hi

just a quickie, anyone know off hand when you change your FB username/url do you retain or lose the likes/fans ?

cheers

dan

Thanks for your comments but im looking directly into subfolder option (since TLD not an option and sub-domain considered bad practice from what i can gather after many days research on Moz etc

As a result this is what ill issue to a clients development team in this circumstance is as follows for where sites preferred structure is sub-folders/directories:

1. Implement IP sniffing on the home page ONLY

2. Then have Sub-Folders named after the official country abbreviations which will create a better user experience than both country and language i.e. domain.com/us/ as opposed to domain.com/en-us/ or domain.com/en-gb/ etc etc. This way it will only manipulate the homepage crawling and not site-wide indexing issues.

3) Target these folders to the correct countries in Google’s and Bing’s Webmasters Tools. Use the official country and language codes in the Hreflang mark-up as per point 4.

4. Set up site maps for each subfolder and rel="alternate" hreflang= according to Google guidelines. Here's a great tool to help with correct implementation: http://www.themediaflow.com/resources/tools/href-lang-tool/

5. Specify the content language/country by adding the 'country-language' meta-tags in the html head

6) Link between each country/language version in a crawl-able and visible manner (for SE and Users)

7) Create individual profiles in GWT & Bing Webmaster Tools for each country/language sub-folder and geo-target accordingly

Create individual profiles within GAnalytics for each country/language version and configure to track internal activity between different versions

9) Localise content so has US currency, contact details, spelling etc

10) Other localisation techniques ( such as marking up contact details with schema places code)

Note RE: HrefLang & Canonicalisation:

An extra advantage of using hreflang is that it will provide a degree of canonicalisation. Should canonical tag be employed in the future never so across language versions if site expand into non English versions. More info here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Igbrm1z_7Hk

Hi

According to all the resources i can find on Moz and elsewhere re int seo, say in the context of having duplicate versions of US & UK site, its best to have subfolders i.e.

domain.com/en-gb/

&

domain.com/en-us/

however when it comes to the user journey and promoting web address seems a bit weird to say visit us at: domain.com/en-us/ !?

And what happens if someone just enters in domain.com from the US or UK ?

My client wants to use an IP sniffer but i've read thats bad practice and should employ above style country/language code instead, but i'm confused about both the user journey and experience in the case of multiple sub folders.

Any advice much appreciated ?

Cheers

Dan

Thanks for confirming that Paul !

Ive also noticed that when using services like Buffer etc, to post socially, that the articles image is not being displayed as an option in the images to choose from, to display as the image in the post, Instead its only showing options like the site logo etc which we don't want.  I asked Buffer tech support and they said that if the images had height/width attributes then they should then be presented as image options to accompany the post

All Best

Dan

Hi

How important are the image height/width attributes and would you expect a best practice site to have them included ?

I hear not having them can slow down a page load time is that correct ?

Any other issues from not having them ?

I know some re social sharing (i know bufferapp prefers images with h/w attributes to draw into their selection of image options when you post)

Most importantly though would you expect them to be intrinsic to sites that have been designed according to best practice guidelines ?

Thanks