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Hi,

I'm fairly sure you can put the tags in a sitemap rather than the header.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2620865?hl=en https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

Placing the tags into the header is a much bigger technical issue for us at present.

Cheers

Moz is flagging a lot of pages on our site which have duplicate page titles. 99% of these are international pages which hreflang tags in the sitemap.

Do I need to worry about this? I assumed that it wasn't an issue given the use of hreflang. And if that's the case, why is Moz flagging them as an issue?

Thanks.

Hi Mike,

I did see that there was an update last week, but as far as I can see we weren't impacted until Sunday/yesterday.

In terms of pages indexed there has been a slight drop, but only 700 out of 19,900. So in line with the variance we get on a week to week basis.

The drop in ranking seems to have only effected non branded keywords. Would a penalty effect both?

Thanks for the input. I got another site crawl from Moz today (i have campaigns running on the regional subfolders and one on the domain) at domain level. We have 1,292 404 errors at a domain level. All of our links are broken, so every URL in the sitemap is pushing Google to a 404. If you actually browse the site it works but every URL has index.php injected into the middle of it.

I have manually checked every non-branded keyword we were ranked no.1 for in Australia. We were ranked #1 for 23 keywords I was tracking. We are now out of the top ten for 20, ranked #9 for 1 and #1 for two others.

I came in this morning to a swath of email updates from Moz. Our site had jumped in ranking in the four geographic regions we target and we were seeing (more or less) the best results we've ever had. Most of the jumps were only 1 - 4 places but they were for our most competitive keywords.

Late this afternoon I did some spot checks on keywords to confirm that we were still holding roughly in the same positions and before I reported this to the wider business. We're not. What's more we have dropped off the first page for some terms and don't seem to be ranked at all for for others. The only keywords we're getting good rankings for are branded search terms.

I can only assume this is due to a technical issues over the weekend our developers caused. I'm not completely across this but I at some point our sitemaps stopped working and a huge number of links on the site were broken. Could a massive surge in 404s cause this? I'm checking google analytics and I can't see a drop in organic traffic yet although I don't have the full figures for today.

Thanks

No. There is a No Follow tag on the link so while Google will see the link no 'juice' passes on.

Yep. Checked in the tester at the time and did some more spot checks this morning.

I used Disallow: /*?key which I thought was generally recognised by bots?

I've blocked a large number of pages which Moz were showing as duplicate or giving 404's in our robots.txt using /?key and /?p etc.

However Moz crawler is still showing as being an issue. I assumed Roger picked up the robots.txt file, or is that not the case?

Looks like Page Rank for all our key product listing pages has taken a hammering. They're all getting a PR of 1, even though our domain authority remains ok (it has dropped too, but not as dramatic).

What we're seeing is a lot of yo-yo'ing. This week we had 30 SERP drops and 17 rises, which has been typical for last month. Prior to that we'd see about half of this.

e.g. 'home security cameras' SERPs since mid-Oct has been: 4, 4, 8, 4, 7, 6. This is pretty typical of what I'm seeing. We've not made any real content or site changes in this time.

Traffic wise there has been a 3.5% dip in search over the last few weeks. So not huge.

We have several country specific sites set up as folders of our main domain. We use hreflang tags to get the relevant site served in each country, with mixed success. In about 60% of searches the US site appears.

Beginning in late October our rankings for the US have slowly, but reasonably steadily dropped. Each week we'll see 10 or so keyword rises and 15-30 keywords drop. Generally by 1-3 places. This is much more movement than we were seeing in the months prior to this.

Is this a result of penguin, or just coincidence? The US subfolder is the only one which has seen drops overall, the rest have actually improved slightly during this time period. I would expect any impact due to Penguin to effect the whole domain?

I've been checking through our backlinks and we do a have a handful of bad links, along with a 100 or so which look a little odd and not completely relevant. I have contacted sites and had some of these removed, and created a disavow list with the worst of the rest. I haven't asked for the site to be re-considered yet.

We haven't had any message in webmaster tools re: bad links or similar.

Cheers.

Thanks.. it took me a while but I did realise that one eventually.

Thanks Thomas. That is how our sitemap now reads. It just seems odd that when you access map via a browser the hreflang tags don't appear...

I've updated the site maps but the hreflang tags still aren't showing when you view the site map...

I think I might see the problem. I'm only referencing the alternative pages with the hreflang tag, I've not included the site itself. it should be:

<url><loc>http://www.swann.com/uk/dvrs-kits</loc>
<lastmod>2014-07-23</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority></url>

This is the beginning of my sitemap for the UK subfolder, as far as I can see we're following both the case studies you posted and the Google advice on the structure. But as you point out when you view the sitemap online it's not showing the hreflang tags.

<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9" xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><url><loc>http://www.swann.com/uk/dvrs-kits</loc>
<lastmod>2014-07-23</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority></url>
<url><loc>http://www.swann.com/uk/dvrs-kits/1080p</loc>
<lastmod>2014-07-23</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority></url>
<url><loc>http://www.swann.com/uk/dvrs-kits/960h</loc>
<lastmod>2014-07-23</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority></url></urlset>

Thanks for running this.

The deeptrawl says that there are no hreflang tags in place. If you view the sitemap.xml files on the site you can't see any there either. However they're definitely in the files I'm giving to my colleague to upload.

I matched the structure of the tag to the two case studies you put in your first post...

Hi,

I did have a read through those two case studies previously. My understanding was that we could implement the code purely on the on the sitemap, and that nothing on the site was needed. Are you saying we also need some code on the site as well?

The verification tool doesn't say we have it implemented, but I wasn't sure that it would check the sitemaps or just the sites HTML.

Hi,

We've had hreflang tags implemented on our site for a few weeks now, and while we are seeing some improvements for the regional subfolders I wanted to double check I had the tags implemented correctly (a couple of examples are below). However while the regional subfolder sites are now ranking instead of the US site for some keywords, some key search terms are still returning the US site. Could this be due to incorrect implementation for that specific page?

Due to complications with using Magento we're implementing the tags in the site maps. Also magento appears to be inserting a rel canonical tag automatically for each page and self referencing e.g. On www.example.com/uk/security-cameras (one of the pages we're having issues with) the canonical tag is http://www.example.com/uk/security-cameras" />. Is this an issue?

Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks.

<url><loc>http://www.example.com/uk/dvrs-kits</loc>
<lastmod>2014-07-23</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority></url>
<url><loc>http://www.example.com/uk/dvrs-kits/1080p</loc>
<lastmod>2014-07-23</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority></url>

Yep they're indexed.

We're going to implement webmaster tools on each subfolder and then set the location to see if that makes any difference.

I thought hreflang was just if you had full translations but I'll take a look at adding that as well.

Thanks.

I've been doing a bit more digging and I'm wondering if its the GEO IP tool we're using (MaxMind) and the way it is configured which is effecting our ranking...

We have a GEO-IP redirect in place for our domain, so that users are pointed to the subfolder relevant for their region, e.g: Visit example.com from the UK and you will be redirected to example.com/uk

This works fine when you manually type the domain into your browser, however if you search for the site and come to example.com, you end up at example.com

I didn't think this was too much of an issue but our subfolders /uk and /au are not getting ranked at all in Google, even for branded keywords. I'm wondering if the fact that Google isn't picking up the redirect means that the pages aren't being indexed properly?

Conversely our US region (example.com/us) is being ranked well.

Has anyone encountered a similar issue?

Which leads me stumped as to whats stopping these two subfolders being ranked.. we're no.1 for branded keywords in the US for some pages on example.com/us and not even ranked in the UK for example.com/uk for the same keywords.

While the duplicate content issues were on the same domain, they were for a sub-folder. It doesn't seem to have effected another sub-folder on the site (example.com/us) so my feeling is that this is a different issue.

I manage the SEO for several different regions which are also based on the same site e.g. example.com/au, example.com/us

The /us site has pretty good rankings and changes I'm making to the site are having an impact. The /au site has really bad rankings, even though much of the content is the same. (The /uk site is also awful but we had an issue with 4,500 duplicate pages which were only resolved last week). Crawl diagnostics are only showing 1 major error for a 404 response, I'm receiving a domain authority of 43 and A grade page ranking for some of our targeted keywords. I could believe that this isn't necessarily going to get us a top 10 rating but I would have thought we would be in the top 50, especially for branded keywords.

Could the lack of ranking be to do with how our domain redirects? If you go to example.com.au you are taken to the home page rather than being redirected to example.com/au. Once you head to an internal page the URL changes to example.com/au/page

I actually had a look at the robots.txt last night to block the effected areas and discovered the dev's who built the site hadn't set it up. We've added a default one which we're going to test over the next week to see how it fares. If that doesn't work then we'll start looking at the parameters.

Thanks.

On one my sites Moz is picking up 4483 duplicate content pages. The majority of these are from our blog and video sections on our site.

We're using a URL shortener and it appears that some of the pages are the full version of the URL then the shortened version. However if you go to the full version you get redirected to the shorter one. So I would assume that the Moz crawler should get the same redirect?

We're also getting pagination being shown as duplicate pages, which I would half expect, but the URLs Magento is creating are truly bizarre:

e.g http://www.xxx.com/uk/blog/cat/view/identifier/news/page/news/index.php/alarms-doorbells/?p=2

Alarms and doorbells is one of our product categories, which is displayed in the LHN on the blog page but has nothing to do with the blog itself.

On another site on the same Magento instance, with the same content (they're for two different regions) we're show as having 248 duplicate pages, again in the video and news section, but this is a completely different scale of issue.

Has anyone else encountered issues like these? I'm probably going to put a noindex in place on these two sections until we can get a solution in place as we're completely unranked in google on this site.

Thanks

I've run the crawl test one of the sites I've taken over SEO for, however its only picking all the pages. For instance it indexes all the pages under xxxxx/us but none under xxxxx/au or xxxxx/uk

The pages are being indexed as they're ranking in Google.

Thanks.