact: Google won't rewrite page title when starting with keywords

Martin Senko replied to thread Myth or fact: Google won't rewrite page title when starting with keywords

Never heard about it, but it does sound funny. Why would Google do that?

Backlinks from Subdomains

Martin Senko replied to thread Backlinks from Subdomains

Subdomain backlinks should count as links, however, they will have much lower value as they are biased in a way. That being said, it's atill a link, as subdomain content is considered autonomous website in the online space. But if Google ranks backlinks differently by IPs and distances, it's technically much easier to see obvious bias between subdomains and therefore the link from subdomain will be of lower value. Still, if each subdomain is ranked individually, such links could possibly bring some aggregated value.

Dec 24, 2019

URL ended with "/undefined" in SERP

Martin Senko replied to thread URL ended with "/undefined" in SERP

Can you post a serp screenshot with the undefined slug? Can not find such case myself.

Thanks

How do facebook conversion pixels work?

Martin Senko upvoted How do facebook conversion pixels work?

It's been long time since I discovered Facebook pixel, however, I haven't had time or courage to find more about how it works and learn how to use it and make use of the data it does provide.

Can you please explain scenarios in which you use Facebook pixel, how do you implement it, and what data do you check when using it. How does it help your business?

If you have some good references to learn from, I'd appreciate if you could post links. Free materials preferably.

Thank you

One website open with multiple domain names Good for Seo?

Martin Senko replied to thread One website open with multiple domain names Good for Seo?

I think you should explain what do you mean by "one website with multiple domains".

Are those domains redirected to a main domain? Are we talking about masking? Or serving exact same content through multiple domains?

Dec 15, 2019

Website network - could be seen as PBN by Google?

Martin Senko upvoted Website network - could be seen as PBN by Google?

We do run a network of websites. For demonstration, I'll make up numbers.

We have one main health related website and 20 supporting websites. Each website hosted on the same dedicated server, same IP address. We are linking from supporting websites to the main website. Links are 99% from articles, but we also have a link in the Resources section on each website.

From time to time, we do link from main website to a health problem specific website, which is often one of our supporting websites, but not exclusively.

Is there a chance, Google will evaluate our network of websites as a PBN and ban it? I don't see manual actions on these yet.

Website network - could be seen as PBN by Google?

Martin Senko replied to thread Website network - could be seen as PBN by Google?

Hi @devon, welcome to SEO Forum.

From what I read, it sounds like a PBN pattern, so it depends on Google and how it evaluates such schemes. Honestly, I don't see anything wrong about what you do, except the information bias - linking only to your own websites which may not seem objective/correct.

I'd definitely stay away from footer and navigation links.

Other than that, I can't really help, as we are talking about reverse engineering Google blackbox, which is not exact science.

Dec 10, 2019

Keyword Ranking Fluctuation

Martin Senko replied to thread Keyword Ranking Fluctuation

@matthewsstephen12

Could really be 5. negative (as long as content is not SPAM, super low quality, duplicity, etc...)? Haven't experienced such a scenario yet. Sometimes, after adding new content, websites skyrocket in rankings, sometimes not so much and often it doesn't make any measurable difference in ranking at all, but haven't really seen a decline due to new content, given it was good quality content.

Dec 3, 2019

Site Issues and Errors

Martin Senko replied to thread Site Issues and Errors

Fixed smartphone layout a little bit @MarkusMay. As always, feedback highly appreciated.

On to next few fixes.

Dec 2, 2019

Competitor Mystery

Martin Senko replied to thread Competitor Mystery

You're welcome @arandazzo88.

Please, keep us posted about changes on the site and your rankings over the time. I am sure it will be interesting to watch!

Nov 27, 2019

Competitor Mystery

Martin Senko replied to thread Competitor Mystery

Didn't mean to say that the user experience on your site is entirely bad, not at all. The site looks OK to me, but I can find room for further improvement quiet easily.

For example this page: /classes/cpr-instructor-course/ is text heavy. There are no dividing elements, seems like a whole lot of text, that no one really want to read. It's bulky and obvious tldr;

I'd suggest using more visually appealing elements like images (illustrations, charts, ...), embedded videos, tables, highlighted text (quotes, verses) etc. Something that will keep your reader interested and focused, so they read through all of that content. By doing that, time spent on each of your content pages should increase and we know that these metrics do help.

Keep pushing your content, getting good references (backlinks), use social media if your audience is there and I am sure it will help in the long term.

Re: Competitor Mystery

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Competitor Mystery

I really appreciate the feedback @ms. ItIt doesn't hurt my feelings. Just gives me a leg up on what I need to work on. I wish I had more of a design eye for UX. Like you, it's hard for me to put my finger on things like that.

Creating unique content will be difficult but I think it's possible by using "past clients" section, testimonials, staff bios, etc. I'll have to play around with it and see if I can be creative enough to make each product page unique yet standardized.

Keyword Ranking Fluctuation

Martin Senko replied to thread Keyword Ranking Fluctuation

Hey @murtza, welcome to SEO Forum.

Unfortunately, there is not enough information in your question. I find it genuine and normal that site ranks change over time, and so do the competitor ranks. You are 3rd today, and 5th tomorrow... It's not all about your site or action you do. Your competitor actions come into play just as vital as yours.

If they do the work, they rank higher and there is nothing wrong about it.

What timeframe are we talking about? I mean, given you start ranking well today, when does the drop happen?

Nov 26, 2019

Competitor Mystery

Martin Senko replied to thread Competitor Mystery

Being 100% honest with you @arandazzo88 gotta say I like knoxvillecpr a little bit more. Just my first impressions, but seems more consistent and easier to read for some reason. Can't really compare content, but that could be also another point of view to consider.

Having dedicated city&product pages should definitely help as long as you can keep up the quality and amount of the content. Also, it's questionable, how different would such a product page be for each city... I'd stay away of it if means the same content, just replacing [city name]. Otherwise, should be positive change.

Re: Competitor Mystery

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Competitor Mystery

Well, that's the difficult piece. We usually try to rank for these keywords [product name] [city name]. However, being in 4 cities, it's difficult.

Currently we have a landing page for each city and then we have our generic product pages. This makes it difficult to rank when someone is searching for a product in their city.

I'm considering a restructure, though. Maybe keeping our city landing pages, but then creating a city specific page for each product. So if we have 6 products and we are in 4 cities, that would mean 24 product pages total. What do you think about that?

Nov 25, 2019

Re: Image Size SEO Tip - Recommendation required!

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Image Size SEO Tip - Recommendation required!

You said you wanted to display the preview size image to reduce page weight and increase page load speed. To avoid the near-term drop in traffic you would have to modify yoursite.com/image-url.

If your current full-size image is found at yoursite.com/image_full-size and your preview image is yoursite.com/image_preview-size then you must modify /image_preview-size to /image_full-size.

I do not recommend this method at all but it is a quick fix to avoid the short-term drop before the new images are indexed.

Nov 23, 2019

best way to increase speed?

Martin Senko upvoted best way to increase speed?

Hello Everyone,

What is the best way to increase website speed load time? I read somewhere that your hosting provider plays a huge role also a good cache plugin for WordPress websites.

Personally I'm a big fan of cloud hosting companies they provide extraordinary support and speed than shared plans. e.g Cloudways they provide managed cloud hosting solutions.

And for cache plugins, I like WP Rocket.

What are your top go-to cache plugins and hosting?

Re: best way to increase speed?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: best way to increase speed?

You need to enable the cache and use optimized images so that it can make the page to load easily. Also choose simple design for your website and minimize HTTP requests.

Re: best way to increase speed?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: best way to increase speed?

Agree with @ms.

Wordpress is bloated. Even if you have a perfect theme, perfectly optimized media, and the best hosting available, a lightweight CMS will outperform.

SEO Forum - To-Do list

Martin Senko replied to thread SEO Forum - To-Do list

Latest posts done today, so I am taking it off the list...

Also fixed User dropdown item Settings.

How different is using subdomain vs. new domain in terms of SEO?

Martin Senko replied to thread How different is using subdomain vs. new domain in terms of SEO?

@brucejonesseo but we are talking subdomain vs. completely different domain here.

This is not sub.example.com vs. example.com/sub

Nov 21, 2019

Image Size SEO Tip - Recommendation required!

Martin Senko upvoted Image Size SEO Tip - Recommendation required!

Hey there, I have the following problem:

The Website

  • I'm running a stock image website (like pexels.com)
  • Currently the website has around 30k images displaying.
  • The most traffic comes from Google Images.

The Problem I created the website a few years ago without any knowledge about what I'm really doing. There I didn't do any optimization to the website speed. Today that changed.

If a user uploads an image it will save three images:

  1. a thumbnail (quite small)
  2. a preview (little bigger but small)
  3. the original file (quite big..)

The website is displaying the original image on the 'show' page of each image. These images also ranked in Google.

Now I want to change the large original image to the preview image to optimize the site load. However I did this but the traffic immediately crashed because the site lost almost every rank in google images. ![stastic](https://i.imgur.com/HNsmru0.png "stastic")

I think this is caused by removing the indexed image so I changed it back again to large.

The question What is better now? The site is quite slow with the big images but over the years these images got a quite good rank. Shall I remove it and wait till the preview image is ranked too? Can I still have the large one in google images but displaying the previews for the user?

What do you recommend?

Nov 17, 2019

Spam at Seoforum - New Antispam Policy Rule

Martin Senko replied to thread Spam at Seoforum - New Antispam Policy Rule

> I would delete the post and give them a warning, 2nd offence would ban the profile. Maybe they would contribute in a more positive way in the future.

Good idea, but this is going to be automatic process, so red flag and ban without manual action from admin.

Re: Spam at Seoforum - New Antispam Policy Rule

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Spam at Seoforum - New Antispam Policy Rule

I would delete the post and give them a warning, 2nd offence would ban the profile. Maybe they would contribute in a more positive way in the future.

Nov 14, 2019

Google Update? Significant traffic drop on two of our sites

Martin Senko replied to thread Google Update? Significant traffic drop on two of our sites

One of our client has confirmed SE traffic decline, due to affected ranking positions. No confirmation of that having something to do with the update in question though. Just saying.

I'll check our rather big dataset of SERPs we are collecting on daily basis, once today's processing is over.

Google Update? Significant traffic drop on two of our sites

Martin Senko upvoted Google Update? Significant traffic drop on two of our sites

One site is health related magazine, the other one is kinda product review aggregator. Used to be at steady traffic levels. About 700-800 visitors on health magazine, but for last 3-4 days, we are down to just about 50-60% of that.

Do you see something similar in your stats? Any confirmation by google? I found SERoundtable flash news about it, but doesn't look like a critical update. At least google says it's just a regular update they do on daily/weekly basis.

Other sites stay about the same traffic wise.

Google Update? Significant traffic drop on two of our sites

Martin Senko replied to thread Google Update? Significant traffic drop on two of our sites

Nothing unusual in my stats. Seoforum went slightly up, otherwise same as always.

Nov 13, 2019

My website authority getting Down Day-by-Day. How can I recover it?

Martin Senko upvoted My website authority getting Down Day-by-Day. How can I recover it?

I am making backlink from a high authority website daily, but still losing my website authority day-by-day. Why this is happening to my website? Please give me any suggestion regarding this.

My website: trendinwealth.com

Do-follow backlink

Martin Senko replied to thread Do-follow backlink

Register on Reddit, get familiar with it, find good subreddit for your needs, post valuable posts regularly and then think about backlinks. Posting links from new accounts doesn't make sense - the reason is obvious.

But Reddit could be good, as long as your post get some traction. You can get quiet some direct traffic too. But it gotta score!

Competitor Mystery

Martin Senko upvoted Competitor Mystery

Can someone help me do an analysis? I've been trying to outrank my competitor for a long time and can't ever seem to do it.

My site: primemedicaltraining.com Their site: knoxvillecpr .com

Here's what I've done and don't understand how it's not made a difference.

  1. We have hundreds more quality backlinks
  2. All our landing pages are 2,000 words
  3. Readability is good (large font, short paragraphs)
  4. Decent CTR, bounce rate and dwell time

All the above is opposite of what my competitor has and yet they still have a strong first place position. If you read their content, it's even border-line spammy. Can anyone give me some guidance of what is going on?

Re: Competitor Mystery

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Competitor Mystery

There are a variety of reasons.

Backlinks are mostly irrelevant. The people who tout backlink profiles also happen to be selling services or software that performs that function. It's not important anymore.

Length of content isn't a strict requirement either. The most important aspect of your content is how it addresses the users' query. You could write a novel and not answer their question.

Readability depends on the audience. Styling has more to do with mobile usability.

Interaction stats are probably the most important thing after relevance to the users' search intent but you can't optimize bounce rate directly. You optimize content and size structure to benefit your bounce rate.

Their content is not spammy. They are a business who is selling a service. Maybe your content is objectively better but is your business? When considering Google business listings, Google maps, other real-world data, plus your web presence, who is better?

Google's algo is a black box. We can deduce certain ranking factors but without knowing exactly what is going on it is impossible to truly compete with another website directly.

You can aim to build the best website in terms of structure and content while also building up a strong customer focused business and end up ranking #1. Or you can try to find the shortcut to outrank someone else.

The former is what one does when they are building a business, the latter is what get rich quick schemes are made of.

P.S.

Site structure matters. Everything should make sense and follow a pattern. Computers understand patterns better than context or content. People like patterns whether they notice them or not.

Oct 27, 2019

Re: Website not ranking in google...

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Website not ranking in google...

There are hundreds of thousands of pages for even the most obscure search queries. Just because you mention a word does not mean you will rank in the top 20 pages. That isn't how this works. Read about the basics of SEO if you actually want to see results.

Oct 24, 2019

Someone ripped of a blog of mine...and it is already ranking higher....how to fix!

Martin Senko replied to thread Someone ripped of a blog of mine...and it is already ranking higher....how to fix!

That's definitely one of key things I'd focus on.

Not the only one though. New quality content, new high quality backlinks to the pages you want to rank high, social signals... everything will help your site.

Someone ripped of a blog of mine...and it is already ranking higher....how to fix!

Martin Senko upvoted Someone ripped of a blog of mine...and it is already ranking higher....how to fix!

Hi everyone,

First post so apologies if I'm not doing this properly.

I run a hobby website. Its all about how expats living in Thailand can get Thai citizenship. Its pretty niche, but that's okay.

Last year I wrote a long blog post on how to you can apply for Thai citizenship.

To my mind, its unique and goes okay and most of my pages rank fairly highly on google searches on the topic.

https://www.thaicitizenship.com/thai-citizenship-for-foreigners-married-to-thai-spouse/

Anyway, last week I find that someone has ripped off my blog, word for word. The reason I found out is that when I did a search on the topic, the following site ranked higher than mine in some cases - even though it is newer, has ripped off my content. To be clear, their site has nothing to do with the topic of Thai citizenship, they just have one of my better articles there, word for word.

https://emergingtrendsadvisors.com/thai-citizenship-step-by-step-guide/

My question is, what have they done (if anything) to have achieved this, and what am I potentially doing wrong. As said, its a hobby site but I'd like to be the best one around. I know my content is the best, but clearly that isn't enough for google.

Many thanks in advance.

SEO Forum - To-Do list

Martin Senko published thread SEO Forum - To-Do list

I know some members posted their suggestions here on the forums and even via email. I am supper happy about that.

Anyway, I'll post here, what we're working on at the moment, so you know what to expect.

  1. First thing first, SEO forum needs Latest posts feed, so this is priority now.
  2. Search
  3. Thinking about dedicated section for SEO jobs.
  4. Sponsored content pages by SEO individuals and agencies. If you wan to collaborate on this one, feel free to respond.

That's it for now.

If you have anything in mind for next updates (probably scheduled for 2020), feel free to post here: https://seoforum.com/thread/seo-forum-feature-requests

My website authority getting Down Day-by-Day. How can I recover it?

Martin Senko replied to thread My website authority getting Down Day-by-Day. How can I recover it?

This is odd situation. Often, it works the other way, but I have experienced similar scenario in the past.

It happened when my client started earning backlinks by spamming forums and blog comments. So what happened was initial signal when the link was created (positive) has been suppressed by negative signal when Google found out, that the link has been removed days/weeks later.

It's same here on SEO forum. When you post something, receive an upvote, reply, you earn some points (as defined per action). On the other side, if your post is removed for SPAM, we pull a lot more points from your score. For example, if you post a thread, you get 10 points. If it's deleted for SPAM, we subtract 100 points...

From my experience, links works the similar way. You get points for earning links, but the negative signal from links disappearing could be more destructive.

Will link building be still relevant in 2020

Martin Senko replied to thread Will link building be still relevant in 2020

Hi @sakshiarora

Link building will be relevant in 2020 and even in 2021... That's because links are one of the most relevant available signals for Google to rank sites on the net. Just like user behaviour metrics (bounce rate, pogo sticking, pages per visit, ...) and so on.

You can't cut down strong signal like links in one moment. Power of links will be probably lower and lower over time, but I can't see it becoming completely irrelevant for ranking sites. Definitely not in the next few years.

What do you think?

Oct 22, 2019

Someone ripped of a blog of mine...and it is already ranking higher....how to fix!

Martin Senko replied to thread Someone ripped of a blog of mine...and it is already ranking higher....how to fix!

Hi @samran

the answer looks quiet simple at first glance. Your domain has lower authority, so likely that's why your content sky rocketed on their site. Could be anything really, but their site seems to be preferred by search engines, because it has better references on the net.

What I see for example on Ahrefs website authority checker: your site (0.9), their site (23)

best way to increase speed?

Martin Senko replied to thread best way to increase speed?

Hi Adam, welcome to SEO forum.

Best tip for speeding up Wordpress? Level up to a different CMS, or get rid of most of installed plugins. You can do with better host, but that's not the way I'd go - you want be able to scale on a hardware vertical forever.

Oct 16, 2019

Best SEO book for 2019

Martin Senko replied to thread Best SEO book for 2019

@Gilly_John I guess your IP matches the OP's IP for reason, right?

We don't allow hidden promotions here. And specially not in your first post.

Thanks for understanding.

Oct 14, 2019

Impossible Google ranking with white hat techniques

Martin Senko replied to thread Impossible Google ranking with white hat techniques

There are few more things, you can't see. For example, bounce rate. And it could be crucial.

Also, the page in question could be newer than top 10 ranking pages, so maybe it just needs more time. Google use metrics like bounce rate, pogo sticking, dwell time, organic CTR and so on, to accurately rank your website not according to what's on it and how good above mentioned ranks are, but according to user interactions.

Basically, if searchers like more the page of your competitor, than everything you mentioned up there doesn't really matter that much.

Will having a lot of inbound links from low domain reputation websites help increase mine.

Martin Senko replied to thread Will having a lot of inbound links from low domain reputation websites help increase mine.

Hi there and welcome to SEO forum.

If not spammy, links in general won't hurt. Your question is missing one key point - are these sites even in your niche? If absolutely not, I wouldn't really spend time on this, not worth it. If close to your niche, then OK, might be worth getting some links for diversity of your backlink profile. Just don't expect too much.

The weight of inbound links is not the same as it used to be years ago. It's still strong ranking signal, but just links won't make your site #1.

Sep 30, 2019

SEO, on-page technical SEO

Martin Senko replied to thread SEO, on-page technical SEO

Are you keeping your current exact URL structure? Are you changing markup too, or just styles?

Aug 1, 2019

SEO + Backlink

Martin Senko replied to thread SEO + Backlink

Same questions over and over. Please, make sure your future questions are more specific (eventually much more).

If website is not ranking, there may be million reasons why. If anyone would like to help you, they would be just guessing. Keep that in mind please.

Online store

Martin Senko replied to thread Online store

Hi @onlinecricstore

Please, be more specific. Your question is too broad to even scratch the surface.

Jul 22, 2019

Website page speed issue

Martin Senko replied to thread Website page speed issue

Hi raheel.

<a href="https://ibb.co/WcVMn82&quot;&gt;&lt;img src="https://i.ibb.co/vJXT1yj/Screen-Shot-2019-07-22-at-14-04-50.png&quot; alt="Screen-Shot-2019-07-22-at-14-04-50" border="0"></a>

as you can see, your page is truly terrible when it comes to page load. There is no one thing to fix. There are multiple issues to be addressed.

Please, let us know, what CMS are you using, and how's the website hosted (is it on VPS where you can buy more resources? Is it shared webhosting with no options at all?).

Also, this is pretty terrible advertisement for your services. Optimizing website speed should be one of the very first things on your list to improve any website, so if you can't fix your own website, why would anyone use your services?

Jul 18, 2019

I'm Robert Garcia! Newbies here

Martin Senko replied to thread I'm Robert Garcia! Newbies here

Weird thing about all those recent accounts is, that they didn't post a signle link, not even in their BIO. What's the purpose then?

I'm Robert Garcia! Newbies here

Martin Senko replied to thread I'm Robert Garcia! Newbies here

Thank you for the heads up. You're right, IP addresses of those last four introuduction posts do match (although not precisely, they are from same class C network) so definitely something worth reporting. I'll keep closer eye on it.

Jul 17, 2019

I'm glad that I am part of here

Martin Senko replied to thread I'm glad that I am part of here

Hi Shawn, good to have you on the board here.

Would be awesome if you could keep us updated on SEO updates and effective marketing strategies. Looking forward to your future posts!

Hi I'm Axe Colver, Interested in SEO

Martin Senko replied to thread Hi I'm Axe Colver, Interested in SEO

Hi Axe, welcome to SEO Forum.

Looking forward to learn something new from you experience. How long have you been in SEO?

Jun 13, 2019
Jun 3, 2019

Google, spammy links and disavow tool - Webmaster Central hangout

Martin Senko published thread Google, spammy links and disavow tool - Webmaster Central hangout

Came across another Google Webmaster Central office-hours hangout issue which also featured common, but interesting question:

My website gets hundreds of links that seem to be spammy I suspect maybe one of my competitors is trying to decrease my rankings Do I need to keep disavowing these links week after week or should I only be worried if I get unnatural links manual action?

John Mueller's answer: So in general we do automatically take these into account and we try to kind of ignore them automatically when we see them happening and for the most part I suspect that works fairly well. I see very few people with actual issues around that so I think that's mostly working well with regards to disavowing these links. I suspect if these are just normal spammy links that are just popping up for your website then I wouldn't worry about them too much. Probably we figured that out on our own. If you're worried about them regardless if there's if it's something that you're not sure about, you're losing sleep over these links and you just want to make sure that Google handles them properly then using the disavow tool is perfectly fine. The disavow tool is not an admission of guilt or anything like that. You're essentially just telling our systems these links should not be taken into account for my website and there are multiple reasons why you might want links not to be taken into account. That's not something that our algorithms would try to judge for your website so if you're seeing spammy links from certain sites, using the domain directive makes it easy to handle these into disavow file and you can just submit those there. On the other hand, if you're if you feel that these links are pretty normal spammy and something that any algorithm would figure out than you can just leave them alone and just kind of move on. I think for most websites out there pretty much the really largest majority of websites you don't need to use a disavow tool. And that's also why we have to disavow tool so separate from search console so that you don't get tempted to using disavow tool because it looks like that's normal part of search console that everyone should be using. But it's really something that you only really need to use in in really extreme cases.

Check full video for more interesting topics <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/cRZP0WhJp18&quot; frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

May 28, 2019

How can you do SEO for a video?

Martin Senko replied to thread How can you do SEO for a video?

Of course you can. Youtube SEO is now trending topic in the SEO industry, but the question is just too broad.

Generally speaking, you need to have good content (suprisingly, right?) so the engagement is high. Good title, description, tags, categories, cc, ... everything does matter to some extent.

But it's mostly about the size of your channel, number of subscribers, history of your videos (views)... It takes a lot of time and effort to get your audience on Youtube. At least, I guess your question is related to Youtube videos.

Explain A/B testing in terms of Google Analytics.

Martin Senko replied to thread Explain A/B testing in terms of Google Analytics.

What exactly do you need to know?

May 24, 2019

Which place is good to pick?

Martin Senko replied to thread Which place is good to pick?

Hi @danaya and welcome to SEO Forum.

First thing - don't use your first post to promote service/product. Hang around for a second, help answer questions of other members and feel free to mention your service, but ALWAYS let us know you are affiliated with it in some way. If you feel ashamed to admit connection, you should not be posting it anyway. If you don't like it, other won't either.

To be complete and answer your question - You are right. It's not a big deal where is SEO company you're using from as long as they provide you with good service that works for you. You should always look at their results and reviews first, and consider that with their service price. If it makes sense all in all, you're good to go with whatever company wherever in the world. It doesn't matter where they are located.

Cheers.

May 19, 2019

Would signatures/signature link motivate you to post valuable information on Seoforum?

Martin Senko published thread Would signatures/signature link motivate you to post valuable information on Seoforum?

What do you think?

Would you consider posting more of your experience and knowledge if you were rewarded with link/short line of text associated with all of your posts?

Let me know what you think. Considering some sort of signatures to bring more value for users.

May 15, 2019

Re: How can I increase my site's Domain Authority?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: How can I increase my site's Domain Authority?

Ms, your explanation is really helpful for me. It surely enriched my working knowledge. I will try to do the way you mentioned. Tanks for your kind time.

May 14, 2019

Re: How can I increase my site's Domain Authority?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: How can I increase my site's Domain Authority?

Hi MS, Cordial thanks for taking your busy time to make such kind support to my issue. Yeah, DA is a developed metric by Moz. I agree with you on what you said. I have already checked my site DA and PA that are accordingly 15 (DA) and 23(PA). As far I learned, High Domain Authority site has some advantage to get ranking on goolge search engine and I believe google ranking may lead my site to more audiences and may increase the possibility of business. Thanks again for coming forward to help regarding my issue.

Should I have two XML sitemaps?

Martin Senko replied to thread Should I have two XML sitemaps?

Edited my response to be more clear.

So, you either use two different sitemaps, both top level - you need to make robots aware of both files in such case.

OR you use multiple sitemaps while having just one top-level sitemap, which is index sitemap with all underlaying sitemaps included in it. That way, you would mention just the index sitemap in your robots.txt file.

How can I increase my site's Domain Authority?

Martin Senko replied to thread How can I increase my site's Domain Authority?

@matthewsstephen12 very true. Link from a high DA site (like 70+) should do a lot of work for you, @bob

Re: How can I increase my site's Domain Authority?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: How can I increase my site's Domain Authority?

Sites with higher authority have exponentially more incoming links, and they pass exponentially more authority when they link to other websites.

  1. Submit daily blogs have DA above 80.
  2. Social media website have DA above 90.
  3. Only a handful of websites have DA of 100 (Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook, Google).

Should I have two XML sitemaps?

Martin Senko upvoted Should I have two XML sitemaps?

My website has 13 pages, the blog section on my website has 46 pages. The blog has an XML sitemap that is automatically generated at "website.com/blog/sitemap.xml". Should I have 2 sitemaps, one for the main site and one for the blog? Or should I just have one sitemap for the blog since the main site doesn't have many pages?

If I make 2 sitemaps, should I mention them both in website.com/robots.txt? Or mention one in website.com/robots.txt and the other in website.com/blog/robots.txt?

Really appreciate any help with this.

Should I have two XML sitemaps?

Martin Senko replied to thread Should I have two XML sitemaps?

Hi @bogla and thanks for being part of SEO Forum community. Great question, thanks for that!

You may have as many XML sitemaps as you want. There is limitation though - XML sitemaps shouldn't contain more than 50,000 URLs. In your case, it doesn't make too much sense to decouple blog pages from other pages, as you are far from the limit.

If you're looking for logical distinction (which is perfectly fine), you can do it as you mentioned above. In that case, you would either use third sitemap, which is going to be index sitemap for other, lower tier sitemap files (containing links to them) OR you would end up having two top tier sitemap files, in which case you'd mention both in your robots.txt. Anyway, you should be OK with single sitemap.

Specifying more than one Sitemap file in robots.txt is fine.

For more details, check:

Multiple Sitemaps in the same directory

Informing search engine crawlers

Hope it helps!

May 13, 2019

How can I increase my site's Domain Authority?

Martin Senko upvoted How can I increase my site's Domain Authority?

Hello friends, Greetings. I am an online small business owner, lead a website. Try to learn how I can develop my business and I am already on studying on relevant resources to develop my website. The domain authority is not so satisfactory level. So, I am interested to learn how to improve Domain Authority. Would you please help me to improve the issue. Thanks in advance for your precious guideline.

How can I increase my site's Domain Authority?

Martin Senko replied to thread How can I increase my site's Domain Authority?

DA 15 isn't high at all. That means, it's relatively easy to rise it by 5 or 10 points in short time period. Since the scale is logarithmic, higher score points are harder to gain.

Generally speaking - acquire new backlinks (higher quality = more gain) and work with social media too (share existing content, discuss it on SM, ...).

Few more good backlinks and social signals should yield higher DA (3-7 increase) in a month easily.

Anyway, I asked why you want higher DA, because DA alone doesn't mean anything. It's yet another metric, along with hundreds of others... The key takeaway is, that if you want to be higher - your content should be better. Google ranks content depending on it's quality understanding it by machines AND people. How your visitors react to your content is crucial. Doesn't matter if you have 1000 backlinks if your content make people click back in first five seconds on your page. And even if you have just very few, or virtually no backlinks at all, your website could still do fine. So, while you definitely need some traffic to your website, it doesn't mean good backlinks will fix everything. It's just one dimension, that means nothing if everything else and specially content is weak.

Hope it helps to get you on the right track.

What Is Local SEO & Why Local Search Is Important

Martin Senko upvoted What Is Local SEO & Why Local Search Is Important

Local search engine optimization is a branch of SEO that focuses on optimizing a website to be found in local search results. Basically, local SEO is a strategic process that focuses on emphasizing the optimization efforts of local brick-and-mortar businesses. Content, on-page optimizations, and link building all with a focused, localized intent are part of these efforts. The focus changes, however, when it comes to localizing link acquisition. The focus changes to making sure all potential local signals across Google’s local search landscape are consistent and correct. If they are not, or you accidentally provide different information for the same business, you could potentially experience situations where your local results display something different than what was intended. Why Local Search Is Important Here are a few stats that prove how important local search continues to be for businesses: 50 % of people who did a local search on their phone went to a physical store within one day. 34% who did their search on a computer or tablet did the same. 18 % of local mobile searches lead to a sale within one day. 60 % of American adults conduct searches for local services or product information on tablets and smartphones. 50 %] of searchers on their mobile phones who conduct local searches are looking for things like a local business address. 78 % of local-based searches on a mobile device end in purchases being made offline. 71 % of people who have been surveyed have said they search for the location of a business in order to confirm its existence before going there for a first-time visit. 1 in 3 searches on a smartphone was conducted just before arriving at a store. 97 % of consumers looked online for local businesses in 2017, with 12 percent looking for a local business online every day.

Who Won’t Benefit from Local SEO?

While as SEO professionals we would love to see everyone benefit from local SEO and sell these services to more clients, the reality is that some businesses just don’t lend themselves well to local SEO efforts. Businesses like online only ecommerce shops, local authors, businesses that don’t want to share their local information, and private online sellers who want to keep their information private are likely not great candidates for local SEO services.

What Are the Important Parts of Local SEO?

When it comes to local SEO, it isn’t all that different from organic SEO – keyword research, content, links, and on-page technical SEO. It just has a local focus. These elements are important to get right for your website and its industry overall in order to outperform the competition in the SERPs. When optimizing for local search, however, these parts contain more of a local focus that focuses on searches people are performing in the immediate area surrounding the business (e.g., local city names).

Keyword Research

Keyword research for local SEO has not changed all that much, although some aspects are a little bit different. Now, statistics show that people have more access to devices like smartphones, Amazon Echo, and Google Home. These devices pave the way for voice search to be one of the primary avenues of executing local searches. It’s easier to say “find a doctor near me” or “find a plumber near me” for most people than it is to type. Thus, it isn’t surprising to see a rise in local queries based on conversational voice search. If your industry is service-oriented, try out keyword variations that include questions. SEMrush’s topic research tool, Keyword.io, and AnswerThePublic all provide ways to see questions people are searching for, along with their search volume. This is an excellent way to target keywords that have local intent. If your industry is a local brick-and-mortar, service-related business, like a restaurant or an attorney or lawyer, try keyword variations that have a conversational tone and focus. You may be surprised by the search volume you can achieve when you do keyword research in this way. The Importance of Content to Your Local SEO Efforts Content with a local focus has a significant importance on local SEO efforts. Depending on your industry, content with local focus, depth, breadth, and knowledge tends to do well. However, just writing long-form content won’t necessarily always produce the best results. It all depends on the nature of the results of your query, and whether this content fits the user intent behind the query the best. It’s not about whether it has the highest word count for the query. Writing custom local content with all of these factors will help you achieve the quality content Google wants to return for certain local results. What should you not do when it comes to content? Wikipedia-type content is the worst type of content you could write. You know the kind. The kind that quotes National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) or city guides data that is available everywhere on Wikipedia. The reason why this is the worst type of content is that not only is the content usually thin, the value that it brings and the value of the research put into the content is usually just as thin.

Thin content adds little value to your SEO efforts

Local SEO Links For local SEO, links are a little bit different than organic SEO. First, you must consider Google’s Webmaster Guidelines when acquiring all links. You don’t want your link acquisition efforts to result in a manual action (i.e., penalty) from Google. If you build links that violate any of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, Google will eventually detect them. The next thing you know, your entire website could disappear from the organic search results.

What’s the Future of Local SEO?

Current statistics, data, and trends suggest that local SEO is headed toward a paradigm shift in significantly improved context and understanding. The proliferation of devices, like smartphones, Amazon Echo and Google Home, suggest a trend towards the creation of devices that have more conversation-like approaches that equal or exceed human understanding.

It could even be suggested that these devices implement higher-quality, faster, and overall improved algorithms to serve enhanced voice search results to the user. Google is always adjusting and updating its algorithms. It remains to be seen what will happen, but hopefully it will help improve all search results.

May 12, 2019

How can I increase my site's Domain Authority?

Martin Senko replied to thread How can I increase my site's Domain Authority?

Hi Bob. Welcome to SEO Forum!

Domain Authority is MOZ's custom developed metric. We can't really tell what are the factors exactly, but very likely it has to do with link quality, link volume, social media mentions and domain age.

Also worth mentioning, DA is logarithmic scale so it really depends on where you are at the moment. What is your DA now? Why/How do you think higher DA would help your site/business?

May 9, 2019

Can anyone suggest me the best SEO plugin?

Martin Senko replied to thread Can anyone suggest me the best SEO plugin?

@digitalmarketingboy - No hidden advertising in your posts please. If you have a service or product to offer: hang around for a while, post some useful information and introduce your product/service by creating dedicated thread. You're welcome.

May 7, 2019

Another possible algorithm update (February 2019)

Martin Senko upvoted Another possible algorithm update (February 2019)

Seeing another large spike in traffic on my current project. Seeing 120% of my average daily traffic before 11am.

This last happened on January 6th. I saw a significant increase in CTR and only a marginal increase in SERP impressions.

Anyone else experiencing a shakeup?

Do you log your ranking positions and changes?

Martin Senko published thread Do you log your ranking positions and changes?

Do you use any third party services to log your search engine positions (other than Search Console, which I don't really consider being third party, as it's Google itself)?

Do you keep track of your most important pages manually, using spreadsheet or something similar?

Looking for your insights.

How to improve website ranking with on-page SEO?

Martin Senko upvoted How to improve website ranking with on-page SEO?

What is the most important factor in on-page SEO?

website speed? keyword density? or other

How to improve website ranking with on-page SEO?

Martin Senko replied to thread How to improve website ranking with on-page SEO?

Single most important factor? Hard to tell. This would be more of a guessing than valid facts.

Anyway, I think that markup and site navigation is fundamental.

Semantics are truly the base of your content. Markup is strong tool not just because it makes your content easier to read and understand. It also gives you great power of working with importance of provided information.

You decide what is heading, which text should be emphasized, bold, smaller than the rest... With proper markup and navigation, you can get the right content in front of searchers which brings you better CTR, lower bounce rate and longer time spent on your site. Which is what you really want.

Google will notice your visitors spend much time on your site, and they interact with it. That creates snowball effect and your ranks should improve.

Don't focus on keyword density too much. Keep it readable. Sometimes, less is more. And more is less...

May 3, 2019

Re: How to drive traffic from social media?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: How to drive traffic from social media?

Usually just posting something in a niche category would attract visitors.

For example, if you hand develop a website, try posting it into the /webdev or /php subreddit and you will get at least 100 visitors in 1-2 days, after that, it really depends on what your site is offering, if the visitors will come back or not.

Re: How to get more traffic from organic search?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: How to get more traffic from organic search?

There are two dimensions your page can grow in organic search.

  1. more content
  2. higher ranking positions

Generally speaking, create more content & work on your rankings by improving your existing content.

The more keywords/phrases you are ranking for, the more potential traffic to your website.

How to drive traffic from social media?

Martin Senko upvoted How to drive traffic from social media?

Hello everyone,

Can anyone guide me how can i drive traffic from social media to my blog or website?

And how can i get traffic from Reddit website?

Give me some clues or steps to understand them.

Thanks in Advance.

Google bugs and more interesting topics - Google Webmaster Central hangout

Martin Senko published thread Google bugs and more interesting topics - Google Webmaster Central hangout

Some interesting topics popped up in the latest issue of Google Webmaster Central office-hours hangout.

Probably the most interesting question was if the bugs on Google are more than usual or are you guys being more transparent than usual?

Answer by John Mueller > I wouldn't say it's more often but we, we definitely ran into a bi,g big bug there which took a quite some time to resolve. And because that's very visible to site owners in particular through Search Console that's something that’s important for us to tell people about. ...

Check the video below for full answer from John and other interesting questions and answers.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/MFoRF3Nw-S8&quot; frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Apr 18, 2019

any SEO tools to use in IRAN? [read about difficulties]

Martin Senko upvoted any SEO tools to use in IRAN? [read about difficulties]

Hi,

I am from Iran. and I work on Persian/Farsi Keywords (Like گوگل, سئو, بلیط قطار, بلیط هواپیما). I am a digital marketing strategists and SEO specialist. (connect in Linkedin)

because of all related sanctions even on the web, lots of tools/software/SaaS/even extensions don't work with Iran location (Adsense has no Iran Location). some even directly block Iranians IPs.

There are some softwares that I could use, like the SEO Power Suite. but the data in these ones are a bit suspicious in my experience. not that they're not good.

DO YOU have any software or tools to suggest? I could really use a good one.

Thank you,

Apr 14, 2019

How to get more traffic from organic search?

Martin Senko upvoted How to get more traffic from organic search?

How to get more traffic from organic search?

How to get more traffic from organic search?

Martin Senko replied to thread How to get more traffic from organic search?

There are two dimensions your page can grow in organic search.

  1. more content
  2. higher ranking positions

Generally speaking, create more content & work on your rankings by improving your existing content.

The more keywords/phrases you are ranking for, the more potential traffic to your website.

Mar 29, 2019

Can speed of a website / load time impact on SEO of a website?

Martin Senko upvoted Can speed of a website / load time impact on SEO of a website?

Hi, I want to know can speed of a website / load time, impact in positive way for overall SEO of the website, and secondly do techniques like image compression, do actually help in speeding up the website, I read on an article about (link removed) that it does, can any one share their experience. thanks in advance.

Mar 14, 2019

This week, Google released broad core algorithm update

Martin Senko published thread This week, Google released broad core algorithm update

According to this tweet:

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">This week, we released a broad core algorithm update, as we do several times per year. Our guidance about such updates remains as we’ve covered before. Please see these tweets for more about that:<a href="https://t.co/uPlEdSLHoX&quot;&gt;https://t.co/uPlEdSLHoX&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href="https://t.co/tmfQkhdjPL&quot;&gt;https://t.co/tmfQkhdjPL&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) <a href="https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1105842166788587520?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&quot;&gt;March 13, 2019</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js&quot; charset="utf-8"></script>

new broad core algorithm update is out already.

Also, recommend checking this post on SE Roundtable.

Too early to see changes in Search Console, but how about your recent traffic?

Mar 6, 2019

Can speed of a website / load time impact on SEO of a website?

Martin Senko replied to thread Can speed of a website / load time impact on SEO of a website?

Hi @scottduncan101 great to have you here. Welcome!

Just one thing, before I move on to your question.

And that's not just you. This is for everyone coming here for the first time. Please, do not post links in your first few posts.

If you want to show us your article, get some honest feedback on something, well, it's fine as long as you clearly state it's your work, you own the website, you are member of a team... back it up with your name.

If it's shame for you to admit it's yours, I am sure other members are not interested in it either. Not worth posting it - will be deleted, just like the links in the post above.

Site speed does matter to some extent

If your page loads in 10 seconds, it's bad. Google don't want to serve their users with slow sites. Because it's clearly bad user experience. However, there should not be any difference, if a page loads in 1.00 second or 1.85 seconds. Fastest != Best, so if your pages load in up to 1.5 - 2 seconds, you should be good...

What's Google Dance?

Martin Senko replied to thread What's Google Dance?

Hi @kusah, and welcome to SEO Forum.

First thing first, please, DO NOT POST LINKS in your very first post, as it's obvious backlinking with no added value for other members and visitors.

So next time you want to share some interesting piece, don't forget to write why it's so interesting and describe what it is about in the first place, so other forumers may decide if they are interested or not before clicking...

Now, to answer your question: > It’s the period when Google is rebuilding its rankings, and results fluctuate widely for a 3 to 5 day period.

from very first G result that popped out on query 'Google Dance' https://metamend.com/archive/education/google-dance/

Mar 4, 2019

Post Free Classified Ads On Digisok

Martin Senko replied to thread Post Free Classified Ads On Digisok

No Ads in regular posts please.

You're free to promote your website by putting it into your profile and posting valuable content for other members.

Just don't post obvious ads with live links - these will be deleted and authors banned. Not really worth it.

If you want to buy an ad spot, let me know, we can work something out.

Re: A very dramatic LOW CTR (0.3%) - Why?!

Martin Senko upvoted Re: A very dramatic LOW CTR (0.3%) - Why?!

From your other post: WP as a platform does not get as much love as most are susceptible to hacking, etc ... but more importantly WP is viewed as "for the masses" and "bloggers". Having survived a DDoS is not a good sign as that will have had an impact on the SEs during that period ... and they have notoriously long memories. These two things CHANGED the site significantly in the eyes of others.

However, the other aspect is the revenue hit and there should be other research into that. When the site changed over the WP did the content suffer? Meaning was it changed to "fit" WP? How was the old version presented? Static HTML? Has there been a change in protocol? (HTTPS for example). Also, since Farsi is indicated, is the geolocation having any impact on traffic/advertisers? Are the best paying ads not displayed due to sanctions, etc? The range of "what it might be" is immense. Can you help narrow things down?

Feb 27, 2019

A very dramatic LOW CTR (0.3%) - Why?!

Martin Senko replied to thread A very dramatic LOW CTR (0.3%) - Why?!

Hi Mehdi. Welcome to SEO Forum.

First of all, don't post unnecessary links in your first post. You may get banned easily. Just a heads up.

To your question. I think the graph is missing important data - positions over time. Sometimes, moving to a different CMS, you may get more pages indexed, rank for more keywords, but not high enough to receive actual clicks. Which is fine - it takes time.

Looking at your impressions data line, looks like they went up, so it could be some indication...

If possible, check your positions over time and also check number of indexed pages and keywords you are ranking for.

Good luck.

Jan 7, 2019

Re: Possible algorithm update (January 2019)

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Possible algorithm update (January 2019)

It is 7:30 am and I have already received 7 hits from Google which means it has already been an above average day. It is strange.

Possible algorithm update (January 2019)

Martin Senko upvoted Possible algorithm update (January 2019)

I saw a significant change of behavior for my current project. I started the website mid November and have been slowly gaining traction. However, today I've jumped from 5-10 uniques to 75 and counting. This type of jump should not occur so quickly.

Anyone else seeing any traffic fluctuations?

Possible algorithm update (January 2019)

Martin Senko replied to thread Possible algorithm update (January 2019)

I have noticed small spike in traffic for my health related product review website since January 2nd, however, nothing on such a scale ^

Does the traffic flow continue today? Will be interesting to see the keywords that perform so well in your Search Console in a day or two...

Jan 4, 2019

Which Backlinks I do first for SEO?

Martin Senko upvoted Which Backlinks I do first for SEO?
  1. Forum
  2. social bookmarking
  3. profile backlinks
  4. Q&A
  5. PDF
  6. Video submission
  7. outreach
  8. commenting.

Which Backlinks I do first for SEO?

Martin Senko replied to thread Which Backlinks I do first for SEO?

First links you acquire for a new site are likely to be from submissions, comments, profiles pages and social networks, as I do not expect new site having great content from the start.

The better links should be acquired along the way, as you publish better content. It's a long, and more importantly never ending journey. Your best bet is to do your own research to discover opportunities within your niche.

Appraise my domain name

Martin Senko upvoted Appraise my domain name

Hello, can you please appraise my domain name Soviet .me

Dec 20, 2018

Appraise my domain name

Martin Senko replied to thread Appraise my domain name

I can see some search results for "civex" on Google, nothing fancy though.

According to Namebio, civex.com has been sold for $3,850 in 2010 on Sedo, and than again in January 2018 for $125 (which is probably what you have paid for it). Seems solid, and I wouldn't be surprised to see it going for around $5k if right person knocks on your door. Who knows. The thing about appraising domain names is, that it's just a speculation. Real value will be negotiated between buyer and seller.

Dec 19, 2018

Appraise my domain name

Martin Senko replied to thread Appraise my domain name

Not ideal extension for resale. Anyway, if there was someone looking to get this particular domain, I believe anything from reg. fee to $500 would be possible. But honestly, there are so many options to go after, that your odds of selling this name are slim to none.

Dec 1, 2018

Suggestion: Basic SEO vocabulary with brief explanation of terms

Martin Senko replied to thread Suggestion: Basic SEO vocabulary with brief explanation of terms

I appreciate your content-driven idea, it does make sense, the only problem is - we need to write it down.

Let's use this thread to get together basic SEO terms that should be included on that page.

Introducing new post type: Blog

Martin Senko published thread Introducing new post type: Blog

First of all, I have to admit that this part took me way more time than I expected. Not that I was working on it, just couldn't get back to work on seoforum lately. Anyway, the blog (beta) is now deployed and this is first post of blog post type.

How is blog/blog post different from a regular thread?

The main difference is, clearly how much more content-oriented blog post is. There is no sidebar, centered single column layout, larger serif font with increased line-height...

Why?

We are doing a lot of digging around Google and have some data, not only search related. I though it would be a good idea to post larger articles from time to time, but thread is just a thread if you know what I mean. Blog post should work better for sharing and get more impressions from the world, as it will present original content

Nov 28, 2018

How to deal with fake negative reviews on Google Business

Martin Senko replied to thread How to deal with fake negative reviews on Google Business

As you probably already know, it's not easy at all to get Google remove some reviews for you. What you are describing is probably the worst case scenario, because there is nothing wrong about reviews with no text. You can't complain about not being your customer, as this is very hard to prove, and Google knows that.

In my opinion, the best thing you can do is responding to them, being nice (even though that might be really challenging at times) and make others who may read your reviews in the future feel ok about it - they understand it's clear fake, it wasn't your fault, customer posted no details so you can't help...

You can still report it, I am just 99% sure it will stay there in case it's one at a time with no text posted.

Spam at Seoforum - New Antispam Policy Rule

Martin Senko published thread Spam at Seoforum - New Antispam Policy Rule

I am posting this to find out if my idea sounds reasonable to you, or if it's too much in your eyes.

So, what I am proposing > Each new post, from a user with no posts would be (automatically) scanned for links, and if contained link(s), the post would be auto-deleted and author auto-banned.

Does that sound fair?

Nov 23, 2018

Instagram's ranking factors

Martin Senko replied to thread Instagram's ranking factors

The good thing about Instagram is, they have publicly uncovered their algorithm.

Key ranking factors on Instagram are

  • Interest
  • Recency/Timeliness
  • Relationship
  • Frequency
  • Following
  • Usage

First three being the most important.

So if you post content in tags that others follow and check often /interest, post frequently enough /frequency + recency while having good base of followers /relationship, you should be seen. The relationship most likely doesn't have to be direct (your followers), but also level of connection or if you want, distance between your and target account matters. It's more likely to show up on closer feeds (target user A is following B who is following you) than on profile that would have no connection at all, or it is 10-15 hops away from you.

Sure, that's just not enough. It's only the starting point. Your content have to be good enough to get you likes, shares and new followers. Cycle through that, get better at knowing what videos and images work for your account and you should grow. But there is no shortcut.

One more thing to note - make sure you don't use automation tools. At least not aggressively. Shadow bans are easy to get now.

Broken SERP after the Medic update on August 1st 2018

Martin Senko upvoted Broken SERP after the Medic update on August 1st 2018

We still experience broken SERP after the Medic update. Positions go up and down, sometimes even more than one page away. I hear even worse stories from local seos. Is it same for your health related sites or you're doing good on your stable position as before? It's all weird, seems like Google doesn't know if they did the right thing so they are trying to pull emergency break.

Lost 35-50% traffic anyway...

Can I rank without backlinks?

Martin Senko upvoted Can I rank without backlinks?

I have read so many articles about ranking and how to rank sites and the most common advice is to build links. At the same time, I should not buy links and do comment spam. Let's say I can't build links. Can I rank my website on the first page for more competitive keywords?

Can I rank without backlinks?

Martin Senko replied to thread Can I rank without backlinks?

Yes you can. But it would take more work and in some point you will have to start building links to keep up with competition.

If you don't want to use links, social signals may help a lot. However, from my experience, links have better effect. If your content gets shared a lot, you can rank well, but with links, you'd rank even better.

It's not one or another. Should be links + social signals + everything else that could possibly help.

With links or without, make sure you have your on-site SEO done right first.

Nov 22, 2018

Re: What exactly Pogo Sticking is? Does it affect SERP?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: What exactly Pogo Sticking is? Does it affect SERP?

Thanks. The way I read it, bounce rate isn't necessarily a bad thing. For example, if you have one page website, your visitors can't visit more than one page per visit, but they might spent a lot of time on your site anyway. Is that correct?

Google Business reviews impact on ranking positions

Martin Senko upvoted Google Business reviews impact on ranking positions

We are running e-commerce store. Signed up for Google Business account, so people can find us locally, check if we are open, call us or visit our website. It works fine, getting some views, customers checking our photos and so on. We ask our customers to leave a review. Not to leave a positive review, just a review, whatever their experience was. And we get 5 star reviews all the time.

However, this month, we received 3 negative reviews already. It's pretty obvious those are not from our customers as they use newly created accounts, leave no comment or feedback, just 0 stars review. We are 99% sure it's our competition, know exactly who that is, but there is nothing we can do about it. Google seems ignoring complaints and our review score is going down due to defamatory reviews.

The question. Are negative reviews in Google Business affecting our rankings? I can't say from our stats yet, they looks normal, but it's short time period and the overall score is not so bad yet. It's like 4.8 now.

But what if they went further and reviews were down to 3 or 2.5? Is it going to affect our rankings?

Re: Google Business reviews impact on ranking positions

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Google Business reviews impact on ranking positions

It might. I would imagine it depends on the niche. If you run a company that makes custom ski masks in a city that has a ton of other custom ski mask companies, then reviews/ratings will likely have a larger impact. Logically there are only a handful of meaningful ways to rank businesses online and quality of service is one of them.

2018 major seoforum rewrite

Martin Senko replied to thread 2018 major seoforum rewrite

@shane do you mean job listings? Or other way around - SEO's available for hire? I definitely plan that for the future, just need to build community first .

Re: 2018 major seoforum rewrite

Martin Senko upvoted Re: 2018 major seoforum rewrite

10k lol. what a joker.

redesign was a success!

Re: 2018 major seoforum rewrite

Martin Senko upvoted Re: 2018 major seoforum rewrite

I like the changes. Good to see blogposts coming. Also password reset is a must. Keep up the good work.

Re: 2018 major seoforum rewrite

Martin Senko upvoted Re: 2018 major seoforum rewrite

Looking good. A "for hire" section might be good in the future. Keep it up.

Site Issues and Errors

Martin Senko replied to thread Site Issues and Errors

@nmiller good catch. Default reply order should be indeed oldest first.

Nov 21, 2018

What exactly Pogo Sticking is? Does it affect SERP?

Martin Senko replied to thread What exactly Pogo Sticking is? Does it affect SERP?

@martinkhan yes that seems right. Pogo sticking is in a way subset of what is considered bounce. So when user bounces, it means he visited one page and left - nothing about time on site, while pogo sticking is kind of a quick bounce, back to the search engine, visiting another page. That's telling G that the site you pogo bounced from wasn't good enough to answer your question, or give you information you were searching for, so you have to open another.

However, what I found interesting is, that the pogo bounce rate isn't variable in G's ranking formula. Well, at least according to what John Mueller said in this video.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/asmUDAzWKdI&quot; frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Re: What exactly Pogo Sticking is? Does it affect SERP?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: What exactly Pogo Sticking is? Does it affect SERP?

AFAIK

> pogo sticking != bounce rate

Bounce rate is one page visit basically. Doesn't take in account the time spent on the site. Pogo sticking is going back and forth between search results, spending no time on the pages.

I think it's obvious why pogo sticking is bad.

Nov 20, 2018

2018 major seoforum rewrite

Martin Senko upvoted 2018 major seoforum rewrite

Hello SEO bots.

You've probably already noticed that seoforum looks different now. Yeah, I spent quiet some time updating and rewriting this project during last few months. What you can see here now is yet incomplete version of the update, but at least, most of my to-do's have been checked.

I still need to fix a lot of things and finish some features that are almost ready to deploy (blogs being the most important one). The thing is, this whole process is taking more time than expected and from time to time I feel like losing motivation and momentum, so I decided to deploy what I currently have so I can see the site live and maybe get some feedback...

I'll share some points from my seoforum to-do list, as of August 2018

  • redesign
  • laravel 5.5 -> laravel 5.6<sup>1</sup>
  • bootstrap 3 to bootstrap 4
  • League CommonMark -> Parsedown
  • post reporting/flagging
  • bookmarking
  • advanced banning
  • blogposts
  • instant search
  • call to action for guests
  • on-site sign up
  • invisible recaptcha
  • password reset
  • custom generic avatars
  • Q&A
  • advanced antispam policy
  • improve tests coverage<sup>2</sup>
  • too many minor things...

<p><sup>1</sup> Laravel has been upgraded from 5.5 to 5.6, but during the development, Laravel 5.7 has been released, so I will have to upgrade again.<br/> <sup>2</sup> Test suite now contains more than 120 tests, which is almost double compared to what I had in August. I see another 50-80 test coming, just to cover current functionality.</p>

I am open to any feedback and suggestions, so feel free to tell me how you like new design, and what does or doesn't work for you.

One more thing I want to share is, I contacted owner of @seoforum Twitter handle, who tweeted that he would like to sell the handle. The bad thing is, he was looking for $10,000 for it, and few months later $4,000 which is far from fair price for a third party handle, that you actually can't sell as per Twitter rules. <blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Would like sell this handler anyone here for offer !!</p>— chirag shah (@seoforum) <a href="https://twitter.com/seoforum/status/1034828258011795456?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&quot;&gt;August 29, 2018</a></blockquote> So yeah, I am not gonna have this handle ever, as it's worth up to $100 for me.

That's all I had on my mind today, so have a good one and enjoy.

Thank you for being part of seoforum community.

2018 major seoforum rewrite

Martin Senko published thread 2018 major seoforum rewrite

Hello SEO bots.

You've probably already noticed that seoforum looks different now. Yeah, I spent quiet some time updating and rewriting this project during last few months. What you can see here now is yet incomplete version of the update, but at least, most of my to-do's have been checked.

I still need to fix a lot of things and finish some features that are almost ready to deploy (blogs being the most important one). The thing is, this whole process is taking more time than expected and from time to time I feel like losing motivation and momentum, so I decided to deploy what I currently have so I can see the site live and maybe get some feedback...

I'll share some points from my seoforum to-do list, as of August 2018

  • redesign
  • laravel 5.5 -> laravel 5.6<sup>1</sup>
  • bootstrap 3 to bootstrap 4
  • League CommonMark -> Parsedown
  • post reporting/flagging
  • bookmarking
  • advanced banning
  • blogposts
  • instant search
  • call to action for guests
  • on-site sign up
  • invisible recaptcha
  • password reset
  • custom generic avatars
  • Q&A
  • advanced antispam policy
  • improve tests coverage<sup>2</sup>
  • too many minor things...

<p><sup>1</sup> Laravel has been upgraded from 5.5 to 5.6, but during the development, Laravel 5.7 has been released, so I will have to upgrade again.<br/> <sup>2</sup> Test suite now contains more than 120 tests, which is almost double compared to what I had in August. I see another 50-80 test coming, just to cover current functionality.</p>

I am open to any feedback and suggestions, so feel free to tell me how you like new design, and what does or doesn't work for you.

One more thing I want to share is, I contacted owner of @seoforum Twitter handle, who tweeted that he would like to sell the handle. The bad thing is, he was looking for $10,000 for it, and few months later $4,000 which is far from fair price for a third party handle, that you actually can't sell as per Twitter rules. <blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Would like sell this handler anyone here for offer !!</p>— chirag shah (@seoforum) <a href="https://twitter.com/seoforum/status/1034828258011795456?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&quot;&gt;August 29, 2018</a></blockquote> So yeah, I am not gonna have this handle ever, as it's worth up to $100 for me.

That's all I had on my mind today, so have a good one and enjoy.

Thank you for being part of seoforum community.

Oct 25, 2018

Regarding reviews and ratings!

Martin Senko upvoted Regarding reviews and ratings!

Hi,

I am trying to use SCHEMA at my HTML site to display ratings in google search results and my schema is working but ratings disappears from search results after few days. Can anyone help me out? www(.)sa-airlines(.)co(.)za/Mango-Airlines(.)html

Regards, Swadesh

Re: Regarding reviews and ratings!

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Regarding reviews and ratings!

Hi Swadesh, welcome to seoforum.

I just checked your page and everything looks good - Google's Structured data testing tool says so. I see handful of rich snippets from your website appearing in google site:sa-airlines.co.za, however, the one you posted isn't there.

I am experiencing same thing with my websites - it appears an disappears randomly, sometimes have even two versions of same page - with and without the snippet.

One thing to note is, that Google doesn't have to display your rating snippets at all, it's just an option. Would be interesting to find out why it disappears. Is it because they don't trust the data website provides? Is it just part of ranking process that it appears and disappears, just like results from new sites are jumping up and down in SERPs before they stabilize? Who knows. Maybe someone with more experience with rich snippets in organic results?

Sep 1, 2018

Re: Website not ranking in google...

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Website not ranking in google...
  1. Sitemap submitted
  2. Sitemap status? Not sure on that one. No errors by the looks of it
  3. 18 pages indexed
  4. No blocked resources or errors
  5. The website has been active for 5 weeks
  6. No SEO plugins.

All pages have page titles and meta descriptions.

My theory might be that the images are too large. The detail in my photos is quite heavy so quite a few of the images reach 800kbs, I am, however using a lazy-loader to improve page-speed. I also have media queries in place to use smaller images on mobile.

Aug 22, 2018

Re: Website not ranking in google...

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Website not ranking in google...
  1. Did you submit your sitemap to Google's Webmaster Tools?
    1. What is the status of the sitemap in GWT?
    2. How may pages are indexed in GWT?
    3. Are there any errors/blocked resources in GWT?
  2. How long has the website been active?
  3. Are you using any SEO plugins?
Aug 21, 2018

Website not ranking in google...

Martin Senko upvoted Website not ranking in google...

I've recently developed a website, it's ranking fine in other search engines such as Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo. But in Google it can't be found. I'm no SEO expert but there's no obvious warnings in Google Analytics or Google Search Console.

The website is www.ambulo.me. Can someone have a look and see what I'm doing wrong?

Website not ranking in google...

Martin Senko replied to thread Website not ranking in google...

Can you give us some keywords, for which you would expect ranking your website on the first page in Google? I see there are 9 indexed pages in google, which sounds about right to me.

Or would you expect more indexed pages?

Thanks for the details and nice site by the way!

Aug 13, 2018

Domains and SEO - with Rand Fishkin

Martin Senko upvoted Domains and SEO - with Rand Fishkin

If you work with domain and I am sure you do, you should check this interview at DomainSherpa out. It's good to know opinion on domains from someone who is focused mainly on SEO.

https://www.domainsherpa.com/domains-and-seo/

Don't forget to comment what you think about this topic.

Aug 12, 2018

August 1st Google Algo Update

Martin Senko published thread August 1st Google Algo Update

Google has released a broad core algorithm update on 1st of August.

> This week we released a broad core algorithm update, as we do several times per year. Our guidance about such updates remains the same as in March, as we covered here: https://t.co/uPlEdSLHoX

https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1024691872025833472

I guess you guys have already read this article, but I found it really valuable and well written, so don't forget to check it out, if you haven't already.

https://www.mariehaynes.com/the-august-1-2018-google-update-strongly-affected-ymyl-sites

Aug 6, 2018

Let's Encrypt: Is it equally good for SEO as any other paid certificate?

Martin Senko upvoted Let's Encrypt: Is it equally good for SEO as any other paid certificate?

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?

May 15, 2018

SEO Basics in 2018

Martin Senko upvoted SEO Basics in 2018

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.

SEO Basics in 2018

Martin Senko replied to thread SEO Basics in 2018

There is a LOT going on in SEO these days. It's more content driven then ever but if you know right paths, you can boost your existing content as well.

  1. AI / RankBrain - taking in account not just how many searchers click on your page, but also how they behave. Ie. how long they stay on your page, bounce rate... Search results change accordingly.
  2. Mobile - everything should be mobile in 2018. Most of searchers use their mobile devices (mobile phones/tables) so it's natural for Google to prioritize results with mobile users in mind (actually mobile first, as they became majority).
  3. Site speed - with mobile users, your site has to be quick. They use mobile data, could be lower of lower signal quality... Your site has to be quick and efficient. So save them some bandwith and load sites as fast as possible. Use lazy loading instead of loading all the bandwith consuming content at once.
  4. Linkless mentions - It's not a 2018 invention, but we should keep that in mind more than ever, that search engine keep track of linkless mentions as well, so it's not all about traditional links. Bing has confirmed it, and Google does that very likely too.
  5. Voice search - Adoption of voice search is on the rise.
  6. Video and visual content - Don't miss the visual boat. Shot videos, include visual content in your articles. It does make it easier for people to understand the topic, therefore Google likes it.
  7. AI everywhere - SERP manipulation techniques will take a huge hit. Guest posting, backlink schemas, keyword stuffing - you name it. No, Google won't filter it all, because they can't, but they will become better and better in filtering.

There is lot more coming, but this is what came to mind when I saw the question. Good luck in 2018 - we will need it :)

Apr 20, 2018

Robots.txt and Sitemap Error

Martin Senko replied to thread Robots.txt and Sitemap Error

No problem, glad to help @akhtar. You can accept answer if it answered your question.

Re: Robots.txt and Sitemap Error

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Robots.txt and Sitemap Error

Your robots.txt file looks good to me, even though Allow isn't defined in the standard. However, major crawlers should know this directive.

See (from http://tools.seochat.com/tools/robots-txt-validator): > The official standard does not include Allow directive even though major crawlers (Google and Bing) support it. If both Disallow and Allow clauses apply to a URL, the most specific rule - the longest rule - applies. To be on the safe side, in order to be compatible to all robots, if one wants to allow single files inside an otherwise disallowed directory, it is necessary to place the Allow directive(s) first, followed by the Disallow. It is still nonstandard.

I guess empty robots.txt would work just fine for, just like having no robots.txt at all.

Robots.txt and Sitemap Error

Martin Senko upvoted Robots.txt and Sitemap Error

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?

Robots.txt and Sitemap Error

Martin Senko replied to thread Robots.txt and Sitemap Error

Your robots.txt file looks good to me, even though Allow isn't defined in the standard. However, major crawlers should know this directive.

See (from http://tools.seochat.com/tools/robots-txt-validator): > The official standard does not include Allow directive even though major crawlers (Google and Bing) support it. If both Disallow and Allow clauses apply to a URL, the most specific rule - the longest rule - applies. To be on the safe side, in order to be compatible to all robots, if one wants to allow single files inside an otherwise disallowed directory, it is necessary to place the Allow directive(s) first, followed by the Disallow. It is still nonstandard.

I guess empty robots.txt would work just fine for, just like having no robots.txt at all.

blog traffic and adsense issue

Martin Senko upvoted blog traffic and adsense issue

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.

blog traffic and adsense issue

Martin Senko replied to thread blog traffic and adsense issue

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.

Robots.txt and Sitemap Error

Martin Senko replied to thread Robots.txt and Sitemap Error

Post your robots.txt and exact URLs you're getting errors for in your Search Console. Can't really tell without knowing your robots file.

Jan 14, 2018

Re: Let's Encrypt: Is it equally good for SEO as any other paid certificate?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Let's Encrypt: Is it equally good for SEO as any other paid certificate?

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.

Dec 28, 2017

Google increased length of snippets

Martin Senko published thread Google increased length of snippets

So, what do you think about longer snippets in search results? I think it's pretty good and this change could improve CTR. Not dramatically, but definitely in a positive way - for good content and useful sites in general.

Do you see any CTR growth lately?

Dec 17, 2017

Duplicate keyword in URL

Martin Senko replied to thread Duplicate keyword in URL

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.

Dec 10, 2017

How different is using subdomain vs. new domain in terms of SEO?

Martin Senko replied to thread How different is using subdomain vs. new domain in terms of SEO?

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

Dec 7, 2017

Duplicate keyword in URL

Martin Senko upvoted Duplicate keyword in URL

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.

Re: Let's Encrypt: Is it equally good for SEO as any other paid certificate?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Let's Encrypt: Is it equally good for SEO as any other paid certificate?

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.

Re: Let's Encrypt: Is it equally good for SEO as any other paid certificate?

Martin Senko upvoted Re: Let's Encrypt: Is it equally good for SEO as any other paid certificate?

SEO Forum uses Let's encrypt as well. It's just pretty common solution these days, and it works for 99% of websites.

I don't think there is anything wrong about LE certificate, even if you are bigger website. It's all about the security first, not the name of CA, and in LE case, it uses same encryption, same algo, ... so why pay for it? LE is well spread out certificate, so unless you need EV, which you likely do not, use LE and enjoy.

Let's Encrypt: Is it equally good for SEO as any other paid certificate?

Martin Senko replied to thread Let's Encrypt: Is it equally good for SEO as any other paid certificate?

SEO Forum uses Let's encrypt as well. It's just pretty common solution these days, and it works for 99% of websites.

I don't think there is anything wrong about LE certificate, even if you are bigger website. It's all about the security first, not the name of CA, and in LE case, it uses same encryption, same algo, ... so why pay for it? LE is well spread out certificate, so unless you need EV, which you likely do not, use LE and enjoy.

Does Google index hash URL segment?

Martin Senko upvoted Does Google index hash URL segment?

Hash in URL means anchor on that page. But if I use links like something.com/page.html#section does Google index this link as a separate page, so index would now contain both something.com/page.html and something.com/page.html#section? Obviously, where I see problem with that is duplicate content, which could be big issue for some sites (including my sites).

I just don't believe Google would be so stupid and index it that way. Or at least, there must be a way to fix it (something like rel=canonical).

I have no evidence that I was penalized for using #section, but it got me thinking lately...

SEO and analytics tools you use

Martin Senko upvoted SEO and analytics tools you use

This is probably secret stuff that most people won't share, but if you don't mind sharing: What apps do you use for monitor and analyze your SEO, ranking positions, backlinks, social signals and traffic in general? No need to state the obvious - I know most or maybe generally all webmasters use Google Analytics. I am more interesting to learn about new, maybe bit specific stuff like Mixpanel, if you know what I mean.

SEO and analytics tools you use

Martin Senko replied to thread SEO and analytics tools you use

I try to keep it simple. Too much of analytics tools makes me overloaded with data that I can't really use, and it takes so much time to actually analyze all the data to make good use it.

This is my list of tools I use, sorted by priority:

  1. Google Analytics
  2. Google Tag Manager (for any website having more than one tag, that one tag would be Analytics. If I need only Analytics, I don't use Tag Manager)
  3. Facebook Pixel (for remarketing)
  4. Other remarketing Pixels
  5. Custom Analytics tools for tracking conversions on third party websites

Have no experience with Mixpanel, but from what I heard, it seems to be really comprehensive tool for nearly anything one could think of.

@martinkhan do you use Mixpanel? Do you recommend it? If so, why? What's best about it?

Dec 4, 2017

Hreflang on multiple domains

Martin Senko upvoted Hreflang on multiple domains

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

What does soft 404 error mean?

Martin Senko upvoted What does soft 404 error mean?

I see this quiet often in SEO discussions, blog posts, etc.

> Soft 404 error

But what does that really mean? Is there an hard 404 too? How are these different?

What does soft 404 error mean?

Martin Senko replied to thread What does soft 404 error mean?

Hi Lisa.

Guys at Search Engine Journal published nice article about 404 errors / error pages. I highly recommend it to read it, so you better understand what are they and when you should use 404 or eventually, how to fix 404 errors.

Check the full article here: 404 vs. soft 404 errors

However, to answer your question; 404 error means the page is missing, but the server responded with 200 (even it probably should be returning 404 or other 4xx HTTP response code). Google, with all the data, knows what are common patterns of 404 pages, so even after getting 200, they may flag the page in their index as missing (404).

What you should do is: return 404 code AND show 404 page, when the page is missing. Otherwise, you're telling user/search engine, that the requested page exists.

Dec 3, 2017

Search console website variations for redirects

Martin Senko upvoted Search console website variations for redirects

Do I need to add http://www.example.com, https://www.example.com, http://example.com and https://example.com? I have all of these defined in nginx server and redirecting them to https://example.com, not sure how to handle that in search console though.

It would be great if we could monitor the website in one place without adding all the alternatives. Is it possible?

Dec 2, 2017

How different is using subdomain vs. new domain in terms of SEO?

Martin Senko upvoted How different is using subdomain vs. new domain in terms of SEO?

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?

Site Issues and Errors

Martin Senko published thread Site Issues and Errors

SEO Forum has been developed by a bot human being. Bots People make mistakes. Therefore, seoforum surely has some bugs and eventually may throw an unexpected error or behave the way it should not.

The best thing you can do in such a scenario:

  1. Navigate to this thread (Site Issues and Errors)
  2. Post issue you experienced here.

OR (if you want it to be more of a discussion than a plain issue report)

  1. Create new thread
  2. Tag it Meta & Site Issues and Errors
  3. Post issue in separate thread.

I will do my best to fix it ASAP.

Thank you for reporting!

SEO Forum Feature Requests

Martin Senko published thread SEO Forum Feature Requests

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.

ms

Martin Senko

@ms
Prague, Czech Republic

PHP (Laravel) backend programmer and data-oriented SEO explorer. Seoforum is my hobby project where I develop, discuss and take care of members comfort. Feel free to post under Meta if you need anything. Or report bugs here https://seoforum.com/thread/site-issues-and-errors Easy way to contact me directly: scroll down, visit Contact Us page and hit me up with your email.

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