Hi Rachel, no problem at all, happy to help out!

We have a couple of clients in similar industries where it seems most of their successful competitors are using black hat tactics to get ahead and it seems to be working for them for now.

These clients are still too new to us to report anything valuable just yet - they're certainly moving ahead and I don't see an issue outranking their dodgy competitors, it's just frustrating that black hat SEO is typically much faster but their rankings could drop literally any day.

That aside, a disavow may help you somewhat but I always recommend spending the time removing as many as you can (without paying the removal fees that many will request!). Building new, high quality and relevant links will also help swing that ratio away from being almost exclusively spam. Everybody has at least some dodgy links to don't stress too much about getting it perfect, just improve the ratio.

It's great that you've got unique content coming and regional differences in law and restrictions is a great starting point for offering that unique value as well. Location pages like this are just fine, so long as they each serve a unique purpose. Just make sure the site structure and content caters to the user's intent, not just adding content to keyword-specific pages.

I would expect that removing as many of those bad links as you can, building quality new ones and improving the site's content will go a long way to lowering your spam score and more importantly, moving one step closer to driving qualified and converting traffic.

Whether or not this is an issue kind of depends on what your product or service is. If you provide a local-only service like a restaurant then your US site ranking in the UK would be unusual.

On the other hand, if you sell a physical product this may not be so unusual. For example, here in Australia we're quite limited when it comes to finding men's online clothing stores, most of it comes from the US or the UK so it's not uncommon to see something like the US Jackthreads show up in the SERPs here.

Since you do have separate domains for each location, this might be an indication that search engines aren't really understanding the different jurisdictions for each site; maybe they're not geo-targeted enough for the algorithm to comprehend the fact that each of the 3 sites server a unique area.

Some of the elements that can help define this, in no particular order:

• Server location
• HTML language ( e.g. lang="en-US")
• Regional language differences (e.g. US spelling vs UK)
• Location markup - on your location pages at the very least
• Location mentions throughout your content

While not specifically on-topic, Rand's Whiteboard Friday about scaling geo-targeting offers plenty of great advice that can be applied here as well.

It isn't possible to do this when behind a login but I would definitely still spend the time doing what you can manually before pushing it live.

The other option you have is to push it "live" but block the whole site from crawlers with Robots.txt. Screaming Frog does give you the option to ignore the instructions in Robots so you could still crawl it. If this site is replacing an existing one that makes it a little more tricky. If that's the case, you could still do this but make sure that you get to work on your audit the second you push it live and get it done as quickly as possible.

If the site is up and blocked via Robots for 20 minutes it's unlikely to cause an issue. If you leave it that way for a week however... not such a good idea

We've experienced almost exactly the same process in the past when a dev accidentally left staging.domain.com open for indexation... the really bad news is that despite noticing this, blocking via Robots and going through the same process to remove the wrong ones via Search Console etc, getting the correct domain ranking in the top 50 positions took almost 6 infuriating months!

Just like you, we saw the non-www version and the staging.domain version of the pages indexed for a couple of months after we fixed everything up then all of a sudden one day the two wrong versions of the site disappeared from the index and the correct one started grabbing some traction.

All this to say that to my knowledge, there are no active tasks you can really perform beyond what you've already done to speed this process up. Maybe building a good volume of strong links will push a positive signal that the correct one should be recrawled. We did spend a considerable amount of time looking into it and the answer kept coming back the same - "it just takes time for Google to recrawl the three versions of the site and figure it out".

This is essentially educated speculation but I believe the reason this happens is because for whatever reason the wrong versions were crawled first at different points to be the original version so the correct one was seen as 100% duplicate and ignored. This would explain why you're seeing what you are and also why in a magical 24hr window that could come at any point, everything sorted itself out - it seems that the "original" versions of the domain no longer exist so the truly correct one is now unique.

If my understanding of all this is correct, it would also mean that moving your site to yet another domain wouldn't help either since according to Google's cache/index, the wrong versions of your current domain are still live and the "original" so putting that same site/content on a different domain would just be yet another version of the same site.

Apologies for not being able to offer actionable tasks or good news but I'm all ears for future reference if anyone else has a solution!

No problem at all. As you said, the fact that you can do a site: search and see that your pages are actually indexed means that most importantly, your site is in Google's index.

As for it not showing up in Search Console, it's very hard to troubleshoot these ones without access to the account - after 3 or 4 weeks you really should be seeing at least some data in there. To my knowledge, the only part that really lags a whole lot is the number of indexed pages.

You should be able to see Content Keywords for example. If all data is completely blank, there may be a larger problem here. Can you see Analytics data for this domain? If so, was Search Console verified via Analytics?

Hi Alex,

There are a couple of misconceptions here that I'll explain in a moment but in short: doing this isn't going to help you

so in the browser it shows up as www.ourcompany.dk

Redirecting from one domain to another will actually take the user to that second domain rather than showing the second website but keeping the original URL. What I mean by this is if you redirect example.com to website.com then visit example.com, after a moment you'll see the URL change to website.com.

In your particular instance, directing www.ourcompany.dk to your .com domain would just take the user to the .com. Also, a redirected URL won't rank so you'd have to be driving traffic directly to the .dk site via social media or something for anyone to even hit that redirect.

The only time this would offer you any benefit would be if you had a great backlink profile on the .dk domain since you'd be transferring ~80-90% of that link strength.

There are options available to do what you're looking to (display the .dk address but the .com site) like iframes but both of these methods would also see your .dk site ignored by search engines since it would be a weak duplicate of your .com.

I hope that helps, let me know if I can clarify anything for you here

Hmm, ok. So you'll be handling the .com which targets the UK and each other location will be responsible for their own optimisation?

That does make it somewhat more viable, provided they are actually going to optimise their respective sites and do it properly.

If not, there's still no real reason why all locations couldn't exist in subfolders for all the reasons I mentioned above.

As a working example of a large site covering multiple locations with this subfolder model, check out HP. Below are 2 different location "home pages" depending on where you are.

http://www8.hp.com/au/en/home.html
http://www8.hp.com/uk/en/home.html

Depending on your position in the company/team, if I were in your shoes I'd be pushing to have all locations run from the subfolder model and setting the international standard that other locations must abide by to keep it all uniform. ie Each page must use the same template including styling etc and cover the same information on their equivalent pages.

As an example, since artificial grass is your product, you might add content to your UK page that offers sections about general information, size and colour options, photos of the product and shipping information for the UK in that order.

You can then use that as a template that must be followed for /dk/, /uae/ etc. The aim here isn't to be a control freak but to maintain a certain standard of quality and continuity; the last thing you want is for any use who jumps from one location to another to feel as though they just arrived on a new website. Much like in the HP example, it's actually pretty hard to tell you're on a different subfolder until it comes to shipping or price information.

Also, I hope you don't mind but I had a 30 second skim over your website. While it's generally a pretty good site, it is a little too keyword-heavy and this isn't something you want to replicate across multiple subfolders.

Looking at the page title for the home page as an example, it's Artificial Grass Lawn, Astroturf, Fake Turf | Easigrass.

The fact that it starts with "Artificial Grass Lawn" is already a signal to users who see your site in the SERPs that it's probably quite spammy and should be avoided.

There are a few other similar elements on the site too, even the location page URLs:

http://www.easigrass.com/uk/glasgow-artificial-grass/

Just easigrass.com/uk/glasgow would be sufficient. Having 25+ pages with artificial-grass in the URL isn't ideal.

I also found 5x 404s and a bunch of internal links pointing to redirected pages. If you want to look into these, Screaming Frog's SEO Spider is a great option for that.

Also, from a user perspective I'm a little confused as to why there are locations under "Find Local Branch" and what seems to be a different set of locations under "Artificial Grass".

Rand actually just did a Whiteboard Friday that covers some of this if you'd like some more info

Hi Alex,

No problem at all, happy to help!

The naming convention creates an interesting problem. It makes perfect sense now but without understanding your range, it was very confusing. It's great to have an outside set of eyes on these things sometimes, especially since I'd expect most of your SEO target audience to be new users.

For starters, I'd consider changing the nav text from Artificial Grass to something like Our Range or Artificial Grass Range to make it clearer that this is a range, not locations; Artificial Grass is a little more ambiguous.

To further clarify this for people, you could also add a heading to the drop-down menu under that item. Something like "Select from our range below" or "Already know which product you need? Select from our range below" - something that suggests the items in this drop-down aren't locations, they're the different types of grass.

Search engines these days are quite clever so I'd expect that as long as you always reference "Easi-Mayfair" and don't allow variations like Easi Mayfair or just Mayfair, this should be clear enough.

the worry of current email addresses and redirecting the TLDs to the subdirectory.

Don't be too concerned about this. I can't imagine too many users would try to visit the domain used in your email address and even if they do, the redirect is in place and working correctly so they'll end up in the right spot. The .dk email addresses still work so changing all those users over to .com address is likely more hassle than it's worth.

Hi Rachel,

Not a problem, glad to hear you're on the right track! It's great to see the pages looking unique and much better for UX.

Looking at the elements flagged in your spam score breakdown, there are some relatively easy fixes in here still which may be contributing at least somewhat. To answer your question directly I would expect it will still be related to your link profile meaning less poor links and more quality ones will be the fix.

Don't forget that this score isn't a direct Google metric either. The entire Spam Score system is meant to be little more than a system of red flags for you to investigate - having a bad spam score isn't inherently a bad thing but it also shouldn't go ignored.

As for whether or not the Spam Score takes disavowed links into account, I can't find confirmation for this either way but I'd doubt it. This would require them having access to your Search Console to see the disavowed file.

Low MozTrust or MozRank Score / Large Site with Few Links These will obviously be resolved with ongoing link building but are likely the most significant factor in current score.

Small Proportion of Branded Links As you go about your link building, it tends to happen naturally but be sure to continue building links that use your brand name as the anchor.

Large Number of External Links You do have a fair volume of external links but they all appear to be legitimate so I'd ignore this one.

Low Number of Internal Links This one is quite valid. Beyond the nav I couldn't really see any internal linking practices going on. They shouldn't be promotional links within your blogs but just making sure that any piece of content that may be relevant to another page also includes a link. For example, if we mention Adwords on our SEO page, we'd include a link to our Adwords page for users who may want more information.

No Contact Info
May be caused by the fact that the phone number tends to show up with slightly unusual formatting in each instance; either:

• 855.4.CYNTOX (429.6869)
• 855.429.6869

I'd be interested to see if changing this to just 855 429 6869 would clear that flag in the spam score. Applying schema markup here may also help.

External Links in Navigation This seems to be referring to the nav links to your login areas so it's another area I wouldn't really worry about. Changing this would frustrate users for the sake of satisfying an arbitrary checkpoint in this list which is exactly what we're not supposed to do with a tool like this!

On an interesting side note, ahrefs is still showing 42 obviously spammy referring domains. This won't change anything to do with your spam score since Moz isn't pulling Ahrefs metrics but it may not be great for your Google rankings if they're seeing the same links.

This is the correct answer.

To expand on this slightly, just make sure none of the 404s are internal (ie there are no links on your site pointing to one of these dodgy pages as a result of the hack) and you're all good.

Remove the entries from your htaccess file to avoid having to parse them constantly and let any external links to dodgy pages 404. This sort of circumstance is exactly what 404s are made for!

The only site at risk of a ranking drop from these 404s is the one pointing to those dodgy pages - who cares about your hackers' rankings?

It's something you shouldn't _really _doing so it comes with the usual warning of "use with caution"...

That said, the chances of anything negative happening here are so slim it's probably not worth worrying about. If you were cloaking shady anchor text relating to gambling or viagra it would be a different story.

There are two other points to be aware of here though. Firstly, it's very unlikely you'll see any ranking difference between those two link anchors in your link profile. The other is that it sounds like you're dropping footer links on your clients' sites to build your link profile. That one is cause for genuine concern if it's on a large volume. If it's only a couple of sites, disregard everything below!

How these are treated post Penguin 4.0 I don't know just yet but at best, they're given very little weight. We've just finished pulling one of our web design clients back up from ~ page 8 after he built a large volume of those same footer links over about 6 months. It may be because they were all irrelevant links (his clients have nothing to do with web design, obviously) or perhaps because his anchor profile was 98% "Web Design". Which of these caused the problem is quite irrelevant.

We removed those links from all but a handful of sites and he's back to the middle of page 1 so the real work just started. This was earlier in the year so again, I have no clue how that same thing would play you now after the latest update.

Hope that helps!

It's hard to say exactly without seeing your site since there are so many potential variables (e.g. are most of your blog posts low quality or just a minority? etc) that would define the best way to go about it.

What I can say though is that you're on the right track as far as using analytics data to determine which ones are providing value right now. There is a danger in losing some rankings if you go removing a huge volume of these posts. Unless they're utter rubbish posts, they'll likely be providing relevance signals to Google on what your site is about. That said, I do think it's a necessary evil and I'd expect you'll be rewarded for it in the long run provided you start replacing the trash with high quality posts in the future.

As for the benefits, if they really are low quality then user engagement is going to be terrible which is obviously not what you should be aiming for. It's also going to be chewing up your crawl budget for no good reason so the leaner your site is, the better base you have to start rebuilding with quality instead of quantity. For the same reason, I generally suggest removing tags and categories that aren't providing any actual benefit too - in most cases I see they're just there either "for good SEO" or because the site owners things that's how users are browsing their site but in almost all cases, that's not true. As always, check your own data on this to be sure.

As for removing vs noindex, this one is always contentious but I lean toward removing simply because it's going to clean things up for the user too and ultimately they should be your primary focus. Having 40,000+ pages of trash on your website is a fantastic indicator to them that your site may not be somewhere they want to be and noindexing them won't do anything to change the user's experience.

Hope that helps!