Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi all, I'm working with a company that has 3 x websites all on separate WordPress platforms.

One is at .com, the others .fr and .de - they are essentially very similar.

I have suggested that it is worth exploring setting all of these websites up on the .com domain with country-specific directories to combine their authority and help all 3 websites naturally rank due to combining incoming links, authority etc.

Quesitons:

To ensure each country has control of their site, would you maintain a separate install of WP at each directory, i.e: .com/fr/ and .com/de or would you put it all on the same WP?

Would you go down this route of combining all 3 sites onto one domain with country-specific directories? What are the pitfalls?

Hi all, I have a site that is a year old, we have been building backlinks organically - probably around 50 or so - then almost overnight we had100s of spammy links. Screenshot here: https://ibb.co/cijiub

My questions:

1. Should I disavow these?
2. What happens if I don't disavow these?
3. Can I work out where they came from?
4. If I disavow a few of them, is this a token offering to the Google Gods that will lower my risk of being penalised?

Thank you.

cijiub

I'm keen to know, too. Thanks.

Thank you - so am I right in saying the quote above says it doesn't matter whether the site is .ie or .com - it will not be detrimental to its ability to be shown in any version of Google search?

Hi all, I am working on a .ie website and I was under the understanding that if you have a regional domain, like .ie you will limited to being shown in a search engine like google.ie

When I go to International Targeting in Google SEarch Console it says the site is associated with: Ireland

Am I limiting my ability to rank well in worldwide Google searches with this domain and if so, how can I counter this?

Many thanks.

Have I finally found a conundrum that the great Moz brain can't solve?

Any thoughts, Mozzers?

Hi all, it's my understanding that 'doorway pages' are bad practice. However, when googling for the services that our company offers, along the lines of '[service] [location]', businesses turn up in Google SERPs that outrank us purely with doorway pages.

Take this as an example:

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=seo+dorking

One of the results is this company who seem to rank for pretty much every town modifier:

https://prioritypixels.co.uk/seo-agency-dorking/

If you look at their sitemaps you'll see thousands of these pages:

https://prioritypixels.co.uk/page-sitemap16.xml

All the content is slightly different but broadly speaking it is very similar. It seems that, in the short term, we can't compete with this company but we could if we employed the same tactics.

So my question is: is what they are doing really risking a penalty?

b1Lpp5

Brilliant, thanks Gaston

Thanks for the reply Roman, I probably wasn't clear. I'll try to clarify:

Say there is a websiteA.com which was established for years but then was taken down and hasn't been live for a couple of years. If I bought website A then rolled lots of its content into a new website, let's called it websiteB.com would I be risking any penalties on the new domain?

Thanks.

Hi all, I'm in the process of setting up a new website.

I have found various old websites covering a similar topic and I'm interested in purchasing two of these websites for their content as it is very good, despite those sites struggling to make ends meet.

One of these websites is still live, the other one hasn't been live for 2 years.

Let's say I bought these websites for their content, then used that content on my new domain and made sure the two websites where this content came from were offline, would I run a risk of getting penalised? Does Google hold onto content from a website even if it is now offline?

Hey thanks for your replies, excellent advice which I am following. The company is: Marlin Marine Services S.L. - any insight you can offer is appreciated.

Hi all, I've optimised an existing GMB listing that has been in place for over a year. The client is a yacht/boat broker and marine repair outfit based in Mallorca.

When I search for terms that they 'should' be ranking for on Google and on a Maps search, they are nowhere to be found, yet their listing does show when you type in their company name.

I've read lots of Local SEO guides and followed their advice but I'm not sure what I'm meant to do next?

Hi there, at the bottom of my website's blog posts the rel=prev and rel=next tags are used on links that point to the previous article that was posted and the next article that was posted. Often these articles are not 'linked' in terms of their content or message.

Is this the correct use of rel=next/prev and if not what are the possible negative effects.

Many thanks.

Scenario:

An automotive dealer lists cars for sale on their website. The descriptions are very good and in depth at 1,200 words per car. However chunks of the copy are copied from car review websites and weaved into their original copy.

Q1: This is flagged in copyscape - how much of an issue is this for Google?

Q2: The same stock with the same copy is fed into a popular car listing website - the dealer's website and the classifieds website often rank in the top two positions (sometimes the dealer on top other times the classifieds site). Is this a good or a bad thing? Are you risking being seen as duplicating/scraping content?

Thank you.

Hi there, what are your thoughts on word count for a content site vs. an ecommerce site.

A lot of content sites have no problem pushing out 500+ words per page, which for me is a decent amount to help you get traction. However on ecommerce sites, a lot of the time the product description only needs to be sub-100 words and the total word count on the page comes in at under 300 words, a lot of that could be considered duplicate.

So what are your views? Do ecommerce sites still need to have a high word count on the product description page to rank better?

Thanks all - but what do you do with the 'old' http profile in GSC. Do you remove the sitemap, delete the profile? Alter any settings?

Thanks.

Hi all, I have moved my site from http to https.

I current have two profiles in Google Search Console:

http://mysite.com
http://www.mysite.com

Do I need to set up the same but with https and if so, what do I then do with the http profiles? Do I delete them? Or just remove the sitemaps? Confused.

Hi there, I'd like to know how to improve a business listing so that it shows up not only when people type in the company name but also when they type in keywords related to that company.

Say the company is a yacht broker based in Portsmouth. How would I get their listing to show in Google Maps when people search for: 'yacht broker' (when Google knows their location is near Portsmouth) and 'yacht broker portsmouth' or 'yacht broker hampshire'.

Many thanks.

Thank you. However this is happening for every URL on the site. How would I fix this?

Hi there, I can access the following site with http and https making me think that there will be a duplicate content issue. How can I work out if this is the case?

http://ionadebarge.com

https://ionadebarge.com

Thanks.

Of course! Thank you. It's been a long week...

Hi all,

I'm working with a client who has various URL variations to display their content in High Contrast and Low Contrast. It feels like quite an old way of doing things.

The URLs look like this:

domain.com/bespoke-curtain-making/ - Default URL
domain.com/bespoke-curtain-making/?style=hc - High Contrast page
domain.com/bespoke-curtain-making/?style=lc - Low Contrast page

My questions are:

• Surely this content is duplicate content according to a search engine
• Should the different versions have a meta noindex directive in the header?
• Is there a better way of serving these pages?

Thanks.

Thanks for all the responses everyone and thanks Jewel for taking time to lay out that taxonomy.

So what you're saying is, it's better to have one page /whitening with all the different services in full, than to have:

/whitening/ - hub page H2s for each service and a paragraph on each with a link to more i.e.

Home Whitening Kit

with a link to:

/whitening/home-whitening-kit/ - full page with lots of in depth info, linking back to main hub page for other whitening services.

Thank you.

Hi all,

I'm working on a dentist's website and want some advice on the best way to lay out the navigation. I would like to know which structure will help the site work naturally. I feel the second example would be better as it would focus the 'power' around the type of treatment and get that to rank better.

.com/assessment/whitening
.com/assessment/straightening
.com/treatment/whitening
.com/treatment/straightening

or

.com/whitening/assessment
.com/straightening/assessment
.com/whitening/treatment
.com/straightening/treatment

Please advise, thanks.

Hi there, we are a retail business and we have invested in quality editorial content which sits in our Blog at ourwebsite.co.uk/blog/

The Blog links to the main site (an online store) and I want to track the 'value' of the blog by how many clicks the blog content generates back to the main store.

At the moment we're using this code on the end of every link in the Blog:

?utm_source=Blog&utm_medium=Widget&utm_campaign=FromBlog

Does this affect SEO and is there a better way of doing it? Thanks.

Hi all, I'm working on a site where when I crawl it with SF, SF doesn't pick up on the meta description (as in the source code it IS blank). However, the meta description has been set via the Yoast Wordpress plugin and it does exist in the source code and is shown in the SERPs.

The code looks like this:

<title>Dining Table and Chairs set</title>

So my question is: will this be affecting SEO and how the website is ranking if all the actual  are blank?

Thank you

Hi all, we run a furniture store and our results in Google.co.uk almost always use the page's content as the description in the search results, even though we have a correctly implemented meta description tag.

The rival's pages that rank above and below us almost always show the ranking page's meta description in Google's results page.

Our developer seems to think it's because we added the meta description tags long after the pages were first indexed by Google and he seems to think Google has "fixed" on the page content and is happy with that over our meta description ...but I've never heard of that before.

Thank you.

Hi all, we have a furniture business with two physical stores and one website, which has the ability to sell online but we hardly sell anything but we're just about to start Google PLA on a few products, let's say our website is at:

nicefurniture.co.uk

We have nicefurniture.co.uk/first-location and nicefurniture.co.uk/second-location set up with all the store info, a Google Map, contact info, etc. This is linked to from the footer on all pages.

Issue 1:

I have been told conflicting things about how to best set up our Google My Business page. One person says set the URL for both to our homepage, nicefurniture.co.uk and the other says point each GMB listing to the store location pages OR we should buy www.furniture-first-location.co.uk as our URL and point the GMB listing to that. To me, that doesn't make sense as we'd be spreading our domain equity with a new domain, surely?

Issue 2:

How do I get each GMB location to show up in Maps, etc when people search for 'furniture location' or even 'sofa location' or 'dining table location'? Would I need to optimize the store pages on our site?

Issue 3:

Years ago we did set up another URL, let's say nicefurniture-cornwall.co.uk and on it there are about 500 pages, all with links pointing to our main website. Google Search Console for our main website lists this other website as one of our top linking domains. Does that mean if we remove nicefurniture-cornwall.co.uk we'll risk a drop in rankings?

Many thanks for your input.

Hi all,

Let's say I have two websites: www.mywebsite.com and www.mywebsite.de - they share a lot of content but the main categories and URLs are almost always different.

Am I right in saying I can't just set the hreflang tag on every page of www.mywebsite.com to read:

rel='alternate' hreflang='de' href='http://mywebsite.de' />

That just won't do anything, right?

Am I also right in saying that the only way to use hreflang properly across two domains is to have a customer hreflang tag on every page that has identical content translated into German?

So for this page: www.mywebsite.com/page.html my hreflang tag for the german users would be:

<link < span="">rel='alternate' hreflang='de' href='http://mywebsite.de/page.html' /></link <>

Thanks for your time.

Can anyone else shed any light on this? Many thanks.

Hello, I work for a furniture business and I would like to set up a dashboard in Google Analytics to show a table for each of the 10 sections to show the most popular content, ie.

/Sofas
/Sofas/black-leather-sofa | 987 PVs
/Sofas/brown-leather-sofa | 782 PVs
/Sofas/classic-material-sofa | 636 PVs
etc.

/Beds
/Beds/king-size-bed | 900 PVs
etc

How would I go about doing this?

Thank you

Thanks for your reply. however the one issue I have is with 301 redirects - I have Googled but I don't think it is possible to do this with Blogspot.

If I were to backup all the content, then delete the Blogspot account, wait a month then repost some of the content back onto ourdomain.co.uk/blog/ would Google likely penalise that content?

Hi all, I work for a retailer and I've crawled our website with RankTracker for optimization suggestions.

The main suggestion is "Pages with excessive number of links: 4178"

The page with the largest amount of links has 634 links (627 internal, 7 external), the lowest 382 links (375 internal, 7 external).

However, when I view the source on any one of the example pages, it becomes obvious that the site's main navigation header contains 358 links, so every new page starts with 358 links before any content.

Our rivals and much larger sites like argos.co.uk appear to have just as many links in their main navigation menu.

So my questions are:

1. Will these excessive links really be causing us a problem or is it just 'good practice' to have fewer links
2. Can I use 'no follow' to stop Google etc from counting the 358 main navigation links
3. Is have 4000+ pages of your website all dumbly pointing to other pages a help or hindrance?
4. Can we 'minify' this code so it's cached on first load and therefore loads faster?

Thank you.

Hi there, I work for a furniture retailer in the UK and I have a question about ranking for search phrases.

Say I'm looking to rank for the keyword phrases: 'Tempur mattress' and 'Tempur mattress liverpool' and I have a category at: www.mysite.co.uk/tempur/ which list all of our mattresses, would I be better trying to optimize this page for those key phrases or would I be better generating a new page, say, www.mysite.co.uk/tempur-mattress-liverpool.html

Thank you for your input.

Hellooooo! Does anyone else have any thought on this? Thank you.

Hi Ruben thanks for your reply. Could you explain why those aren't good options and when you say redirect, what you mean by that? A 301 on all Blogspot content to ourwebsite.com/blog or something else?

Thank you.

Benjita.

Hi there, I work for a furniture retailer in the UK and I have a question about moving our blog.

We have had a blog at www.ourcompany.blogspot.co.uk since 2012 and it was last updated mid 2014. There are about 100 posts and the content is actually really good, not spammy in any way and not stuffed with links to our site. The content is essentially guides to buying the right furniture.

We have now launched blog functionaility on our website at www.ourcompany.co.uk/blog as I feel this is a better long-term solution to increasing site traffic and page rank.

I want to pick your brains on the best way to handle the old content.

• A: Copy all the Blogspot content across and back date it to the same date it was originally published and then delete the old Blogspot account? Or will Google see this as duplicate content.

• B: Backup all the Blogspot content now, delete the Blogspot account and then repost this content at a later date? Will this still be seen as duplicate content?

• something else.

Thanks for reading.

Hello, I work for a furniture retailer and I'm doing an audit of our digital presence and need a hand with our G+ pages. Thanks for reading!

• We are one company but with two shops, located about 10 miles apart.
• One shop has been established over 10 years, the other is roughly a year old.
• The shops are called: 'Our Company' and 'Our Company, Second Location'
• Each shop has its own website (which is confusing and we'll hopefully shortly revert back to just one)
• We currently have three Google+ profiles: the first G+ was set up a number of years ago and was set up as a personal page, not a business and it links to both shop's websites. The other two G+ pages appear to have been created when we created a Google Local listing for each shop.

My questions are:

• What is the best tool to handle all this info across the web? Bright Local looks good.

• Should I junk the original G+ profile? If I do, how will I know I won't remove any important stuff from Google?

• Should I keep 2 G+ profiles, one for each store or have 1 G+ profile and put both store's details in there. Or should I have 3 G+ profiles: 1 for our company name, and 1 for each of our 2 locations?

• When I search for 'Our Company', I only ever get our original company to show in the Google Local listing on the right hand side of search results. Our second shop is shown in 'People also search for'. Is this the best I can hope for? Is there any way to control this?

• Both of the G+ profiles that are linked to our Google Local listings have the original G+ URL. Should I customise this and if so, are there any naming conventions I should follow?

• What should we do with the (2?) G+ profiles for each shop? Both have currently got no content on them.

Thanks in advance for any tips and advice.

Hi there, I'm new to Moz. I work for a furniture retailer and I'm in the process of auditing our digital presence and improving how we appear on Google and therefore to our customers. I am working on our website's content and SEO, Google Local Listing, getting our products added to Google Shopping and updating our social media accounts, removing old accounts and improving current ones.

I'd like to know how to make the most of Moz. I have set our site up in Moz Pro but I'm unsure where to go next, so I was wondering if you'd be able to offer 5 tips on where to really get started.

Thank you.