Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey Kane -

Jumping in here because I told you I would. I've seen it work two different ways.

As you saw in my posts, I have the following configuration:

• Self-referencing canonicals (/es/ canonicalizes to /es/, regular canonicalizes to itself)
• HREFLANG point to each other as the alternate.

When you search "canonical delays with Googlebot" in google.es, the English ranks first and then the Spanish. Of course, with the Spanish search "etiquetta canonical retrasa con googlebot" the Spanish one ranks. This is, of course, a test with two different languages.

I've seen it work with two English-language URLs (Australia and English) where the following is what worked:

• Canonical referencing the primary (English)
• HREFLANG pointing to each other

The title/meta description of the /au/ version disappeared because of the canonical but the /au/ version ranked in google.com/au instead of the regular URL.

The self-referencing HREFLANG seems to not be necessary, but I've never had an issue using it. However, your mileage may vary.

BTW, all of this testing was done by my coworker Dave Sottimano, not me. But these were the findings.

Hey Shauny -

I'm not seeing those directory links you're talking about in either OSE or Majestic. What I do see, though, is these links which appear to be from a link network (since all the links are the same) -

http://www.directorio.internet.com.pe/Top/Regional/Europe/United_Kingdom/England/Manchester/Worsley http://www.smart-dir.com/dir/Regional/Europe/United_Kingdom/England/Manchester/Worsley http://www.gosearchfor.com/directory/Regional/Europe/United_Kingdom/England/Manchester/Worsley

I'd go and remove those links, if your rankings dropped.

In my opinion, right now directories are too risky for my clients and my own sites. The only ones that I would do are BetterBusinessBureau (in the US), DMOZ, and Yahoo directory. Other than that, I steer clear of them and have moved my clients away from them.

Sounds good Tom.

Hey Greg, any resolution on this?

Hi Lee, any update on the status of this? Did you ever hear back from Google?

Just one more, you have some weird internal duplication going on too. The following URLs are indexed but render the homepage:

http://www.ohioautowarehouse.com/contactus.php?stock=CAR%20HAULER&year=1999&make=Ford&model=F-350%20SD&trim=XLT%20Crew%20Cab%20DRW%204WD

http://www.ohioautowarehouse.com/contactus.php?stock=q2311&year=2004&make=Cadillac&model=Escalade&trim=AWD

I bet there are more of these too. Maybe these pages are supposed to 404/redirect and instead are mirroring the homepage? That could be causing the issue.

If the links are exact anchors (which I assume they are if you were doing link exchanges) and are in the footer, I would get them removed. I have not heard of anyone linkbuilding their way out of Penguin; only by removing bad links have people recovere. So yes, I would remove these links if they are this way.

Branded links are usually fine, unless they are something like what WPMU dealt with and they were too close to exact anchors.

Penguin seems to mean that there are specific links that Google does not like. Go look at the posts that have been written for the different types they don't like, and look through your backlink profile to find the money terms where you might have too many exact anchors.

Good luck.