Ah, so you mean brand terms as in the brands that you carry, not your own? Those are fairly large brands that sell through a number of sites, so you have a large competitive base.

You are seeing the number of different queries rise, but your traffic to the page in question is falling. I would take that to mean that the brand head terms are where you are losing the traffic. You're pulling in longer tail phrases but not enough to recover from the lose of traffic on head terms.

I doubt display has anything to do with this, it sounds like a pure SEO problem. However, with so many brand focuses at such a high level of competition, it is going to be hard to pinpoint what is wrong without an in depth SEO review. I can't provide that to you, but you might look into engaging with someone to do some in depth reviews of the traffic to your brand pages over time to pinpoint the drop started to happen, what changes might have occurred on page to create a change in relevance of the page, if there are new entrants to the market pushing your results down, or if there are any penalties or algorithmic issues with your site that might be impacting the site overall. Those are good places to start.

Best of luck, I know this industry well. Another Kate Morris runs Adore Beauty, so I've kept an eye on this field for a long time.

Let me rephrase to make sure I have this right.

Using Search Console you are seeing clicks to terms with your brand in them dropping. Clicks, but not impressions. When you check SEMRush, there isn't a drop in the term's collective demand. However, your analytics shows the same traffic decline that Search Console shows and you are also seeing a sales decline.

You mention that your paid search for these terms is converting well and you are seeing more traffic there?

Have you considered that your paid search is cannibalizing your organic traffic?

If I am misunderstanding, please let me know. The more you can share about the terms you are seeing declines for, the better the problem can be diagnosed.

Thanks!

Changing the duplicated content will take care of it by itself. It will have to be rewritten for each market though. It is up to you to decide if that is the best course of action for you. If you translate the content using regional dialects (have someone in that region write the page fresh), then hreflang is useful. That's when the en-us and en-ca, etc. come into play. Would something like that be possible?

Does anything about how people search for the product change in the 5 countries?

That tool is meant for the business as a whole.

Are you willing to (or are they, the client/company) put the work into differentiating the content per country? Is that needed? If it is just the form that changes, you can just change the form depending on what country they input into the form. Would that work? Then there is only one site to maintain and all you have to deal with is translations (german, spanish, japanese, french, etc. The languages, not the countries).

All that said you have two choices:

1. One site, different translations (using hreflang in between) with some changes to what happens with the form.

2. Multiple country sites that are operated differently to target each region. These can be ccTLDs or on the same domain but need to be treated as separate sites. No need for hreflang, but major need for different content.

Hey!

So international can be pretty confusing, so welcome to the world of international expansion. I'd suggest first checking out this tool I built to determine how to approach your situation. It seems like you have needs for translation (German language, not Germany focused) and geo-targeting (Canada focus, same language), and you will have reasons for people to access different content.

http://outspokenmedia.com/international-seo-strategy/

Let me know what result you get and we can go from there. If it is blended, I can give you some pointers from there. It won't be easy, it's not just about hreflang, but we'll get you set up right.

Hi Sam,

I can see how this might be concerning. Without knowing your site, I can't confirm anything but answers to your questions:

1. Bots have been known to "fill out forms" before and at least Googlebot has been known to find pages through the use of Chrome (a user using Chrome). There are many ways, but if you are sure that there is no link to it anywhere, I wouldn't worry about it.
2. No. That is what header codes are there for, to let the bots know what is there, what is forbidden, etc.
3. Other than robots.txt, there isn't any way to stop them from sending in requests. If it gets out of hand, you can try talking to AdWords directly, but more than likely, this is not causing an issue.

Overall, I'd just let it happen. Let them get the 403 error and they'll figure it out. As long as this isn't showing in the organic index, you should be fine.

If it is just a few pages and they are only translating, you can create the pages in spanish and use hreflang to markup the English page as being in English as the Spanish in Spanish.

Instructions here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

With canonicals, I would not worry about the incoming pages. If the new content is useful and relevant, plus linked to internally, they should do fine in terms of indexation. Use the canonical for now, and once you launch the new pages, well a month after launch, if there are key pages not getting indexed, then you can reassess. The canonical is the right thing to do in this case.

As for link equity, you are right, that is a simplistic view of it. It is actually much more intricate than that, but that's a good basic understanding. However, the canonical is not going to hurt your internal link equity. Those links to the different sorting are navigational in nature and the structure will be repeated throughout the site. Google's algo is good at determining internal, editorial links versus those that are navigational in nature. The navigational links don't impact the strength nearly as much as an editorial link.

My personal belief is that you are worrying about something that isn't going to make an impact on your organic traffic. Ensure the correct canonicals are in place and launch the new content. If that new content has the same issue with sorting, use canonicals there as well and let Google figure it out. "They" have gotten pretty good at identifying what to keep and what not.

If you don't want the sorting pages in there at all, you'll need to do one of the following:

• Noindex, disallow in robots.txt - Rhea Drysdale showed me a few years back that you can do a disallow and noindex in robots. If you do both, Google gets the command to not only noindex the URLs, but also cannot crawl the content.
• Noindex, nofollow using meta robots - This would stop all link equity flow from these pages. If you want to attempt to stop flow to these pages, you'll need to nofollow any links to them. The pages can still be crawled however.
• Noindex, follow - Same as above but internal link equity would still flow. Again, if you want to attempt to cut off link equity to these sorting pages, any links to them would need to be nofollowed.
• Disallow in robots - This would stop them from crawling the content, but the URLs could technically still be indexed.

Personally, I believe trying to manage link equity using nofollow is a waste of time. You more than likely have other things that could be making larger impacts. The choice is yours however and I always recommend testing anything to see if it makes an impact.

Is your issue with crawling or indexing? Those are two separate issues. Why don't you want Google having the canonicals in the index? If you can give me some more insight, I can try to recommend the best option.

And I'm not following your last question. Can you try to ask it another way?

This one would need a canonical. For one category page with 5 different sort options, you'd need one canonical URL (one without any sorting or the default sorting) and point all others to that URL using a canonical tag.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en

Would that work for your setup? If I understand your situation correctly, this should work. It consolidates link equity and allows Google to choose what needs to be indexed and served.

You have a lot of questions in here. We are going to need to limit this thread to your main question of the https URLs being indexed.

Can you share the domain?

Have you claimed the https domain in Search Console yet to see if these indexed URLs are being shown in search results?

If the https is resolving, I would go ahead and use an htaccess command to have any https redirected to the same URL that is http. I don't see why it would be happening, but it is and that's the best way to take care of any traffic issues.

It's going to depend on how your tracking is setup but out of the box, GA's channel for Social is anything that is tagged as social. Any untagged campaigns, including social ones, are going to be put into Other.

It's traditionally untagged paid advertising like Facebook. Paid Search is typically campaigns from AdCenter or AdWords, the search engines themselves.

Oh wow. Missed this somehow. I remember answering but the answer isn't here. Weird.

Short answer, this markup would be confusing to a bot. You are telling Google that /fr has multiple regional translations. Which isn't true. If you have one French translation that isn't regionally focused, you need one hreflang tag for that page.

If you are trying to geo-target a specific country, you need to actually make content for that country you are targeting. If you don't have the resources for that, just offer your content in french without geo-targeting and it should rank just fine if it's relevant and strong.