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Hi guys
I have a question about one of the required bulk upload fields for Google My Business Locations: "State".
We are covering Ireland and the UK and we don't have states, more provinces and counties. Any ideas what to enter in to this field? For example, for a shop in Dublin Ireland should it be Dublin (the county) Leinster (the provence) for the "State" field? And how are these abbreviated? Should I just enter IE or GB for all entries in the state field?
Hi Dirk
Thanks for your response.
We do actually want to specify country also for currency and licensing reasons. But I get your point, we could certainly have generic language non region specific tagging also. For example we have a hrefleng="en" for the .com but will also want "en-CA" for Canadian specific currency and licencing.
Thanks
Hi guys,
I'd love to hear your opinion on how to handle this. We have a www.site.com business site. We expanded our business to Italy a few years ago with an Italian ccTLD with a www.site.it version.
A business decision has been made to expand in to several new territories, but we will be going with a subdirectory structure for each country: .com/se, .com/fi etc
When we're setting up the hreflang tags for this, the language/region all need to be cross annotated. This is all fine. The only anomaly is the site.it version already existing. This site will continue to exist as it suits its market context so well. In terms of annotation, should the hreflang include the .it site or is the ccTLD the only signal google needs to serve the correct version to Italian searchers.But the hreflang tag needs to declare all available language versions and it is possible to include different domains etc.
Please let me know your thoughts on this 
My gut feeling is that it should be included? Thanks!
Hi there!
Yes, if you have multiple language versions of a URL, each language page must identify all language versions, including itself. If you add any more languages or regions later, all pages will have to refer to that new language and itself also.
Hi Patrick, thanks for the response.
It is a legacy architecture that's in place, this would be a temporary situation while the new mobile solution is being built.
I was just wondering about the possibility of defining more than one rel alternate, I've never seen anyone do it (because why would you :P) but in the interest of mad science, would the relationship work between a canonical on each mobile subdomain pointing to multile rel alternate tags on desktop.
When redirecting from desktop to mobile with a separate URL structure, you need to have a rel alternate - rel canonical handshake to define the relationship between the pages. But if you have a different subdomain for different mobile devices, can you add more than one rel alternate tag on the desktop page?
EG if site.com is redirecting to iphone.site.com, m.site.com, android.site.com
Hi All,
Hi hope someone could answer to this question because on internet I haven't found a clear solution so far:
I have:
In order to optimize my mobile websites, According to the Google guideline of the above separate urls configuration , I should add a tag link alternate media in the desktop page and a canonical tag in the corresponding mobile page in order to create a connection between them. But, I need to keep a 1-to-1 connection between desktop page and mobile page (Google recommends to have 1 desktop page linked to 1 mobile page and viceversa and discourages the 1-to-multi connections).
What I would like: In my case, I have to add the a single desktop page of desktop site (example www.example.com/category1/), 3 links alternate media tag,( one for iphone.example.mobi, one for android.example.mobi and one for winphone.example.mobi). Furthemore, I have to add a canonical tag in every corresponding mobile page of the 3 mobile site version, a canonical tag pointing to my sektop page www.example.com/category1/.
Now my worries are: having a single desktop page with 3 different link alternate tags pointing to 3 different mobile websites (one each), is something or not aligned to the google seo mobile guideline? If not, How should I configure my desktop website and my 3 mobile web applications(iphone, android, winphone) in order to follow the Google requirements for Separate urls apllication?
Thanks,
Massimliano
Let's use this example...
www.miniclip.com and there's a function to log in...
If you're logged in and a cookie checks that you're logged in and you're on page, let's say, www.miniclip.com/racing-games however the banners being displayed would have more call to action and offers on the page when a user is not logged in to entice them to sign up but the URL would still be www.miniclip.com/racing-games if and if not logged in, what would be the best URL practice for this? just do it?
No, 404 errors are a natural part of the Internet.
It shows a splash / promotion page yet you check the cache and it's the real homepage, they are doing this so they don't lose rankings but how are they redirecting users to that but Google is caching the real homepage?
is it friendly?
thanks!!
Hi,
Let's say my homepage is www.xxxx.com but I want to redirect users who land on the homepage who don't already have a cookie from the site, to a temporary landing page like www.xxxx.com?AFF_ID=XXXXX as an example, how do I stop Google bot from following that redirect? I don't want Google to cache that as my homepage because I'll lose all rankings??
Thanks!
Thanks for your reply Yannick. It's much appreciated.
I don't find you very convincing though.
I'll give you a thumbs up but I need somebody else to answer please.
But my question is and what I'm trying to understand is that - IF it does flow Link Equity like you said it does, then what is to stop somebody putting Canonical Tags into Internal Pages pointing back to their Homepage to channel Link Equity from Internal Pages back to their Homepage for example????? Would Google just ignore these or penalise you because will Google know that the content isn't the same?
Hey,
I will give a thumbs up and best answer to whoever answers my question correctly.
The Canonical Tag is supposed to solve Duplication which is fine.
My questions are:
Does the Canonical Tag make the PR / Link Juice flow differently? If I have john.long.com/home and john.long.com but put a Canonical Tag on john.long.com/home reading john.long.com then what does this do? Does it flow the Link Equity back to john.long.com?
Can you use the Canonical Tag to change PR flow in any means? If I had john.long.com/washing-machines and john.long.com/kids-toys...
If I put a Canonical Tag on john.long.com/kids-toys reading john.long.com/washing-machines then would the PR from /kids-toys flow to /washing-machines or would Google just ignore this? (The pages are completely different in this example and content is completely different).
Thank you.
Martijn is 100% correct so please listen to him.
Thumbs up.
Google recommends around 100 however they say they will crawl 10K + so I wouldn't worry at all.
Get rid of the Sub-Domain and create europcar.ie/rugby instead.
301 rugby.europcar.ie to the new europcar.ie/rugby.
Why? To improve search results.
When? It's impossible to say It could happen on Christmas Day for all we know.
I have read around forums quite often actually that people's rankings are suffering so possibly however I don't think it's anything concrete at the moment, I think it's just a case of seeing more than usual
Sha,
I'm sorry but I don't think the link profile is big enough yet to be drilling down into these kind of areas, he said he is losing a small amount of traffic, not that he had tons and now he receives none.
1. True however the link profile is only small so it'd probably not of been focussed on that much so far.
2. True again but same as 1.
3. This is only a VERY small ranking factor and for you to even suggest this as a reason as to why his traffic has dropped by 90% is quite ludicrous.
4. You've mentioned this already, nice link though
I'm not attacking you or saying that you are wrong, actually, all your points are 100% correct however with such a new site and the amount of traffic being so small and with a such a small link profile, I think the suggestions above are too advanced at the moment and the problem lies elsewhere.
If you look at the crawl date, then the traffic decrease happening around now also makes perfect sense because Google has had time to drop you down the rankings for example.
Slightly different.
In terms of Social Bookmarking, it MAY help but it's pretty positive. Try Digg.com
I'm just glad I noticed it
I think this is your problem to be honest and the rest of the site is fine but as your site is currently as it is, I would expect fluctuation anyway.
I think you should see Kieran's comment below and follow the steps, there is no need for me to repeat everything when he has done such a good job below. I'll take credit for the spot but I think Kieran deserves credit for his willingness to expand in detail.
Thumbs up to Kieran from me.
Regards, Ryan.
You can't unfortunately unless you have a campaign set up. You can start one though, you can use Raven SEO Tools for example and you can get it to watch your rankings plus up-to 10 competitors so you can see where they are moving and the data is stored as well, so if you set it up now and want to check in 6 months time, what was happening today for example, you'll be able too. Raven SEO Tools is really well priced as well.
If you do a cache check on your homepage then you'll see a logo come up that normally means a 404 error on Google so I think there was some problem with the latest cache, either on your side or Google's. I would recommend Social Bookmarking to get Google to visit your site and re-cache and I think then, everything should stabilise.
It's called fluctuation and there isn't much you can do about it to be honest, just keep building good links and hopefully it should stabilise. You should try Social Bookmarking as that can work wonders.
Bringing back URL's that you didn't want and then decide that you do want is pretty annoying to Google...
It's also about the Server Response Codes.
Quality link building, just keep going.
I'm from Burnley originally and I've worked in Blackburn and Manchester previously but now I live and work in Dublin, Ireland It's nice to see somebody local on here.
I would suggest Social Bookmarking the new pages that you have created and I think you'll be surprised at what will happen, something so simple. Have you updated your sitemap as well?
A buy button within content is sufficient.
Gear your website up onsite correctly first then begin link building so the site can absorb the link equity freely and correctly.
Blackhat methods are your only main concern and Blackhat methods and what to avoid are all over the web, if you just search on Google.
The keyword tool is pretty inaccurate, it can be an indication though, when using it make sure that "Exact" is ticked on the left hand side and not "Broad". I would recommend looking at Google Insights and Trends as well.
There are a couple of directories that may be worth paying for such as the Yahoo Directory and free submission to Dmoz but most of them will be spam.
PRNewswire is by far the best although it can be quite pricey 
It could do, yes but highly unlikely. Do you have any idea what they might be achieving from this?
You say that you've contacted the company to get it removed so hopefully they should comply with this quickly. It would take Google a very long time to pick up on this anyhow. If the worst was to happen and you got penalised, you could just explain in Webmaster Tools and it would be fine plus you could sue them for a hefty sum as well. The chances of you getting penalised for this are next to nil anyway.
Can I suggest that you give them a call?
+48 914325555
I think I know exactly what you're looking for...
It is for competitors though, yes?
If the page isn't that important then you can actually leave out the Meta Description if it's that much of a headache for you.
Companies are actually selling clicks via Google+1 - can you believe that?
Google have been made aware of this very quickly though so I am sure they are on top of this.
It will be beneficial for both Ryan.
Do a site: check in Google and see if the homepage still ranks #1.
Give it 2 weeks and if nothing comes back up then as you mentioned, go through crawl errors etc using W3C Validator, Screaming Frog, Xenu, Webmaster Tools and use some SEOmoz tools.
Check for broken back links and try building some new links.
If nothing changes then consider a reconsideration request through Webmaster Tools.
Option 1 will be your best bet by far.
It won't happen again - trust me.
Always go for A.
If B still appears then 301 that page to A.
If you struggle with conducting a 301 then you can set your preferred domain in Webmaster Tools.