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I'm working on a site that has different versions of the same page in multiple languages (e.g., English, Spanish, French).

Currently, they feature customer testimonial quotes on some pages and the quotes are in English, even if the rest of the page is in another language.

I'm curious to know what are best practices around how to treat client quotes on localized languages pages. A few approaches that we're contemplating:

1. Leave the quote in English and don't translate (because the customer quoted doesn't speak the localized language).

2. Leave the on-page quote in English, but provide a "translate" option for the user to click to see the translated version. The translated text would be hidden until the "translate" button is selected.

3. Go ahead and translate the quote into the local language.

Appreciate your thoughts, thank you!

Thanks, Martijn.

How would you typically reference the code from other pages? An example would be great. Thanks!

We're looking to implement structured data for our social profiles and logo, as referenced here:

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/social-profile

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/logo

Should we add the markup for these structured data types to multiple pages, the homepage only, or all indexable pages? TIA

Thanks Peter, I appreciate you tracking that down!

Is the priority value (scale of 0-1) used for each URL in an XML sitemap still a valid way of communicating to search engines which content you (the webmaster) believe is more important relative to other content on your site?

I recall hearing that this was no longer used, but can't find a source.

If it is no longer used, what are the easiest ways to communicate our preferences to search engines? Specifically, I'm looking to preference the most version version of a product's documentation (version 9) over the previous version (version 8).

Thanks!

Hi Ronnell,

Thanks for your considered response, I appreciate it!

Re: #3, I was thinking an advantage to splitting the content amongst multiple pages could be that it gives the search engines more URLs to index, and thus gives more opportunity for users to find it via long-tail keywords.

For example, if we split a webinar transcript across five pages, and optimize the title tags, header tags, other on-page elements, etc. uniquely for each page, then it increases the chances a user will find one of those pages (via long tail searches) vs. loading all the content on the first page.

We could add a sidebar paragraph that gives an overview of the webinar content, and users would see that when they land on the page (or perhaps a modal would be more effective?). Once a user signs up to view the entire transcript, we redirect them to an unlocked experience of the first page of the webinar.

I'm not sure if the effort to separate the content and optimize all the unique pages is worthwhile, and I do think the user experience will have more friction if we go this route. We plan to experiment and see how it goes!

Thanks again -

Our B2B site has a lot of of long form content (e.g., transcriptions from presentations and webinars). We'd like to leverage the long tail SEO traffic driven to these pages and convert those visitors to leads.

Essentially, we'd like Google to index all this lengthy, keyword-rich content AND we'd like to put up a read gate that requires users to register before viewing the full article. This is a B2B site, and the goal is to generate leads.

Some considerations and questions:

• How much of the content to share before requiring registration? Ask too soon and it's a terrible user experience, give too much away and our business objectives are not met.
• Design-wise, what are good ways to do this? I notice Moz uses a "teaser" to block Mozinar content, and I've seen modals and blur bars on other sites. Any gotchas that Google doesn't like that we should be aware of? Trying to avoid anything that might seem like cloaking.
• Is it better to split the content across several pages (split a 10K word doc across 10 URLs and include a read gate on each) or keep to one page?

Thank you!

Thanks Cesar, I appreciate your detailed response.

Pick one, set up our redirects properly and we're good to go!

Thanks much!

I've been recommending using non-www vs. www as a preferable set up if a client is starting a site from scratch, and there aren't any pre-existing links to consider.

I'm wondering if this recommendation still holds?

I’ve been looking on the interwebs and I’m seeing far fewer articles arguing for the non-www version. In the two courts, I’m seeing highlighted:

Pro www: (ex: www.domain.com)

• Works better with CDN networks, where a domain needs to be specified (though that argument is 3 years old)
• Ability to restrict cookies to one hostname (www) or subdomain (info. blog. promo.) if using multiple subdomains
• IT people generally prefer it

Pro non-www (ex: domain.com)

• If you ever want to support or add https://, you don’t have to support 2 sets of urls/domains
• Mindset: fewer and fewer people think in terms of typing in www before a site url, the future is heading towards dropping that anyway. Though that is a bit of a cosmetic argument….

Is there a trend going back to www? Is there a technical argument to recommend non-www over www?

Thanks!

Ha ha, I know! It's like giving the developers a little present all wrapped up with a bow...here's the problem, and here's where to fix it

I love Screaming Frog! One use case I've used recently is using it to find internal 404 errors prior-to and immediately-after a major site redesign.

After running a crawl, go to Bulk Export > Response Code > Client error (4xx) Inlinks and download the report. It shows the offending URL and the URL referring to it, which makes it easier to update the bad link.

I also have this page bookmarked, and it's my go-to guide:

http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/screaming-frog-guide/

Hi Richard,

Google can take its time reindexing sites. That's great that you've submitted a sitemap. Another thing you could do is submit your new URLs directly through Google Webmaster Tools by going to:

**Crawl > Fetch as Google **

then submit your URL and select the "Submit to Index" button. You can then choose to submit just the URL for crawling or the URL and all its direct links.

You can submit 500 individual URLs/month for crawling and 10 URLs/month w/their direct links.

GWT says:

"Recrawling happens a few minutes after you click Go. At that time, the content of your page is what Google will index. The page will be considered for indexing provided it meets our quality guidelines and avoids the use of noindex directives."

Personally, I close those "join my email list" pop-ups as quickly as I can, because I find them annoying. Let users see your content and decide for themselves if they want more engagement.

If you've been soliciting users with a pop-up AND with a more discreet subscribe form, are you able to do an analysis of who subscribed via which method, and calculate engagement metrics (e.g., open rate) or the un-subscription rate for each? Maybe look at this metric by time period: past year, 6 months, 3 months, last full month, etc.

If so, you might find your answer there.

I prefer to see subscription options at the bottom of blog posts (I just read something amazing, and so I'm likely to sign up for more) or as a global element in a sidebar.

Hi there - wanted to follow up with additional information about this matter.

High Level: It looks like anonymizing IP addresses may be a non-issue.

I read through the Google Analytics product forums, and read one thread where someone was having trouble with their eCommerce tracking after adding the anonymize IP code. We have an AdWords account, so I contacted AdWords Support and asked them if it would affect our eCommerce tracking and also if/how it would affect our geolocation reporting.

Their response: "...anonymization does not affect the Analytics data in any way. The anonymization in this case happens after our tracking is done, thus keeping the original data intact: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2763052?hl=en"

I also asked if there was any way to set filters to anonymize IP addresses for users in a specific country (e.g., Germany), and they said there is not: "...currently the only way to anonymize IPs in our system is either by their Geo location (which means excluding all data on German users) or by putting in individual IPs in the system (which will be an impossible task, looking at the large group you are trying to anonymize. Unfortunately there's not other way to do this in our system currently."

While there are several mentions that anonymizing IP addresses will affect geolocation reporting, I haven't found any solid examples of exactly what data is lost/inaccurate.

Bonus: A colleague pointed me to this interesting article about how you can use Google Tag Manager to exclude some traffic from getting passed into Google Analytics at all, including passing IP address information: http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2014/03/11/goodbye-to-exclude-filters-google-analytics/

For sites with a lot of traffic that are hitting GA's sampling limits, using GTM in this way can also help reduce the data set passed into GA, thus giving you more of the data you care about before hitting the sampling ceilings.

I haven't tried this yet myself, but thought it might be helpful if others are contemplating these issues.

Hi Mase,

I've managed sites with with hundreds of thousands of pages too, and in my experience a discrepancy between what's offered up via the sitemaps and what gets indexed is typical (dare I say it, a 10% discrepancy seems pretty good!). Pages deeper in the site seem to suffer this fate more frequently than those with fewer subfolders, as do those with thin content.

I agree completely with Ryan's comment about Screaming Frog: it is an invaluable tool for site audits, in addition to lots of other useful site insights. You might find this article interesting to get a sense of the many ways you can use SF: http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/screaming-frog-guide/

Hi Ryan,

Thanks for your response. The company is not planning to physically move servers into the country, but we plan to sell products to Germans via our own website and through German retail outlets. I believe the products sold to German customers will be shipped from a distribution center located within Germany, but I'm not certain about that detail.

We plan to use a subfolder structure for the German content (http://example.com/de/) vs. a TLD (http://example.de), in part because we want to consolidate incoming links to one TLD.

One thing that is unclear is what are the downsides to anonymizing IP addresses? I've read we'll lose some geographic information about users, but I haven't seen specifics on exactly what will be lost. City-level data? Metro-level?

Thanks again!

Our company will be expanding into Germany later this year, and we need to modify how we use Google Analytics to comply with Germany's privacy laws.

One option is to anonymize the IP addresses of our users. It looks like the only effect is that some of the Geo reports will become less accurate, but would love to hear from those who have done it. I've read through the Google Analytics forums on the topic, and the info there is sparse.

I'm curious to know if anyone else has experience with this, and if you did it, what were the effects on your GA reporting or any other tools or technologies used on your site? Is this a non-issue, or are there pitfalls we need to consider?

Thanks!

Hi Kate,

Nifty quiz and flowchart! Thanks for sharing it. All the countries targeted are English-speaking, though further expansion to non-English speaking countries is planned for 2015. Here are the answers to the questions:

1. Does your business/product/content change in different countries?

A: Not really. 90% of the products are available in all three countries, and only one country is currently lacking the remaining 10%, and it will start selling those products there in 2015.

2. Would it make sense to an international visitor to see different site content? (ex. currency, localization, etc.)

A: Currency - yes. Otherwise, not really.

3. Do you have the resources to differentiate the content?

A: Not currently. This is a set of branded products, and the product descriptions use extensive "on-brand" language.

4. Are there multiple official languages for any of these countries?

A: Yes, Canada's official languages are English and French. There is no French version currently available.

5. Do you plan on offering the site content in all official languages?

A: Next six months - no. Late 2015 - maybe.

Going through the quiz, if I answer:

1. No, 2. Yes, 3. No

This is the recommendation:

Your International Strategy is:

Translate Only

1. Don’t machine translate, while manual translation is costly, it’s the best for your goals.
2. Put your HREFLANG in XML sitemaps.
3. Use the Language Meta tag for Bing translation targeting.
4. Don’t use a ccTLD. That is for Geo-Targeting only.

Aside from the manual translation portion, do you think #2 and #3 are still the best solutions for this situation?

Thanks for your help!

Hello!

I have a site that serves three English-speaking countries, and is using subfolders for each country version:

• United Kingdom: https://site.com/uk/
• Canada: https://site.com/ca/
• United States & other English-speaking countries: https://site.com/en/

The site displayed is dependent on where the user is located, and users can also change the country version by using a drop-down flag navigation element in the navigation bar. If a user switches versions using the flag, the first URL of the new language version includes a language parameter in the URL, like:

• https://site.com/uk/blog?language=en-gb

In the Moz crawl diagnostics report, this site is getting dinged for lots of duplicate content because the crawler is finding both versions of each country's site, with and without the language parameter.

However, the site has rel="canonical" tags set up on both URL versions and none of the URLs containing the "?language=" parameter are getting indexed.

So...my questions:

1. Are the Duplicate Title and Content errors found by the Moz crawl diagnostic really an issue?

2. If they are, how can I best clean this up?

Additional notes: the site currently has no sitemaps (XML or HTML), and is not yet using the hreflang tag. I intend to create sitemaps for each country version, like:

• .com/en/sitemap.xml
• .com/ca/sitemap.xml
• .com/uk/sitemap.xml

I thought about putting a 'nofollow' tag on the flag navigation element, but since no sitemaps are in place I didn't want to accidentally cut off crawler access to alternate versions.

Thanks for your help!

I agree with Oleg; either option won't make a significant difference for SEO - but if you plan on fleshing out the individual restaurant content by adding other pages (e.g. /locationname/menu/, /locationname/reviews/) then I would go with the /locationname/catering/ option.

Yahoo recently changed how they process searches, and searches are now all done through a secure server.

This article goes into more detail: http://searchengineland.com/yahoo-search-goes-secure-182343

"By default, searches on Yahoo.com are now done through a secure server. That means more protection for searchers but less data for search marketers about how they are receiving traffic. Most visits from Yahoo done via search will appear as if someone came to a site directly. As a result, Yahoo’s apparent popularity as a traffic driving source will appear to plunge."

More traffic from Yahoo will now appear as "direct" instead of from Yahoo. Perhaps you've seen an increase in direct traffic?

Anyone know of any medical or health-related sites that have widely implemented medical schema types?

For example: MedicalCode, MedicalTest, MedicalSignorSymptom, etc. and others listed here: http://schema.org/MedicalEntity

I've reviewed the examples on schema.org, but it would he helpful to see some live examples in the wild.

Thanks!

Hi Thomas,

Thanks for responding. I checked out awe.sm, and unfortunately they do not yet support LinkedIn and don't have an estimated timeline for when it will be enabled on their product roadmap.

I use HubSpot with another client, and will check out their social capabilities. I love the ease of creating landing pages on HubSpot, though find their reporting clunky and hard to manage.

Sprout looks like a great option - the can pull in data from Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Will check them out further.

Thanks again!

Can anyone recommend a social analytics tool/service that integrates analytics data from Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn?

I'm looking for one place to manage all the data from these individual analytics platforms. So the service would be one where the subscriber would need to provide their account credentials from each platform, and the data would be rolled up into a unified dashboard.Thanks!

I agree with David K. too - where are sales dropping and when did the trend begin? Check your conversion tracking to make sure it is set up and tracking properly. You an also write in to AdWords Support via the 'Help' link and ask them to confirm your conversion tracking is working correctly too.

Tip for using Sitelinks: set them at the ad group level, and use the primary keyword for that ad group as the first sitelink. You need to set the sitelinks to go to different URLs than the primary destination URL.

Example: If you ad group is structured around 'Prince George Christening Photos', make the first sitelink be the same phrase. Good CTRs.

Serendipitous timing - this article was posted yesterday about using mark-up, and how Open Graph and Schema.org are used, and why to use both:

Facebook Open Graph serves its purpose well, but it doesn’t provide the detailed information search engines need to improve the user experience. A single web page may have many components, and it may talk about more than one thing. Even if you mark up your content for Facebook Open Graph, schema.org provides an additional way to provide more detail about particular entities on the page.

http://searchengineland.com/schema-org-7-things-for-seos-to-consider-post-hummingbird-172163

Thanks, Craig. Do you know if any of the OG and schema tags would duplicate or conflict? I see a lot of documentation about using one or the other, but not how to use both harmoniously.

Thanks Keri, interesting example. While the GE Healthcare site is more commercial in intent, I like how they've treated the share functionality using the node icon. Subtle, yet shareable

I haven't checked in depth, the regulations are with the FDA and they aren't the most up-to-date with social media practices! No competitors are using OG yet, but their sites are also very under-optimized.

Josh,

You might also look at the organic search traffic coming from Bing, since they still share their keyword data. It sounds like this client doesn't have a lot of organic search traffic, but if the site hasn't changed much recently you could review a longer time period - like six months - and see which keywords drove organic visits via Bing.

You can then extrapolate the Bing data to estimate what keywords might be driving a lot of volume through Google.

Agree with Craig about looking at the GA 'Top Pages' report too.

I have a client who for regulatory reasons cannot engage in any social media: no Twitter, Facebook, or Google+ accounts. No social sharing buttons allowed on the site. The industry is medical devices.

We are in the process of redesigning their site, and would like to include structured markup wherever possible. For example, there are lots of schema types under MedicalEntity: http://schema.org/MedicalEntity

Given their lack of social media (and no plans to ever use it), does it make sense to incorporate OG tags at all? Or should we stick exclusively to the schemas documented on schema.org?

Thanks Simon, agree analyzing site analytics is critical to understanding where and what to improve.

Hi Robert,

Thank you, excellent suggestions! Will definitely utilize visitor flow in GA and give extra attention to using structured markups.

Thanks!

Agree with Jesse, using GA Event Tracking will help you track clicks on the mobile button. Within GA, you can slice and dice the information a few ways to see mobile users exclusively.

One option is to use the "Advanced Segments" feature to view "Mobile Traffic" and then drill down via the Content > Events > Top Events report.

I'm psyched - a client has just approved a complete redesign of their site! Feel like a have a little bag of gold in my hand, and want to spend it wisely.

My question to you, fellow Mozzers, is what elements would you make sure to include a site to make it as optimized as possible?

A few details about the site:

1. It is an informational site, designed to generate leads for a medical product. No products for sale, no e-commerce functionality needed.

2. The site has approximately 250 pages. Last site update was in 2009.

3. Videos are an important part of their marketing strategy.

In addition to shortening their URL structure (some URLs have 6-7 folders, ugh), I plan to utilize schemas and incorporate mobile responsive design.

What other areas would you prioritize for optimization?

Thanks,

Allie

Update from Moz Support this morning - this is a known bug and engineers are working to fix.

Is anyone else having trouble getting results from the Keyword Difficulty Tool today?

I submitted 20 keywords for basic analysis, and it has been pending for almost an hour. I restarted my machine, logged in and out - no change.

I pulled a few hundred keywords successfully yesterday. Does anyone know if there is a limit to keywords pulled within a 24-hour timeframe?

Thanks!

Thanks grasshopper!

No; site B is using Spry, a now defunct Adobe framework: http://blogs.adobe.com/dreamweaver/2012/08/update-on-adobe-spry-framework-availability.html

Site A uses ExpressionEngine.

A client (Website A) has allowed one of their franchisees to use some of the content from their site on the franchisee site (Website B). This franchisee lifted the content word for word, so - my question is how to best establish that Website A is the original author?

Since there is a business relationship between the two sites, I'm thinking of requiring Website B to add a rel=canonical tag to each page using the duplicated content and referencing the original URL on site A.

Will that work, or is there a better solution?

This content is primarily informational product content (not blog posts or articles), so I'm thinking rel=author may not be appropriate.

Would you recommend the rel=canonical tag for other page types as well, like informational pages?

For example, Website B has been given permission by the content-creating Website A to use A's original content on B's site. Should site B be required to include the rel=canonical tag on each URL where they are using copied content?

The content still exists on Website A - is using rel=canonical the best way to ensure they continue to get credit for it?