Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hello! Glad to hear the project should soon be progressing!

I haven't worked with automated translation in a while, so I'm not sure how good an automated solution would be nowadays, but a native-speaker editor at the least is probably necessary (and perhaps optimal if the jargon is particularly unusual).

A story for an example: my father is a swimming coach and was teaching some Arabic speakers, so he tried to translate the training session (full of swimming jargon) into Arabic. Everything went surprisingly well, besides the translation of "distance per stroke." The tool didn't know that "stroke" in swimming means the same thing as "stride" in running, and the translation read "distance per heart attack."

Yes, the "drop" in traffic (or drop in reported traffic) is because the analytics code doesn't have time to kick in before the redirect script takes over.

If you were to move the refresh script to the bottom of the code and the analytics to the top, the likelihood of reversing this goes up. We had a similar problem with a client site in that they had a very heavy piece of conversion optimisation software running at the top of the code and our tracking code at the bottom. Users clicking from search to the home page usually knew where they wanted to go quite quickly, and would click away before our tracking code had loaded. Client was desperate to know why our SEO traffic had gone through the floor. It had not. We had them reverse the analytics and CRO codes and our traffic "came back".

JS is executed in the order it's included in the code, so moving it should work. Should being the key word - I am not 100% on this.

I am not sure how to place a delay with JS so hopefully someone else can chime in on that one. Meta refreshes allow a short time delay - does anyone know what the correct way to do this for solely mobile traffic would be? Acknowledging that meta refreshes are not recommended for SEO, but they are a popular way of defining a short delay in redirecting a user.

I would say to redirect the internal page to the new website unless you know that the page receives a decent amount of traffic _internally _(i.e. people navigating to this page from within your existing website) and you have a decent sales funnel / conversion process in place. In other words, does the existing page have value other than just being about the subdivision?

If not, redirection is probably your best bet. Ensure internal links that exist to the individual page at the moment are updated to point to the new domain.

Cheers,

Jane

Bizarrely, I just answered quite a similar question to this about five minutes ago...

Have you looked into the rel="alternate" tag option? Sometimes this is also referred to as the "href lang tag". You can place these on both the UK site and the .com, indicating that the UK site is "the same" but is targeted for UK customers only. This is basically canonicalisation with a geo-targeting twist: it negates the issue of duplicate content whilst reinforcing that the .co.uk is for UK audiences.

More information on the tag is here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

The .co.uk replacing the .com in UK SERPs won't be immediate, but this is a fairly safe option for rankings. Can you also use a javascript lightbox when a UK IP is detected on the .com site, explaining that UK customers have to purchase on the .co.uk and providing a link? It isn't good to automatically redirect based on IP, but a JS pop-up / lightbox will be ignored by search engines and will allow any remaining UK traffic to the .com to make its way to the appropriate website.

Does this help?

Cheers,

Jane

Hi there,

This is pretty much exactly what the rel="alternate" tag is for. Have you looked into that option? This allows you to use the .co.uk for the UK and the .com elsewhere: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

You will have trouble ranking a .co.uk in countries besides the UK, although moving everything to a .com in the future might be an option as well. However, it should be perfectly feasible to rank both sites with proper geo-targeting like this.

Hi there,

This somewhat depends on the structure of the website. These are the options, using the structural idea you have put forward:

example.com/plumber/london

example.com/plumber-london

example.com/london/plumber/

example.com/london-plumber/

The first would be a good structure if you have a parent "plumbing" page, which links to a range of locations in which you have plumbing services listed: London, Manchester, Bristol, etc. Each location would have its subfolder after /plumber/

The second example would work if you do not have a London page or a Plumbing page, but just a page about plumbers in London. This is true for the fourth example too.

The third example would work best if the parent page is a page all about services across London, them you have a page about plumbers coming off that page.

You should be able to rank any of these structures, but I would say this relates more to the hierarchy of the website than it does anything else.

I have direct experience with this.

It looks to be pretty useless to contact the authors of old posts and ask them to insert links to your site, with anchor text or without. This was a very very popular link development tactic three of four years ago. It was pretty easy to scale and it was effective.

For Google, negative the positive effects of this tactic was likely quite easy:

• Cached versions of a page contain no external link to www.yoursite.com
• Page exists for extended period, gains PageRank
• Link suddenly appears on page to www.yoursite.com, often with optimised anchor text
• If you're being really obvious about it, you've paid for this link and set a time period of one year for the link to be up. All of a sudden after a year (or a set period), the link disappears, and www.yoursite.com seems to have a lot of links that disappear from older posts after one year. This is so blindingly obvious and easy enough for amateurs to spot: it's unfeasible that Google can't spot this too.

A natural link is going to appear in a new blog post, not an old one. How many times have you gone back and edited an old post to include a new link? I can think of once or twice in my history online where I have done that with the legitimate intention of adding a good resource to the article. I am not adding links to insurance websites, jewellers, etc.

A new post may or may not acquire authority, but if you are trying to place links based on authority, look at the website the new post will go up on. Do its posts regularly receive a good number of links, decent traffic, social media attention, etc.?

This tactic of placing links on old blog posts was effective in the past, but I would be confident saying that its effectiveness en masse disappeared some time around 2010.

Hello fellow Kiwi!

Moving the links to the company's social profiles won't make any difference to how well www.mountainjade.co.nz ranks, but it will make them much less visible and probably result in fewer clicks to each one. Do visitors to the website click on these at the moment? I would expect that traffic to drop substantially if the buttons are placed in the footer.

I honestly don't see these as a contributing to clutter or being an issue - they are fairly discrete both in terms of coding and aesthetics at the moment.

Hi there,

A 404 certainly isn't the best way to handle a new URL / page before it is populated with content. It is good that Google isn't finding these pages yet (as you state in a later comment), but keep in mind that it could - the pages aren't linked to, but there is never any particular guarantee about what Google will and won't find. It's highly unlikely if you don't link to them, but still - it's not worth taking the risk. As you also say, there's no stopping anyone else from linking to the pages and / or for Google to go on a exploratory mission of its own.

As a note, internal 404s / 410s ("Gone") are perfectly okay if they're appropriate for the situation, i.e. a page has been removed. Not ever removed resource has to be 301ed elsewhere. This isn't the case here though.

To my mind, blocking bot access to these pages while they are empty is a better option, and noindex / follow would achieve this. I believe Er_Maqul has misunderstood what you were saying here - there is no "nofollow" in this situation.

I would say that popularity has a lot to do with it, plus the overall reach of your site. The appearance of sitelinks for the misspelt two-word name variation is a very good sign that the brand is recognised and growing, and that you're on the right track as far as growth goes. I would expect sitelinks to show up for the one-word brand name if you maintain a good, quality level of link development, content promotion, social activity, etc.

Hi Rohit,

Just to follow up and add to what others have said: if you built links from third-party websites, pointing to your site, Google should crawl the third-party websites and see the links pointing to you within 15 days. If Google is not crawling the site more regularly than once every 15 days, the websites are probably lower in quality and not great sources of backlinks to begin with.

If you are using Moz / Ahrefs, etc. are slower in crawling and indexing than Google. Moz often updates once every 30 days, so could pick up these news links in its next crawl. Ahrefs tends to be slightly faster, but is still not instantaneous in picking up new links.

Hi Ash,

To echo what Andy has said, adding a noindex / follow meta tag to a page ensures that whilst the page is not indexed, the other pages to which it links still receive PageRank / authority. Are there reasons why it is important that the category page is indexed, e.g. does it receive a decent amount of converting traffic?

Hi Carl,

Several large publications do this sort of thing already, but they do have a lot of content of their own to back the duplicate / blocked content up. The most large-scale example of this is newspapers that syndicate content from other papers, often internationally. I was the SEO on a project like this for a large UK paper, and we blocked the duplicated content's subfolder via robots.txt so that the newspaper was not re-publishing indexable content from its international sister.

Your other option is to use the canonical tag to point back to the original version of the content.

Syndication shouldn't be harmful, and if you were doing this with a lot of content on the site to begin with, it would be normal and fine. What worries me is Google seeing a new site where there is literally no content (to begin with) and a large, blocked section. After the Panda update, it's pretty important to show a resource-heavy website, even if the site's purpose is filled without content. For instance, a property search engine I worked on saw a huge Panda penalty because all of their articles were on an artlce subdomain, not on the same subdomain as the "money" part of their site. We had to move the articles over to the main site.

It's not possible for me to say exactly what will happen if you go ahead with this, but I must advise that you should be building out your unique content both before launch, and quickly post-launch. It's vital that unique, indexable content be live on the site for it to perform well, even for commercial queries that don't rely on a site having articles.

Cheers,

Jane

Hi David,

Sorry I missed out those ones! I'd say you'd want to remove the "search engine optimisation" anchor text for sure if you're under penalty / suspicion in general. The recent furore about guest blogging has been quite focused on footer author bio links too unfortunately. I can't say for sure whether all or many footer bios are going to get nuked or considered very suspicious, but I would say that I'd be wary of the practice if you're already penalised. It seems ridiculous, but sadly you aren't the only person who's wrestling with nofollowing or removing what were otherwise considered to be good links.

Perhaps start with changing these to purely brand links, either the company name or your name. If you're still having trouble after getting rid of the links Google has cited, move on to removing or nofollowing these types of links. I agree that it's painful to consider removing links without being sure if they're hurting.

As others have said above, combating scrapers is a big reason, but you're relying on lazy scrapers not removing the tags.

Another reason is to prevent rogue content management systems from attaching unnecessary query strings to URLs, creating pages that can end up loading infinite times under different URLs. A canonical tag in the source file would mean that any number of duplicate pages point back to the original. The same reason goes for sites that have issues with redirecting www / non-www URLs to the correct version, or who deal with the same problem regarding secure / insecure URLs. In all these cases, the canonical tag is a bandaid, not a cure - it would be better to fix the underlying problem of the rogue CMS, incorrect redirection, etc. but the canonical tag (self-referencing) is there if you need it.

Google doesn't seem to have an issue with it, but if you're at all concerned about the other engines, use with care.

Hi there,

This somewhat depends on the structure of the website. These are the options, using the structural idea you have put forward:

example.com/plumber/london

example.com/plumber-london

example.com/london/plumber/

example.com/london-plumber/

The first would be a good structure if you have a parent "plumbing" page, which links to a range of locations in which you have plumbing services listed: London, Manchester, Bristol, etc. Each location would have its subfolder after /plumber/

The second example would work if you do not have a London page or a Plumbing page, but just a page about plumbers in London. This is true for the fourth example too.

The third example would work best if the parent page is a page all about services across London, them you have a page about plumbers coming off that page.

You should be able to rank any of these structures, but I would say this relates more to the hierarchy of the website than it does anything else.

The other responders here are right - that activity needs to be stopped right away. It's highly unlikely that they'll get away with it for much longer, and when they're hit it won't be pretty.

Hi there,

Yiannis makes some great points. Here are some more thoughts:

Are there other news outlets, forums, communities on Facebook, etc. in your space that you regularly communicate with? One reason the SEO community shares posts so often is that many people have been chatting to each other in a range of locations for years. They are not posting in a vacuum where they put up blog post links on their Facebook and Twitter pages and wait for shares - they have been contributing in various ways in a lot of places, Moz included, for so long that their peers share their work.

You will also find that there are a LOT of networks like email lists that deliberately share each other's content. They're all meant to be secret and they realistically are - no one who isn't on an individual mailing list knows about it - but if you watch social media closely enough within a niche like SEO, you can see the same people sharing each other's things. You can determine that they have either a mailing list or a private Facebook / Google group where members ask for shares. These deliberate shares always prompt "natural" shares if the content is good enough.

Getting friendly enough with people that you're included in these sorts of lists, or setting one up yourself, is a longer process that means getting involved with a lot of peers, even competitors, where they're hanging out online - talking to them on Twitter and Facebook.

At my former agency, a post on pagination - one of SEO's most "boring" subjects - got so much attention due to being well-written and shared by a few highly-followed people within SEO (including Rand from here at Moz) that it became the second-most visited page on our site behind the home page over an extended period. If we had simply been tweeting out URLs and titles, few would have read it. However, we shared it with friends and cited it where relevant and it was picked up in a big way.

I hope this helps!

Hi,

Guest posting, or seeking PR on third party websites, is still going to work well for a high number of people, especially as Google gets better at determining what is natural and what is not. I believe the issue currently is that determining intent with guest posts is very difficult for Google, hence one reason why they have taken out a sweeping penalty on sites that have even looked sideways at My Blog Guest in the past few years.

The point about going for a piece whether you get a link or not is quite important, although be aware of some other points as well. If you get a post written about you on a site, in a newspaper or magazine:

• Does that site / newspaper offer advertorials / paid posts for other people? If so, are you going to be swept up in that and assumed to have paid for your post?
• Would you guess that any of the other posts on the site have been sought by SEOs? If you have any suspicion, best to stay clear.
• Is there an "advertising" page where you can contact the site about links (not affiliate / banner ads that go through redirects)? Check out that such advertising isn't a red flag for SEO.
• Do sites place "sponsored" disclaimers alongside posts by external authors? There is no evidence or proof that Google crawls for these types of disclaimers, but it wouldn't be hard to do.

There are plenty of awesome businesses that have built good rankings off of PR and will continue to do so. Google's primary challenge is also that many people who are doing guest posting for SEO really well are continuing to do it and it's impossible for Google to detect at present because it looks just like PR. In some ways, this is what Google kind of wants anyway - some "SEOs" are now producing content for links that is good enough to add value to the web, basically meaning that Google's stringency has made those posts no longer part of the problem.

Hi there,

A 404 certainly isn't the best way to handle a new URL / page before it is populated with content. It is good that Google isn't finding these pages yet (as you state in a later comment), but keep in mind that it could - the pages aren't linked to, but there is never any particular guarantee about what Google will and won't find. It's highly unlikely if you don't link to them, but still - it's not worth taking the risk. As you also say, there's no stopping anyone else from linking to the pages and / or for Google to go on a exploratory mission of its own.

As a note, internal 404s / 410s ("Gone") are perfectly okay if they're appropriate for the situation, i.e. a page has been removed. Not ever removed resource has to be 301ed elsewhere. This isn't the case here though.

To my mind, blocking bot access to these pages while they are empty is a better option, and noindex / follow would achieve this. I believe Er_Maqul has misunderstood what you were saying here - there is no "nofollow" in this situation.