Welcome to the Q&A Forum

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

link

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

link

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.

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.

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?

Give the SSL Labs tool a try. If you have a misconfiguration it should help you identify it

https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/

Danny is right. You can't geolocate a site to a continent. Goelocation assumes you're targeting a country or language.

I wouldn't bother with a site.asia domain either if all you're worried about is latency. Instead, what I would do is work on geolocating your site. For instance, Amazon offers geolocation in their Route 53 product (country or latency). So you could host your site in the US and a copy in one of their Asian datacenters. This way, your visitors (and robots) will always go to site.com, but be served the fastest instance of your site. This avoids the duplicate content problem entirely. There are some other services and hosting out there that could probably help you do this as well.

It's not over, it's just changing. Whenever a business model changes (i.e. selling newspapers) you'll have people who try to hold onto the old ways. In the US (where the government won't step into that fight) the news publishers have either gone to a paywall/loginwall or they try to track how many visits you've made (i.e. You've read X of X free articles, please pay to read more). Google requires some content to be free so it's becoming a crap shoot as to whether or not you can read an article for free. The place that's suffered the most is social linking, where I'll see a link on a blog or in social media and click it, only to hit a pay/loginwall.

The EU is going a different route with government regulation. I remember when Germany tried to make Google pay for linking to news content and Google opted to drop them from the SERPs if they didn't opt in. The publishers couldn't opt in fast enough. Google shut down their news feed in Spain rather than pay for linking to content. There are rumblings of trying to make Google expand "right to be forgotten" takedowns to all Google sites (which has pushed Google to force users to use only localized search). How far they get remains to be seen. If they declare Google a public utility there will be legal wrangling and if Google loses they may pull out of those markets.

So where does that leave you as an EU SEO? It depends on what you're trying to do. News outlets don't need a lot of SEO because they are high quality content generators, which is what Google feeds on naturally. I wouldn't worry about Google dropping markets anytime soon (legal stuff will take years and we're not to that point yet). If you could elaborate on what you do I could comment better on that last part of your question.

You're actually pretty close to the box of swag reward. I got mine a couple of months ago and it was filled with lots of really neat stuff (I got both a vinyl AND plushie Roger).

The rewards are handed out manually so it's not some automatic process. I'd get your 2k and wait a month or so. You should get an email asking where to send your swag.

Depends on what rankings you're going up for. Have you done a keyword analysis on the keywords you're ranking better for? Ranking well for the term "blue kangaroo widgets" might sound awesome... until you realize nobody searches that term.

You might want to spend a little money on Adwords and play around with keywords to see what brings in actual traffic. More importantly, Google has been showing more ads above organic, so even if you rank #1, you might be #4 in the actual list behind ads. While the Keyword Estimator is good, real data is better. Moz also has the Keyword Difficulty Tool which can help you find keywords that are actually worth ranking for.

Lastly, are you tracking conversions? You need to be. Figure out what that incoming traffic is doing. Even if you bring them to your site, are they doing what you want them to?

Moz doesn't crawl everything, nor do they crawl as often as Google.You're getting a subset.

You should never take OSE as the sole source of your links. Cross reference with other tools (WMT, Ahrefs, etc). OSE is designed to give you a subsection but to make sure that subsection is as data-rich as possible (note that OSE ranks your links as well).

Sorry for the late response.

What SSL Labs is telling you to do is disable SSLv3. You should be using only the more secure Transport Layer Security(TLS) 1.0 or higher (if you're running credit cards then PCI compliance will force you to use only 1.2 soon). I would also disable RC4 if you can (only affects IE6 users)

I can't claim I know the origins of the word. I use it here only as a synonym of "cling on to". My name is a bit more mundane, in that it was a street I used to work on when I created my SEO accounts.

I think that this is going to fall into the same category as some other ideas about "optimal content". Back in the day there was "keyword density". Then came "latent semantic indexing" where your words had to relate to other words on your page. And now we have a "magic" word count (don't get me wrong, it's an interesting stat)

I had to spend a LONG time deprogramming people from these ideas because people glom onto them as the limit lines of SEO. They're dangerous in the sense that if someone thinks the line is "10% keyword density" or "1125 words" people will start measuring them and making sure that their page on "blue widgets" has exactly 10% KD and 1123 words so Google will love it (who cares if it's crap nobody will read?)

My advice on content is that it should read naturally. Don't pull out any measuring sticks. Stop with the SEO hyper-focus.  If it doesn't read like something you would tell a personal friend it's probably not worth writing. Or ranking...

Have you looked at the docs? They have an article about how to migrate from 1.5 to 3.x

https://docs.joomla.org/Joomla_1.5_to_3.x_Step_by_Step_Migration

If you've not done it before I would suggest using a migration service (just Google for Joomla migration). You're less likely to run into showstopping issues. For a long lived website I'd pay for the service just to have peace of mind.

I would highly recommend you run your site through SSL Labs tool. It should help you identify any problems with your SSL install.

Also, make sure that you're loading GA in a secure manner. If it's not loaded securely and someone says not to load insecure assets then it won't show up.

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)

Is your brand name trademarked? If so, you can use that trademark to remove ads that contain your trademark in their ad copy (here's the Google form for Trademark complaints in ads).

Generally speaking, it's a good idea to bid on your own name. Case in point: we started TV ads this year and while we rank #1 for our brand, when the TV spots started we saw an enormous surge in people searching our brand name. Also, remember that some searches (especially on mobile) do not show any organic results above the fold. Bidding on your own brand name should be an integral part of your marketing strategy. Don't worry about making it more expensive for your competitors.

I'm not sure I understand. What is wrong with the ASP -> PHP redirect?

While it's possible that advertising is skewing this, it's also important to note that Social advertising doesn't work the same way as regular ads. Social ads simply place you in front of people who would not otherwise see your posts. So you're basically paying CPM but any Likes/Shares are incumbent on the people who see the ads to respond in that way. Granted you can still go viral without that, but it's much rarer nowadays. Most people boost social with ads but I wouldn't necessarily classify those differently. A like from an ad still means they're following/engaged with you.

I don't know that it much matters. The localization signal from just the ccTLD is not terribly strong but it should be the same for both the older .com.xx as well as the newer .xx

For purely aesthetic reasons I would choose .xx

The correct answer is... as many as you can afford the time to build correctly

From the Moz link building guide

There are lots and lots of ways to get links. The right tactics for you depend on the resources you have at your disposal as well as the industry that you're in. Industries that are more established and competitive often require you to be quite aggressive with link building, and you might find earning those links more difficult. Other industries, often the newer industries that are quickly growing, are full of opportunities to engage with bloggers and build a community.

But the key here is to BUILD VALUE. From Rand's recent Whiteboard Friday

I would urge you to go the opposite direction. Narrow your funnel. Worry less about the number of people you're targeting and more about the success rate, because once you get the success rate high, you can turn up the volume really fast. But if your success rate is low and there's a limited market of influencers in your field, you can quickly burn all of them with your outreach before you ever have a chance to get good at it.

The simple fact is that your question is, more or less, "How many low quality links can I safely build?" and the answer there is none. I could easily go get 80 links... and then those links would get devalued or draw a Penguin penalty. Instead, you need to build quality links, and that means you have to take time to build some value with what you're offering to them. To sum up that Whiteboard Friday "There are no shortcuts to build quality links". You have to do it low and slow. If someone is willing to give you a link for little or nothing then that link isn't work building.

Just an educated guess on my part but I'd say that it's probably due to the indexing problems of late.

First, this index still contains data crawled up to 100 days ago.We try to make sure that what we've crawled recently is stuff that we believe has been updated/changed, but there may be sites and pages that have changed significantly in that period that we didn't update (due to issues I've described here previously with our crawlers & schedulers).

It's clear that Avvo is being crawled and indexed. You have a link on this page that shows up in OSE already

http://www.avvo.com/attorneys/34655-fl-daniel-dean-1267113.html

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.

Link audits are always helpful (hence why Moz specializes in them) but you want to identify bad or poor links. Relevancy is something that Google will determine for itself. I mean if a tire shop is linking to a florist Google might not give that link much weight but what if the tire shop has a blog and they want to thank said florist for sending flowers after a coworker dies? Google might not give it a lot of relevance to it, but it's also not necessarily spam.

Unless you can clearly identify that a given link is actively hurting you, I wouldn't remove/disavow it. Remember that link disavow is a flamethrower in that it can kill weeds and burn your house down. Which it does depends a lot on how you use it.

So, first off, you don't NEED to go full HTTPS. The SEO benefit (if there is one) is minor at best. If it were a large benefit then people would be driving hard towards full HTTPS. Google doesn't require any data be submitted over HTTPS, but PCI compliance does. You don't take credit cards so that doesn't apply.

If you want to try SSL for free, my suggestion is to switch to CloudFlare DNS and use their Universal SSL product. This way you can stick HTTPS on your site without changing anything. You can use an unsigned certificate on your site if you want to go full SSL. Cloudflare only encrypts between their servers and your clients, not between you and CloudFlare. Full SSL doesn't require a valid SSL, just any SSL certificate (Cloudflare doesn't validate between you and them). Once that's done, be sure to enable HSTS to force all traffic through HTTPS

Someone needs to make a Blackboard Thursdays...

I think you're right. it doesn't sound like there's a solid case here for subdomains. Consolidation would make for easier marketing as well.

Subdomains are a bank shot at best. Google can determine their relationship to the root domain, but you're relying on Google to make that connection. A subfolder, however, has an implicit connection to the root domain (because it's under said domain). Just understand that a subdomain (for the purposes of SEO) should be treated like it is its own site. That means each one gets its own marketing campaign.

Should you consolidate? Possibly. How related are the franchisees? I mean, if we're talking restaurants that's a no-brainer to consolidate, but if we're talking about, say, carpet cleaning you could make a case for subdomains focusing the local aspects better. Additionally, a subdomain would afford them their own site so they could do distinct advertising/promos.

Wayfair is a similar comparison. Wayfair represents a single consolidated site compared to their 200+ domains previously (under the CSN brand). I'm familiar with them since we did similar things back in the day. I'm not sure how applicable it is because we used to do the same mega-spam footers they did. The bulk of their problem (long before Penguin) was that they were what is best termed as incestuous linking schemes. What crib bedding has to do with pool covers is anybody's guess. What likely tripped them up was, back in the day, we all linked keyword rich links to the sites without any regard to relevance. Once Google catches that you have to get rid of it. A single domain is far easier to SEO for, but they probably ultimately consolidated for the sake of advertising (their ads are everywhere). But (on point with the OP) Hayneedle did 301 their old domains to their new consolidated domain, and obviously for SEO benefit. Example

I don't think it's as big a deal now because link wheels like that are long gone. I have also seen other smaller networks arise (i.e. Soap) that link between properties (in the header no less) and do not nofollow anything. It's worth noting that these networks are poorly related (camping vs diapers vs clothing) so I don't think there's any real focus on SEO there (or they just don't care). At best these links carry some minor boost but at worst they carry no weight at all. Either way, if there was a penalty it doesn't show up.

There's an SEO I know who does nothing but buy expired domains and 301 them to his site. He claims excellent return on his investments in these older domains in terms of boosting his domains that he redirects to. So 301-ing a domain is worthwhile.

Not really. Google is looking for unnatural links and patterns. A single sitewide footer link isn't going to impact SEO that much. If the sites all share the same server/IP Google will likely just devalue them (not penalize) and move on. If you're still uncertain you can always nofollow them.

The only exception would be if you're trying to link targeted words in the anchor (which does look spammy). Just link the site names.

It doesn't look like that site is even indexed by Google. Even if it were, disavowing an entire site is pretty easy so a one domain spam attack wouldn't be very effective.

I wouldn't worry about it unless you experience a massive rankings drop.

I always remind people that Black Hat techniques like this can succeed in the short term but seldom produce the desired result in the long term. Google has a small army of highly paid smart people who want to catch things like this (see Panda, Penguin, etc). When Google does catch this (assuming they haven't already) they will almost certainly face some sort of penalty.

My bet is they're spending the newness of their sites on this technique (a new site has no rank but no penalties either). It probably gives some initial boost until Google catches on with their slower systems (Panda and Penguin are both slow in refreshing). A spam report to Google might draw a manual penalty to the main site but, as Egol said, this is a lot of wasted time and effort on their part.

Depends on the blog. Not all guest blogging is the same. If the blogs in question were just for guest blogging and have no real topics they focus on you could have hurt yourself. But if the blogs were high quality and related to your site then they could have helped.

Do you have social media that you promote and actively work on alongside your blog? What else do you do to encourage readership beyond just posting a blog? You might be wondering "I just want to know about links" but this is the new link building. Readership tends to link things so building readership is critical. Then you need to (as Rand put it) amplify your content.

Nobody ever said spam doesn't pay (in fact, short term spammers get lots of money potentially). But spam doesn't have long term success either. Remember, even if Google doesn't catch it now, Google is still actively trying to catch them. For a long time people said Google couldn't filter links and then came Penguin, which could filter links.

My suggestion is you report both sites for spam. Google is far more likely to take manual action against these sites in the short term. And they clearly are spam.

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.

And they would have gotten away with it too if weren't for those meddling kids and their pesky subdomains

I think your answer is in the question

All our old pages were 301 redirected and content is relatively the same on the new redesigned website.

So if you recently remodeled and redid your URLs that's a much more likely suspect in your drop. 301s past most, but not necessarily all, page juice

A US address would help, but only in the sense of latency. If you're hosting in India and I'm in the US, that means the data has to literally travel halfway around the world and back again. With the cheap cost of virtualization (cloud) hosting, that just doesn't make sense if you're trying to target the US market. So i would physically host in the US for that reason. If you still need to target an Indian market, I would get a ccTLD .in domain (i.e. purplecola.in) and host locally for that as well.

Beyond that, breaking into the US market should be simple. Your two things to keep in mind are

1. Proper localization. This is more crucial since you're in India. There's a tendency for Indian companies (especially in the tech support industry) to try and pretend they're American. I've had Indian phone tech support tell me their name is Bob and it's just not believable (tell me your real name or it looks like you're trying to hide something in plain sight). This goes double for your SEO content because there are LOTS of Indian companies trying to sell American content that is not really American localized. You need your content to look and read American because you don't want bad localization.
2. Once your content is good, go get some American links. This will send a strong geolocation signal that you're a US focused site. You should already have Webmaster Tools set to the US anyways.

Normally Google is making changes to their algorithm and it's SEOs who are trying to convince you that certain changes are beneficial. But full-site SSL is the exact reverse. Google says it's a (small) ranking factor and SEOs are the ones remaining to be convinced. Nobody has proven any kind of serious boost and I'm still dubious that it's a good decision from a pure SEO standpoint.

If you want to do your own experiment, use Cloudflare. It can serve up a SSL version of your site without a certificate (and thus free) and you can do your own test to see if full SSL is worth it to you without having to make any serious configuration changes (and you can always turn it off if you want)

It used to be true that you had to have one IP per SSL certificate, but if you have a modern web server you can use something called Server Name Indication instead.

I'm not sure what you mean by "offered 2 types of certificate". There's a couple of ways to take that.

1. Your provider is offering you a SHA1 or a SHA2 (SHA256) certificate. If you get this option select SHA2, as SHA1 is now deprecated due to security issues and will be unsupported in modern browsing soon.
2. Your provider offered you domain validation vs extended validation. The latter is only for registered corporations and gives you the "green bar". It does not afford you any more security from an encryption standpoint (both use the same underlying systems), it just looks better in the browser.

Putting your whole site under SSL is not a bad move from an SEO standpoint. Google publicly said that SSL is a ranking factor (nobody knows how much of one it is, but the boost is minor if there is one) and robots have supported SSL for many years. What I would do, if I were you, is make sure you have a proper redirect to force users into SSL. Don't run a mixed encrypted/unencrypted site if possible.

Last but certainly not least, after you get your SSL set up you need to audit your SSL. This is a critical step many website owners miss. Just this weekend I found a site with incredibly outdated software and, as such, it supported every SSL flaw in the book. A site with SSL exploits still enabled might as well not run any SSL at all.

First off, let me commend you for asking questions. Too many people hand their website (and thus their brand) to someone else and then walk away. Nobody will care about your website like you do.

Second, you've got far greater problems than cloaking. Head over to SEO browser and put your URL in and click the Simple View button. Not only is it cloaking, the page the robot sees is filled with keyword stuffing. This is an actual paragraph on the page being fed to bots (emphasis mine because it's both hilarious and sad)

log home construction cost Everything I do and Log Home Construction I do on the principle of Russian borscht and log home construction cost. You can throw everything into it-beets and Log Home Construction carrots and Log Home Construction cabbage and Log Home Construction onions and Log Home Construction everything you want and log home construction cost. What's important is the result and Log Home Construction the taste of the borscht and log home construction cost. log home builder reviews There are many fine ideals which are not realisable and Log Home Construction and yet we do not refrain from teaching them and log home construction cost. log home construction cost I want to know how God created this world and log home construction cost. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon and Log Home Construction in the spectrum of this or that element and log home construction cost. I want to know His thoughts the rest are details and log home construction cost. The surest way to get rid of a bore is to lend money to him and log home construction cost. log home construction cost calculator log home construction cost Your Rutherglen Log Home Construction and log home construction cost Source

Seriously, it's like someone found the worst SEO manual from 2005 and ran with it. I've not seen SEO this bad in YEARS. Your website, as it is running, is a walking and talking example of what NOT to do with SEO. Panda was built to find sites like this and penalize them. At this point, if I were you, I'd go get a Wordpress blog, write a few content pages and point your domain at it. You literally cannot do worse than your current site.

Your misspelled domains should 301 to the correct domain. You can make any subdomains redirect to the proper TLD as well.

Wordpress tries really hard to be a CMS but it's really not much more than a blog with some page management thrown in. The only advantage WP has here is that it's free.

If you're a professional photographer then you need a photographer website. Don't try to cut corners. if you were a woodworker I would tell you to buy a circular saw over a hand saw. Get the professional website that is built to showcase your talent.

The short answer is you can rank any site for any geolocation.

The longer answer is that you have a ccTLD which, as you've noted, is geotargeted to Spain. That's not an insurmountable problem, but it does tend to tilt the table against you slightly. That having been said, this is about SEO and marketing so if you want to keep your single ccTLD there's no reason you can't. When was the last time you took note of the domain name of a link you were clicking in a search result? As long as it's relevant, do you care?

Build other language sections and segment them using subdirectories (i.e. brand.es/en, /fr, /it, etc) and build your localization in. Advertise locally through Adwords and do what you can to reach out to local links so you can build some broader geotargeting for engine bots to grab onto. Remember, make sure you're doing authentic localization and NOT dumping your content into Google Translate.

All this having been said, if I were you I would see if I can get the ccTLDs for these other countries and do your localization that way (i.e brand.co.uk, brand.fr, etc). This will tilt the table in your favor and allow you to focus on localizing and marketing. It will make advertising easier as well.