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I have a client who appears to have taken a big hit in a few areas recently: MOZ Domain Authority has dropped from 16 to 1 In ahrefs, their http version has 103 backlinks from 46 referring domains, but the https version shows 'no data' for backlinks or referring domains Their 'average position' in SERPs has fallen from around 32 to 43 in the last six weeks Ininitally, I thought this might be due to the MOZ indexing problems last month. However, I now suspect this is connected to their switch from http to https, which occured in mid December. Although all the http pages appear to be redirecting, it looks like the backlinks are not being associated to their https version. Anyone had experience of this and/or now how to remedy?

Hi Guys I have just completely a site re-design, I have 3 top level domains. I have no idea whats causing the drop in ranking.  I have changed the title tags and meta tags to improve them and make them better, as the last ones weren't really doing us justice.  But I see now it has actually dropped our main keyword.  I read somewhere that i had to completed **site search **to check and I don't see our home page showing.  I was ranking for the keyword: "online psychics" for over 4months at #6 and now is not showing anywhere in the top 50 keywords.  I'm also affraid I can not find our other keyword "online psychic readings" which we were ranked #11 seems to have dropped to #44 I have no idea why this would be the case.  Our new home page shows a better user experience and also added more content, unqiue content at that - our last design was content thin so I have no idea why we have dropped so much in rankings.  The site is also new about 6months new.  I have checked WMT and have not received any warnings of any penalties as such, unless it is still coming? Does anyone have any suggestions here? Cheers

I have taken on the SEO/Inbound duties for my company and have been monitoring some of our competitors in the market space. In June one of them began a black hat link building campaign that took them from 154 linking root domains to about 7500 today. All of the links target either /header or /permalink/index and all have anchor text along the lines of "Windows 7 activation code." They are using forgotten forums and odd pages, but seem to be finding high DA sources to place the links. This has skyrocketed their DA (40 to 73), and raised their mozRank, mozTrust, and SERP positions. Originally I thought to report it to Google, but I wanted to wait a few weeks and see what the campaign did for them and if Google would catch on. I figured adding 81K links in 2 months would trigger something (honestly, if I was able to find out they were doing it then it's got to be obvious).  But they have grown every week and no drop in rankings. So my question is would you report it? Or continue to wait and see? Technically they are not a "competitor" in the strictest sense of the word (we actually do sell some of their products as OEM), but I find the tactic despicable and it makes my efforts to raise our rankings and DA seem ineffective to people not in the know about SEO. Interested to see everyone's responses! Taylor

I have a site with paginated search result pages. What I've done is noindex/follow them and I've placed the rel=canonical tag on page2, page3, page4, etc pointing back to the main/first search result page. These paginated search result pages aren't visible to the user (since I'm not technically selling products, just providing different images to the user), and I've added a text link on the bottom of the first/main search result page that says "click here to load more" and once clicked, it automatically lists more images on the page (ajax). Is this a proper strategy? Also, for a site that does sell products, would simply noindexing/following the search results/paginated pages and placing the canonical tag on the paginated pages pointing back to the main search result page suffice? I would love feedback on if this is a proper method/strategy to keep Google happy. Side question - When the robots go through a page that is noindexed/followed, are they taking into consideration the text on those pages, page titles, meta tags, etc, or are they only worrying about the actual links within that page and passing link juice through them all?

Another SEO person who was working my potential dental customer  website managed to hookup over 147 backlinks to various bogus weather sites, watch sites, chinese sites etc. The dentist owns the URL which is "dentist" plus his zipcode.  Is it worth continuing SEO on this site or should I scrap the URL? I am worried that Google may take action on this site sometime in the future and all the work I will do will be lost. He does have another website, because SEO's keeps trying to sell dentists microsites... This site isn't too bad but he doesn't own the URL but the url is a combination of the two doctors names and isn't easy to remember... and we would have to spend time trying to gain control of the URL. Suggestions?

How should I deal with a 500 errors?