In most cases, no. I would still add language tags to your site, but Google tends to view different language sites as localized to that language.
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RE: If I have two brands and I market one in English (BrandA.com) and one in Spanish (BrandB.com), and the websites are identical but in different languages, would that have a negative impact on SEO due to duplicate content?
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RE: Hotel SEO / Rank Conundrum
The answer here is not one that I often advocate but you're going to to need to grease the wheels a bit
Buy his website out. Make certain this includes his domain and control of the social media he's running. Have him sign a legal agreement as well. Once you own it, 301 redirect it to your main resort page.
If he balks, or tries to run the price up, my bet is he has a contract with the owners of the building and they might have some things they can do that will make his life uncomfortable (consult a lawyer first so you know what your legal options are). You might be able to use that as a stick to encourage him to take the carrot of a buyout. Try the carrot first, tho, and save the stick for any serious negotiations.
Next, you need to harden the contracts with your private owners. Make it clear that, for a small sum of money, they agree not to try to represent themselves as the resort. Again, consult a lawyer and get this written properly. Make any future private buyers sign this agreement as well.
At the end of the day, I would chalk this up as an expensive marketing lesson. If you can get him to sell, you don't have to jump through any hoops. Otherwise, you're competing with what Google sees as the legitimate business (which is a much more difficult path to walk).
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RE: From menu to dropdown menu: Is there a risk?
As long as you're not using JS to draw the new links (i.e. CSS hides them until an appropriate hover event) you should be just fine. Google will still spider the links from the source code.
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RE: HTTPS 301 Redirect Question
I don't know if you admin your own server, but if you do, you should be able to easily tell it to redirect HTTP to HTTPS. I do this with Apache (it's much easier and faster than .htaccess) and it works really well.
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RE: Hi - I have a question about IP addresses
Not really. As big as this site sounds, attempting to do so would probably pose a security risk to your website (as an IT professional I can think of a few ways this could work, but all involve exposing the main server in ways I would cringe at). The subdomain has the fewest questions overall.
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RE: Hi - I have a question about IP addresses
It depends a bit. In order to host on a different site you'll have to have a different domain or subdomain. That will let it live under a different IP. The IP thing isn't an issue but the different domain might be. I would try to get it under a subdomain of your main domain (i.e. blog.domain.com) so bots can at least see there's a relationship there. The catch here is that your subdomain is not going to pass as much juice to your main site as if it lived under domain.com/blog (where it's part of the same domain).
You don't have to host your own blog incidentally. Check out wordpress.com where, for a fee, they will map a domain to your blog. It's the safest way to host Wordpress, since they update it and secure the servers.
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RE: Empty href damages SEO? (href="#")
The only reason to use a fragment (the hashtag part of a URL is called a fragment) as your anchor, is that you're adding that link solely for the purpose of tying it to a DOM event (like an onclick event). There's better ways to do this in modern web programming, but it's still possible to see some old school sites doing
By definition, fragments exist solely for the client. Your web server will not log them. Google Analytics does not natively track them. So clicking on an empty fragment like that will just take you back to the top of your page (provided the JS doesn't stop the event). There's nothing to track. But there's something interesting to note here
Google can actually do some basic JS and it will recognize this bad attempt at link obfuscation as an actual link. So if you have links similar to this (which is not recommended) then those links will be counted as links. Be aware of this if you're worried about backlinks.
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RE: Search Console says 111 links. Moz says 3\. Do I have a site problem?
Remember that Moz's index is not a complete index of the Internet. They freely note that https://moz.com/blog/mozscape-index-2015
You'll notice this index is a bit smaller than much of what we've released this year. That's intentional on our part, in order to get fresher, higher-quality stuff and cut out a lot of the junk you may have seen in older indices. DA and PA scores should be more accurate in this index (accurate meaning more representative of how a domain or page will perform in Google based on link equity factors), and that accuracy should continue to climb in the next few indices. We'll keep a close eye on it and, as always, report the metrics transparently on our index update release page.
Moz is aiming towards accurate representation, not completeness. I don't think that anyone but a complete spider like Google or Bing could tell you how many links you actually have.
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RE: GTLD for SEO?
The only TLDs that get any known different treatment is the ccTLD (which sends a geolocation signal).
The reason non-"standard" TLDs don't show up very often is that most people buy the common TLDs. Most people still associate the ".com" with websites because they are the oldest TLD. I personally own a ".info" for my email (not a new TLD either) and I typically have to spell it out to people (I occasionally get some strange looks handing it out verbally). I can only imagine the looks if I had a more exotic TLD ("Yes, my email is ralph@crazy.ninja... no that's really it"). So other TLDs are basically less popular and less well understood, which explains why they aren't used very often.
The arguments over the years that I've seen that Google is flat out lying about the TLDs being treated equally have never really withstood scrutiny. There has never been anyone who has made a given TLD rank higher solely because of the TLD. The cases I've seen had other factors that could just as easily explain a ranking difference. And an objective test would be very difficult to create, as you would need two identical sites, and from an SEO perspective that's super hard to pull off.
Ultimately, tho, why would Google lie about this? What's there to be gained in telling people it's not a ranking factor when it is?
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RE: Error Code 804: HTTPS (SSL) Error Encountered
Give the SSL Labs tool a try. If you have a misconfiguration it should help you identify it
Best posts made by Highland
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RE: CNAME vs 301 redirect
A CNAME is a DNS record that says that domainA.com lives where domainB.com is. That means you then do another lookup on domainB.com and get its A record. Somewhere down the chain you have to have an A record. An A record is what ties a domain to an IP.
The problem here is that a CNAME is not the same thing as 301. If you go to the CNAME as mentioned above, your browser will still say domainA.com. We use a CNAME because we have a load balancer with AWS. So our site resolves to a CNAME that resolves to the load balancer address but it still shows up as www.ourdomain.com. We have dozens of URLs like this pointed to the same hosting configuration and each domain is seen as the original TLD. This will cause duplicate content problems for your client.
The correct solution is to set them up with an A record pointed at a web server and then have your web server return a 301.
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RE: AdWords Different Budgets on Different Days
You can adjust campaign budgets by day. it's just not obvious where.
- All online campaigns
- Campaign tab
- Automate button (to the right of the create Campaign button). Be sure to check only those campaigns you want to automate
- Change Daily Budget When...
- The real trick here is Frequency. To change your budget on a given day, you need use Weekly and then you can specify by day.
Remember to do the math. This method increases or decreases budgets, it does not have an option to directly say "On Monday i want to spend $x and Tuesday spend $y", you have to have it adjust the budget based on the budget WHEN IT HAPPENS. So on Tuesday your budget is $270. On Wed you will increase your budget by $54 and then you'll want another rule to remove that $54 on Thu.
If you elect to do percentages you can't just say "raise by 20% then lower by 20%" or you'll start creeping your budget. To make a 20% boost work you have to increase the amount you decrease by. For instance, we used to drop our Thu spend by 36%. That meant the boost had to be 56.25% (small rounding error but acceptable) on Fri to go back to where it was.
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RE: Improving SEO with no blog
Why do you NEED a blog? More importantly, why do you need a blog for what is a highly technical (and probably arcane) topic?
Blogging is not for everyone and everything. Blogging is for where there is some form of dialog or constant change where you can generate fresh content people want to read on a regular basis. I have one website where a blog makes a lot of sense. It lends itself to lots of artsy-deco blogs and we have some talented young ladies who have found a niche in writing that. Their readership isn't stellar, but combined with social media efforts it works decently well. I have many other websites where we have no blog and never will, because attempting to blog about those topics would be pointless because nobody would ever read them. Instead, we put the information out and then market the sites as best as we can.
It sounds like you're a bit too niche here. If all you do is SEO, and don't offer, say, online marketing, you're really missing out because SEO as a job by itself is really hard to sustain. Offer to set up an Adwords campaign or offer to do some work on their social media. Maybe they need more local efforts. Do they show up on your phone if you search for what it is that they do? I find myself using Google Now a TON for local because Google makes it stupid easy to find. Websites, maps and phones numbers (with one click to open up my dialer and call).
Offering more services should help keep your clients happy. Especially if they don't have the time (or drive) to work with you on SEO.
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RE: IP address geolocation
Physically hosting your server in a target country does help, but that help is miniscule. In Geotargeting, the largest signals come from your link profile. So if your links come from the US primarily, you should rank better in the US. You also have a genertic TLD instead of a ccTLD, which helps.
Some possible actions to help your site be seen as US would be to do some marketing within the US. Another option is to see if you can get covers.ca and then work on geotargeting that site to Canadians. That would send a strong signal that covers.com is aimed at the US.
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RE: How to market spiritual, product, and service site on very low budget
Have you journeyed to Seattle and tried meditating in the Moz break room while holding a Roger plushie until security escorts you out? (sorry, I couldn't resist)
First off, you need to better organize your site. It's not horrible, but the URLs are all over the place. Blogs are smashed together onto single pages. Content is disjointed.
Second... pervy quest? What? You need people to take your site seriously and dangling the prospect of NSFW imagery isn't going to help that (and might get you added to some domain filter lists). Don't play up the "naked" part. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to use that word.
Third... what is the site about? It's not obvious from a quick glance at the front page. Theory of Everything? That's cool but... what was I doing here again? You need a better design (too many stock images and cut out the rotating images as it distracts from the page) and you need some focus. All the content needs to pull in the same direction. What is it they want visitors to leave with? (besides a crystal bauble)
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RE: Am i being impatient?
You need to understand that SEO is more than just about SEO scores. Scores are more about letting you know if you've screwed up. Only Google can tell you why you don't rank for your terms. Maybe you're competing with a large brand. Maybe you don't have enough signals coming from elsewhere (social, links, etc). There's a myriad of reasons.
My advice to you is to start a marketing campaign. Do something to get your site out there. Maybe its Adwords, maybe promoted Facbook posts, or maybe just some guy wearing a goofy sign on the street corner. Don't assume Google will come beating your door down just because you have a Moz A rank site.
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RE: OMG. RAND IS ATTACKED! (in a blog post)
The bulk of his argument could be summed up as "Fresh content usually wins". It has some merit. But the rest of the article could be taken as saying "Game what you can now and move on."
SEO is a subset of marketing. It always has been and always will be. SEO is where you market to the search engines.A major part of Google's problem is we don't have any idea what constitutes what they like anymore. So his guess about it all being about freshness sounds good until you find searches where that's not true. But you CAN produce quality content and still lose the SEO game. But you can lose the SEO game and still win the war.
The danger for this guy is that he seems to advocate link spam. He heavily caveats it but offers no real reasons not to engage in it. I have no doubt link spam still works. The question you have to ask yourself is "Do I want to build something on top of that which Google is trying to actively destroy?" If you can live with being a flash in the pan, go for it. Make your money and then watch as Google throws it in the garbage. And hope that the next time around they're just as gullible.
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RE: Too many 301s?
I would 301 the pages and get them out of your site's index. Even if you canonical all of them Google will still have to index 1000 pages instead of 1. The 301 will transfer most of your rank to the new page and you'll improve your crawl budget.
Why take the 301s out? Just leave them in there in case there are links pointed to them.
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RE: Combining reviews and duplicate content
Not really. People are obsessed with calling duplicate content a penalty. It's not really a penalty as much as engines trying to sort the noise out. If pages A, B and C all have the same content, there's only room for a single #1 rank, so that means the other pages will have to lose out. They're not penalized, just not ranked as highly.
The place where duplicate content is harmful is if someone scrapes your site and outranks you. That's a different problem entirely. In your case, the concern is that you will harm your site. That's not the case. The engines will simply pick one review page in your case and devalue the rest. In my book that's not necessarily bad because people are still going to come to your site and read a review page.
Canonicals can help by letting you pick which page wins the duplicate race. You simply tell Google that B and C are duplicates of A and, thus, A wins #1.
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RE: Moving to a new domain name - 301 redirect NOT an option
While not having a 301 or even the original domain is problematic, I don't know that it is a bad as you think. Unless they took the previous site and set it up exactly as it was (which I doubt the new owner would do that), you should be able to set up your new domain and start over as it were. That's not as hard as it sounds and, believe it or not, Google can figure out domain migration like that without a 301.
Once it's up and running again you need to market the fact that it's moved. Nobody likes dead or incorrect links so go find all the old links you had and let them know that you've moved. That should get them to update and you can possibly rebound some of your original brand authority.
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