Hi ,
finally I managed to setup my site in Baidu Webmaster Tools with the help of a freelance staff member in China. Site is verified and sitemap submitted.

In section "Site Properties", field "Affiliate subject" I can't figure out after extensive search what I need to setup here for a foreign company without any presence and without company registration in China. Anybody can help?

When I click on this field, it indicates "Site association subject is a necessary link for mobile resources to enter search." so my site will not show up in mobile results without it?

Grateful for any tips on how to resolve this piece of puzzle of the baidu setup.
Thanks

Any ideas how to increase the Yandex Site Quality Index via onpage changes?

Thanks EGOL. Interesting. 
Same goes for me. Performance of affiliate programs mostly was very disappointing in the past. In this case it is a complentary service which could add real user value and I do not want to risk losing visitors via adsense to competing services and filtering out competitors  in adsense would just be too time consuming.

Thanks Egol, good point. 
Did you ever experience problems in google due to too many affiliate links? If so, how long did it take to recover in google rankings?

We have pages with lots of unique content that are ranking very well in google.
I am now considering to add towards the end of the pages widgets from the booking.com affiliate program and also from the affiliate program of two other accommodtion sites.

These affilliate widgets would be placed far beyond our core content in the bottom 15% of the page. Each widget will contain a large number of links to the different accomodation options that booking.com or others offer.

In our context this information would be indeed very useful for our visitors.

1. Shall I be concerned that our google rankings may suffer due to google perceiving our site as less quality (or google misinterpreting our intent to generate traffic to affiliate programs) ?
2. If google rankings would be suffering, is this something we would normally see in a week (most of our pages are crawled daily by google)  and then recover in a week when we would remove the widgets or would this generally be something that would affect the ranking over the course of a month or more?
3. Shall I be concerned abou link dillution since my pages would now have a lot of links pointing to the affiliate sites, which could devalue my internal links?

Any thoughts?

thanks Stephan.

It took nearly a month for search console to display the majority of our pages in sitemap as indexed, even though pages showed up much earler in SERPs. We had it split down into 30 different sitemaps. Later we published also a sitemap index and saw a nice increase a few days later in indexed pages which may have been related.

Finally google now is indexing 88% of our sitemap.
Do you think in general that 88% is for a site of this size a somehow normal percentage or would you normally expect a higher percentage of indexed sitemap page and investigate deeper for potential pages that google may consider thin content? Navigation I can rule out as a reason.

Update. now 10 days passed since our migration to https and upload of sitemap, still same situation.

Google has been crawling all our pages during the last days. I see it in the crawling stats.

My concern is that

1. majority of my sitemaps are still showing up as "pending" 3 days after I originally submited the sitemaps.
2. those sitemaps that are processed show as indexed only less than 1% of my submitted pages.

We do have around 170.000 pages in our sitemap.

So I wonder wheher this is unusual or normal delay from google search console.

We migrated 4 days ago to https and followed best practices..
In search console now still 80% of our sitemaps appear as "pending" and among those sitemaps that were processed only less than 1% of submitted pages appear as indexed?

Is this normal ?
How long does it take for google to index pages from sitemap? 
Before https migration nearly all our pages were indexed and I see in the crawler stats that google has crawled a number of pages each day after migration that corresponds to number of submitted pages in sitemap.

Sitemap and crawler stats show no errors.

I have a page which is ranking already pretty well for a relative competitive keyword. 
Google also ranks us on first page for synonym of keyword we optimize the page for (even though synonym does not appear on our page).

I am now considering to replace some occurences of the keyword in the page by different synonyms, in the hope that our ranking may further improve for these synonyms. 
However I am concerned that google may penalize me for keyword stuffing if I am using a wide range of synonyms of one keyword on our page. My plan is only to replace some occurences of keyword with synonyms. I am a bit nerveous here since page is already ranking quite well in a competitive niche.

Any thoughts?

Thanks a lot Serge!

When searching for "Madrid hotels" in google I see that the top organic search results have one row of sitelinks. 
What can I do that also my site shows sitelinks if I am among the top organic search results?
Anything onpage that I can do to increase probability that google will show sitelinks?

Strangely the text which shows as sitelink for SERPs from booking.com and tripadvisor does actually for most of the sitelinks not appear on the landing page (I also checked the source code).

After some digging here is what we did finally:

1. researched with tineye.com whether images were from free image sources and that among top results in tineye were no references to licences

2. additionally we uploaded each image to https://www.picscout.com/ which is a site fully owned by getty images and upon upload indicates whether it finds any licencing information for the image. As picscout has some bad reputation for their practice of exortion letters it is probably best to not submit on their site the URL of images on your own site, but rather use their upload function instead.

We plan to add several thousand images to our site and we outsourced the image search to some freelancers who had instructions to just use royalty free pictures.

Is there any easy and quick way to check that in fact none of these images violates copyrights without having to check image by image?

In case there are violations we are unaware of, do you think we need to be concerned about a risk of receiving Takedown Notices (DMCA) before owner giving us notification for giving us opportunity to remove the photo?

Kate. The domain has  100.000 pages and will scale to over 1 million unique pages during the next couple of months. I do not want the Sorting URLs have any negative effect on the new indexing of the new 900.000 unique pages in the next months.

Regarding link equity. My simplified understanding of link equity is that if a page has 10 links then each link carries 10% of the total link juice of the page. If now 5 of the 10 links do link to a canonical version of the same page (=sorting URLs), I may be losing out on 50% of the potential link juice the page carries. This is my concern. Therefore my doubt is if I should rather try to hide these sorting URLs from google (same as was also recommended by Rand for facetted navigation pages that one does not consider important for being indexed).

Hi Kate, thanks lot. Yes canonical is something we should definetly do and we have implemented.

Still I had the experience in the past that google also indexed lots of canonicalized URLs with near identical content. Any additional step I could do to minimize indexing of these URLs further?

Wouldn't then the basically "self referencing" URLS of sorting links (going to canonicalized versions of the same page) be lost for link equity?

We are now introducing 5 links in all our category pages for different sorting options of category listings.
The site has about 100.000 pages and with this change the number of URLs may go up to over 350.000 pages.
Until now google is indexing well our site but I would like to prevent the "sorting URLS" leading to less complete crawling of our core pages, especially since we are planning further huge expansion of pages soon.

Apart from blocking the paramter in the search console (which did not really work well for me in the past to prevent indexing) what do you suggest to minimize indexing of these URLs also taking into consideration link juice optimization?

On a technical level the sorting is implemented in a way that the whole page is reloaded, for which may be better options as well.