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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

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: Noindex filterpages. Exclude those filterspages in Search Console and robots.txt. 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: -          Excluding in robots.txt should result in Google not crawling those pages right? -          Is this number of crawled pages normal for a website with around 1000 unique pages? -          What am I missing? BxlESTT

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!

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 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, 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!

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 all, I normally work for clients in my home county (The Netherlands) and with local citation building I focus on Dutch websites or well know .com websites in the Netherlands. My rule of thumb kinda was, if it’s not known in the Netherlands it isn’t worth getting mentioned there. Since The Netherlands are pretty small and I think Google ain’t perfect I was wondering if it makes sense to list a Dutch business on any .com business listings that are internationally big, but aren’t well known in the Netherlands. Two reasons that got me thinking this direction: A big well known Dutch company offers a service such as Moz local and did integrate their service with several international business listing websites that I never heard off, since these business directories focus themselves on other parts of the world. Google ain’t perfect and I think they got more budget to identify trustworthy business directories with an international focus or a focus on America then with a focus on The Netherlands. So I’m wondering if it makes any sense to list a Dutch business on let’s say the top 20 international business directories (although these directories don’t have any brand recognition in The Netherlands).

I hope someone can help me make some decisions. I did read a lot about Local SEO lately but I’m not sure what way to go with this client. Client: Service provider with two physical locations (service is provided on the physical location). In the coming 12 month there will open 1-2 new physical locations in other cities. Has only one phone number. I will try to advise them to get a local phone number for both locations. But they prefer one (mobile) number to keep things simple. Clients are willing to travel for the service, since it’s a one day course they take. Current clients do come from a lot of different locations. The competition for around 5-6 big cities is pretty low since there aren’t a lot of service providers who deliver these courses. Questions: Should I put both addresses in the footer? It’s a best practice with only one location. I think it’s handy for users with two locations as well but I’m worried about how Google sees this. Also this will get confusing when the client passes 3-4 locations. If the client sticks with one mobile phone number, should I make a Google + local page for both physical locations? The Google guidelines clearly state they prefer a local number as much as possible. If I add “Our service areas “ to the top navigation and make a unique place page for every city (to rank organic aswell) is it wise to link those local Google + pages to the unique page about this service? Normaly I would go for yes, but I want to add places with and without a physical location under the same navigation. With just one location I would just focus on that city and add unique pages for the other pages. I’m getting a bit stuck between best practices since the client got opportunities with multiple strategies. I hope you guys (and girls 😉 ) can help!