Sure:

• The SEMRush blog has a lot of good tutorials.
• There's an ultimate guide written by Refugeeks that is worth reviewing.
• I've written an article on how to use SEMRush's display ad tracking features for non-PPC purposes.

So - hard to give a good answer for this aside from subjective opinion of what we've noticed recently. And, whatever answer I write will probably be dated 3 to 6 months from now.

With that said, the above answers are about right. Google should be able to understand these, and probably does (especially when there are no exact match results), but that doesn't mean that the page will rank if there are a bunch of people specifically targeting the "best haircuts calgary" variation.

If there were two pages, one with a split keyword and multiple links and social shares, and the other one with an exact match keyword and zero links or social shares - I'd put my money on the page with the split keyword.

Hey Mike,

Outside of Local SEO, one single site would be the clear winner because it’s easier to build the authority of that one domain.

Within Local SEO, having dedicated domains could make more sense. One could make the argument that it’s simpler for Google To understand a single location, but there are plenty of retail sites with single domains that refute that argument.

One could also make the argument that it might be easier to build homepage links to separate domains, but I don’t think it’s enough of a factor to change your web structure.

Option 2 is the standard in your industry, for certain. But it typically means higher web design costs to build and maintain them all, even if they’re somewhat cookie cutter. Frankly I think that’s as big of a factor in your decision.

I wouldn’t worry about the administrative relationship you described. It’s not going to be a major factor - you’re not deceiving Google by separating the sites, you’re changing how users experience the sites.

A couple of clarifying questions:

• Are any of the communities near each other, or are they in many cities across the country?
• Are you seeing subpages of corporate sites ranking in the local search results for any of your communities?
• Is there any administrative value to separating the websites? Outside of SEO considerations.

Knowing that all of your properties are in the same area, this seems like the biggest argument in favor of separate sites. Google may be more likely to rank other sites instead of subpages of the same site to avoid what is called domain crowding. However, it still happens in local. Just search for "office supply stores" and you're likely to see multiple listings for Staples or OfficeDepot, for example.

Honestly you could do both. Have a corporate site with pages for every property on it, and set up microsites with single properties on them. If the site is setup well with something like Wordpress Multisite then at least the same software can be running and updated simultaneously. In that case I'd probably use the microsites as the landing pages for Google local listings.

If you do go the route of multiple sites, I'd recommend having a clear button or call to action to "View Our Other Properties in the XYZ Area".

I haven't seen any studies with <embed> the way I have with <iframe>. <embed> is also used for video and flash, but neither would be indexed the same way as PDF so hard to compare. The embed tag is pretty standardized, so I really doubt they wouldn't crawl this similarly.</p> <p>IIRC in the ugly era of flash, it was proper to have a <noscript> {crawlable content here} </noscript> section after the <embed>, so that's one comparable situation, but that's due to the flash itself not being crawled well.</p> <p>If it's not a hassle, I would add the text link to the PDF that says "download full PDF" or similar. If it is a hassle and takes longer than a couple hours, then it's a harder call.</p> <p>Similar thread that could be helpful:</p> <ul> <li><a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3686331/does-google-index-html-content-supplied-by-the-object-tag">http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3686331/does-google-index-html-content-supplied-by-the-object-tag</a></li> </ul></iframe>

"apart from main page, contact page, about us and some other generic pages, site name should be removed as it might produce duplicate content."

As a blanket statement, this is misleading at best.

Default title tags for most websites are "Page Title - Site Name", or something similar.

I generally like to keep the brand name in the title tag because I'm usually working on sites where the brand is valuable. For instance, "Seattle Lodging - Airbnb" is more compelling than "Seattle Lodging".

The main reason I usually get rid of the brand in the title tag is when I'm trying to create a high-clickthrough-rate title tag and the brand portion is getting in the way. For example "Seattle Lodging & Vacation Rentals - Nightly Rates Starting from $79!" might be a really compelling title tag and I can't fit the brand name on there, so I'll drop it. BUT I won't drop it elsewhere on the site where I want a solid default title tag format.

The only caveat is that if your brand sucks (eg DavidsCheapAffiliateReviews.info) then it might actually detract from your click-through rates, and you might want to leave it out.

We see scraped content all the time. Occasionally we see scraped HTML in full form but slightly edited.

In general I'd do the following:

• Disavow those domains in GSC. Also consider disavowing any domains pointing links at the mirror sites. It could be possible that they are building up junk links to a mirror site which canonicals your site. No idea why anyone would do that but worth covering your bases.
• Submit DMCA notices to Google, their webhost, etc.
• Take a look through server logs for anything screwy. If you see tons of weird traffic from countries that aren't relevant to your business, you might decide to block them with your .htaccess file.
• Certainly make sure nothing has been changed on your own site (canonicals, common Wordpress hacks, etc.), though nothing is suggesting to me that that has happened.

Other than that I would just keep an eye on it and keep an eye on Google Search Console.

Sorry, I can't help much re: multiple languages and how you should be tracking. I would probably track each subfolder as a separate campaign, but I'm going to defer to someone else's opinion on this question, since I don't deal with multi-language sites.

One more thing that could be a long shot but is worth keeping an eye on: If someone had zero ethics and wanted to steal your links, one thing they could do is reach out to webmasters that link to you and pretend to be you, and claim that the mirror site is the new version of the website and ask them to change their links. Once complete, they'd redirect the mirror site to their own commercial site.

So, keep an eye on your own link profile and theirs, just to make sure none of those links are changing.

Hey Tim,

A few questions for you...

1. What type of e-commerce CMS are they on?
2. Are these mis-matched pages always on the same site (and not the competitive site that you mentioned)?
3. Are there any canonical tags on the site that are pointing towards the other website?
4. Is the content on each page unique for that domain (not including the other domains you mentioned)?

OK, 2 primary questions for a multilingual site. This specific site has 2 language so I'll use that for the examples.

1 - Self-Referencing Hreflang Tag Necessary?

The first is regarding the correct implementation of hreflang, and whether or not I should have a self-referencing hreflang tag.

In other words, if I am looking at the source code for http://www.example.com/es/ (our Spanish subfolder), I am uncertain whether the source code should contain the second line below:

Obviously the Spanish version should reference the English version, but does it need to reference itself? I have seen both versions implemented, with seemingly good results, but I want to know the best practice if it exists.

2 - Canonical of Current Language or Default Language?

The second questions is regarding which canonical to use on the secondary language pages. I am aware of the update to the Google Webmaster Guidelines recently that state not to use canonical, but they say not to do it because everyone was messing it up, not because it shouldn't be done.

So, in other words, if I am looking at the source code for http://www.example.com/es/ (our Spanish subfolder), which of the two following canonicals is correct?

1. OR

For this question, you can assume that (A) the English version of the site is our default and (B) the content is identical.

Thanks guys, feel free to ask any qualifiers you think are relevant.

Yes, I understand. You're only going to get those links from web design sites if there is content on your site that is relevant to web design. So, you need to create that content on your site before you have anything to link to. Those pages won't rank for traditional real estate keywords, but the pages will pass link value to other pages on the site, and the domain overall.

The relevance won't be an issue - although you will have to build all of the normal realtor links as well as the web design-related links if you want to compete. However, the web design links will be a good way to exceed the competition.

Google will recognize on a domain level that the site overall is about both web design and real estate. They will also recognize on a page level that some pages are about a specific topic. You'll need to be conscious of what keywords you're targeting on each page.

Hi Duncan,

Here's some initial thoughts on steps I would take:

• Since external links are fine, there shouldn't be a need to do anything disavow-related, but I would definitely do that if you see any external links pointed to those old pages, which is common with hacked sites.
• Sounds like you've covered your bases regarding preventing the site from getting hacked again at a CMS level, database level, plugin level, etc., so I'll assume that is good to go.
• If these spammy internal pages were all in a specific subfolder, you could block that subfolder via Robots.txt to send a stronger signal that the URLs should be ignored and de-indexed.
• The internal links should disappear as the pages are removed from the index, but that can take awhile, and it's not uncommon for Search Console to display pages/links/data that have since gone away.

And a couple of questions for you:

• Once those bases are covered, then you're still faced with the potential "penalty", or poor performance. I'm assuming that these pages not ranking in Google were performing well before the site hack?
• How long has it been since the site was initially hacked, and how long since full cleanup was completed?
• Are the spammy internal pages showing up as 404 crawl errors yet?