Hi Pat:

Thanks for your answer/response! Our URL is www.metro-manhattan.com

To answer your questions:

1. When we moved the site to a new theme/database the URL structure did not change. However, about a year before we migrated to a new domain and and went HTTP to HTTPS (secure) so there are redirects. 301 redirects were used.

2. All the on page optimization moved when we changed themes.

3. Yes, there are some unnecessary URLs, but they are managed by robot.txt.

4.  Gzip compression/caching/cdn has been implemented to speed up site. My SEO provider is constantly adjusting but the site is not particularly fast.

If we were to custom develop the same functionality without purchasing a theme, would the performance (Google Page Speed, GT Metrix) be much better?

If we are satisfied with the structure, design and functionality of our site, is custom coding a costly venture?

Thanks, 
Alan

Last year we purchased a $79 them and coded a new designer our real estate website. The  database of listings was transferred to the new theme.

A year later we realize the new theme is not that fast; does not perform great, so despite optimizing our server we are not getting very fast performance.

So, my question is, can we take the design, the CSS of our current theme (and database) and transfer it to a better performing theme?  We are in a very competitive niche and our website must perform quickly both desktop and mobile.

If this is feasible is this a major production? Note we are very happy with the design and this would solely be to improve download speeds to improve the user experience and get better ranking.

Thanks,

Alan

Hi Joe:

About 35% of our traffic is derived from mobile so maximize mobile conversion probably worth the effort.

Do you think it would be most effective to display the phone number as an actual button with a similar design as the other 2?  Is there any form of protocol for displaying phone numbers on mobile devices?

Thanks, 
Alan

We are attempting to keep the number of CTAs (Calls to Action) on our commercial real estate website to a minimum. Our adjusted design (see attached) has 2 CTAs. One is "Contact Agent" the other is "Schedule a Tour". We are focusing on the listing page, which is the primary product page and critical in terms of CTA.

Our mobile version does not show a phone number while the desktop version (also attached) displays a phone number.

Should the mobile version also display a button a phone number? Some members of our target audiences, business owners and executives who are often in their 40s and 50s may prefer to call us up rather than communicate by written message. Any suggestions for elegantly displaying the phone number without causing confusion? I have read that the number of CTAs should be limited so I am on the fence as to whether or not to include a phone number

Thanks, 
Alan

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Hi Lauren:

Do on page factors influence Domain Authority as much as building back links? This is a really key question!

I need to decide whether to invest resources in building back links or improving on site SEO. How about internal links? How much do they contribute to domain authority? At the moment my site lacks internal links, would adding them in a relevant manner improve domain authority?

While I greatly appreciate your last response it is somewhat ambiguous.

Thanks, Alan

Hi Again Lauren:

According to Rand Fishkin's post:
https://moz.com/community/q/da-pa-fluctuations-how-to-interpret-apply-understand-these-ml-based-scores

Domain Authority is predominantly determined by backlinks  from other websites rather than on site SEO factors (content quality, internal linking). This contradicts your response somewhat which make things really confusing. Now I don't know whether to allocate resources towards building backlinks from other domains or whether to work on improving internal links and contents.

If you could please clear this up it would be much appreciated.

Thanks,

Alan

Hi Lauren:

Thanks for your response. I was under the impression that domain authority was solely determined by external backlinks. So, are you saying that domain authority can be increased by improving the internal linking structure between pages and improving the quality of pages?

Our site has many, many "orphan" pages. From what you are saying, improving the internal linking structure would improve our Domain Authority, is that correct?

Also MOZ shows certain title tags, URLs and descriptions as too long, some are duplicate and some missing. Would correcting these help improve domain authority?

Is it safe to say that improved Domain Authority would increase the likely hood of improved ranking?

Thanks, 
Alan

There are 2 or 3 URLs and one image file that dozens of toxic domains are linking to on our website. Some of these pages have hundreds of links from 4-5 domains. Rather than disavowing these links, would it make sense to simply break these links, change the URL that the link to and not create a redirect? It seems like this would be a sure fire way to get rid of these links. Any downside to this approach?

Thanks, 
Alan

The vast majority of the 140 domains that link to our website are very low quality directories or and other toxic links. Only about 20-30 domains are not toxic (according to Link Research Tools confirmed by out manual inspection of these links).

Would removing some of these links improve of MOZ Domain Rank? What if we cannot remove them, can NOZ detect a disavow file?

In general would improving the ratio between good quality and poor quality links improve domain authority?

Thanks,
Alan

Hi Mick, thanks so much for your detailed response.

We took a terrible hit, losing 85% of traffic (65/day) a year ago. In April, we migrated our domain, got an SSL certificate and filed a disavow simultaneously. Everything was done by the book. The redirects implemented perfectly. The design, content of the site remained the same when we implemented this.

In December we launched the first upgraded version of the site since 2013. Within 2 weeks much of the traffic recovered. Bounce rate is way down, visitors click on more pages and spend more time on the site. We are now back up to 50 organic visitors per day.

Now I don't want to do something that will mess things up again. But I see the link profile is so awful that perhaps cleaning it up could b beneficial. No guaranties of course.

I wonder how long Google would take to index links, 3-4 months?

Regarding requesting link removal, I understand and agree, probably total waste of time.

Thanks, 
Alan

The vast majority of the 140 domains that link to our website are very low quality directories or and other toxic links. Only about 20-30 domains are not toxic (according to Link Research Tools confirmed by out manual inspection of these links).

Would removing some of these links improve of MOZ Domain Rank? What if we cannot remove them, can NOZ detect a disavow file?

In general would improving the ratio between good quality and poor quality links improve domain authority?

Thanks,
Alan

Hi Jeff:

Happy to report that improved metrics are not caused by bots or any unusual spikes in traffic. So I think we are seeing a legitimate improvement. Last year we focused on UX improvements. Will focus on content and links this year in order to solidify our gains.

Thanks for your input!!

Alan

Greetings MOZ Community:

On June 14th Google Webmaster tools indicated an increase in the number of indexed pages, going from 676 to 851 pages. New  pages had been added to the domain in the previous month. The number of pages blocked by robots increased at that time from 332 (June 1st) to 551 June 22nd), yet the number of indexed pages still increased to 851.

The following changes occurred between June 5th and June 15th:

-A new redesigned version of the site was launched on June 4th, with some links to social media and blog removed on some pages, but with no new URLs added. The design platform was and is Wordpress.

-Google GTM code was added to the site.

-An exception was made by our hosting company to ModSecurity on our server (for i-frames) to allow GTM to function.

In the last ten days my web traffic has decline about 15%, however the quality of traffic has declined enormously and the number of new inquiries we get is off by around 65%. Click through rates have declined from about 2.55 pages to about 2 pages.

Obviously this is not a good situation.

My SEO provider, a reputable firm endorsed by MOZ, believes the extra 175 pages indexed by Google, pages that do not offer much content, may be causing the ranking decline.

My developer is examining the issue. They think there may be some tie in with the installation of GTM. They are noticing an additional issue, the sites Contact Us form will not work if the GTM script is enabled. They find it curious that both issues occurred around the same time.

Our domain is www.nyc-officespace-leader. Does anyone have any idea why these extra pages are appearing and how they can be removed? Anyone have experience with GTM causing issues with this?

Thanks everyone!!!
Alan

As a real estate brokerage firm our business is local in nature. If we can get improved ranking for such terms as "New York City office space" it would help our business immensely.

Your suggestion of using both .com and .NYC is very good. 
Thanks,
Alan

My real estate web site was migrated form Drupal to Wordpress last July. The ranking have dropped a lot since migration. One of the things we changed is that we have added two carousels to the home page. Most of the text is below the carousels. Is this bad for SEO?

Thanks,
Alan

When I enter "Site: URL" to check what a search how Google displays  search result, a date appears at the very front. This takes away several characters, really valuable real estate.

How can I stop Google from displaying these dates?

There are certain Wordpress plugins like "WP Date Remover" however the seem to only apply to blog posts. Dates are appearing on results on all my Wordpress pages. Is there an internal setting in Wordpress that will allow me to remove dates for these non blogpost pages?

Hi Joe:

About 35% of our traffic is derived from mobile so maximize mobile conversion probably worth the effort.

Do you think it would be most effective to display the phone number as an actual button with a similar design as the other 2?  Is there any form of protocol for displaying phone numbers on mobile devices?

Thanks, 
Alan

I simply want to understand what I am paying for. If a vendor takes 15 minutes a month and uses an automated systems to create links I would like to know. If the hourly rate the vendor is charging me is $4,000/hour I think I am entitled to know.

I am not fixated on $500, $1,000 or $2,000 per month. I am fixated on getting fair value. When one party (vendor) has more information than the customer, the customer is in a vulnerable position and apt to overpay. That is why I am asking.

It seems reasonable to pay an SEO what a CPA, a decent attorney or other professional earns on an hourly basis. But an hourly rate equivalent to a Fortune 500 executive or a neuro-surgeon seems excessive.

I am simply trying to determine what is fair and customary.

Thanks, Alan

There are 2 or 3 URLs and one image file that dozens of toxic domains are linking to on our website. Some of these pages have hundreds of links from 4-5 domains. Rather than disavowing these links, would it make sense to simply break these links, change the URL that the link to and not create a redirect? It seems like this would be a sure fire way to get rid of these links. Any downside to this approach?

Thanks, 
Alan

Our relaunched website has a much lower bounce rate (66% before, now 58%) increased pages per session (1.89 before, now 3.47) and increased session duration (1:33 before, now 3:47). The relaunch was December 20th.

Should these improvements result in an improvement in Google rank? How about in MOZ authority?

We have not significantly changed the content of the site but the UX has been greatly improved.

Thanks,

Alan