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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
Hi Bob,
You seem to know what you're talking about and have some pretty decent rankings. I think you need to start with conducting a comprehensive competitor analysis looking at both on-site factors and off-site factors (ie, backlinks). This will help you to identify opportunities where you can really get the edge on your competitors.
Aleyda Solis did a great infographic and post about this very topic which I highly recommend - https://moz.com/blog/illustrated-seo-competitive-analysis-workflow.
With Vista Print being a huge company, you might be hard-pushed to rank first but I would definitely spend some time to look at their link profile as well as the other top competitors to see how they're approaching their link building strategies.
Hi Edward,
With your competitors seemingly not having the most up-to-date or high quality link profile, this provides you with a massive opportunity! Where they have links from generic directories, you can earn links from high authority websites which are relevant to your niche.
It's always good to analyse and compare competitors' link profiles; I would only use this process to find a few main directories within your niche (free or paid) and bear in mind that they could also bring some referral traffic if the directories are popular. Otherwise, stay away from:
You said that you have been actively writing content. Producing content is great but you need to promote it if it is going to earn links. The best way I have found to earn the most authoritative links is via manual outreach, in which blogger outreach could be included of course. Contact the editors and webmasters of sites within your niche (but certainly try to think creatively to find opportunities which are outside your niche too), show them some examples of that great content you've been producing and ask them about the opportunity to create some exclusive content for them or even to collaborate on a piece of content together.
Hope that helps!
Hi Joshua,
I think I have the hassle-free solution for you!
If you're asking this question with regards to the site listed on your profile (which is in English), as a first step I would not get into translating your content at all.
The products on your site are relatively high-end which are more suited to the more affluent consumers in India who will commonly be searching in English, rather than Hindi, Urdu or one of the many other languages spoken there. Also, approximately 80% of the population in the UAE are expats (of which many are British or American) so again, no need to translate for the moment.
If you start to see good results in these countries with the English versions, that's the time to think about investing in the local languages. Particularly as it's not just the associated cost of translating the website; you should also have native speaker customer service reps for example.
Use the Google Keyword Planner to see how many searches there are in English in these countries. Testing like this is a crucial part of international SEO so you don't waste money on translation and localization which can be expensive.
My suggestions above are based on the assumption that you will have local domains for each country eg, example.co.in (for India). If you want to target these countries with your main .co.uk domain, start some Google AdWords campaigns (in English) targeted to those countries and see how they go; if it works, then you can look further into the big international SEO question of wheather to use local domains, subdomains or folders to target those countries and languages.
Hope that helps
You said that the manufacturer's products have a different branding so for me that's a clear point of differentiation that warrants two product pages. If there are also differences in pricing etc. then that's also a good reason to create the new product pages. If the new pages are optimised for the manufacturer branding and the existing pages for more generic terms then you shouldnt suffer from cannibalisation. The generic keywords should still generate proportionally more traffic to the existing pages, which importantly for your client means more sales of a product which t make a higher margin on.
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!
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
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.