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Hi, Moz has flagged a whole lot of pages as dupe content, but I cannot see how they qualify as such.
Not sure if I'm allowed to post actual URLs here....happy to if I can, but I feel certain that the pages are not 90% similar. Has anyone else had this experience? ~Caro

I just read a great article on the SEO benefits of external links to relevant authoritative sites. But it didn't state if the benefits still existed if the external links were nofollows.
The article concluded: “Outgoing relevant links to authoritative sites are considered in the algorithms and do have a positive impact on rankings.” I found this old article on the subject, but opinions on the nofollow issue were mixed:
https://moz.com/blog/external-linking-good-for-seo-whiteboard-friday Can anyone shed any light? Thanks! ~Caro

I have a client who's thinking of placing their blog on a separate domain because the plug-ins and various other functionality is becoming bulky and slowing things down for the main site. There will be a 'Blog' link on the company's website navigation, just as there is now, that will take people to the blog. As an SEO person, this seems like a bad idea, even if we set up 301s from all the old posts to all the new ones. In my research I came across these two points: All backlinks to blog posts contribute directly to a website’s OVERALL SEO strength because those backlinks are pointing to your main domain.  Removing them may reduce overall link juice to the site. Simply having fewer content pages on the site will cause entire site to rank lower because Google loves content-rich authority sites. Does anyone know this to be true for sure? Thanks,
~Caro

My client is trying to achieve a global presence in select countries, and then track traffic from their international pages in Google Analytics. The content for the international pages is pretty much the same as for USA pages, but the form and a few other details are different due to how product licensing has to be set up. I don’t want to risk losing ranking for existing USA pages due to issues like duplicate content etc. What is the best way to approach this? This is my first foray into this and I’ve been scanning the MOZ topics but a number of the conversations are going over my head,so suggestions will need to be pretty simple 🙂 Is it a case of adding hreflang code to each page and creating different URLs for tracking. For example:
URL for USA: https://company.com/en-US/products/product-name/
URL for Canada: https://company.com/en-ca/products/product-name /
URL for German Language Content: https://company.com/de/products/product-name /
URL for rest of the world: https://company.com/en/products/product-name /

A client's home page, which has always done very well, has just dropped out of Google's index overnight!
Webmaster tools does not show any problem. The page doesn't even show up if we Google the company name. The Robot.txt contains: Default Flywheel robots file User-agent: * Disallow: /calendar/action:posterboard/
Disallow: /events/action~posterboard/ The only unusual thing I'm aware of is some A/B testing of the page done with 'Optimizely' - it redirects visitors to a test page, but it's not a 'real' redirect in that redirect checker tools still see the page as a 200. Also, other pages that are being tested this way are not having the same problem. Other recent activity over the last few weeks/months includes linking to the page from some of our blog posts using the page topic as anchor text. Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Caro

I am in the process of phasing out a website that has been acquired by another company. Its web pages are being 301 redirected to their counterparts on the website of the company that has acquired them. How long should I maintain the hosting of the phased out website? Technically, do 301s still work after the hosting has been discontinued? Thanks, Caro

Hello all, If a company acquires a smaller company and 'absorbs' its products and services into its own website, what is the protocol with closing down the smaller company's site? So far we added our branding to the site alerting their visitors to the imminent takeover, and 301 redirected certain pages - soon we'll be redirecting all the pages to their counterparts on the main website. Once that's done, should we noindex the old site? Anything else? Thanks, Caro

We've acquired another company and want to redirect their soon-to-be-obsolete website to ours. It includes a blog with many blog posts. Should we: only 301 redirect the top level blog URL
try redirect individual blogs to blogs of a similar topic on our site (least practical I'm sure)
redirect all their individual posts to our main blog URL Thanks, Caro

I think I already know the answer to this, but I'd love a second opinion. If you add German meta data to some web pages will it help those pages turn up in search results in Germany?I'm assuming not. It's an English, USA based site, doing well here for English searches - and I don't want to mess that up. A German site is being planned, but this client is hoping the English site could be found in the meantime. ~Caro

I have a client whose competitor has great positions in Google, and a quick look at the meta data revealed this (I removed the company name): I'd love some opinions on this. My gut feel tells me this is spammy. But all my client sees is that this site is on page 1! ~Caro