mastodon.social is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
The original server operated by the Mastodon gGmbH non-profit

Administered by:

Server stats:

360K
active users

Resorting to saying @johnmu ... What's going on? Please :)

1. Why does my site (~500 pages, ~1 year old, but site-wide 301 redirect from a then 2-year-old site with 3x the traffic) get decent traffic and engagement, but have an insanely high average position?
2. Why does it have so few keywords for which it ranks? Ahrefs shows basically 0 long-tail keywords.
3. Why does it show just *1* page in CWV? So odd!
4. Why do no images from sub-pages show up on Google Images?

More background below.

@johnmu More stats:
1. No security / manual actions.
2. New domain was a parked domain from Huge Domains. No weird history.
3. The 301 redirects were all done well (multiple SEO people checked).

Just hoping you'll help. Or that anyone else has an idea.

John Mueller

@zomfg Honestly, none of that says much of anything -- none of those metrics are "ranking metrics" (to make up a name). Imagine you're describing a book: 500 pages, it has a new name, and it's not well-placed in the NY Times list -- would that be useful to give the author recommendations for better placement? Probably not. What matters is what you do with those 500 pages, not that you have them.

@zomfg What I'd recommend thinking about is what unique value you're bringing to the internet with those pages? How does this map to what users want? Is it clear that you're the expert in that field, if that's important? And then, how do you present your pages so that users & search engines recognize both value & relevance? Maybe 10 pages are enough, maybe you need 1000 -- that's a completely different question though.

@johnmu: So kind of you to reply. Thanks for your help with my issues (and those of so many others)! I've thought of those but maybe not enough. I'll continue to work on them. Thanks again.