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I don't know about whether Google would know or not, but your human visitors probably will notice! Computerised translators such as Google Translate are great for translating little phrases when you're on holiday, but I don't think they can compete with using an actual human being. Language has so many nuances, which a human can understand, but a machine can't.

Years ago the BBC Radio 1 breakfast show used to do a competition where you had to work out what the original phrase was that had been translated into another language and then translated back into English. They didn't use Google Translate (I don't think it existed then!) but changed the language settings on a mobile phone (If I remember rightly). The difference between the original phrase and the final phrase was usually pretty funny (hence the competition).

If I was you, I wouldn't want people in other countries laughing at my product descriptions because of a stupid machine.

Hi,

I asked a couple of weeks ago for some help with interview questions... I've now written these, but I have been asked to come up with some data with an anomaly for the interviewee to identify and explain what they'd do...

I'm thinking something to do with landing pages, but what?!

Any help would be most appreciated

Thanks again!

Amelia

Hello,

Our sites are on https and have been for around a year and a half ago.

The only site we switched from http to https was really young when we did it and so the risk of lost rankings/traffic was minimised because we didn't have much to begin with. However, I have to say, we didn't really notice any difference before or after.

The only issues I have with the https version is that rich snippets don't seem to show. I suspect this will get resolved though as more and more sites move over to secured versions.

Good luck with the switch, Andy has given you all the info you need on that so I won't add anything else!

Best wishes,

Amelia

Hi Andy,

I just wanted to say, I followed your advice and now every single page I've submitted via webmaster tools in the xml sitemap (for Commercial Trust) has been indexed! Thank you for helping with this, you are a super-star!

Amelia

It sounds like a temporary redirect so, yes a 302 would be correct. Remember 302's do not pass link juice though.

I would employ a translator. People can interpret nuances in languages that a machine (however brilliant) just cannot. Google translate is great if you just want to translate a few words here and there but a whole website? It'll read like a badly translated flat-pack furniture installation manual!

Good luck, whatever you choose to do

We did it  as a response to managers above our heads within the business deciding it was a good idea. Had no choice! But, as I said before, it made no real difference, though (again, I said this before) our site was really new (about 3 months old on a new domain) so it's hard to say whether we really lost traffic, because we did not have that much organic traffic on the site at that time.

I think you're wise to wait for the dust to settle so you can learn from others' mistakes

I just wanted to post up a message to everyone who has helped me with this problem.

First of all, please accept my sincere thanks. I REALLY appreciate everyone's contribution.

Now, I just wanted to tell you all what, as a company, we've decided to do.

1. We've written letters to: The company that copied us, their web designer and their host, asking them to remove the copied content within 14 days of the letters.
2. We've 'reported' them to Google, via one of the links that David posted (https://support.google.com/legal/troubleshooter/1114905?hl=en)
3. We've reported them for scraping, using the link that Paddy posted

Hopefully, this problem will go away, but I hate to think how much business we may have lost as a result - the two pages they've copied are really important sales pages (remortgage and first time buyer) so for us, it's a massive shame.

Best wishes, and I hope you all have a great weekend!

Amelia

This totally depends on too many variables for me to say (I think anyway).

Personally, I wouldn't overwhelm your visitors with too much wordy text - they're interested in test driving your cars and possibly buying one, NOT reading a load of gumph on the cars. Either they like the cars or they don't, obviously you need to include the benefits and features of each vehicle, but really I wouldn't write huge volumes of text because that'll put people off.

Just that really - we're getting on average around 80% online enquiries, and 15% calls. Calls convert better so would prefer calls. What steps would you put in place to increase calls?

Ours is a lead generation site - we're a mortgage broker.

So far we have a click to call button on the quote page which loads on mobile devices and doesn't display when the call centre is shut.

We get traffic from organic and PPC.

I'm trying to come up with a bit of a plan to address this.

Thanks,

Amelia

I think Egol has covered it.

We recently did a DMCA, and it was really quick. Our case was cut and dried though, we're financial services so have to hold a record of everything we publish for our regulator so it was really easy to prove. I did dob the other company in to iStock photo as well though because they are still showing an image we paid for and it's cropped exactly the same as the way our designer did it so we can only assume the other company did steal it.

Why redirect twice? I'd redirect to the https version from the old site/pages instead of going through two loops...

Also, did you do the change of address thing in webmaster tools? You can also remove urls from the index through webmaster tools, but I've only ever done this once when our IT guy f-ed up our dns settings so can't really help you much though it was pretty straight-forward if I remember rightly.

Good luck

Maybe google is testing the two landing pages to see which is better for the user?  I am assuming here that Google has signals that indicate whether a site/page is useful or not to the people using the query to find them. I've noticed this sort of thing happen to my sites and it always settles down in the end.

As for your client - I'm in-house now, but when I was agency-side I would have found a questioning client tricky. I think though, that honesty is the best policy - even if you have to say "I don't know why Google is behaving this way. I am looking into possible reasons why this could be happening, but I may never find the answer. I am monitoring your site and am continuing to optimise your homepage for the keyword, 'voltage optimisation'."

Sometimes clients can be difficult, but they have to understand that some of the things Google does are a complete mystery, and that's just the way it is.

Hi Josh,

I'm doing a similar thing - not exactly the same as we are merging 2 websites into one and then just for the fun of it putting the whole lot onto a new domain...

We've not done this yet as our new site is being built. Anyway, I found this webinar really useful: http://moz.com/webinars/domain-migrations-lessons-from-the-moz-transition and this blog post: http://moz.com/blog/domain-migration-lessons

I hope they help!

All the best,

Amelia

If your competitors have stolen your content and are profiting from it then do everything you can to get it removed! DMCA, write to the sites, write to the hosts.

Do NOT move the content to an archive URL before doing the DMCA or Google won't know that you originally created it. This happened to us - another mortgage broker stole some content from one of our main sales landing pages, we didn't notice until after redesigning our website, and of course our new urls had a later date stamp than the site that stole our content so our listings started to drop (whole site, not JUST the page that had been copied). We got the listings back within a month of filing the DMCA,  but still, it galls that our content may have persuaded customers to contact the other company! They should have been our customers!

By all means rewrite/refresh the content if its 2 years old, but do it as well as the DMCA.

Good luck with this - I feel your pain,

Amelia

I see Andy has also suggested removing via webmaster tools. And he was smart enough to remember fetch as google too! Andy, you rock!

Hi,

I don't think it will affect rankings so long as the text on the page stays the same.

I would A/B test this change though, because you may find fewer people download the pack. Or, if that doesn't matter so much as harvesting contact details then I guess it's not a massive concern.

We have a downloads section on our site, and we have a popup newsletter sign-up form which appears when they click the download button. It's not currently compulsory to sign up for the newsletter, but this is something we are considering. I'd be interested to know how you get on with yours!

Best of luck,

Amelia

This is a really good question.

I think ALT tags should be used on all images that add information to the user, but not on those that are just there to add a bit of interest to the page (background images etc).

Someone using a screen reader would find it intensely annoying if you just stuff keywords into your alt tags. Don't ever forget the true purpose of alt tags: they are there to help people using screen readers (generally blind and visually impaired people) to 'view' a web page. Not to get additional SEO benefit. Though of course, if you choose relevant images you can 'kill two birds with one stone'!

Hi,

Thank you for responding. I am using Google analytics experiments. You put some code on the original page and 'magically' the two pages get rotated to show approximately half the visitors one version, and the other half the other version. The new version is often called 'page-name-b' (for example) and if it wins then the content moved to the original version. The only exception to this rule was when we used a page called 'todays-mortgage-deals' - because I wanted to try and get it to list for more than just 'mortgage quote'.

Best wishes, and thank you again for responding

Amelia

If you're aggregating content from different pages into one, then you may want to look at canonical tags. I'm sure someone much smarter than me will tell you how to do it

I'd include a button to say 'buy all ingredients for this recipe' and have it automatically add the ingredients to the users basket. Easy peasy user experience and you potentially get to increase the average basket value. Win win. You could also include individual buttons next to each product in the ingredients list on the recipe page (assuming it's labelled 'ingredients' and 'method'.)

I also wouldn't hid any text if you can help it - especially content that triggers a sale.

As far as I know, Google isn't case-sensitive so the two queries would be treated as identical.

Hi,

We have a 'Why Choose us' section on most pages of one of our websites, and it hasn't affected our SEO in the slightest. It helps inform people as to why they should choose our company as opposed to the competition.

I don't believe it's 'garbage' - SO LONG as it's well executed. It drives conversion for us, so I think it's worth having.

I don't think it's worth having if there is nothing to differentiate yourself (or your client) but that's a different topic.

As far as SEO goes, it does no harm - so long as the rest of the content on the page is unique and useful.

Good luck, whatever you choose to do.

Amelia

Thank you Andy - you've struck a chord with me here. Good point, well made!

I get the same thing. Nobody on here seems to know the answer (I asked a similar question in the last week or so) - if the pages are there when you do a manual search then I wouldn't sweat it. I have taken the view that it's not worth worrying about!

Good luck Amelia

Hi Kyle,

I'd be careful. The more your sites look like a link farm the less likely they will list.

If you can't be arsed creating several decent sites, why not just create one excellent one and put all your efforts into that rather than this (dodgy-to-me-sounding) strategy. If you don't mind my saying, I think it's fundamentally flawed and I recommend against it.

Good luck with whatever you end up doing!

Best wishes,

Amelia

I may not be answering this correctly...

Are you looking for a list of URLs? If so, easy peasy to use screaming frog.

If it's all the pages Google has indexed, I don't really know and I'm sorry! However, I will come back to this thread to see if someone else has the answer for you, because I'm quite interested in it myself!!!

Best of luck,

Amelia

It doesn't seem normal. Have you done a whois lookup on the domain? May be worth contacting the domain owner, because it could all be a horrible mistake on their part.

I don't really know what to suggest you do beyond this though... I'd be interested to know what other people say.

You may find it does the opposite of what you intend if your visitors don't use social media - they'll feel left out of the party and nobody likes that! There are many many reasons why someone would choose not to be on social media, and forcing them to have an account just to read an article is never going to work - they'll just leave and find the content elsewhere on the web.

Check analytics to see how socially engaged your visitors are. If they are, then I'd test it as a tactic - it may not work for long though, because it's the sort of thing Google doesn't like ('Don't do as I do, do as I say!!!!')

I bet Mr Cutts is thinking of a way to thwart your plan as I type this

Good luck whatever you do, and please let us know what the outcome is!

Amelia

Hello Wardy,

If you are really concerned, you should make the links nofollow. However, I think Robert has got this answered for you!

Best of luck,

Amelia

I looked at Hubspot, but decided not to use it in the end. I didn't think it offered anything extra that Moz doesn't. It was also expensive (if I remember rightly). And I like Moz, best of all the SEO tools...

Thank you, yes one page definitely gets more traffic and converts better than the other. I have a third 80% BTL mortgage page, which targets longtail: https://www.commercialtrust.co.uk/btl/landlord-advice/mortgages/80-buy-to-let-mortgages/  - this was written to be an informational article rather than a sales page. It links through to the product page (https://www.commercialtrust.co.uk/btl/product-types/80-buy-to-let-mortgages/) and other, similar product pages (other high LTV mortgage pages - e.g. 85% LTV BTL mortgages - this is the highest LTV the market goes on BTL mortgages at the moment).

I appreciate your answer and input and am grateful to you for putting the time in to answer.

I was going to say pretty much the same thing: most people on google+ are there because of SEO. They are not there to connect with other people (I say this in the broadest possible sense), they are there to promote their business. The idea of sharing other company's posts is a pretty good one, just be careful not to share something by a direct competitor. And stick to your niche as much as possible - the company I work for is a mortgage broker, so I share stuff from estate agents, conveyancers, housing lawyers etc - never a competing company!

I would also say, use your personal account to share as well. I get far more reshares by using my personal account than when I share via our company page.

Hope this helps,

Amelia

Hello,

You are better off not getting keyword rich anchors these days. I wouldn't change a thing if I was you. Google isn't happy by this type of link (apparently it's a 'bought' link even though no money has changed hands), so you're better off making sure it looks as natural as possible.

Best wishes,

Amelia

Has it increased your average time on page? That may indicate a good user experience so Google may reward you for it. However, as Chris has indicated, load times may suffer with live chat. We took live chat off our website because of this.

Thank you - I question the logic behind this though... The two pages are not identical, so I don't believe that a canonical tag is appropriate here. I am open to being persuaded otherwise though!

I am appreciative of the time you have taken to answer this question.

Best wishes,

Amelia

I'd call it black hat. You're efforts will always be best spent on building value, trust and authority for your brand or company. Don't waste your time on buying false 'likes' or fake links, it'll come back and bite you on the ass eventually. And, anyway, you want your message to be put in front of people who actually want to hear it and do something about it (e.g. buy from you), not people who are paid to say they like it even if they don't. I imagine they aren't real people anyway - you'll be sending fake messages to fake people who will only share it with other fake people - none of this will increase your sales revenue!

Hi,

You're right, it's a pig to watch a competitor who has done bad linking constantly out-perform you.

However, as Chris says, you need to balance the risk against the reward - if it doesn't matter to you that at some point (dunno when) your site will get hit by an update then, knock yourself out with links. But, if you want to protect your brand and website then you shouldn't copy your competition by following their lead with spammy links.

Instead build links for traffic. Find out how and where your target audience hangs out online and look at ways your domain/products can be put in front of them (which, to be fair, you've started with the reviews etc). Use analytics to determine how well these referral links convert and refine your strategy from that (keep doing what affects the bottom line and drop what doesn't)

There are loads of online opportunities out there that don't rely on first place listings. Yes, these help (I'm an SEO - of course I'd say strong listings help!!!) but they are not the be-all-and-end-all. Build relationships, get in front of your target customers and target the longtail with blogs, PR and other content. Use social media if it's where your target customers are.

Do what you can to improve your site - this is something you control. (BTW, I haven't seen it, I'm NOT suggesting it's in a bad way or anything). Look at your engagement metrics - time on site, bounce, pages/session - get these to improve and you should find your site starts to pick up. It's amazing what can be done just by improving these metrics.

That's how you succeed, and one day (dunno when!) you'll find that because you have a fantastic website (that converts!) and have built up a strong positive reputation you out perform your competition without needing all those spammy links.

Good luck, and don't give up!

Best wishes,

Amelia

Sounds good, please count me in.

I am an inhouse online marketing executive. I work for a UK commercial mortgage brokerage offering BTL and commercial mortgages as well as bridging loans.

Thanks!

Thank you for answering this question, it's much appreciated.

They used to let you do the same with wikipedia, seems to not be there today when I search though. Other sites that have this are Amazon and The BBC. I haven't checked for any more though!

I assume it's only high traffic sites that get this.  I wonder what the threshold is?

Like you say: fascinating!

BTW, I noticed this ages ago, but that doesn't mean you're knowledge is outdated, it's probably one of those things Google has rolled out at different times in different countries. I can't actually remember the first time I saw it, but it was probably at least a year ago. I'm in the UK.

Best wishes,

Amelia

Hi Mozzers,

As a response to Rand's recent (ish!) whiteboad Friday (http://moz.com/blog/my-customers-wont-amplify-my-content-whiteboard-friday) where he talked about how many verticals will never gain much in the way of links because they aren't fun or exciting products/brands. I think my sites fall into this - we sell mortgages! Not the most exciting or sexy of products, but try buying a house without one!

With this in mind, I am looking at building an extensive PR campaign, but this will take a fair bit of time to get going. In the meantime, my boss has asked me to find some paid link opportunities. I've been trawling through our main competitor's backlinks like a demon (so much trash in there though, why hasn't Google noticed it yet??) and one of our main competitors looks like they are running an affiliate scheme.

I have absolutely no experience in this area. None. Zip. Nothing.

I want to change this! And get some good relevant (converting) traffic to my site. I personally think this would be more beneficial than buying links (my boss understands that any paid links I get will have to have nofollow and therefore would be built for traffic) because we'd only pay when we made a sale - right? I think this is the way it works?

Anyway, I wanted to know how to become an affiliate? Sorry if I've got the terminology wrong here - like I said before I have zero experience in this. Please can someone point me in the right direction? I've found a few companies that appear to act as the middleman but I have no idea of what is good and what isn't in this area. Steep learning curve for me....

Any knowledge you wish to share with me on this would be greatly appreciated! Thank you

As Mr Roberts says, making the links nofollow should stop you being penalised AND give you the benefit of the traffic.

I second TheeDesign - do the change of address in Webmaster tools. Double-check your 301's. Then check them again...

Good luck, it's possible to do without a penalty. I did it earlier in the year, I lost a little traffic in the first month, then gained ever since (except for current - no one wants to visit a mortgage broker's website during Christmas because they have much better things to do, like eating mice pies and sipping mulled wine!!!)

Do they bring traffic? Does that traffic convert?

If yes, then making them nofollow won't actually hurt you very much at all!

It seems counter-intuitive I know, but better to be safe than sorry.

Good luck,

Amelia

I would take any SEO 'rules' with a pinch of salt.

Build pages for people first, worry about search engines afterwards. At the end of the day, search engine spiders are never going to buy cat toys off of you, but people will (assuming your example). Make your site easy for people to use, and the conversions will follow. Google is looking more and more at user engagement (check out the latest whiteboard Friday - http://moz.com/blog/the-massive-ranking-factor-too-many-seos-are-ignoring-whiteboard-friday) so look at ways of improving these before worrying about where to put your links - it really doesn't matter overly much.

Good luck,

Amelia

PS - this 'first link rule' sounds like 'old' advice to me, and may have worked well several years ago, but I highly doubt it makes much difference in 2014 (2015 soon!).

Note Ray-pp suggests you use a private directory... Make sure to keep it out of the serps

Don't do it. Ruben is right, it's risky and potentially dangerous. Use your budget for good

I'm not sure this would help the other radio stations and as others have suggested will damage you. I would fight the proposal as much as possible. It won't benefit either party.

I appreciate though that you may be tasked with making the best of a bad situation. Patrick has come up with some great suggestions.

Good luck whatever you end up doing

Thank you Patrick. I think I agree with you, but I'll wait for other responses as well! It's been like this for over a month so a few more days won't harm it

Best wishes,

Amelia