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We're kind of in crisis mode, as our ad revenue is about to take a huge hit. Hoping someone can help me figure out what to do next. Site: https://indoorgardening.com Here's what I did (below) that I think broke things somehow. I'm clearly not an SEO expert but thought I was making things better. And things did improve over the last week or so but then fell apart 2 days ago. 1. Most posts did not have a Yoast focus keyword. I added keyword phrases and used Yoast suggestions to optimize for that and for readability. 2. In some cases I changed post titles to better reflect the keyword phrase. 3. In some cases I changed the slug per Yoast's suggestion and did a 301 redirect from the old slug to the new one. 4. I used Grammarly to fix all spelling, grammar, punctuation, etc. 5. Some Yoast-suggested changes that were made: Image alt tags, subheading structures, adding keyword to subheadings, first paragraph, and meta description, changed sentence length for those over 20 words to clean up the text, added transition words where applicable, reworded passive voice sentences, added internal links when needed, eliminated consecutive sentences (first word), improved Flesch reading ease when necessary. 6. I also added or changed Amazon affiliate links where needed and swapped out images when necessary. Results:
I started this project about 3 weeks ago. On 11/29 we had one of our highest traffic days, with 1017 hits coming from Google. On 11/30, 257 hits came from Google, and on 12/1, 3 (three!!) hits came from Google. At this point, 82 of 89 posts have a double green "Good" score in Yoast; 6 are "OK" and 1 does not have a focus keyword designated. Thanks in advance for any help anyone can provide. -John

Hi. I work for a regional news source, and our (separate) Spanish-language news publication recently changed its domain name. The publication lost its Google News inclusion. Most of their traffic came from Google News, so traffic tanked. They're trying to get back in. They reapplied but didn't get approved. They're now in the 30-day waiting period to reapply again. The website is run by a third-party company, which handled the domain name change in April (2015). That company has been running their site for a couple of years. Our in-house devs' hands are tied on helping, because we (at the mother company) don't manage their site. This third party has not been responsive. The Spanish pub folks have reached out to me to help them prepare for Round 2 of reapplication. I'm the mothership in-house SEO, but I've never experienced this situation before. Because everything seems to be in order besides the ham-handed changes, my best advice to them so far is: You'll have to wait until Google gets to know you again, unfortunately. Does that sound right? Any pointers out there for bringing their best possible A-game to the next round?

We are working on an internal project, where the website owner is thinking of making regular changes to one or two items on the top level menu. Assuming they redirect the original pages or navigate to them in other ways, is there any other impact on SEO to changing the menu structure? I assume they'd submit new sitemaps after each change. Many thanks Fiona

We are making significant URL changes to our website. Because the URL is changing the social sharing buttons are not showing previous shared counts. I have read several resources like the one below that is linked to in several other similar questions. http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2172926/How-to-Maintain-Social-Shares-After-a-Site-Migration However I would love to get some insight from someone who has done this and there thoughts on the outcome. As an ecommerce site the "Social Proof" of products that have received social shares is a big deal to us. In Mike Kings example above the counts are being attributed to the OLD URL which is problematic over time. Our site has been up for over 12 years and has had several major changes to it, and I am certain there will be more in the future, being able to preserve the count on the current URL is ideal. While I agree with him that over time I believe social platforms will let data pass through 301 redirects, until then I need to find the best way to do this.  Also with his example and others I have seen people mention than new likes from the new url can reset the counter. If you have gone through this and have ideas pleas share them. I look forward to your thoughts thanks.

My site is http://www.clairehegarty.co.uk/ Hi, my site has always done amazing in the rankings, for a few years i have been number one for the word gastric band hypnotherapy as well as many other keywords which includes hypno band.  but in the past couple of weeks i have seen some of my keywords drop and end up on pages two and three of google instead of page one. Can anyone please give me advice on what i need to do to change this situation please

I couple weeks ago I switched my website from Drupal to a Wordpress CMS: Martial Arts Austin   My rankings have  remained the same, but the Domain Authority has plummeted from like 29 to 21. I know this is small fry, but I don't want my business to drop in ranking. The URL's were kept exactly the same, with the internal links and copy also kept the same with few additions. Also, according to Open Site Explorer, the site's stronger pages have now averaged out with the weaker and unused pages so they all now share the same Page Authority - that doesn't seem right. Is there reason for concern? Did I screw something up, or am I making too much of this? Thanks