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.

If you're targeting primary keywords and inadvertently pickup long-tail keywords in the process... what's the problem?

Also, Google doesn't just match keywords and call it a day.

I would forget link building and focus on traffic generation. While the latter will affect the former each mindset emphasizes something different.

Writing content for reputable websites within your niche or being interviewed by the press provides a new traffic channel while also creating a link. This also has the benefit of highlighting your industry knowledge. The goal here should be building reputation, not links.

After all, the purpose of SEO is to generate monetizable traffic. Building links to build links is a waste of your time. There are many other high-value opportunities for a business like yours to shine.

IMO

Until the old domain no longer appears in search. Unless you also have physical content (business cards, pamphlets, etc) in the wild. If that's the case I would keep it redirecting for a couple years.

@bhumi

Don't worry about the little things. Backlinks can speed things up a bit in the nearterm but might kill you in the long term. Social can be a positive indicator but you will not be penalized for ignoring it either.

Just focus on quality content, being useful, and providing the best onpage experience you can. When I've built content sites in the past I've always waited 12 months before deciding my next move. After major changes I wait 3-6 months.

Google is watching. Just be patient.

Seems like your post was overlooked. :(

The uncategorized tag has nothing to do with search or performance. It's no different than using any other category. With that being said, if you don't have a sitemap then Google won't find those pages. So to be clear, provided you have a full sitemap this will be a non-issue.

As for the second question, slight wording variations is roughly equivalent to duplicate content. What is the purpose of having several similar pages in the first place?

You spent this much time building the base of your site. Think of this like the base of a pyramid. The base provides support and context for the rest of the website. Next you should focus more on longtail, intent based queries. As you stabilize your ranking for those keywords you can begin building content for the real money keywords. You won't rank right away for these but you've shown G that you're site is relevant. By this point they have a good understanding of the purpose of your website, the topic, and the quality (ie user interaction) and will start testing you in more competitive queries.

If you half-ass the base, time will topple your pyramid.

How long has it been? SEO takes time. I made huge changes to one of my content sites 3 months ago and am finally recovering traffic/search impressions. Be patient.

Only add content that adds value for the visitor. Everything else is a waste of time.

IMO

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?

You can disavow the backlink in Webmaster Tools.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en

What are you referring to? How many times to repeat the targeted keyword or how many target keywords per page?

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.

I would expect a near term hit to traffic and rankings with either setup. I personally think b2c makes more sense as a primary page. Might just be my preference though.

Google takes a while to update. Stop worrying so much about backlinks. They don't matter all that much. You're just wasting time when you could be making new content.

You need to setup Google analytics if you haven't already. Alexa does not know anything specific about your website. The stats you see are best guesses and are often very incorrect.

Don't worry about world rank. Your audience is all the matters.

Curious about this update too. I've only been seeing improvements for rank/traffic. Noticed a surge in SERP impressions about a month ago but no deviation since.

"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.

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.

Well if it's working in your area and for your competition I guess you could cautiously test it. It's worth noting that sometimes things work today, but can also destroy businesses down the road.

Good luck!

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.

Your best bet is to 301 or label them as canonical. The following link has more information direct from Google. How to go about automating this process depends on the CMS.

https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/06/bye-bye-preferred-domain-setting.html

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.

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.

https://support.google.com/news/publisher-center/answer/9607025?hl=en

It shouldn't matter unless you're stuffing keywords. H tags should reflect the importance of headings. My assumption is you have one for the post or page title and then again with the site title. This is common with WP sites/themes and will not negatively impact your site.

There are a variety of reasons for this problem. Your search terms could be cyclical or demand could have dropped due to the coronavirus. Or you might have been hit by a penalty or are ranking lower due to an algo update.

There are too many possibilities to problem solve without additional information.

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.

How long has it been? Wouldn't worry if it's only been a couple of weeks.

I don't consider following checklists optimization. It's basically just box checking.

Experiment and see what works. Make sure you're relevant and useful.

Also, building backlinks is more likely to hurt you in the long-term than make a site successful.

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

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.

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.

No problem :)

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'.

~24% CTR for mobile and ~32% CTR for desktop for the top position.

Search for 'serp ctr by position' and you should find a number of studies.

So to be clear, the website was hacked and used as a link farm? These links originate on /de/?

You are trying to determine the best way to handle the links with non-existent destinations?

I suggest looking at SEO like brewing beer. It's not ready once all the ingredients are mixed, but once you've given it proper time to brew. Rank changes are exactly like that. You could have done everything right, except wait long enough.

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.

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.

Agreed with @ms.

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.

That's not a question someone can really answer without a serious time commitment. If you've changed something on page, reconsider those changes. If not, look for information regarding algo updates and see if anything applies to you.

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.

We now have 500 registered users :)

Thank you to all of our members.

Do you mean to remove something from a website you own? Or from a random website?

For websites which you do not have control over you have a couple of options. Google has DMCA tools along with abuse tools for their blogger platform. It can be tricky and in most cases you won't have much luck.

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.

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.

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.

Forget keywords. Think search intent. What does the searcher need? What can the search query tell you about their intent?

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.

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.

You should prioritize speed over the short-tern drop in traffic. If you really want to avoid that, change the preview image slug to match the full size slug. You won't break the link from Google.

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.

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?

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.

I think it does but not directly. Consider how your on-page metrics impact organic rankings. If the paid traffic boosts your time on site and pages per session while lowering your bounce rate I am betting you will see organic benefit. Likely it would not be enough to justify the cost of such a campaign.

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?

Focus on creating quality content. Links follow. You can rank without links in noncompetitive niches but as competition increases more validation is needed.

Is there a way getting rich without putting in work? Of course not. If you don't want to put in the effort to build something meaningful, then you will not own something meaningful.

Fast money is short money.

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.

Looking good. A "for hire" section might be good in the future. Keep it up.

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.

If you have 18-pages indexed then you are in Google.

5-weeks isn't that long. To be honest, who is searching for abulo? Is your website in anyway related to the intent for that term? I think you might just be misunderstanding how Google works and how websites rank. You do not just get to rank because the word is in your domain.

I would bet longer snippets is actually an indicator of diminishing the number of links per page. I imagine they will continue working to drive down the number of sites on the 1st page as low as they can without detracting from the search experience or lowering ad revenue. In fact, removing organic results will likely increase ad clicks thereby increasing their revenue. I would imagine domain names will eventually be removed too and replaced with some type of related brand name. I would expect the search results to more closely resemble an app store styled page focusing on the reputation of the author and the quality of the content.

If Google noticed the content will be pushed down. It will not completely disappear though. Once everything is fixed, resubmit your sitemap and request a full index. They will start moving up again once Google is aware everything is working properly again. Google luck.

None of those are needed unless you are providing SEO consulting services. They do not actually benefit you as a site owner. It is easy to get caught up with cool tools and products but your focus should be placed firmly on creating quality content. You should also focus on building a website that is easy to use and navigate. Focusing on anything but the user indicates that you are looking to make a quick buck without actually earning it. Build with purpose and you will rank. The rest is just noise in terms of sustainability and profitability.

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?