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Update: Still no improvements in the results even after all the changes have been implemented. Anyone with other suggestions perhaps?

Hi Linda,

Thanks for the feedback.

• The hreflang format is corret, i just checked again. nl-nl and nl-be.
• The canonical url doesn't point to the NL or vice versa. It did have another URL as we're getting data from a different system and using wordpress to generate the userfriendly URL. So The canonical still has a different URL. I've made the change to make it exactly the same as the one shown in the URL. I hope it will help in some way.
• Geotargeting config was set correctly for each account in Search console from the beginning.
• All backlinks are from .be domains except the one with a high spam score. I've already made the request to remove them.

I'm also thinking about referring the canonical url of both nl and be website to the .be domain as the content is the same. What i'm thinking now is that there is a case of duplicate content and perhaps the .be website is somehow being penalized as the one with the duplicate content which is why the nl website is showing up higher than the .be website. Would this help? I mean if I do this, would Google show the correct domain in the correct engine despite both having same content?

Thanks for the reply Antonio.

• Checked the robots and it's not blocking anything. All pages are being indexed as well. when I use site:website.be I do see the results. It's just that the .nl website seems to overtake the .be results.
• Where could I find the log files from Googlebot?
• I'm using Yoast SEO pluging for the XML sitemaps and there's no indication of the language there. i'll double check again.
• Concerning the backlinking, do you mean link building?

I've submitted my sitemap to search console and I did notice that only a few of my pages have been indexed. But When I use "site:" I do get the pages.

I have 1 website with 2 cTLD. 1 is with .be another .nl. Both are in Dutch and pretty much with the same content but a different cTLD.

The problem I have is that the .nl website is showing up in my serp on google.be. So I'm not seeing any keyword rankings for the .be website. I want to be able to see only .nl website serp for google.nl and .be serp on google.be

I've already set up hreflang tags since 2-3 weeks and search console confirmed that it's been implemented correctly. I've alsy fetched the site and requested a re-index of the website.

Is there anything else I can do? Or how long do I have to wait till Google will update the serp?

Hi Keszi

Thank you for your reply and insights. Great reference to the article. We'll go in-depth.

However, the changes are so sudden(*1) and big(*2) that we believe it must be something bigger than this.

(*1) the big drop (for NL) happened on 8-21 December.
(*2) we're talking about -95% organic traffic overnight

Fellow mozzers, we need your help

We have a situation where a customer has two websites for each country:

• flowtracksurf.be → Belgium
• flowtracksurf.nl → Netherlands

They used to have very good keyword rankings in the SERPS in BE & NL.

Flowtracksurf.nl had good rankings in Google.nl and Flowtracksurf.be in Google.be.
Recently there has been a change: Flowtracksurf.nl is not showing up in Google.nl anymore. It also seems that all the rankings from flowtracksurf.nl have been switched to flowtracksurf.be.

.BE is doing very well, .NL is suffering.

Data shows us that .NL :

• In the first two weeks of december 2014, we see a massive drop in traffic (GA)
• In that same week(s) we see a drop in search queries (Webmaster Tools)
• We see the exact opposite in .BE (growing strong in those weeks)
• When we look at the cache of flowtracksurf.nl we see only reference to flowtracksurf.be. Is that a hint of what was going on?
• On the same date that we see a massive drop in traffic on .NL, we see a peak in 'indexation' of .BE
• We see that the MOZ pages crawled dropped in that same week for NL
• We're also seeing that all the traffic from Google.nl is now going to flowtracksurf.be.

Some keywords we were scoring #1-2 for are: surfvakanties, surfvakantie, surfcamp mimizan, surfcamp, frankrijk, surfcamp spanje, surfen frankrijk

We just can't figure out the hard evidence in the data.
Can you help us on that?

Hi

Have you noticed that you can access industry benchmarks again in Google Analytics?

Make sure you activate anonymous sharing in your GA-account settings.
The report becomes available in Target Audience > Benchmarking.

Hope this helps

Hi guys,

A client of ours has a website with a very bad linkprofile. We adressed this issue and we migrated the website to another domain.

We redirected the bad website (cornelisbedding.be) to the new domain (cornelisbedding.com) with a 302 redirect. We didn't want to pass the bad link juice. The problem we are having now is that we can't afford to lose the redirect on cornelisbedding.be. We would lose to much traffic because the old domain still has alot of links that generate good quality traffic.

I have read that Google will treat 302 redirects as 301's in the long run. We really want to avoid this.
We were thinking of using a meta refresh with a delay on, but in Google's eyes that would be considered spammy.

Are their any other suggestions on how to handle this?

Thanks you!

That's great news. Thanks for the update.

Hi Cyrus,

Any updates about the G+ situation?

Hi

Great question. I was pondering on the same question for a few months and decided from what I've read on different sites to give it a go (often read BOTW helps trustrank). BOTW is a manual processed directory that looks for quality and relevane. In terms og Google this should be a good thing.

We have the link up now (look for iValue). The page sits on a PA 1 (for now) but DA 85! These figures make me believe it will be of value to our authority. Opensiteexplorer isn't showing the link yet but Google newest links (via Google Webmaster Links). So Google picked it up.

Our site is doing quite well lately but we've put a lot of effort in other fields so it's hard to say how strong this link adds. I think of it this way: "How much time should I invest to get a link from a DA 85 domain (knowing that linking domains strongly correlates to rankings)?" Probably a few hours So $ 149 was worth the investment to me. Future will tell how much exactly.

Hope this helps.

Hey Jack

I use the Geo Meta Tags to determine location of the website/business (check Wikipedia on this).

Basically I insert these meta tags (example location)

name="geo.position" content="37.996163;-95.712891" />
name="geo.placename" content="6 Hassaluthdreef, Hasselt, Vlaams Gewest 3500, België" />

Hope this helps, Jacob.

Thanks a lot for this question and answer. I've been cursing for months and months on this issue.

The solution suggested by Barry is TOP! Download Open Office, even if it's just to convert CSV correctly to columns.

Please share the URL of your website so we can check.