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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

We plan to implement an exit intent layer.
For mailing list expansion and/or to display personalized third party advertising.

Any negative impact this may have on google rankings?
Shall we limit exit intent layer so to show only to users who visited at least 2 pages on our site?
Shall we reduce size of layer on mobile?
Anything else to consider to minimize potential negative impact on google rankings?

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

We are considering to add at the end of alll our 1500 product pages answers to the 9 most frequently asked questions. These questions and answers will be 90% identical for all our products and personalizing them more is not an option and not so necessary since most questions are related to the process of reserving the product.

We are convinced this will increase engagement of users with the page, time on page and it will be genuinely useful for the visitor as most visitors will not visit the seperate FAQ page. Also it will add more related keywords/topics to the page.
On the downside it will reduce the percentage of unique content per page and adds duplication.

Any thoughts about wether in terms of google rankings we should go ahead and benefits in form of engagement may outweight downside of duplication of content?

About 30% of product reviews that the clients of our ecommerce store submitted in the last 10 years are 3 words or less (we did not require any minimum length).

Would you recommend to hide those very short review texts? Where to draw the limit?
Numeric star rating would still go into our accumulated product rating.

My only concern here is what impact it may have on google ranking. 
To give some context, the site has for a long time some panda/phantom related issues where there are no obvious reasons that we could point to.

We are going to implement a faceted navigation for an ecommerce site of about 1000 products.
Faceted navigation is implemented via ajax/javascript which adds to the URL a large number of #parameters.
Faceted pages are canonicalizing to page without any parameters.

We do not want google to index any of the faceted pages at this point.

Will google include pages with #parameters in their index?
Can I tell google somehow to ignore #parameters and not to index them?
Could this setup cause any SEO problems for us in terms of crawl bandwidth and or link equity?

What is best way to display user reviews in languages different from the page language? (e.g. English reviews on a page in Spanish).

For the user it would be useful to see these reviews but I am concerned about negative SEO impact.
I would not want to invest into having them all translated by human translator. Any suggestions?

thanks Wiliam

thanks Nigel

When moving the content after a while to a subdirectory of my core website I would copy the full content and later further improve it. Would the external links that I redirect via 301 be counting similar to links I had earned in the first place? I understand that 301 redirect normally just implies minimal loss of link power.

Topic of the site I consider to acquire is loosely related to my core site.

I have a website which has 25 different language versions on 16 different domains. Hreflan are setup to point to different language versions.

In the footer we have deeplinks to the 25 language versions. Site is not spammy but in small niche and many language versions have very few other external links. For some time this site had lost rankings for reasons that are unclear till now.

I see that large international sites such as booking.com, tripadvisor, apple  all use different approaches to interlink their language versions. Interestingly Tripadvisor is nowadays loading the links to their other language versions dynamically only upon click so that these links do not show up in source code, deviating from their former implementation of static deeplinks to all language versions.

Matt Cutts mentioned back in 2013 “If you have 50 different sites, I wouldn’t link to all 50 sites down in the footer of your website, because that can start to look pretty spammy to users. Instead you might just link to no more than three or four or five down in the footer, that sort of thing, or have a link to a global page, and the global page can talk about all the different verions and country versions of your website.”

But in their webmaster guidelines google recommends: "Consider cross-linking each language version of a page. That way, a French user who lands on the German version of your page can get to the right language version with a single click."

I assume for SEO anyway these links have no value, but for user experience it would certainly be better to provide somewhere deeplinks to other language versions. Also the fact that language versions are on different domains and have few external backlinks may increase a bit the risk in our case. I guess in doubt I would prefer to be safe and load deeplinks only upon click same as tripadvisor.

Any thoughts/suggestions on best interlinking in our specific case?

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.

not sure, you may have misunderstood the question.

to clarify: all pages are one domain.
including all pages in one sitemap would exceed googles recommendation of max. number of pages per sitemap and we like to see breakdown of how far google is indexing our different language versions.

For a new B2B service we have identified websites that we would like to make aware of our service.
There are about 1000 websites for which it was not possible to retrieve emails, and where we need to do the outreach using the websites contact pages.

Do you know of any tools that save time or outsource companies specialized in such a service? We do not want to fully automize the process but a human should do a visual check that form is properly filled. What I imagine could save time would be tools that already load from a list of URLs the next pages already in the background  of the browser and good autoform fillers.

Any recommendations?

We have 30 sitemaps, one for each language version of our site. About 5000 pages per sitemap.
To get a better idea on which pages google is not indexing, I thought about quickly generating sitemaps by page cagetories to see if there are any patterns.

Any problems if I submit now new additional sitemaps dividing all our pages by product page, considering that the same pages are already in our existing sitemaps we submitted in the search console. So having same URL in more than 1 sitemap would be a problem?

As a side note, we observed when adding a sitemap index that google search console in its count of total indexed pages, now counts every page twice since we submitted both the sitemap index and the individual sitemaps, so search console does not recognize in count that sitemaps in sitemaps index are identical to the ones we submitted individually in search console.

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.

Hi Donna, we are using cloudflare which may have blocked your scan/bot.
We disabled cloudflare temporarily and submitted new robots.txt and new sitemap and still get the same warnings.

We just migrated to https and created 2 days ago a new property in search console for the https domain.

Webmaster Tools account for the https domain now shows for every page in our sitemap the warning: "Sitemap contains urls which are blocked by robots.txt."Also in the dashboard of the search console it shows a red triangle with warning that our root domain would be blocked by robots.txt. 1) When I test the URLs in search console robots.txt test tool all looks fine.2) When I fetch as google and render the page it renders and indexes without problem (would not if it was really blocked in robots.txt)3) We temporarily completely emptied the robots.txt, submitted it in search console and uploaded sitemap again and same warnings even though no robots.txt was online4) We run screaming frog crawl on whole website and it indicates that there is no page blocked by robots.txt5) We carefully revised the whole robots.txt and it does not contain any row that blocks relevant content on our site or our root domain. (same robots.txt was online for last decade in http version without problem)6) In big webmaster tools I could upload the sitemap and so far no error reported.7) we resubmitted sitemaps and same issue8) I see our root domain already with https in google SERPThe site is https://www.languagecourse.netSince the site has significant traffic,  if google would really interpret for any reason that our site is blocked by robots we will be in serious trouble.
This is really scary, so even if it is just a bug in search console and does not affect crawling of the site, it would be great if someone from google could have a look into the reason for this since for a site owner this really can increase cortisol to unhealthy levels.Anybody ever experienced the same problem?Anybody has an idea where we could report/post this issue?

To my understanding in many Asian languages city names are transcribed as they sound and this can cause confusion especially in the case of lesser known American city names.

So I was planning to put in our international website versions (Chinese, Japanese, Korean etc. ) the English name in brackets after the translated city name in meta title and H1.
However when I checked Tripadvisor and Booking.com I noticed that they do not show the English city name anywhere on their Asian language versions.

Any thoughts?
Would you recommend to  put the English city name in brackets after the translated city name or may it rather hurt our ranking and traffic?

EGOL thanks. Interesting point. I could see how it may slightly increase engagement and how this in turn may be a slight positive factor in ranking, even though the focus of our site is quite obvious already on the index page. 
Still my main doubt is whether in having much more comprehensive content on the main keyword on the  domain index page instead of having the same content in a category page may as such affect positively ranking of the main keyword in google, considering that google currently lists my root domain homepage instead of my category page in SERP for main keyword.

90% of our sales are made with products in one of our product categories. 
A search for main category keyword returns our root domain index page in google, not the category page.
I was wondering whether integrating the complete main category directly in the index page of the root domain and this way including much more relevant content for this main category keyword may have a positive impact on our google ranking for the main category keyword.

Any thoughts?

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 Dimitrii

Dimitrii thanks a lot. Yes all would be follow links.

I guess my main concern is the "dillution" of link juice. In several places I read that the concept of optimizing site architecture for optimizing for "link juice" would be a concept of the past. But from all my understanding how google values links it makes sense that it could affect rankings of my core landing pages if I have on the index page links to 1000 instead of 100 core landing pages.

Also my doubt is whether adding links in hidden DIV would affect dillution. Here I guess the answer can only be given by somebody who added lots of links in hidden DIV and monitored whether or not it had a noticeable impact on rankings.

Technically basically there would be 2 options:

1. javascript: hiding DIV
2. ajax (loading it only once user clicks) => here I understand that google can follow ajax links but will do this much more inconsistent since following ajax links requires more of google's ressources.

Ideally I would like to use javascript (hiding DIV), but I am concerned about dilluting "link juice" to my top 100 landing pages. Would this be a relevant concern?

Currently we have direct links to the top 100 country and  city landing pages on our index page of the root domain. 
I would like to add in the index page for each country a link "more cities" which then loads dynamically (without reloading the page and without redirecting to another page) a list with links to all cities in this country. 
I do not want to dillute "link juice" to my top 100 country and city landing pages on the index page. 
I would still like google to be able to crawl and follow these links to cities that I load dynamically later.

In this particular case typical site hiearchy of country pages with links to all cities is not an option.

Any recommendations on how best to implement?

Some elements are not properly shown when I preview our pages in search console (fetch as google), e.g.
google maps, css tables etc. and some parts are not showing up since we load them asynchroneously for best page speed.

Is this something should pay attention to and try to fix?

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).

Hi Britney,  my plan would be to put at the end of the page about 5 small unobstrusive links to 5 different relevant affiliate sites.
Thanks for pointing to the case study, which was very interesting and gives hope that if we would suffer penalization by google we could recover fast by just removing the links.

We have a site of about 100.000 pages that is getting several million of visitors per year via organic search.

We plan to add about 50.000 new pages gradually in the next couple of months and would like to add affiliate links to the new pages. All these 50.000 new pages will have unique quality data that a team has been researching for a while. I would like to add in the area under the fold or towards the end of the pages in an unobstrusive way affiliate links to about 5 different affiliate programs with affiliate links customized to page content and of real value to visitors.

Since affiliate links are one of the factors that may trigger panda I am a bit nervous whether we should add the affiliate links and if there is any way of implementing the affiliate links in a way that they may be less likely to trigger panda. E.g. would you consider hiding affiliate links from google by linking to intermediate URL (which I would mark as noindex nofolllow) on our domain which then redirects to the final affiliate landing page (but google may notice via chrome or android data) ? Any other idea?

yes, but there is no info regarding my issue.

I used to be able to see google seller ratings of my sites at
https://www.google.com/shopping/seller?q=example.com

Now I just see it for sites with a couple of hundred reviews. 
Is there still any other URL or other way how I can see the seller ratings that google collected so far for my sites (even if I did not reach the threshold of 200 ratings in last 12 months)?

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?

Thanks a lot Laura, so I guess we would not need to be too concerned.

Everett, thanks so much. Also the link for the quality rater guidelines was very interesting and useful.

they are all genuine. but due to way it was asked answers are mainyl very short.

I remember back when searchengineland.com was hit by panda, that John Mueller mentioned that short comments could be considered by google as not too useful.

Our customer reviews of products are mainly very short and many times not fully formulated sentences.

Would you recommend to just publish the longer comments?

I am concerned about googles evaluation of the quality of the page content.

In a travel related page I have city categories with city related information. 
Would you recommend for or against duplicating some relevant city related in subcategory pages.

For visitor it would be useful and google should have more context about the topic of our page.
But my main concern is how this may be perceived by google and especially whether it may make it more likely being penalized for thin content. We already were hit end of june by panda/phantom and we are working on adding also more unique content, but this would be something that we could do additionally and basically instantaneously. Just do not want to make things worse.

Hi Patrick, thanks these are very useful links for an audit. Also the Barracuda tool is great.
In our case we are already quite confident that our focus should be adding more content to our about 1000 city category pages.
My core doubt right now is really: Shall I as a quick first step add now to the city pages the mentioned data from external sources or may it rather hurt in the eyes of google. For visitors it would be useful.

We just lost over 20% traffic after google algo update at June 26. 
In SEO forums people guess that there was likely a Phantom update or maybe a Panda update.

The most common advice I found was adding more unique content. While we have already unique proprietary content on all our pages and we plan to add more, I was also considering to add some  content from external sources. Our site is travel related so I thought about adding for each city page external data such as weather, climate data, currency exchange data via APIs from external sources and also some data such as population from open source databases or some statistical info we would search on the web.

I believe this data would be useful to the visitors.  I understand that purely own content would be ideal and we will work on this as well.

Any thoughts? Do you think the external data may rather help or hurt how google perceives content quality?

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.