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Thanks, valuable advice! I will put it to good use.

Thanks for your comment Dirk!

Rewriting the content would be the best case scenario. Do you think it's a absolute must to rewrite those words (let's say, because Google would els filter out the .be domain if it's a exact copy) or would it be an extra to make the website convert even better and add a extra trust signal to Google?

It would probably be a pain in the ass for this webshop to check all there product descriptions for any possible words to change. They would probably not launch the .be website if it would take them a week or two to go through all the pages.

Thanks for both of your opinions! Since this client is looking for the quickest fix possible, what is your opinion on the optional points:

• Crosslinking every page though a language flag or similar navigation in the header.
• Invest in gaining local .be backlinks

Do you think they are neccessary or add enough extra value to justify the extra costs (especialy for the extra backlinks)?

Hi Gianluca,

Your comment made me doubt my research. I started a new question about it. Do you have a minut to give your vision on my situation? I would really appreciate it.

https://moz.com/community/q/duplicated-content-multi-language-regional-websites

Best regards,

Bob

Hi Guys,

I know this question has been asked a lot, but I wanted to double check this since I just read a comment of Gianluca Fiorelli (https://moz.com/community/q/can-we-publish-duplicate-content-on-multi-regional-website-blogs) about this topic which made me doubt my research.

The case:

A Dutch website (.nl) wants a .be version because of conversion reasons. They want to duplicate the Dutch website since they speak Dutch in large parts of both countries.

They are willing to implement the following changes:

• -       Href lang tags
• -       Possible a Local Phone number
• -       Possible a Local translation of the menu
• -       Language meta tag (for Bing)

Optional they are willing to take the following steps:

• -       Crosslinking every page though a language flag or similar navigation in the header.
• -       Invest in gaining local .be backlinks
• -       Change the server location for both websites so the match there country (Isn't neccessery in my opinion since the ccTLD should make this irrelevant).

The content on the website will at least be 95% duplicated. They would like to score with there .be in Belgium and with there .nl in The Netherlands. Are these steps enough to make sure .be gets shown for the quarry’s from Belgium and the .nl for the search quarry’s from the Netherlands?

Or would this cause a duplicated content issue resulting in filtering out version? If that’s the case we should use the canonical tag and we can’t rank the .be version of the website.

Note: this company is looking for a quick conversion rate win. They won’t invest in rewriting every page and/or blog. The less effort they have to put in this the better (I know it's cursing when talking about SEO). Gaining local backlinks would bring a lot of costs with it for example.

I would love to hear from you guys.

Best regards,

Bob van Biezen

Thanks for the link, didn't know about that. Could indeed be game-changing!

Hi Don,

Thanks for the clear explanation. I always though disallow in robots.txt would give a sort of map to Google (at the start of a site crawl) with the pages on the site that shouldn’t be crawled. So he therefore didn’t have to “check the locked cars”.

If I understand you correctly, google checks the robots.txt with every single page load?

That could definitely explain high number of crawled pages per day.

Thanks a lot!

Hi Don,

You're right about the sitemap, noted it on the to do list!

Your point about nofollow is intersting. Isn't excluding in robots.txt giving the same result?

Before we went on with the robots.txt we didn't implant nofollow because we didn't want any linkjuice to pass away. Since we got robots.txt I assume this doesn’t matter anymore since Google won’t crawl those pages anyway.

Best regards,

Bob

Hi Don,

Just wanted to add a quick note: your input made go through the indexation state of the website again which was worse than I through it was. I will take some steps to get this resolved, thanks!

Would love to hear your input about the number of crawled pages.

Best regards,

Bob

Hello Don,

Thanks for your advice. What would your advice be if the main goal would be the reduction of crawled pages per day? I think we got the right pages in the index and the old duplicates are mostly deindexed. At this point I’m mostly worried about Google spending it’s crawlbudget on the right pages. Somehow it still crawls 40.000 pages per day while we only got around 1000 pages that should be crawled. Looking at the current setup (with almost everything excluded though robots.txt) I can’t think of pages it does crawl to reach the 40k. And 40 times a day sounds like way to many crawled pages for a normal webshop.

Hope to hear from you!

Hi Miriam,

I added keywords to the business titles of Google My Business listings and I didn’t see any big ranking improvements on categories the business already appeared at.

I added keywords to the business titles of Google My Business listings and I saw a big improvement on categories the business didn’t already appeared on. So adding “SEO” in the business title of an webdevelopment firm could result in them being shown on keywords like “SEO The Hague”.

I Removed keywords from (compeditors) business titles and didn’t see a drop in their ranking visibility.

At this point I believe keywords in the business title could help Google associate your business with a keyword or service type but isn’t (or is only a small) rankingfactor. It’s the difference between being shown, or not being shown at all. Not the difference between position 2 and 3.

Note: I only tracked this with a few Google my business pages for a short period of time.

About the advice from the Google support staff, heard it the last time on 10 dec. 2015.

Hi Miriam and Kristen,

I didn't do a big case study or what so ever on this topic but I reported this kind of keywords in the business title through Google Maps and I didn’t see any noticeable changes after the changes were applied. At least not with the top 3 in the local pack. I can however confirm that adding this information causes fluctuations since I did some testing with a few websites. Although It didn’t cause a big boost it did help a tremendous amount with being shown on certain keywords. Since there isn’t a category for every niche this helped some business being showed on the right keywords on the first place.

This is a subject were a bigger case study will be needed I think.

Btw, another interesting aspect I found is the local business support desk recommending Google plus activity on the account. Views, followers, posts etc. Did get this tips 2 times after I called them a few times. Not sure it works, but we’re trying this out for our own account at the moment.

Hi Guys,

I'm working on a project (premium-hookahs.nl) where I stumble upon a situation I can’t address. Attached is a screenshot of the crawled pages in Search Console.

History:

Doing to technical difficulties this webshop didn’t always no index filterpages resulting in thousands of duplicated pages. In reality this webshops has less than 1000 individual pages. At this point we took the following steps to result this:

1. Noindex filterpages.
2. Exclude those filterspages in Search Console and robots.txt.
3. Canonical the filterpages to the relevant categoriepages.

This however didn’t result in Google crawling less pages. Although the implementation wasn’t always sound (technical problems during updates) I’m sure this setup has been the same for the last two weeks. Personally I expected a drop of crawled pages but they are still sky high. Can’t imagine Google visits this site 40 times a day.

To complicate the situation:

We’re running an experiment to gain positions on around 250 long term searches. A few filters will be indexed (size, color, number of hoses and flavors) and three of them can be combined. This results in around 250 extra pages. Meta titles, descriptions, h1 and texts are unique as well.

Questions:

1. -          Excluding in robots.txt should result in Google not crawling those pages right?
2. -          Is this number of crawled pages normal for a website with around 1000 unique pages?
3. -          What am I missing?

BxlESTT

Hi Dmitrii,

Thanks a lot for your feedback. This really helps making some content based decisions.

Best regards,

Bob

Hi Dirk,

Thanks for your response! This gives me just the bit of extra assurance to push for rewriting the pages!

Best regards,

Bob

Hi Guys,

I'm working on an site which faces some ranking problems. Although some of the problems have been mapped and will get fixed in the future I’m wondering if you could give me an second opinion on the amount of keywords used on the website. Although the texts reads “OK” I’m wondering if the site could experience negative influences of the amount of keywords used.

Website: http://premium-hookahs.nl/

Main keyword:  waterpijp / shisha

Besides the general keyword the secondary keywords get used a lot on category and product pages.

I would love to hear your opinion!

Hi Andy,

Thanks for sharing. I stumbled upon it right after I posted this discussion on the Q&A. It's an great video and does indeed gives a lot of helpfull information!

Hi Josh,  thanks and you're right. I should just deal with that fact. Mabye take some more time to get to learn the partners I'm focusing on before throwing in an request or what so ever and see if that could set me a bit futher apart from what most people consider spam.

Thanks taking the time to repond Dmitrii! This really helps.

When i e-mail them as Bob, or Bob from Client company X they Google my name (my last name is in the e-mailadres and in my senders name) and find out pretty quickly I'm an SEO. Today this was even 4 out of 10 people I e-mailed.

They replay with stuff like "I can see you're an SEO professional" and other related messages.

Did this clearify the explanation for you?

I always send outreach under my own name. I use either my private e-mail address or an own e-mail address from the clients domain. I just send out 10 emails and I did get 6 replays which 4 of them started about my SEO background . The response rate was great, but my SEO background isn’t in this case.

How do you guys handle this situation?

I have always used my own name because it feels right. It’s also handy in case I pick up the phone or visit an link prospect in person.

The disadvantage is that people directly doubt my sincerity or they want to sell me a paid placement.

Love to hear your take on this.

Hi Gianluca,

Thanks for taking the time to respond. Clear answer, will keep the distribution into mind!

Hi Wouter,

Thanks for your reply. Since you're from Holland as well, do you insert international linkbuilding in your offers to Dutch clients? Or do you only go for these links if you happen to stumble upon a good opportunity?

HI J.P.,

When chancing URL’s always keep the redirecting (301) in mind.

About the URL structure:

From this example I can’t tell you if you’re right or wrong about your approach. In general I think about the following things while I format URL structures:

1. If I would read this URL in the SERP’s, is it clear on what section of the website I enter?
2. Does it contain any keywords?
3. Doesn’t it repeat  any words?
4. Isn’t the URL too long / hard to read?

Depending on those criteria I decide on the amount of folders in an website. For example, I own an review website which has an URL structure of /industry/city/company. Three layers, but the make sense to me.

I hope this helps!

Hi guys,

Just wondering, what’s you take on doing international linkbuilding for an national company?

In Holland there are very few websites / blogs / information platforms about certain niches. Let’s take SEO for example. There are a few marketing websites, a few SEO related websites but at an certain point my attention goes to what’s happening in America (on Moz for example).

I think writing an YouMoz post is a great way to add something to the community. If that would reward an backlink, I’m all motivated to start writing! But does this help our rankings for Dutch query’s?

I can see a lot of examples in which “the place to be” isn’t a Dutch website, but some big ass international forum / website etc.

I would love to hear all of your opinions!

Hi guys,

Just went through the same process as Alligator. Found this old webmaster video in which Matt Cutts states it's ok, but still recommends to use newer tactics.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hb4LYWxXESY

Hope this helps other people!

Whaha that's the goal actually Thanks for you responses!

Yeah it will probably take 6-12 months to recover (or to get near the previous traffic). Redirects are on the road map and a lot of other stuff as well. Actually I wrote an whole report about the problems some time ago, but a lot of points haven’t been implemented by the developer. So that’s why we’re taking on the project again since the current situation clearly doesn’t resolve itself.

The address situation is just an point I stumbled upon just now. At the time I wrote the report both brands had their own unit number within the same complex.

Hi Christopher,

Thanks for your response!

I totally agree with you. Local is a chance an webshop should take. In this situation however local is a small issue, my main concern is recovering the 80% traffic loss in the last year during to a double failed site migration and bad user metrics. In this case I want to keep both shops separated since historically they both performed great.

Merging both now would mean we take the traffic loss as it is. I believe it’s possible to recover at least to a certain point in this situation since these problems aren’t spam / thin content related.

Hi Dan,

Thanks for your answer! Our situation is exactly the same. Different brands, social channels, unique content etc. it's like coca cola and pepsi on the same adress. Both selling the same, but different.

Good to hear your story. In this case I will just start cleaning up all the other mess of the site migration first and will see what happens.

Thanks a lot!

Hi Guys,

A client of mine took over an competitors site 12 months ago. They sell almost the same products and both websites now list the same address on their contact page. Local search isn’t really important to them (webshops). They aren’t really active with Google plus reviews.  but I’m still wondering.

Could this cause any ranking problems? A lot of online citations still mention the old competitors address and two almost identical company’s with the same address sounds like an bad idea. Any suggestions about this topic?

Just as a side note: the competitors site lost a lot of traffic, which is caused by a lot of different problems (double site migration were they didn’t think about SEO). So I would love the hear your thoughts about this specific ranking problem.

Thanks a lot!

You're right to set your priority on keeping them under the limits. I normally use the keyword preview tool from Moz to check this since Google started using pixels instead of characters.

https://moz.com/blog/new-title-tag-guidelines-preview-tool

In your case, I would use one of your longer product names and make a good title with that so the majority of your pages won't cross the line. At least, that's what we do in this situation.

I don't know if a longer title will dilute the effectiveness of each keyword. Interesting question, sounds logical (especially if the title gets cut off) but I never read anything about it. Would love to hear someone else his view on this.

Hi Marvellous,

Patrick provided you with a great answer. Notice he mentions the sitemap as well, if you’re using an automatically generated sitemap (from Yoast for example) these pages will be included and that way they will get indexed. Besides the option that Patrick mentioned you can exclude them from your sitemap with the advanced settings of the Yoast SEO plugin (assuming you’re using it).

If you want to be sure they aren’t indexed, you can use a site:yourwebsite.com command to view your indexed pages. You can add a text from the pages you don’t want to be ranked for ass well to narrow down the results.

Best regards,

Bob

Really cool! In Holland we don’t really look at Bing a lot so this is more a guess from my side:

1. I think a ton of authority helps them
2. Any verified listings sound like a logic factor

Looking forward to see more comments on this subject!

Hi,

About point one:

Links in comments can be a great addition to your posts if they are legit and an extent of your post. Typically this is not the case with most comment links. Make sure you clean up any spammy (promotional) links or work with a trusted user system. This way you can promote legit user that are actively participating on your blog to post (do)follow links. I know Yoast.com works that way on their blog.

About point two:

This discussion on Moz should provide you with an answer:

https://moz.com/community/q/do-pingbacks-in-wordpress-help-or-harm-seo-or-neither

I hope this helps!

Best regards,

Bob

Hi Benjamin,

Since you’re conducting this experiment with care I think you might see my answer coming. It depends on the amount of confidence you want the results to have. In the little experience I have with A/B testing this normally depends on the amount of traffic and conversions you have. If you’re really big the more important reliable data is to your company. If you’re smaller you might not have the time / traffic / budget to get the most trustworthy data so you’ll (kind of automatically) settle for less.

In my case, we based most of our decisions with early prototypes of services on data that wasn’t flawless. But at the end, it’s up to you what is and isn’t acceptable for your company.

I hope this helps, although I think you would have come to this point without my comment

Best regards,

Bob

Hi Chris,

I think limiting your title tag to 50 characters is a waste of visibility in the SERP’s. A good meta title (in my eyes) combines the essence of the page, keywords and a clear call to action. In this case I wouldn’t use your company name in the meta title unless you’re an well-known brand or advertising your way to it at the moment.

I think the meta title of your competitor is pretty ok, if you remove “cheap” it would be a good sentence in my eyes and it gives the searcher extra conformation that this cartridge fits it’s printer.

A few things I would keep in mind:

1. What makes your websites stand out? That might be a good addition to the title.
2. What is it people are looking for? Sometimes people want to see a price very quickly, if so, and you’re not the most expansive one you could add this.

I hope this helps!

Best regards,

Bob

Hi Anirban,

As far as I know they don’t crawl websites that way. Did you check the following?

• Make sure there are no internal links (you already said so, but double check this since one link can get a whole lot of pages indexed).
• These pages don’t have external links pointing to them
• These pages aren’t in the sitemap

If you wish to keep pages out of the index you can try the following:

• Add the noindex tag
• Exclude them through your robot.txt file

I hope this helps.

Hi Mike,

Your solution is pretty common and effective. Like James said, this doesn’t transfer all the linkjuice (wide spread misconception). In the original pagerank system there was a damping factor of 0.85. So through every link or redirect 15% pagerank was lost. Although it’s unknown if these rates stayed the same during the years you can expect a small lose in linkjuice.

This is why people do outreach to change their backlinks after a sitemigration. In most cases I recommend to only try to change your most important backlinks since it’s probably not worth your time chasing down every link you got.

Hope you this helps you plan your next steps.

Hi Christian,

Were do you find the [No Title]? Any screenshot would help. As far as I can see the 200 pages got a title and description. Although these are definitely worth looking at since a lot of them are far too long.

The massive amount of 404’s got me worry the most. Beside that might be worth your time to check the HTTPS vs HTTP version since these seems to create a duplicated version of the site.

Hope this helps.

Hi Marie,

Your quick answer made me wonder, do you monitor this subject somehow? Or were you just lucky to see it pass by in the Q&A?

Haha, the other guys already told you, but this is great! Thank you very much for all the research you did about this topic.

Hi Andy,

I do agree about your advice to clients. The reason I bring this up is because it's totally normal in this industry (putting a stamp on your work) and for that reason I would find it logic if search engines treat these different than other side wide links.

NoFollow is very rare and only makes up a very small % of all the links on the web (a lot of web developers don’t even know what it does) so I would find it strange if those “follow” links bring down penalties.

From a search engine view, wouldn’t this be a great way to determine what web development firm made what kind of websites? If I build a great websites for a large corporation, why shouldn’t that be a quality signal? Reviews are?

Did you see any concrete penalties that a web development did get because of these links?

Hi Patrick,

Great addition! Didn't think about the potential risk of spammy backlinks the client might get.

I will definitly take that in consideration. Did you see any penalties from this kind of links with clients?

Thanks for both of your opinions! Would love to hear some more about this topic.

@Patrick – Isn’t nofollow a bit of being overly protected? No offence, I’m  considering it as well but since every web development company does the follow link, won’t Google just devaluate the links till let’s say 5-10% of a normal link? I don’t see any of my competitors getting penalized while there backlink profile consist of 80% “designed by” links, some of them with keyword anchor text in them as well. I’m sure your way is the most safe, but missing a change can hurt as well.

@Andy – Do you mean they hold 0% link value or just very low link value? Since with 300 clients this can be an enormous amount of backlinks and then no value vs small value makes a lot of difference. I agree with you that this isn’t the only way you should be linkbuilding, we are definitely going to do a lot of other stuff it’s just that I want this to be further proof since it will make up a big part of our backlink profile (same as with every web development company).

Hi Guys,

Since our company does a lot of web development jobs next to our SEO work, we came across the topic of the “Design by” or “Webdesign by” links that our competitors are placing in the footer of clients websites. When I did some backlink analysis of our competitors these links make up the biggest part of their backlink profile. That way, I think they are important for the promotion and SEO of web development companies.

I would love to have your opinion about how to use these links for SEO

1. Side wide vs homepage

I think there are two ways here, going for a link at the bottom of every page or just one link at the bottom of the homepage. When you look at exposure the most ideal situation would be a side wide link (more eyeballs). From a SEO standpoint this might cause trouble.

2. Follow vs nofollow

I think this is a very interesting one since there seems to be a lot of different opinions about if this is advertisement or not. A normal banner in a sidebar would get the nofollow tag to match Google’s guidelines but what about this “designed by” link? I know  few designers and “putting a stamp” on their work is pretty common and more likely viewed as something that they deserve then an act of commerce.

Besides this discussion adding the nofollow tag could prevent any issues with side wide links but reduces any SEO benefits to zero. Another option is adding the nofollow tag to all the links expect the one on the homepage.

3. Anchor text and descriptive text

Since anchor texts play a big role in SEO (and in detecting spam) I’m interested in your opinion about the use of anchor texts with such links. Just the company name or the web address sounds like a safe choice (especially with side wide links) but it’s pretty attempting to link words like “Webdesign” instead of the company name. Do you think it’s safe to use this, or any other keywords in 0,5,10,15,20,25% of the times?

And do you think the descriptive text “Webdesign and SEO by” got any value (or causes potential risks) when added before the link?

4. Alternatives or extra link opportunities

Here are some other options I found and thought about considering getting links from client websites.

• Asking, or earning a link in their first blogpost. Yjpiieee our website is online, thanks guys of company X.
• Links in the disclaimer or legal parts of the website.
• Link in the main content of the about us. Most likely in the bottom a little section about the credits of the design etc.
• Links on partner / friend / links pages of the website.

I saw all of these links in the backlink profiles of our competitors.

Last but not least, my current standpoint:

At this moment we ask our clients if we may place a small text and link in the footer of their website next to the copyright claim. We use texts like “Webdesign and SEO by Web Whales”. With only our brand name as anchor text (to avoid penalties). It’s a side wide follow link. Side wide because we want the exposure and follow because we want the SEO benefit. We considered just making the homepage link follow, but this kind of feels like manipulation so we just went for all follow since this is pretty normal on the web.

Beside that we celebrate new websites with our clients to increase the change getting mentioned on the first blog or partner page. Occasionally we ask them for links on these pages.

What’s your opinion about this topic?

Hi Om,

I recommend making your sitemap update daily (automatically). If you're using WordPress the SEO by Yoast plugin can do this for you. If you submit the URL to Google everything will go automatically. Manually changing is a real pain in the *** since every time a page disappears you should update your sitemap since this could cause you sending Google to 404 pages.

Can it be that the traffic from Google are expats? Since it's hard to give people a face solely based on Google Analytics data. Either way you look at it, I think the best solution is the one that services your visitors and is SEO friendly. And if you’re facing the situation you can’t choose between the two, I would always stick with designing for people instead of search engines.

Since search engines are getting pretty smart in detecting unnatural “optimalisation” and a good user experience results indirect in good rankings (dwell time for example) as well.

Thank you both! This really helps.

Hi Lina,

It would keep the URL's short and descriptive for your visitors and more important in the SERP's which could increase your CTR.

Besides that, my experience is that people look for either an hotel or information about the place. Although they will find the information useful at some point the starting of a search (entering the query in Google) will focus on either information about the place or information about the hotels.

This way I would split the information on your website as well and make sure you point your visitors to it with internal links or buttons.

That’s just my point of view, asking your target audience about this is a great way to make decisions as well!