Search Engine Optimization

In this blog post, I would like to share my experience of resolving a Google promotion credit issue on our Southern Cross Group company's Google Ads account. Our Google Ads agency was "First Rate (Aus) Pty Ltd" and we received a $600 credit for spending $600 on Google Ads with a condition to spend it before Dec 31, 2022. However, after spending the required amount, the remaining credit of $543.53 was not applied to our account. Promotions was Active I noticed the issue with the remaining credit before it expired and brought it to the attention of our Google Ads agency. They escalated the matter to the Google Support team, but the response was not satisfactory. The Google Support team advised us to wait until the end of December for the credit to appear. I sent several follow-up messages to our agency, but no updates were received. Promotion - Credit Expired Finally, on 10th February 2023, our ad agency informed me that they had resolved the issue with the help of a ...

I want to share a real-time incident that I faced after migrating our website server from a Digital Pacific dedicated hosting (Linux server) to Godaddy shared hosting (Windows server) environment. As a SEO analyst, I noticed the following issues with our current shared hosting server that are impacting our website SEO activities, particularly website crawl: Blocked Googlebots: This is a common issue with our shared hosting where their firewalls block a part of legitimate traffic along with Googlebots. I reviewed the website firewall log and found that it has blocked Googlebot from crawling the site. Example: 66.249.73.29 - - [03/Aug/2021:23:52:19 -0400] "GET /invasivef6/ecce412002.htm HTTP/1.1" 403 2700 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/92.0.4515.119 Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)" "PROXYBLOCKID:BNP003" "CACHES:-...

 One of my biggest challenges in my SEO career was a security issue affecting my company's website. The website was hacked with a Japanese keyword hack that injected spam pages and resulted in Google SERP showing Japanese text. I identified the issue when our website's visits dropped, using Google Analytics tool. Screenshotimage1: Checked it by URL Inspection tool  Screenshot 2 image : Also checked our website by the “site:” Search operator in Google SERP. Screenshot 3 image:  There were 1.13K spam pages, as per the May 2021 coverage report in Google Search Console. Screenshot 4 image: The hackers manipulated our “website XML sitemaps” (and also “Robots.txt” file.) Screenshot 5 image: Hacker removed our WP admin privileges. To restore the website, I worked with the web development team to identify and fix any security vulnerabilities. As the exact issue couldn't be found, we decided to upload a fresh backup of the site. To prevent future hacks, we took the following st...

I would like to share a challenging experience I had with a fake negative review on our company's Google Business Profile (GBP) listing for our Victoria location. An unknown person, going by the name of Jim D, left a 1-star review and rating on our GBP listing. I investigated the review with our HR team and managers, and they confirmed that Jim D did not appear to be one of our employees in our records. I flagged the review as spam, but after waiting for three business days as per GBP's rule, there was no change. I then decided to reply to the negative review on our GBP in an attempt to resolve the issue. However, Jim D did not respond to our reply. Our reply was as follows : "Hi Jim, According to our records, it does not appear that you have ever worked for Southern Cross Group. Please note that this is a platform for constructive feedback, and so, if you have any, we would be more than happy to hear it and take it on board. Please send us an email to info@scgroup.global....

Recently, I faced an issue with my company website's bounce rate in the Google Analytics tool. As you can see from the screenshot attached below, the bounce rate is extremely low. Screenshot image1: 0.59% bounce rate for 1,064 pageviews is suspiciously low for this one page. Screenshot image2: The 4.38% bounce rate for this entire website is way too low to be accurate. In both screenshots, the bounce rates compared to the number of pageviews are suspicious. Low bounce rates for pages < 10 views would not be considered to be extremely suspicious. Pages that have a low bounce and have > 3000 pageviews is extremely unlikely. This would indicate that I have an issue. I have analyzed and gathered our details: We are using Google Tag Manager and recently I migrated our existing site Google analytics tag by removing them from the website code and then added it within the Google Tag Manager interface. In Google Tag Manager, we have set up some event tags for Google Analytics (A con...

 As a SEO Analyst, one of the challenges I faced was encountering a "Crawled - Currently not indexed" status on Google for our old blog post - https://scgroup.global/blog/safety-tip-green-cleaning-cleaner-future/ (Continuity of case 2 ) that I worked on. After some analysis and troubleshooting, I was able to fix the issue and get the post indexed. First , I analyzed the content, meta tags, internal, and external links for the blog post. I used the "Copyscape" tool (https://www.copyscape.com/) to check for any plagiarism issues with the content. I then edited and updated the meta tags to make sure they were properly optimized for the post.  The title and meta description for the post were updated to : Title: Safety Tip: Green Cleaning for a Cleaner Future | Cleaning tips Meta Description: When you choose green cleaning products and practices, your family is safer and healthier. Find out more about the advantages of greener cleaning. The future: green cleaning, clean ...

 I recently encountered the "Duplicate without user-selected canonical" error in the Google Search Console for my company's website. This error means that Google did not index a certain page on the website because it was considered a duplicate of another page, and no canonical page was designated using the canonical tag. According to Google's official documentation , if you believe that the wrong URL has been chosen as the canonical page, you can explicitly mark the canonical page for the duplicate page. Alternatively, you can ensure that the content between the duplicate pages differs substantively, which may help Google understand that the pages are not truly duplicates. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7440203?hl=en In my situation , I have a few PDF pages on my website that are not being indexed by Google because they are considered duplicates. https://scgroup.global/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-seo/css/main-sitemap.xsl - Sep 16, 2022   https://scgro...