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Thanks a lot for your thoughts on this John. Really appreciate you taking the time to look into it.

You make a great point about not always copying competitors without testing first. If it's rolled out on such a wide scale, it's always going to be a hard case to put to the client knowing that they're going to lose out in the short-term when it comes to advertising revenue but regardless, I think it's our job as SEOs to first and foremost propose the most SEO-friendly implementation possible.

I've just begun a new project auditing the site of a news publisher. In order to increase pageviews and thus increase advertising revenue, at some point in the past they implemented something so that as many as 5 different articles load per article page. All articles are loaded at the same time and from looking in Google's cache and the errors flagged up in Search Console, Google treats it as one big mass of content, not separate pages. Another thing to note is that when a user scrolls down, the URL does in fact change when you get to the next article.

My initial thought was to remove this functionality and just load one article per page. However I happened to notice that VentureBeat.com uses something similar.

They use infinite scrolling so that the other articles on the page (in a 'feed' style) only load when a user scrolls to the bottom of the first article. I checked Google's cached versions of the pages and it seems that Google also only reads the first article which seems like an ideal solution. This obviously has the benefit of additionally speeding up loading time of the page too.

My question is, is VentureBeat's implementation actually that SEO-friendly or not.

VentureBeat have 'sort of' followed Google's guidelines with regards to how to implement infinite scrolling https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/02/infinite-scroll-search-friendly.html by using prev and next tags for pagination https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663744?hl=en. However isn't the point of pagination to list multiple pages in a series (i.e. page 2, page 3, page 4 etc.) rather than just other related articles?

Here's an example - http://venturebeat.com/2016/11/11/facebooks-cto-explains-social-networks-10-year-mission-global-connectivity-ai-vr/

Would be interesting to know if someone has dealt with this first-hand or just has an opinion.

Thanks in advance!

Daniel

Hi Kady,

I did tweet about this and Aleyda and Gianluca were both kind enough to reply. It does seem that at present, it's not as widespread in other languages as in English, but it's also interesting to note that it seems to be less common for Italian queries vs Spanish.

The example from Gianluca was "que es una meta description" which on Google.es displays a Direct Answer. In Italian I tried "cos'è una meta description" but no Direct Answer was given, just regular search results.

Maybe it's because in Italian for example, there's no equivalent article which explains what a meta description is which meets all of Google's requirements for displaying a Direct Answer... but that does seem unlikely!

Daniel

Thanks Dr. Pete! I guess there's still some more to find out about how much it's been rolled out in other languages. Thinking of reaching out to Aleyda and Gianluca Fiorelli to see if they have any additional insight.

Hi guys,

Last year I wrote a post for the YouMoz blog (https://moz.com/ugc/google-s-direct-answers-how-to-keep-visitors-coming-to-your-site) about Google's Direct Answers box.

Needless to say, I focused purely on English language queries but I'm curious to know if anyone has seen the box appear for queries in other languages.

If you've seen this happening and could provide some examples, then please let me know!

Thanks in advance!

Daniel

Hi,

Based on the info you've given, I would definitely go for your option 3.

Having links in the footer of the site is never a good idea as it multiplies the number of links by as many pages you have on the site. If you think it makes sense to have a page presenting the other websites then that sounds great and only means one external link to each site; sounds like you could create some nice content on this page too!

Hope that helps

In Moz Pro, if you go to Search > Keyword Rankings, you'll be able to scroll down to the "Tracked Keywords Overview" section. In the table there is a column named "Universal Results" which will show an image or video icon next to the keyword. Here you can find some more information - https://moz.com/blog/hot-off-the-press-more-universal-results-included-with-your-campaign-rankings.

Hope that helps!

Hi David,

Like you mentioned, I would ensure that all pages from airjordan.com redirect to their equivalent on nike.com/air-jordan. No need to worry about adding any canonical tags if you're using 301 permanent redirects for each page. Redirects are also much better for user experience as they redirect both the search engine spider AND the user.

Hope that helps.

If you want en-gb to be your standard English language subfolder of the site, I would just use the first part (language) of the href lang: en. The gb part is about country targeting which is actually an optional element. So that way US traffic will go to en-us, the rest will go to your en-gb subfolder.

I would say though that maybe US English is more "international standard" than British English.

Additionally, if the home page of your domain is a country selector (see http://www.emirates.com/index.aspx for an example) then it's a good idea to use X-default. So if you want ALL visitors to first go to your home page, then have them select the country and language which is most appropriate for them, you can use . This lets Google and Yandex know that regardless of country or language, all visitors should go to that home page first. There's more about x-default here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.ae/2013/04/x-default-hreflang-for-international-pages.html

Hope that helps

Hi Becky,

Even if the links are within a drop down, it's not to say that Google can't crawl them.

Here's a video from Matt Cutts where advises against using cross-domain links in the footer and suggests using a country locator page as per my example from Apple's website - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FJNbVU2ihU0

Dan

Hi David,

Like you mentioned, I would ensure that all pages from airjordan.com redirect to their equivalent on nike.com/air-jordan. No need to worry about adding any canonical tags if you're using 301 permanent redirects for each page. Redirects are also much better for user experience as they redirect both the search engine spider AND the user.

Hope that helps.

If you want en-gb to be your standard English language subfolder of the site, I would just use the first part (language) of the href lang: en. The gb part is about country targeting which is actually an optional element. So that way US traffic will go to en-us, the rest will go to your en-gb subfolder.

I would say though that maybe US English is more "international standard" than British English.

Additionally, if the home page of your domain is a country selector (see http://www.emirates.com/index.aspx for an example) then it's a good idea to use X-default. So if you want ALL visitors to first go to your home page, then have them select the country and language which is most appropriate for them, you can use . This lets Google and Yandex know that regardless of country or language, all visitors should go to that home page first. There's more about x-default here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.ae/2013/04/x-default-hreflang-for-international-pages.html

Hope that helps

I agree with Andy above that it's extremely important to markup your sites with href lang, however I would also go further and say to localize the different forms of English. Would be best to use British English on .co.uk and .com.au domains, whereas American English for .com. An added benefit of having separate ccTLDs like .co.uk and .com.au would be that users view your website and company as being UK-based, Australian-based etc., so it might be confusing for visitors if they are seeing American English used everywhere; localizing the content should also mean a better conversion rate!

Additionally, there was a good recent blog post by Liam Curley on the YouMoz blog arguing that using ccTLDs might not be worth it compared with using a folder - https://moz.com/ugc/why-cctlds-should-not-be-an-automatic-choice-for-international-websites. Food for thought!

Hi Peter,

Both really good answers to your questions above but maybe it would be good to give you some further pointing in the right direction. Perhaps you could answer the questions below and I can give you my personal opinion on which method would be best:

• will you be putting an equal amount of marketing (content, PR, etc.) into the Spanish version for example compared with English?

• are you able to offer  fully localised service eg, Spanish customer service, Spanish sales team etc.?

• is your company well-known globally?

It's important not to also forget that another option is using ccTLDs (eg, .co.uk, .com.au). These give the highest signal to search engines about the country being targeted and also importantly make you look more "local" which can do wonders for increasing conversion rate in countries where your company is not well-known.

Hi Luke,

Just make sure that your robots.txt file located at https://www.example.com/robots.txt doesn't block search engine spiders. Of course there may be some folders or filetypes you want to block but it certainly shouldn't look like below which would block everything:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

Hope that helps

Ciao Emanuele!

If you seem to be experiencing ranking issues, the best way you can see if there is something to worry about or not is by seeing if there have been any drops in organic sessions on analytics. Has there been a drop?

If there is a pattern to the types of keywords which you seem to not be rankng for, you should check in analytics to see if the pages on your site which correspond to the keywords are losing organic traffic or not. Example: keyword A will be most relevant to example.com/page-a

Search results are different for different users, based on location, which version of Google you are using, whether you are signed in to Google not etc. so don't be too concerned unless traffic is also affected.

Additionally, the message in GWTs on 12/6 isn't something to worry about. I have also seen this message for many of the sites I manage and it is really just Google giving some tips such as defining a target country, giving access to other users, creating XML sitemaps etc.

Let us know if you are also experiencing drops in traffic!

Hi Becky,

The main reason I think it would be flagged up would be because the links to each sister site are located in the footer and therefore appear on every page of the websites! Perhaps you have thousands of links in total from each site to the other.

I recently had this same issue come up with one of my clients and we chose to build a separate page, linked to when users can select their country. Check out http://www.apple.com/choose-your-country/ to see what I mean. That way there is just one link to each sister site rather than hundreds or thousands.

That should be a relatively simple, quick fix to implement.

Hope that helps

Daniel

Hi Becky,

Even if the links are within a drop down, it's not to say that Google can't crawl them.

Here's a video from Matt Cutts where advises against using cross-domain links in the footer and suggests using a country locator page as per my example from Apple's website - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FJNbVU2ihU0

Dan

I wouldn't hold out for dmoz to approve your submission. It's really the only generic web directory still worth submitting to these days but it can take months before you get approved. If and when it does get added though, it's certainly worth the 2 minutes it takes to submit.

Manual outreach is just a way to contact people directly whether that be bloggers, journalists and editors, contributing articles to industry websites etc. You can reach out by email but I find that contacting people via LinkedIn and Twitter has a much better success rate. Here is a good article to introduce you to the topic - http://www.buzzstream.com/blog/essential-guide-effective-link-building-outreach.html - which also features Moz's own Follerwonk tool.

When I say about directories which are not human-edited, I mean directories which don't even have an approval process and therefore allows anyone to "build a link" straight away. You will normally be able to spot this in a directory's "submission guidelines" and they will normally be the directories which require a small fee upwards of $50.

Hi Kusanagi17,

If you really badly want to rank for the keyword, there's no need to create that extra page ie, /benefits-of-running-shoes. With your domain name being what it is, it's fine just to use that same keyword in the title of the home page.

With regards to why that page isn't being indexed, yes it's probably to do with Google deeming that there's no need for that page given the domain name, but also the fact that a new site's deeper pages will take time to be indexed. Given that it's a new site I wouldn't worry at all about adding a 301 redirect from the extra page to the home page.

Hope that helps!

Daniel