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Without any more data points, this looks like a penalty of some kind. Have you logged into Google Webmaster Tools recently to see if you have any messages?

Did Andy get the answer you needed? It sounds like everything has been taken care of but I wanted to be sure.

Language and country targeting are two different things. There are tons of people across multiple countries that speak English. People in Turkey speak a few languages as well I would assume.

It seems like you want to take the content on your site focused to users in Turkey, but offer it in English. If you put the English content on your Turkey ccTLD, it can still rank for people searching across the world for those English terms, but it's harder depending on the topic especially if there are sites/companies in their own country targeting the same topic.

Check out this tool I made to determine what international expansion strategy is best for your company. http://www.katemorris.com/issg

Does the client have a PR team or anyone that reaches out to writers when there is a story like a new product or brand? If not, that needs to happen first. Hire or contract PR help, best with someone that already has contacts that you can benefit from.

When you have that, then yes, press releases are helpful to get the word out about a new product or brand. But don't rely on the press release itself to bring recognition, stories, or anything else. Press releases like any other piece of content needs to be promoted to the wider audience.

On the technical side, press releases should not be used for link building. A well executed press release along with the right promotion will bring links, but not from the release itself.

HI!

There are a number of things I want to address in your situation, so please bear with me.

First, I can't see the site, so I can't verify the content on your site as 100% unique, relevant, and design with the user experience in mind. You need more than just reviews and images to have a great page, so if that isn't already the case, that is the first place to start. For any user search, ask what the best page is and beat that in terms of content. If you aren't sure how to be better than the best, find users that are looking for that via surveys and ask them.

Second, I am assuming a number of things. It sounds like your site just launched late 2013. This is based on your timeline and relatively low DA. If that is true and your timeline is accurate, you should be going through some major fluctuations. Your site is new, which means Google is actively testing it's content. Your rankings will change heavily in the first few months. You then noticed a number of onpage issues, and those were just changed as of last week. It's going to take some time for that information to be updated.

Third, based on the above and what I've seen in the past, it's very normal for your rankings to fluctuate. If you're checking by a rank checker tool, it'll fluctuate as none of them are accurate right now. If you're checking yourself, then the same IP is looking it up repeatedly, acting like a rank checker. Normal users can see ranking fluctuations per day based on the tons of factors that go into ranking.

I would highly suggest not tracking ranking, but rather watching the organic search traffic going to the page you are targeting here. That's the only way to show real success.

Fourth, tracking domain authority over time is not valid. Domain Authority change numbers based on the Moz data set. You could "lose" domain authority in one time period and still get more traffic. DA is only to be used in comparison to other sites related to you.

In the end, be patient, focus on your content and track organic traffic to important URLs to see how things are performing.

Perfect.

Note the #2 item on this list. The key to having international content is treating each country subsite as it's own site. Make sure you have someone from that country consulting you on each country focused site. So if UK, have someone native to the UK review the site. Same for Germany, France, etc.

As for structure, my personal favorite is subfolders. So your UK site would be www.domain.com/uk. www.domain.com if you get to the point that you have so many and really need a US one as well, make www.domain.com the "universal" version, and www.domain.com/us as targeted to the US, but it might not be necessary at this point.

The content is the big part, if you want to do well internationally, really focus on getting the content right. There will be some overlap, don't worry about that. Focus more on the user experience for people in each area.

The only technical thing that needs to be done is for you to geo-target in the respective WMT areas.

Does that help?

So glad to help! Good luck with everything!!

What you're doing would cause that many links to the US subdomain. In fact, it'll happen to any domain with that location changer up top. I wouldn't worry about the number of internal links due to this, I'd worry more that you're doing something that isn't great for your user. I'd recommend not doing an IP based automatic redirect. Rather, detect the IP, set a cookie, tell people you think they are in that location with a JS prompt that allows them to change the location and then always let them change the location regardless of IP.

Does that make sense?

No. A canonical would not be helpful here. There are major issues with canonicals and international content.

Hi Mike!

Moosa has the best behind the scenes answer, but everyone here is dead on. Both structures work really well when it comes to search because they are both descriptive and short. That's really what you need to focus on. If I had to pick though based on your examples:

www.mysite.com/marketing/digital/research/...

www.mysite.com/digital-marketing/research/..

I'd go with marketing/digital/research .. that way as you content changes, you can change the types of marketing research and if digital is just understood later as marketing overall, then at that time the research can just be put under marketing, but I think you'll always want to distinguish the types of marketing. This will just account for all possibilities.

Also, having all marketing focused content under /marketing/ allows you do be able to do some quick calculations inside of analytics on multiple scales. You can filter to see traffic, sources and more data for all marketing (all with /marketing/), just research (anything with /research/), and so on.

Hope this helps!

There are two ways to go about this project.

1. Send out a press release and do no further work. This, I assume, means you just want the press release duplicated, syndicated, and just basically reproduced as you wrote it for the purpose of getting links only. That's all sending out a press release will do without a good person with good contacts to follow up with key journalists. There are no more "major" PR news wires that are not having their link equity stripped, due to the fact that they are paid services. Any others that might be free would be smaller scale. I am sorry to say I know of no such places. But once Google/Bing find them, I am sure their ability to pass link equity will diminish as well. That update was not about the newswire services, but about press release syndication. If you just want your press release published, it will do nothing for the company. Press releases are not read, stories are read. There will be no link equity, Google is removing it from any syndicated press releases.

If this is really the route you want to go down, just avoid press release sites altogether like you mentioned before.

2. Now, if you mean to get coverage for the company on this story, which is what you should be hoping for, a story, not the publication of the press release, then yes, you will need a PR person. You might not need someone who identifies themselves as that, but you need someone that can talk with journalists, pick out people who might be interested in the story, and talk to them about covering the story, This is the right way to do it and what will produce the most benefit. The only benefit of a press release at this moment in time.

I hope that clears up what I mean.

What are your goals in finding a "PR site"? To get a press release written? Released to a wider market?

I am assuming your goal is more centered around getting coverage over this new partnership. If that's it, I am sorry to say that doing that will not be free, and will not come from posting a press release to a site.

You need to find and hire a good PR person or company that specializes in your industry.

You need to title the images what they are, not focused to SEO. So if the dress is called the Summer Green in Fields Dress, the file name should be summer-green-fields-dress.jpg (or something like it) and then the alt text be Summer Green in Fields Dress.

Actually, sorry guys, I am not sure HREFLANG is the right thing here. It might be, but it depends.

Christopher, can you check out the tool at this URL and answer the questions? Once you've done that, let me know what result you get and I can recommend some actions from there.

I am not sure there are titles that will ensure anything. Just like any direct mail or email marketing tactic, people get used to overused ones quickly and easily. My advice is not to use the same title every time, but craft each on to each person you are reaching out to. Trying to do guest posting en masse is not going to be worthwhile for you.

If you have an online store dedicated to selling shoes in France, I would focus less on how to optimize and more on getting someone that is fluent in French and native to France. You are going to have to give that person the time to really translate your site from a French person's (someone that lives in France) perspective. All the site content.

Once you have accomplished that and used the correct implementation of HREFLANG and the meta language content tag (for Bing), let it sit for the time being. See how much traffic it garners. Get user input, check internal search patterns. If you aren't already tracking internal site search, please do that. If you don't allow internal site search, add that and track it in analytics.

Only then do you optimize for specific text.

First, you're thinking about this all wrong. Stop thinking in terms of PR juice. PR (pagerank) hasn't been updated in a while and is a horrible metric. Also, don't think of links in relation to each other. They are independent unless you are part of a link farm. Those are identifiable, always.

If you want to say thank you, say thank you. If someone linked to you and it provided business, def say thank you. But don't think about it in terms of link equity. If they linked to you and it's bringing business, that is all that should matter. Thank in any way you deem respectful.

There used to be a platform for this called Sponge, but their site is down so I assume it's gone now.

Q&A can be very useful, but you will need to focus attention less on length and more on the capability to search the questions. More importantly if your market wants this and if it's not available elsewhere. If this is something that has been identified as necessary and useful, go for it. Don't worry too much about the headings and length. Just don't make this a factory of questions and 300 word answers. Allow the people writing the answers to answer well, no matter how long.

Hope that helps!

Whether a subdomain carries all the weight of the main domain has yet to be proven, but I think in this case it does. But link equity flows from the page not the domain.

A better test is: does the site look spammy? Do I want my brand on there? If yes, awesome. Then: Did I pay for this placement? (If yes, please rethink that unless it's advertising and nofollowed)

If it's natural and good for your brand, no matter what site, just keep it there.

Hi Michael,

First, I need to clarify something. If you have .es, .it. de, those are not language domains, they are ccTLDs, targeted at different countries. .es is for Spain based sites, not Spanish language sites. If your translations are on ccTLDs, you are sending the wrong signals to Google and Bing. A ccTLD is always geo-targeted to that country and for some of these domains, the language you mean to target is actually much larger than that country. For instance, only half of the world's French speakers live in France.

If you are just meaning to translate your content, I'd suggest moving that to your main domain and putting them in subfolders, so www.domain.com/es www.domain.com/it (for italian, not Italy).

Once that is all settled, linking to the others in the footer is not hurting your link equity, but it isn't necessary either. For translated content, you should be utilizing HREFLANG and the Meta Content Language tag (for Bing) to note to the search engines what pages are translations. Then you simply need to give users a way to change the language either at the top of the page (preferred) or the footer.

If you mean to geo-target (developing different sites to target different countries), then my answers change completely, let me know if that's what you are trying to do here rather than just translate. If you're not sure what to do, check out this tool I made to help you pick the best international strategy. http://www.katemorris.com/issg

I would not recommend IP based redirects. You can detect and do an initial redirect (with a javascript overlay telling people that you think they are in a specific area), but you'd have to give all users (including Googlebot) the ability to go to the other URLs as well.

HREFLANG is not meant for geo-targeting and IP addresses only tell you location. You only need HREFLANG if there are language changes within a country targeted site or universal (not geotargeted) site.

Even ignoring that, the HREFLANG would not help if people were always redirected based on IP, so I don't suggest that.

Hope this helps, let me know if you have any more questions.

Both answers so far get to one of the points that I was going to make, always update redirects so that there is not a chain, but I wanted to add something else. You only need redirects as long as someone is linking to those pages. You should be taking time to fix any internal references to changed URLs and contacting websites that link to the old URLs and asking them to change the URLs. That should be a part of any site URL change.

If you have only revised your URLs once, you only need redirects for 3-6 months while the search engines reindex everything. In that time, you should have changed all links to the old URLs.

In your case, I'd drop all old redirects except for the last one and see what 404s you get. Find the referring site, and contact them to change the link to your site. Once that is all done, then you can work on this latest revision to change those links.

Hope that helps!

I would worry less about what your communication to them says and more about identifying the market. To get a 20-40% return on who you contact, you're going to have to put in some major work into who these site owners are and if they want or need help. This isn't a numbers game, it's a market identification game.

If it were me, I'd spend time on a few web design and website development forums looking for people who are asking questions about their site or have concerns, and then develop conversations with them. Step away from this being about you and make it about them.

Hope that helps!

I love that you made the tweet joke yourself.

If you create this as your site (your site is the Pinterest looking site), you are hoping to maximize others linking to your site? I think it might drive good interest socially, but I am not sure that type of site lends itself well to links. If you do go with this type of site, I would focus your efforts on collections of pins and do promotions around those. I think that would be the best way to get link attention. Focus less on the pins and more on the boards.

It's early Monday, so does that make sense?

How have you gotten your links so far? The strongest ones I see are very exact match looking, on homepages, and therefore I am wondering if they are paid links or other business deals.

Are you the only one with permission to publish the content? If not, and there are others, you will need to canonical to where the publisher/owner of the content has the content up. If you are the only approved publisher on the web, you can make others canonical to you, but it'll be a battle.

For reference, here is the question:

Thank you for helping me in this. I now have the clarity in making the right recommendation to my client.  However we are now left with 2 options:

• Create unique design/Content for the new **brandnamebianalytics.com **and work on optimization from scratch.
• Redirect **brandnamebianalytics.com to brandname.co.in or vice versa. **The reason we've considered this option is because brandname.co.in is rich in content and drawing around 3000 visitors traffic per month and we cannot afford to lose the reputation the (co.in) site has earned till date.

I appreciate the time you've taken in replying to my query and I look forward to your thoughts/recommendations in the above mentioned issue.

Redirecting to .co.in will keep the domain focused to the Indian market, and if I read right, you want to focus on the US market as well. So I'd recommend designing and developing new content for brandnamebianalytics.com and optimize from scratch.

Hope that helps!

Why are you publishing the whole book if it's not yours? If you are going to do that, I'd noindex the content since it's not yours and you don't have permission to publish it from the owner. Or I assume you don't.

What plugins have you added recently? What settings have you changed in Wordpress?

Something is causing a ton more URLs. I would worry less about the rel canonicals and more about the duplicate content. I am with Rohit and his advice, you need to noindex a ton of content including archives, tags and maybe categories. I would worry less about categories though.

Hi Mark,

Can you fill us in on what exactly you are attempting to do? What is your end goal here? What are you doing keyword research for? What metrics are you looking to provide and why?

Question 1: What types of favorable benefits are you talking about? Do you mean that will you get a better list by using Google's tools over Bing's tools?

Question 2: I don't get this question at all. I think you are asking: "if I optimize for "blue widgets" and Bing users prefer "navy widgets" - am I losing the ability to rank in Bing because I optimized for the "wrong term"?

Let me know if I understand you correctly.

There is no reason I know of to delete the pages. Just rewrite the content and make sure you have a valid sitemap. Things should be just fine.

From what I am hearing, nothing much will change across countries, so why geo-target at all? Are you going to be developing any content that is different per country?

Assuming you should geo-target, I'd recommend subfolders (domain.com/uk, domain.com/us, etc.) as you can then use some of the equity from the main domain. Then use WMT in Bing and Google to geotarget those folders to the countries in question.

I'm not sure I get what you are asking. You mention products but also mention hotels. Can you share exactly the issue you are facing?

Facebook is not meant for just loading products or hotel locations. It's more about sharing things they are doing over time or having a facebook page for each hotel location.

But if you are talking products, take a look at what ModCloth does. They mention their products in really interesting ways that drives traffic to those pages.

Can you visit this tool and tell me what result you get from your answers? I'll be able to help more once I know what strategy is best for you.

http://www.katemorris.com/issg/

I can't say for certain about the volume increasing overall, but image search has changed tons. What I can do is point you to a GA hack that allows you to see if your traffic is coming from image or not.

http://moz.com/blog/decoding-googles-referral-string-or-how-i-survived-secure-search

Tommy is getting to the point but things are still very confusing when it comes to international.

Can you go check out this flow chart, see what is best for your business, and then let me know? http://www.distilled.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/International-Search-Strategy-Guide.pdf

That should answer most of your implementation questions as well, but I want to make sure it make sense. So check it out first and let me know.

But if what I am assuming is the case that you have geo-targeted sites and there is no translation going on within the geotargeted sites (.com and .co.uk), then HREFLANG is not needed. What I mean by translation isn't happening in the site is that the .com (US) site isn't translated to Spanish or any other language. And the same in the UK. If no translation is happening within a geo-targeted site, HREFLANG is not necessary.

Let me know what you're trying to do with geo-targeting and international strategy and I can help better answer your question.

So you are launching it globally, but might want to have region specific ones in the future? Is this just a blog? So the homepage will be posts?

Yeah, I'd focus in on marketing efforts and local citations. Nothing looks out of place, just seems like a new site with little pointing to it. Good luck!

Go with the subdomain that is just targeted to Portuguese, the language. Use an HREFLANG tag to tell Google which pages are translations of an equivalent English page. This will allow you to get traffic from a number of countries that speak Portuguese. I am of course assuming that your content doesn't change other than the translation.

Don't geo-locate unless you mean to actually target a country. If you want to go after the Brazilian market with different content that is just for Brazilian citizens, then geo-locate. In that case you can use a ccTLD (those are only for geolocation), subdomain, or subfolder. That's up to you, but only when you are ready to actually geo-target your content.

Kelli (sorry, I had the wrong name somehow?)

First let me clarify a few things.

1. Is the content between the US, Canada, and UK the exact same but on different URLs?
2. Is any of the content translated to cater to the different markets (spellings, word usage, etc.)?
3. Does each country have the same product set, etc.?

The HREFLANG is not necessary unless you are changing the language in some way. I am not sure that is what you should be using here. But your answers will help me understand so I can tell you what to do.

Check out my tool here to help: http://www.katemorris.com/issg/

Hi Tammy,

First, a few questions, what terms did you drop for? I see many of your pages indexed and link equity flowing through the site. It's new and only has 8 external links from 2 root domains from what I can tell. The 818 links are mostly internal links. So from my point of view, you added the site, Google indexed and tested it, but after the initial bump, it knocked back down. It's annoying but not unheard of with new sites.

What are your plans for outreach? Did this dentist have a site before that is redirecting at all?

Kate

Are you posting the full text or a link to the content on your site? I would recommend putting the content on your site and sharing the URL on Google+, Linkedin, or Facebook.

Regardless, I have never seen content on Google+ or Facebook impact anything to do with Google in regards to duplicate content.

Subdomains would be a hard path, totally possible, but really tough. You need time and resources to dedicate to each subdomain to build the content (if geo-targeting, more time and resources would be needed to change and focus the content). I would suggest parameters, but that's just my 2 cents. Good luck!!

If you know they are bad, I would recommend diavowing them. You never know when or if you'll get a warning. I would err on the side of caution and go ahead and disavow. There is nothing saying you have to, but it makes the most sense to me.

I am going to agree with everyone here and add that while there are not "limits" on the other H-tags, they don't hold much value anymore. Don't use this as a "tactic" to rank. Spend your time on other things specifically on building relationships in your industry.

I do not recommend redirecting people to different content based on IP. Googlebot may change IP addresses but it's always from the US. This makes it impossible for Googlebot to see any of your international content. You can use the IP address to ask the user if they want to set their settings to a different country and be placed there every time, but do not assume.

Try what Martjin said, but also, if there is anyway, can you attach a screenshot of your goal setup? I need to see what has been marked as required, what the text is exactly and other things. There are a number of things that might be going wrong. Also, can you attach a screenshot of the report that is wrong you are talking about? Feel free to edit out any sensitive information.

First of all, I don't think what you are doing is best for the user. Setting language based on IP address is assuming things that are not always true. Rather than setting language based on IP, try detecting language preference from the browser. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8199760/how-to-get-the-browser-language-using-java-script

I would suggest checking out this guide to international strategy to determine if you need to just target language or country.

If you do end up just translating, I prefer using subfolders or parameters, not subdomains. And don't use a ccTLD like .fr or .de. Those are for geo-targeting only and require you to distinguish your content based on what country you are targeting.

Hi!

With a .co.uk, you cannot geotarget to other countries, but that's not needed in this case. Since you are not actually geo-targeting, you are actually just translating, all you need is to add a few lines of code and you're set.

Visit my guide here and it has instructions on what to do. http://bit.ly/14GdPoh

Kate

You shouldn't be focusing blog posts on specific keywords at all. Blog posts are best for long tail terms, so it doesn't matter how many you write. If you start writing multiple on one topic that is a head term you are shooting for, then you should have a category page for all of those, and that is the page that should rank for the head term.