Welcome to the Q&A Forum

@peteboyd you can refer to this tutorial: https://www.growwithom.com/2020/06/16/track-dynamic-traffic-google-tag-manager/

Should meet your requirements perfectly - using GTM to replace a static value with the url in your UTM Source.

@Anna33212 could I ask if the internal link structure leading to your "97% pages" is the same as your old website? Assuming that the 1:1 redirection for these 97% pages has no issues, then I wonder if the updated internal link structure is not as good as previously?

Hi @Ravi_Rana , this gets a little tricky as your content will likely not be localised. Off the top of my head, 3 things you can do are:

1. Have a section dedicated to your product/service for each country on all pages.
2. Get backlinks from local websites in each country, anchor text should include the country name. Also list yourself on local directories.
3. Use local biz schema to list your office/store in each country.

^as with SEO in general, this ideas are subjective. If you are not in a competitive niche and have gathered sufficient authority, then you may not need all to take all these extra steps.

@nicolasvhe recommend having headers with each of your keywords and also having sections of content that are dedicated to each keyword where possible. In essence, you should strategically signal to Google the relevance of a section for the query.

@HimalayanInstitute Since its the same domain, there is no pressing need to submit as an additional property in GSC. You can filter down to the blog file path from there.

There is no harm though in having an additional property in order to handle data for your blog more efficiently. Although, I do not believe that there is any additional benefit like increased crawling should you create this additional property.

Definitely recommend resubmitting your sitemap to signal to Google that a large change in URLs has just occurred.

@RVForce (1) Your main URL variant should have a self referencing canonical. (2) Your index.html page variant should have a canonical tag pointing at the main URL variant.

On both pages, use:
e.g. <link rel="canonical" href="https://www.example.com/" />

@bakergraphix_yahoo-com unless the same GA tracking code/tag is on the duplicate website or it has links to your domain, then might not be the case. A couple of things to check before confirming though. Do see if the traffic is from direct or organic. Also do see if GSC provides any insights into how popular your website is in the particular city in Virginia.

@viveklazy to check for indexing of your link, 1 way is to use the site: operator on google search. Input in the page url and the anchor text in quotation marks. If the text has been indexed, then likely the link has as well.

@CitimarineMoz self-referencing canonicals as you described are an additional signal to Google to state that the page is the main variant and thus should be used on the SERP. Where no canonical tag is stated, there is a possibility where if content is similar, Google might select another page as the "canonical". As such, your page would not be shown on the SERP.

In your case, would say that implementing self referencing canonicals is a form of insurance/good to have at this time.

@Safxmed you can use a canonical tag to point the filter page variant to the static category variant. This way, there is a clear signal to Google as to which is the preferred page for showing on SERP. This is the method used by ecommerce giants like Shopee. If a user searched on Google and clicked into their category page, the url would be the static variant. However, if they were to travel from the home page via the filter system to the same category, they are actually given the filtered page variant.

If you do follow this, i still recommend having the static category urls in links from home, menu, and footer where possible. This is for internal linking purposes.

@Leviiii actually if you are solely creating slugs that redirect to the subdomains, then there is little value in this action? Would be better off just having the subdomains linked from your main domain directly. Better for both users and search crawlers.

Alternatively, if your slugs have different content and then you can link to the corresponding subdomain. *Note that its a normal href link and not a redirection. If you are worried about content duplication or keyword cannibalisation when doing this, can simply point a canonical tag over from the subpage to the subdomain.

@Ravi_Rana if you are retaining the .com domain, then I recommend creating sub folders for each country. Duplicate your website's content and localise the content. Then use hreflang tags formatted as language - country.

Example for your UK page variant, would have hreflang tags as follows:
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-au" href="https://example.com/au/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-nz" href="https://example.com/nz/" />

Also do insert 1 more hreflang tag for x-default, pointing to the default page to be shown to users outside of these 3 countries.

Do really localise the content as its possible that Google ignores your hreflang tag if the content is too similar.

@vbsk there is quite alot of info that you have mentioned, so correct me if i don't understand the constraints here correctly.

From what i read, if you are able to migrate the content of the forum onto your new site and retain their existing urls, then no redirects are needed.

If you are switching domains, then you can set a sitewide rule via .htaccess file or equivalent to redirect to the new domain.

Essentially, so long as the content is still on your website with no change to URL (or there is a filepath/domain name to forward all redirects to via a few rules), then this should be fairly straightforward.

Hi @MattHopkins based on your sample urls, looks similar to Shopify's filter tag content duplication issue. Might want to try applying the same fix which is to set a site wide url matching rule to apply a canonical to the main product collection page for each of these.

Hi @ZeonAley you can use a couple of free chrome extensions for example

1. Moz Bar - helps to visually highlight outbound links on your page
2. SEOquake, details down outbound links from a page

Also can consider the free screaming frog application. Allows you to crawl your website and find outbound links.

Hi @amanda5964 actually could I ask if there is a reason for having these identical pages? You might want to consider simply combining the pages - i.e. deleting your sub page and redirecting to home if the content is identical.

Hi @Socialdom agree with everyone's inputs so far.

Just wanted to add that when you use the disavow tool, results from it are pretty slow. Could easily take up to 9 months to see any difference. As such, if you have had any rankings hit due to spammy links, you may not see a recovery any time soon.

Additionally, if you are using any link audit tools, the disavow links will likely still show up. You should be able to add them to a disavow list within the tool though.