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What is currently taking place is that in the US I am competing with my international english website for top spot and the international english website often wins. I was hoping that I could assign international targetting to each and that the effort would help Google point users to the most relavent content but according to https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/62399?hl=en:

"This setting is only for geographic data. If you're targeting users in different locations—for example, if you have a site in French that you want users in France, Canada, and Mali to read—don't use this tool to set France as a geographic target. A good example of where it would be useful is for a restaurant website: if the restaurant is in Canada, it's probably not of interest to folks in France. But if your content is in French and is of interest to people in multiple countries/regions, it's probably better not to restrict it."

So, to answer my previous question it looks like this will often lock the results into the country.

Thank you for your answer. In our case the following applies:

"If your website is using different folders with gTLDS (example.com/de;example.com/es;example.com/fr) - yes you can verify them and setup to specific geo-location."

For now, we won't be implementing HREFLANG tags but I am considering assigning each website in Webmaster Tools an International Targeting setting. If I assign this value, for example the french website to France, I shouldn't necessarily see the French website show up less in, let's say, Canadian French searches, correct?

Our company services multiple regions. Our website is setup for France, International (en-gb), Spanish, United States and China. The websites share a common template and format and menu tree but each has unique content.

Should I use a single Google Webmaster Tools site for all of these or establish each of them as a unique website?

Thank you for the detailed response Danial. Our US website only does business in the Americas (Canada, US, Latin America) which is the reason that setting it as the International site does not make sense to us.

Taking the feedback in it seems that I could get by with the following. Please correct me as needed.

America's Website: www.website.com/en-us
 - hreflang US: en-us
 - hreflang Canada: en-ca
 - Can I have multiple defaults for a single URL when not using x-default?

International English Website: www.website.com/en-gb
 - hreflang: en

French Website: www.website.com/fr-fr
 - hreflang: fr-fr or fr

Chinese Website: www.website.com/zh-hans
 - hreflang: zh-hans

Thanks Tom. Two of these articles I have stumbled upon in my research of hreflang tags and they are filled with very helpful information.

After breezing through the articles rather quickly it seems that if I add the en-us hreflang tags AND the en-gb tags, the following is likely and somewhat obvious to occur:

1. US Searches
    - EN-US results should get priority followed by EN-GB
2. UK Searches
    - EN-GB results should get priority followed by EN-US
3. For search outside of both the US and UK Google will revert to showing the most relevant result without bias to the hreflang tag.

My conclusion is that for EN-GB maybe I should not set hreflang so since we do not necessarily want the results to favor the UK - we want these results to populate searches for everywhere except the US.

Thoughts and feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Our website is configured like so:

MyCompany.com Websites

• /en-gb - International English
• /fr-fr
• /zh-hans
• /m/en-us - North American site - completely different structure

The first three bullets share a Drupal instance where the North American site uses a different PHP framework and has it's own unique look and structure.

Currently none of the websites have hreflang tags which means that sometimes when searching in the US the en-gb results creep in. I want to turn on hreflang tags for the international english website (en-gb) but my fear is that Google may not return the en-gb results to English speaking users if they are not in the UK. We want these results to appear for anyone who is not in the US who speaks English.

Just a note, Canada is not included in this since they'll be added to the North American site soon and will have their own hreflang tags.

Between  MOZ's last scan of my site and the one before my domain authority dropped from 35 to 29. I'm not sure where to begin investigating this and how I can leverage MOZ in this case.

Any guidance would be greatly appreciated.

I'm considering implementing the following: http://lnavigation.demo.aheadworks.com/index.php/electronics-computers/electronics.html?___SID=U&mode=grid.

My concern is that it doesn't seem to align with Making AJAX Application Crawlable. However, the pagination, Grid/List toggle, etc.. appear to have their full HREF links intact and when accessed at that URL the appropriate, matching data is displayed. So, it seems that if Google can see the full URL path then it should be crawlable, correct? I'm not very concerned about the filters being SEO friendly.

Hoping the Moz community will offer some helpful insight. Thank you!

Thanks for the feedback Ryan. I may not have been very clear in my response - I know I was bouncing all over the place. usa cannot be my base URL for scalability reasons. Slowly we'll start adopting other countries websites so the top-level subdirectory needs to be broad enough to not restrict us to a specific part of the world.

My intitial thought is to opt for something like website.com/M/us-en or website.com/-/us-en where the base directory is short in hopes that it doesn't dilute the value of SEO terms later in the URL such as website.com/M/us-en/store/product-name.html. Is that something to worry about?

I've been pushing hard to get our Americas site (DA 34) integrated with our higher domain authority (DA 51) international website. Currently our international website is setup in the following format...

• website.com/us-en/
• website.com/fr-fr/
• etc...

The problem that I am facing is that I need my development framework installed in it's own directory. It cannot be at the root of the website (website.com) since that is where the other websites (us-en, fr-fr, etc.) are being generated from. Though we will have control of /us-en/ after the integration I cannot use that as the website main directory since the americas website is going to be designed for scalability (eventually adopting all regions and languages) so it cannot be region specific. What we're looking at is website.com/[base]/us-en. I'm afraid that if base has any length to it in terms of characters it is going to dilute the SEO value of whatever comes after it in the URL (website.com/[base]/us-en/store/product-name.html).

Any recommendations?

Preferred version is already set to WWW. Also, all canonicals point to the same URL and I do not have more than one per page.

My guess is that in time Google will realize that my duplicate content is not actually duplicate content, but in the meantime I'd like to get your guys feedback.

The reporting in Webmaster Tools looks something like this.

Duplicates

• /url1.html
• /url2.html
• /url3.html
• /category/product/url.html
• /category2/product/url.html

url3.html is the true canonical page in the list above._ url1.html,_ and url2.html are old URLs that 301 to url3.html. So, it seems my bases are covered there.

_/category/product/url.html _and _/category2/product/url.html _ do not redirect. They are the same page as url3.html. Each of the category URLs has a canonical URL of url3.html in the header. So, it seems my bases are covered there as well.

Can I expect Google to pick up on this? Why wouldn't it understand this already?

I'm redesigning our company ecommerce site and need to test render an infinite scroller to ensure that it is as SEO friendly as possible. My problem is that I cannot view it in Webmaster Tools since I am blocking the site from crawlers using robots.txt. I know I could simply unblock Google temporarily but I really would rather not make my dev site available to search engine crawlers.

Can we put a percentage on 301 link dilution? We can't stay on the current domain so the question becomes what is the recovery time of newdomain.com (with Webmaster Tool site transfer) vs us.internationalcompany.com?

P.S. Thank you both for the continued responses.

1. The company outsourced the website to a 3rd party development company. My team has been told by the corporate office that the dev company owns the code and servers that the website resides on and we're simply using what they were paid to develop for us. To get the access that we want we'd have to buy the code and from what I've gathered it won't come cheap.
2. That sounds comforting. So in this scenario a strong emphasis on establishing proper 301's and maintaining page authority should leave us in a better position than when we started?

Currently our corporate website and store website are under two domains.

• internationalcompany.com (DA: 51; Corporate Website)
• companystore.com (DA: 34; US Store Website)

We were hoping to piggyback on the corporate website domain authority by moving our store to internationalcompany.com/store and when we learned that couldn't happen we opted for us.internationalcompany.com/store. The reason we are leaning towards the route of us.internationalcompany.com is because it is likely that we will be taking over the US branch of the corporate website so we thought it better that the store be a sub address of that.

My main concerns...

1. From what I have gathered it seems that I can't do a change of address to a subdomain within Webmaster Tools - I'd have to have access to internationalcompany.com which won't happen soon. So, is a 301 just as good in this case?
2. As a subdomain, we won't actually reap the benefits of the domain authority of the parent domain will we?
3. Are we just as well off considering a new domain and asking that regional tags be established on the current internationalcompany.com so that the content does not interfere with our SEO efforts?

This is a broad explanation for a complicated issue. Please ask any question that may help clarify.

Ray,

Thanks for the continued support. There are a few that I am using to measure organic search where the numbers are off by 1-2% but I think I can give you a more simple example and still enable you to help me out. One email report simply uses the regex (email|bronto) for filtering source/medium. The conversion numbers for this filter come out similiarly - 1-2% more than what Google shows for email conversions within the LND attribution model tool.

1. Is there a simple way to have Analytics only return data provided in default groups (Organic, Email, Direct, etc.) rather than using regex filters?
2. Is it possible to change the attribution model outside of conversion tab for private dashboards, etc..?

Are you saying that LND is the default way of measuring conversions in GA? When looking at a report that displays conversions over a time frame those numbers are just slightly different that what LND shows for that same conversion over the same time frame.

I was under the impression that GA credits the source with a conversion if it is the source for the current session but it seems that if the user returns later that the source may still be credited. Is this the case? How long does GA credit a source?

Hi Ray,

Your response is very helpful and insightful. Will you take a look at my other comment and offer additional insight? I'm hoping that product category page SEO is negligible enough that I can squeeze by without it impacting my design.

Tim, I have implemented product and recipe schema previously. So, it seems that I may have nothing to worry about on this front.

You're correct, we do currently link to products included in our recipes. I suppose you put me at ease though as I do not know enough about SEO to determine whether or not other-category information causes Google to interpret our sites purpose differently.

On another note, you did spark a thought. We are linking our products from the recipe page but those links are hidden behind a products tab. Can you offer insight into how beneficial it would be to not "hide" that information in terms of SEO?

In your experience, do categories carry much ranking power in terms of internal links? This is the only page that concerns me in terms of SEO. My products will scrollable horizontally causing much of the listed information and image to be hidden. To me, it seems that all that Google can take away from a category page in terms of SEO is that it is where a particular product falls under - but can't my breadcrumbs do the same (my canonical URLs do not include category).

We sell food products that, of course, can be used in recipes. As a convenience to our customer we have made a large database of recipes available. We have far more recipes than products. My concern is that Google may start viewing us as a recipe website rather than a food product website.

My initial thought was to subdomain the recipes (recipe.domain.com) but that seems silly given that you aren't really leaving our website and the layout of the website doesn't change with the subdomain.

Currently our URL structure is...

• domain.com/products/product-name.html
• domain.com/recipes/recipe-name.html

We do rank well for our products in general searches but I want to be sure that our recipe setup isn't detrimental.

I am designing a new category for my website. Instead of a grid or list view there is an additional (default) view that implements Owl Carousel.

What this means for SEO is that there is going to be a lot of dynamically loaded content and I am not quite sure how to handle that. By default all the user (and Google) will see is product images. Once the product image is clicked more details are shown about the product.

Are there any articles that any of you can refer me to on Googles recommendation for handling dynamic content?

My initial thought was that with a decent site map and the other available views this wouldn't be a big deal, especially since my categories tend to bog down SEO with links and repetitive terms in the product name (i.e. Flavored This, Flavored That, Flavored Other Term) as well as I'm unsure if I need the "juice" passed through my category product links.. but I'll leave it to the community to confirm that.

I am looking through my crawl diagnostics and one of my errors states that a page has a duplicate title. My problem is that I do not know how to find the duplicate.

Any advice here?