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_So using /pt-br/ is fine, what really matter is letting Google know the language/location through search console and other measures what language/location the page are targeting. _

Correct, also, do look into meta tag called "hreflang":

https://moz.com/learn/seo/hreflang-tag

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

I'm not following what you mean in the last sentence: Unless you use some type of CMS, then you can just use RewriteRule or something to only display needed URL.

Most CMS systems have some type of functionality or plugins, which would let you create content in different languages within the same admin, so you wouldn't have to physically create all subfolders etc. So, whenever CMS does that, it would give you URL, but you might use htaccess rewriterule without redirect to make URL look like you want. Just google "rewrite rule without redirect" and you'll see what i'm talking about.

Hope this clarifies a bit

Hi.

Yes and no. Look more at DA, rather than PA. PA is awesome, but it's much more valuable to get a link from low PA page on high DA site, rather than don't get link at all. At the same time it rarely happens that there is a really high PA page on very low DA domain, there is a correlation between those. Yes, sometimes PA can be higher than DA of a given domain, but not by much. Basically, you won't be able to have 99 PA on domain with 20 DA.

Now, you're talking about paid do-follow link. You're just asking for trouble, aren't you? Google has been talking for long time that they penalize for paid links. Watch these videos: https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=matt+cutts+paid+links&tbm=vid

So, if you do decide to do it - yes, it's gonna be valuable if you don't get penalized

Pointing to themselves won't produce a duplicate

True, but won't get rid of duplicate either.

Hi there.

Basically, canonical link tells search engines to move all the ranking weight to a page, linked by canonical link. Therefore if google thinks that page A should be ranked for a given keyphrase, but this page A has a canonical link to another page B, page B will be considered as a ranking nominee and page A will be discarded. Which means that all meta data and other things WILL be taken from page B.

Hope this helps.

Sure thing

Agree with both statements.

Also want to say that the way you have it set up is a bit weird. If i land on non-english version of your website, and then on click on any link it would take me to english version, I'd consider it a big UX flaw. Especially if user can not understand english.

Good question, isn't it? I wish somebody knows exact answer, but I'm not friends with Matt Cutts

From what I heard, read etc, my understanding is that Google knows websites, who are selling links, by simply reading the content and links on that website. Example: if website has a page with prices for articles with links or press releases, Google bots can read that content and understand what the page is about. Then they look at how many of outgoing links on website are do-follow, how often they appear, diversity of those links etc. Basically, if 99% of outgoing links are do-follow and they are all to different domains, the picture is pretty clear. If picture is not clear enough, bots would send a request to manual action team.

Hi. Thanks for reply.

No, it's not. The problem is that i have 20+ clients, each of them have 3-5 goals, so, I would like to send them a report of goals by source. Also, for our own website we have 18 goals - switching the way you suggest (and that's the way I am doing) is very time consuming and somewhat difficult to see the whole picture.

Hope this makes sense.

Howdy.

I'm crazy about loading times optimization

So, the strategy is to have first visual within 800ms. and everything visually available at the scrolling pace. That's why deferring and lazy loading is so popular.

Hope this helps.

P.S. I believe if there is no visual within 3 sec, there is like 80%+ of bounce.

Howdy.

So, here is the thing - MOZ link crawler is very delayed. They crawl about once a month. Also, as any other crawler, there is a limitation on resources. Therefore there is high chance that simply your link profile is not up-to-date. If all other tools are saying that it's the case, then you are good.

As for why your website is not ranking better than competitors - there are so many other signals than links. And the metrics are just metrics.

Hope this helps.

"The en and en-GB sites are duplicates of each other" - not true at all. "en" is for all english speaking users, "en-GB" is for english speaking users in Britain.

Here is Google's Article: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

Hi there.

Of course it can! The crawl rate is in pages per day, so if you remove pages (especially 1.5 million), there won't be as much to crawl

Also it can happen, if you have the same static pages and the crawl bot has crawled them all. Google doesn't crawl all pages all the time, they have limited resources. So, if you have launched or updated website recently and now not really updating it, you can see the change in crawl rate.

However, you can change crawl rate for 90 days, if you need them to crawl your website constantly (usually good for websites in process of reconstruction). Here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/48620?hl=en

I thought of this way - but figured there should be easier (less bulkier) way to do this. Well, I guess if nobody else has any suggestions, I'll do that.

Howdy.

What you need to do is look into internal links structure with what anchor texts are used. And using that to strengthen internal "rankings" of pages. Also look into external links and what pages and anchor texts are used there. Increase the flow to higher level pages, they will outrank the lower level pages.

Hope this helps.

Hello, there.

Are you and your competitors link/being linked from the same websites? If so, then whenever those hosts become history or do clean up, you all get unlinked at the same time. And, if you and your competitors are watching each other closely and trying to get backlinks at exact same places - you will get indexed at the same time as well.

Cheers.

Hello, there.

_"The issue is that all these listings are coming from the same domain page" _- It is an issue, indeed. My recommendation would be to create unique pages (I wouldn't go with subdomains, I think that's just too much for each location. At the same time make sure that you have all locations in local directories. This will help Google not to "nix" the results.

I'd say look how big companies do it - let's say Apple and do the same way.

About links - https://moz.com/learn/local - good guide.

Hope this helps.

Hi there.

I see some issues:

1. you say you use rel=next and rel=prev. When I go  to provided url and look at the source code, i see only rel=next and ALL of them are linked to ?page=2. Definitely look into that.
2. when i hover over page numbers, it shows me url structure as ?page=x, not the post request, so, there might be some miscommunication in the code. At the same time, ?page=x are existent and not redirected to post request pages (I assume that's what you want to be happening). So that might be an issue as well.
3. It seems to me that what's happening is if i click on pagination button, i get to ?page=x, then internally from page the post request is being sent and it changes the displayed URL. If this is true, then ?page=x will be displayed in SERPs, because POST url change is happening after page is accessed.

Hope it's not super confusing

Thanks for reply.

Yeah, that's the way I'm going to do if can't find any better solution.

Hi.

My belief is that for ANYWHAT good TECHNICAL audit you will need access to Google Analytics and GWT. Because it's TECHNICAL. And these tools will tell you everything about penalizations etc.

Yes, you can use MOZ, but if you don't have access to historical rankings data - there is no much use to determine anything about penalizations.

The rest is covered by other comments - ahrefs/majestic/OSE for backlink profile, MOZ Rank Tracker for current rankings, webpagetest and PageSpeed for loading times.

And the most important - your own head. Just look at the website. If that website has been penalized - there is huge reason for that and you'd be able to see it just by looking at the website architecture, content etc.

Hi,

I'm not sure about how much capitalization differences effect your rankings, however I do know that Google likes consistency a lot. So, I say follow Google guidelines, it surely won't hurt.

About Google understanding the locations of branches of the company - that's quite easy. Do those locations have their own contact us/address information pages? Do those locations have their own Google plus pages? If so, then don't worry, it won't be duplicate. However make sure that you don't have exact duplicate websites for two different locations.

Hope this helps.

You misunderstand the meaning of that article.

"...that when you do block thin or bad content, Google prefers when you use the noindex over 404ing the page..."

They are talking about the walk around the problem of blocking pages INSTEAD of removing them.

So, if for whatever reason you don't want to delete a page and just put a 404 status on it, it's worse than putting noindex on it. Basically, what they're saying is:

• if you have thin content, DELETE it;
• if for whatever reason you don't want to delete it, put NOINDEX on it.

P.S. My suggestion still stays the same. Delete all bad content and, if you really want, put 410 gone status for that deleted content for Google to understand immediately that those pages are deleted forever, not inaccessible by mistake or something.

Hope this makes sense

.

Anybody knows if what i'm asking is possible to do with GA API?

Howdy,

Yes, you won't be able to see anything in server logs. What happens is that the crawler is not getting proper response data. There are couple good explanations in other Q&As. And it's not necessarily robots.txt problem. Read these:

 https://moz.com/community/q/803-error

https://moz.com/community/q/how-to-permanently-fix-the-moz-crawl-803-error

https://moz.com/community/q/how-do-fix-an-803-error

Hope this helps

in GA - traffic drop offs, in fact any large changes in any metrics

GWT - manual actions, system messages, security issues

Hi there.

Whenever you go to managing your business listing page, there is a checkbox which says "This business permanently closed". Make sure it's unchecked.

If everything else appears to be fine, then just wait on Google. Usually it takes them couple days to approve changes. Make sure though that everything is properly setup, basically, make sure you're shooting yourself in a leg by having some incorrect settings.

Hello, my friend.

Here is a video from Matt Cutts exactly on this question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pnpg00FWJY

Hi there.

I haven't worked with chinese websites, no. But since you're saying that website will be hosted in US, there shouldn't be any problems at all. The question really is not if GA will be accurate or not, but is that website gonna be accessible by users from china. The idea is that GA will track ANY hits to website, so as long as users can get to website, all data will be recorded.

Howdy.

So, there are couple ways to do it.

1. Find a plugin which works (don't know if such exists
2. Use htaccess rewrites. In this case you won't be able to use manufacturer dynamicaly though.
3. Change the catalog model files. Here is a link for couple examples: http://www.placementedge.com/blog/how-to-add-a-prefix-to-magento-product-urls/ All you need to do is append matching variables before the product urls.

Hope this helps

I'm not sure if I understand your question correctly - correct me if i'm wrong.

Well, when i say competitor, i mean your competitor. MOZ doesn't have any topical relevance algorithms in calculating DA (as far as I know and understand). So, they do crawl all links (or as much as they can) on the Internet.

Now, as why you need to look at your competitor relative changes. Basically, as Rand said here:

My strongest suggestion if you ever have the concern/question "Why did my PA/DA drop?!" is to always compare against a set of competing sites/pages. If most of your competitors fell as well, it's more likely related to relative scaling or crawl biasing issues, not to anything you've done. Remember that DA/PA are relative metrics, not absolute! That means you can be improving links and rankings and STILL see a falling DA score, but, due to how DA is scaled, the score in aggregate may be better predictive of Google's rankings.

If 100 DA websites got more links, then all other websites' DAs will drop proportinally. Therefore, if your website's DA dropped even more, something is wrong with your backlink profile.

It's quite weird, I know. I'm not sure if I can explain any better. Hope this helps.

P.S. I'll send this post link to Rand, maybe he can clarify more.

Hi.

Make sure your Business G+ is optimized, all info is consistent through different local listings and the website. Also, it won't hurt to link G+ and website contact page. Do use structured data to help Google understand who and what you are.

I do believe that organic search rankings have a positive effect too. If you're ranking in first three spots and you have G+ optimized, you'll most definitely be in local results as well.

Cheers.

No problem.

Consider .nl as main domain as well.

IPv6 is that long IP address.

Simply go to filters in GA, find predefined filter, choose exclude, choose "traffic from IP addresses" and paste your IP, which is 2606:a000:4e2b:d500:61d9:9d4e:c539:ea86.

Howdy.

I say go with canonicals for all pages but home page. And make sure that there is a bit of different content on that home page, maybe an explanation of differences between two of your sites.

That would be the only way to resolve duplicate content issues. Second way would not.

Hope this helps

Hi there.

So, tools are saying one thing, but actually googling gives you another? I'd look into cache and history related stuff in your browser. Also it might be location biased.

Go into incognito mode, try do a search. See what comes up. Also, tool you are using might have cached information - try couple different tools, see what results you get there. Sometimes it also can be localized bug, and it shows in browser that keyword is not ranking at all, but it actually is. Try from different computers, different browsers. And just wait couple days - see if it comes back up.

P.S. Have you done any black/grey hat recently?

Ok, the easiest way is to go to google maps and type in your company name. Then click on it on a map, the knowledge graph will appear on a left side. at the bottom there is suggest an edit. click on it, there is that checkbox.

Hi there.

Bing, Yahoo and Google have completely different algorithms. It's quite easy to rank in first two, comparing to Google. Now, since the algorithms are so different, it's very hard to optimize for all engines at ones. I have many clients who rank in top 3-5 on yahoo, but nowhere in Google. The thing is that traffic share brought from non-google engines is so little, even when the rankings are great, that we pay very little attention to optimizing for those engines. Usually, if you can get good rankings on Google, good/fair rankings in other engines will follow.

So, you shouldn't really compare Bing and Google. "Forget" about Bing and start working on optimizations in Google without comparing to anything, because, most likely when Google rankings start growing, Bing rankings will go down, especially in the beginning of optimization journey. Of course, if most of your organic traffic brought from non-google engines and you don't think that it would change, even after good rankings in Google, then maybe you shouldn't be optimizing for Google (very strange feeling when I was typing it).

Hope this helps

Well, try ipv6 by itself first. Make sure it's working, eliminate the variables, you know. If it works by itself, then you can start digging into regular expressions (even though it should be simple ipv6|ipv4 without escapes). Who knows - maybe fault is not in regular expressions, but address is wrong or something.

If you have a budget for paid search and dont care about it ranking organically - sure However, not everyone will go for paid search ads. As for link juice - just add dofollow links to individuals.nl on non-canonicalized home page and that will transfer pretty much all the juice.

Hi, Greg.

I still think that the explanation roots in the relativity idea I have quoted above. Also I linked to original post by Rand, so, check it out - you might find all the answers

Hi there.

It surely would look strange and maybe even suspicious in eyes of google. What about simple call forwarding? Just forward all calls from all of those numbers to your main one. Win-win situation.

Hi there.

I assume you are talking about adding UTM tracking parameters to the links on local listings profiles like Yelp, G+ etc?

If so, as far as I know there is no way to control anchor text, so users will see full url with all parameters, which might be confusing.

But overall - it will be helpful to see how many people are actually finding your client in local search and, if it's large enough number, they might want to invest in promoted listings within those networks. Other than that - I can't think of any benefits.

Hope this helps.

Hi there.

I'm not seeing any messed up code or headers or anything like that. As Gaston said, it might be after-effects of broken plugin or something.

At this point, i'd recommend this: do manual fetch as google request, see if it comes up. If not, disable all the plugins, do new fetch and see if it comes back, re-enable plugins, fetch, see what happens. this would help you troubleshoot.

I recommend doing these steps on development server - basically replicate your website on like a subdomain URL - that way you can do all the plugin disabling etc and do all the fetches without affecting currently ranking site. Also, after replication on dev server and doing fetch right away, you'll know if your home page is just being still cached by google in the state of noindex due to previous mess.

Also, make sure that in sitemaps you have last-modified set to as recent time as possible, otherwise google won't update the page index, since it's technically considered cached, if not modified since last crawl.

Hope this makes sense.

Hi there.

Well, #1 is easy - go to your campaign->Site Crawl->4XX Client Error, Then click download CSV, this can be opened in Excel no problem.

#2 is quite more difficult. There is no way really to automatically remove 404s with magic. However, you can use 301 redirects (rewriteRule) for whole subfolders/directories, also, since you are using CMS, you might be able to find-replace paths in broken urls.

However, none of that would really fix 404s. If pages just moved, you should use 301 redirect, if it's gone, then you might use 410 Gone.

Hope this helps.

Hi there.

_ I don't feel comfortable doing it this way as it goes against what I believe is good SEO_

Not true at all. Good SEO is exactly about this - good related content. In your case it's a little difficult, since it's international company and all. But the thing is that simply having local listings will not make you rank for local results, unless your brand is directly associated with the keyphrase you're trying to rank for.

I would recommend to have not just 1 contact page per location and that's it, but have somewhat unique content for each location (or at least each major area).

Hi there.

I don't think there is any specific courses for technical SEO, since it includes html, css, js, jquery, php and more.

I think you would be better off trying to find lessons/guides for specific programming languages your website is built on, rather than trying to learn everything at the same time.

As for APIs - the same thing - there are lots of good tutorials for specific APIs, but to use them you need to know some of programming languages, since all APIs are based on one or another programming language.

So, my advice - find out which languages your website is built on, what API it uses and what language that APIs is operating with (most likely it will be the same as your website platform language), then find some crash course online for that language, spend couple weeks learning it - then you should be able to do simple technical SEO changes.

Hope this helps.

Hi there.

Yes, 3 page visits is not the best metric, that's for sure. As for page depth - it's the same as number of unique pages visited. Therefore, page depth of one is visit to a landing page only.

Cheers.

Hi there.

Official guide from Google - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7440203?hl=en

Official response from google on the same page -

Indexed, not submitted in sitemap: The URL was discovered by Google and indexed. We recommend submitting all important URLs using a sitemap.

So, no, it's not necessary, but recommended, otherwise you can't control how often Google recrawls it etc.

Hi there.

I would say use all available tools like you mentioned + Ahrefs, Screaming Frog etc + Simply googling exact match links. Build up a combined list of returned results, get unique links. This is really the best way to accumulate all those links.