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Hello all, I'm looking for opinions on this. Imagine there is a website example.com in English and the company 'Example' wanted to translate some of the pages (not not all) in to Russian. So they set up example.com/ru and translate the key pages into Russian. But half of the pages on.com/ru are left in English and there are no plans to translate them. How would you handle the pages in Engish on .com/ru? My thoughts are that they should: Canonicalise to the same versions on .com, and... Remove RU hreflang tags from the pages on .com/ru which are in English Otherwise, users searching in English with Russian browser settings could land on a page in English but then navigate to a translated page in Russian (+the menu navigation items will be in Russian) = bad UX. Not to mention they would be telling Google a page is in Russain but Google would be crawling English. So IMO, the best option is to use canonicals for this so that the .com version of the page is indexed. Then when a user lands after searching in English they will always be served English pages within that session. If English speakers/searchers land on the .com/ru page that would lead to a website half in one lang and half in another. I'm aware that Google recommends not using rel="canonical" across country or language versions of your site, but I believe they are making that recommendation based on an assumption that all pages are going to be translated to another language. In this case, there is no intention to do that, ever. Thanks for your thoughts and opinions. Cheers, Gill.

Hello, I'm currently tracking contact form submissions any time a user clicks 'Submit' on a pop-up form. Once the form is submitted, the URL of the page remains the same (there is no /thank-you page or such like), hence needing to fire the Event based on a click. Problem is, even if the form is not actually submitted and a user just clicks the Submit button without filling in the fields, the Event will still fire. I know there is a way to ensure the Event ONLY fires when the form is actually submitted for real, but I don't know how to implement that in GTM. Any help most appreciated 🙂 Cheers, Gill.

Hi folks, This is something I've pondered for a while. I've ask a couple of Googlers but no reponse yet and I don't I'll get one! In your opinion, do you think Google looks at on page metrics like bounce rate for example from all traffic mediums (organic, paid, email, social  referral etc etc) or they only look at on page metrics from organic traffic? I'm not talking about direct correlations from other mediums. I'm only talking about when a user lands on a website, do the actions they take matter with regards to Google's search algo no matter of the referring medium, or do Google only look at onpage metrics on visits which came to the site via organic search as a medium. Option 1 As a very simplified example: Google gives extra weight in the SERPs to website A which has an average bounce rate of 30% from all mediums compared to website B which has a bounce rate of 50% from all mediums. Option 2 Google gives extra weight in the SERPs to website A which has an average bounce rate of 30% from organic traffic only compared to website B which has a bounce rate of 50% from organic traffic only. I'm not sure if anyone outside Google has the answer/proof of this but was keen to get other people's thoughts. If you think the also uses one or the other, can you give an insights/proof of one or the other? For me it would make sense for them only to use onpage metrics from sessions which came from organic seach traffic, but who knows! Merci buckets, Gill.

Hi folks, I am working with a group for which I do SEO etc. for one part of the group. Another part of the group hired an SEO agency to carry out their SEO for them (before I joined). In short, they are doing a terrible job by building links in very dodgy directories (ones which get taken offline) and via machine generated 'articles' on horrendously bad 'blogs'. Please take a look at these 'articles' and leave your thoughts below so I can back up the point that these guys are not the kind of SEOs we should be working with. [List of links to articles removed by moderator] Many thanks in advance, Gill.

Hello all, Interested to hear your thoughts on this. What's best practice re server IP location. Is it OK for that to be in the US if your company is in Europe? Any potential issues? John Mueller says server location is irrelevant, but some developer I work with thinks IP address of the server is a factor. I can't see how it would be in this day and age. https://www.seroundtable.com/seo-geo-location-server-google-17468.html Many thanks, Gill.

Hello folks, I'm looking at hosting options. In your opinion, what's the best provider out there and why? Cheers, Gill.

Hello there, I'm working on implementing local business structured data for a website but we have multiple offices. Is it okay from a Google perspective to add different local business data on different pages of the website, or can I only use one set of local business data site wide? Many thanks, Gill.