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We're in the process of implementing hreflang markup for Canadian & US versions of a website.

We've found that about half of our Canadian traffic has browsers that are set to en-us (instead of en-ca, as would be expected). Should we be concerned that Canadians with en-us browser settings will be shown the US versions of the website (as the hreflang would markup 'en-us' for the US version of the page).

Our immediate thoughts are that since they're likely to be searching from Google.ca and would also have Canadian IP addresses, that this won't be an issue. Does anyone have any other thoughts here?

Thanks for your response. Here is some more information about the issue -

Are your link hidden in flash or java?  **No **

Is the page an iframe? No

A little more information about this site:

• Is indexed by Google, successful Screaming Frog crawl
• Recently converted from http to https (sitewide)

Hey guys,

We've done a crawl and none of our internal links are showing up. Are there any on-page factors that would prevent Moz from being able to detect our internal links?

Thanks!

A client of ours recently had a new site built and made the switch to HTTPS. We made sure to redirect all of the HTTP pages to HTTPS and submitted a new sitemap to Google. GWT says the sitemap was submitted successfully but only 4 pages have been indexed where there should be over 2000. This has led to a plummet of organic traffic and we can't find the issue. Has anyone else had issues/success with doing a HTTPS switch that knows how to fix this problem?

We were tracking the old domain as well and were expecting to see roughly the same amount of traffic be added to the new domain. We did find that it was an error with the switch to HTTPS which we weren't notified of, but we submitted a new sitemap for the HTTPS and the site only has 4 pages indexed, where there should be over 2,000. Any idea why that might be happening?

We've recently 301 redirected one of our client's domains to their new website and the strange thing is, we aren't seeing an increase in traffic in analytics. You would expect the traffic to increase roughly by the traffic volume from the old domain. There were a few hundred redirects and we tested a large sample and the redirects have been implemented properly. Is there something that we did incorrectly in our implementation of the domain redirect? Or is there something else that we need to do in Analytics to properly track those redirects?

I think you can set it to public or private (logged-in only) and even put a price-tag on it if you want. So yes setting it to private would help to eliminate the dup content issue, but it would also hide the links that I'm using to link-build.

I would imagine that since this guide would link back to our original site that it would be no different than if someone were to copy the content from our site and link back to us with it, thus crediting us as the original source. Especially if we ensure to index it through GWMT before submitting to other platforms. Any good resources that delve into that?

What about this instance:

(A) I made an "ultimate guide to X" and posted it on my site as individual HTML pages for each chapter

(B) I made a PDF version with the exact same content that people can download directly from the site

(C) I uploaded the PDF to sites like Scribd.com to help distribute it further, and build links with the links that are embedded in the PDF.

Would those all be dup content? Is (C) recommended or not?

I'm currently doing an audit for an online auto parts store and am having a hard time wrapping my head around their duplicate content issue. The current set up is this:

• The catalogue starts with the user selecting their year of vehicle
• They then choose their brand (so each of the year pages have listed every single brand of car, creating duplicate content)
• They then choose their model of car and then the engine
• And then this takes them to a page listing every type/category of product they sell (so each and every model type/engine size has the exact same content!) This is amounting to literally thousands of pages being seen as duplicates

It's a giant mess. Is using rel=canonical the best thing to do? I'm having a hard time seeing a logical way of structuring the site to avoid this issue.

Anyone have any ideas?

You could just rel="canonical" to all the US pages you want to out-rank the UK pages.

I've noticed with hosting multiple websites on a single account you end up having your main site in the root public_html folder, but when you create subfolders for new website it actually creates a duplicate website:

eg.

http://kohnmeat.com/ is being hosted on laubeau.com's server.

So you end up with a duplicate website: http://laubeau.com/kohn/

Anyone know the best way to prevent this from happening? (i.e. canonical? 301? robots.txt?) Also, maybe a specific 'how-to' if you're feeling generous

• It's an information resource that was built with the intention of being of value to prospective salon owners. (similar to how the seomoz guide is of value to prospective SEO's). The reader will likely not be an immediate customer, but may remember us down the road when they are ready to purchase our products. (similar to readers of seomoz guide).

• It will be hosted on the site we sell our salon-related products from. The goal is to use it as link-bait. Links are top priority.. traffic is just a bonus.

I had the same situation a year ago and didn't bother waiting. I just made the switch and 301'd the old site to the new one. We took a minor hit in rankings for about 2 weeks, and then ever since, we've been ranking quite well. I'd make the switch now.

Our team just finished a massive piece of content.. very similar to the SEOmoz Begginer's Guide to SEO, but for the salon/aesthetics industry.

We have a beautifully designed 10 Chapter, 50-page PDF which will require an email form submission to download. Each chapter is optimized for specific phrases, and will be separate HTML pages that are publicly available... very much like how this is setup:

http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo

My question is, what's the best way to promote this thing? Any specific examples would be ideal.

I think blogger outreach would likely be the best approach, but is there any specific way that I should be doing this?.. Again a specific start-to-finish example is what I'm looking for here. (I've read almost every outreach post on moz, so no need to reference them)

Anyone care to rattle off a list of ideas with accompanying examples? (even if they seem like no-brainers.. I'm all ears)

I have a client who is ranking #1 for every term related to "bathroom renovations (main city)". They have now started to take on dealers/franchisees in neighbouring cities, and each location would now like to be ranking for THEIR cities.

Is it better to use bathcompany.com/location or location.bathcompany.com?

Considerations:

• The site has the address and phone number of the main location listed in the header, so if we do /location you will still see the main NAP.

• Using /location, If someone browses beyond the location landing page, they will venture into pages that target the main city (ex. "Bath Remodelling (Main City)")

• Using a subdomain will mean that we will need to duplicate content such as their image gallery, and we will have to create new content for their service pages or risk duplicate content. (ex. "shower remodelling (city)")

Questions

• By using /location they will benefit from the strength of the subdomain, while using a new location-based subdomain will this mean we will have to start from scratch in terms of domain authority / link-juice?

• Will the NAP in the header affect the ranking of these location pages?

Awesome Chan, thanks. That was my thought as well. Most difficult part will be determining how to get that script in place.

Any chance you can spend a little time writing it out?

My guess is that we should be doing a rel canonical tag on all the article.cfm?intDocID=22572 type pages, that would then direct the bots to our /bc-blazes-construction-trail. But what's the easiest way to do that across the whole site?

My client has several articles and pages that have 2 different URLs

For example:

/bc-blazes-construction-trail

is the same article as:

/article.cfm?intDocID=22572

I was not sure if this was duplicate content or not ...

Or if I should be putting "/article.cfm" into the robots.txt file or not..

if anyone could help me out, that would be awesome!

Thanks

Miriam,

I have a similar situation where:

• My client is a Windows Installation company

• He is located 30-45 minutes from ~15 cities with 50,000+ population/each

• He is currently ranking well for the largest city nearby (2.5M population), but wishes to rank higher for these other smaller locations.

Since there's about 15 cities that he will be wanting to rank for, the only way I could really add those cities to his other pages is to include a list of "locations we service" on each page, otherwise it won't read well for the users (i.e. "We will come to you in city1, city2, city3,...,city14, city15").

My initial thought was to build out a single page for each of the locations he wants to rank for, and then build deep links to those pages. Obviously I would make the content as unique as possible, but there would certainly be some overlap.

So the question is.. do I try to rank my main pages for all the locations, or do I make new pages for each location.. And, if it's the former, how do I go about doing that? If I list the locations like I mentioned, then I'm only getting the location keyword on there once, and it won't be in the H-tags, title, or multiple times throughout the page.

Thanks for those analogies, they helped. I guess the answer, like almost every other SEO answer is... 'it depends'. That's interesting that you say you don't do link building though. Now I have a few questions about that

• Do you still have good success by just doing content?

• How much content do you usually need to produce before you start seeing good rankings for shorter-tail keywords?

• Would this same strategy work in a local setting (ex. 'insurance London, Ontario')? or is it mainly for global/national sites, where location of visitors is irrelevant?

• How do you promote the content that you've created?

• Finally, do you work on multiple sites, or just for one company? You seem to be quite respected on moz, yet I can't find out a damn thing about you haha. (feel free to PM if you don't want it splattered all over the public forum)

Appreciate the help!

So here's my question/scenario.. When it comes to link-building, I'm noticing a trend that goes like this:

If you have a website like www.insurancelondonontario.com and you want to rank highly for the target phrase 'insurance london ontario', you need to get links with that anchor-text pointing to the index page, which is the page you want to rank for that keyword.

But what I'm noticing, is that a lot of link builders use a strategy where they create a good piece of content.. like "10 Ways to Decrease your Car Insurance Premiums" within the blog, and then build links to that article since it's easier as it's a good piece of content.

My question is.. how much can this really help you to rank for 'insurance london ontario' if all your doing is building links to that blog article, and not the main page? I know it helps the overall domain authority, but is it enough to get you ranking for your goal phrase, or is it just a supporting method?

I deal with budgets that small and have good success with them too..

http://www.atmosmarketing.com/work/case-study-seo-success-stories/

All you need is:

• A really good keyword research report (this is important because you don't want to target the wrong keywords with such a small budget)

• Some basic on-page optimization (don't need to spend a fortune here, and most of the time I include this in my basic pricing)

• Continual link building.. this is really where most/all of the money goes..

Feel free to contact me at corey@atmosmarketing.com if you need a quote or some help

Absolutely I would. If your entire link profile was made up of these sites that would be a different situation. But if it has a high DA/PA, and it's in a related niche, then I definitely would.

I have a list of keywords I'm trying to target and they are essentially different variations of each other:

Example:

blue yankees baseball hat

yankees blue baseball hat

yankees baseball hat in blue

Should I be targeting all these on the same page, or should I be making a new page for each one?

Thanks Mozzers!

Did I stump the moz community?

I have a client that wants to rank for a keyword phrase that has many permutations..

ex. "Alaska Hill Country Resort", "Hill Country Resort Alaska", "Hill Country Alaska Resort"

But I'm wondering if I should target these all on the same page or not.

I'm assuming all of these permutations are actually valid searches because I did my keyword research for 'exact match' keywords and got results like this.. (let me know if I'm missing something here, or if this sounds right)

• [Alaska Hill Country Resort] - 230 Local Searches
• [Hill Country Resort Alaska] - 140 Local Searches
• [Hill Country Alaska Resort] - 30 Local Searches

The phrase we're targeting is their main keyword phrase, so I've chosen their home-page as the page to rank for this phrase.

My thought is to optimize for the most popular phrase (ex. "Alaska Hill Country Resort"), and sprinkle in the other phrases throughout the copy. Next I would run a link-building campaign targeting the main phrase first.. then the next phrase, and so on, so that my anchor text is more heavily focused on the more popular terms, but I would also make sure to include the less popular terms.

Do you think this is the best way to go about this? Do I really need to make individual pages for each of the permutations, or is it okay to target them all on one page since they are essentially the same keyword?