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I have an English website with USD prices and US phone.
Via currency dropdown visitors in Ireland can choose EUR as currency, visitors from Denmark Danish crown etc and via GEO IP I also serve local contact phone numbers.

So I though it made sense to define this with the alternate tags, but now after several months google still does not pickup these pages in local searches.

Did anybody have success with getting a website just with currency parameter ranked locally using the alternate tag?

Does it help to have also static links (not only dropdown links) to currency versions on the page? Any other thing that could help to have google pick these up?

Below my code sample:

Andy, James: thanks for your input and suggestions.

Andy, thanks for sharing.

The special point here is that "Car Discount", "CarDiscount" and "CarDiscount.com" are actually the most natural anchor texts that an independent site owner may choose apart from full URL anchor you mentioned.

To give some context, I do not plan to build now many links with exactly this same anchor text. But these 3 anchor texts are actually the most frequent that other websites have chosen to link to me.

So my doubt is now, whether there is need for action and whether I should reach out to other websites to change the anchor text, if my aim is to rank well for "Car". Actually I dropped significantly in ranking on one of my sites for "Car" keyword, so I wonder whether it may be related (even though for date of ranking change it may rather be panda than penguin).

Also any experience whether CarDiscount or CarDiscount.com maybe better than "Car Discount"?

I have a couple of partial match domains in the format KEYOWRDdiscount.com and also the website name resembles domain name.

"Car Discount" is not my website but just an example to illustrate: 
Is "Car Discount" a problematic anchor text for CarDiscount.com?
Should I try to modify existing external anchor texts to "CarDiscount" or "CarDiscount.com" instead of "Car Discount"

Do you know of any cases where such anchor texts coinciding with partial match domain were likely reason for penguin penalization?

Thanks.

I have schema markup on a category page and on a product page on a website in 10 languages.

Product page markup is showing in google SERP in all languages (both star rating, number of votes).

Category page markup is showing very inconsistently. For English google SERP do not pick it up at all.

For Spanish and German they are showing completely in SERP (votes, minimum price), for other languages, just part of makrup (minimum price) is shown in google SERP.

In rich snippet tool they show up correctly in all languages.

Any suggestion what can be done to get schema of category page picked up more consistently?

Any experience of other markup formats than schema being picked up better?

Thanks

Marie, thanks a lot for sharing this.

I will use the canoncical then as you suggest for now.

At a later point I will have unique product descriptions written for product variations.

From your experience, do you think small variation of description text is enough, or do you think that the majority of text may need to be unique. At zalando I actually saw that they implemented minimal variations in the beginning of the meta description. Just adding sometimes 2 words or changing word order.

thanks Oleg.

yes, this makes much more sense.

thanks Zeph.

in our case it is not an issue. We actually have flags and localized versions for US, UK and also CAN.

Also for the swiss we have a intuitive flag solution considering french, german and italian version.

thanks.

I understand that this is considered best practice.

But do you know about a case or heard about a case where this really was the likely reason for panda?

I noticed that some very big ecommerce sites such as zalando with top-notch SEO, actually publish color variations with near-identical product descriptions and without canonical or noindex. I was wondering, maybe google is more understanding in terms of content duplciation when it comes to product variations on ecommerce sites as it is generally not done for manipulative purposes.

Would like to add 300 products to ecommerce site of which 150 products are just variations in different colors.

In this particular case there are some reaons for:

• Not writing partially unique product descriptions for each product variation
• Not setting them up as variations on one product page

So I would have several product pages with nearly identical product descriptions (proprietary description written by us), just name of color in title and description and EAN in description being different, as well as over time different user generated content showing up. Also different product images used.

I would not mind if google  would not index some product variations.

Do you think I should be concerned about Panda? Do you know any website which had a Panda problem caused by product variations?

Thanks

For  a partial keyword match domain name what would you recommend as ALT tag to internlink country domains (different CCTLD)?

Option 1) 
DOMAIN.com DOMAIN.de DOMAIN.co.uk

=> I am a bit concerned about this option in terms of potential penalty for keywords in ALT (since partial match domains)

Option 2) 
UK
DE
FR ...

Option 3)
English UK
Deutsch Deutschland
Deutsch Österreich
Francais France

=> concerned here about mixing lots of languages in ALT tags in each page, which may confuse google language detection.

thanks.

understand your doubts.

indeed it was expensive to create and especially to update great part of the content every year.

Have chosen on purpose a lower search volume example.

I have  destination pages with  facets of different leisure activities possible at the destination:

golf hotels USA

tennis hotels spain

while the above certainly have search volume, where to draw the line if you have detailled content on facilities of leisure activities at the hotel.

Excellent. We have lots of proprietary content,

I am getting a bit side-tracked now, but if you have a minute I would really like to hear your opinion, as your comment touches my principal doubt, which I posted here a week ago, but did not get any good response.

Shall I provide facets of  category pages for as many facets as I can provide unique content and benefit for visitor?

I plan to launch about 30 facets for each destination page. All unique content. All useful for visitor, but I am not sure if I should limit to less facets. Is 30 facets OK as long as they are unique and provide value? If I should cut out facets based on low search volume, where to make the cut?

To give an example, for a good ranking hotel site, should I create (among 30 other facets) facets like "hotels boston table tennis", "hotels new york table tennis", if I have unique proprietary content for these pages, despite relatively low search volume?

EGOL, thanks a lot. Again excellent advice.

Do you think new pages could harm ranking/indexing of my existing destination pages?

Would you launch the first 60.000 pages on one day or rather stretch time period?

New pages are mostly just 2 clicks from my index page. 
Also have to clarify that we have have about 30 language versions in same domain, so under 10.000 pages finally per language.
Domain authority is 58 with 358 linking root domains (without any link building).

Frankly I doubt we will get in a natural way  lots of deeplinks as in the past 95% of our links were going to our index page, but will now consider to plan some active link building after launch.

Jonatahan, Tommy thanks for the comments.

To clarify. Pages are destination pages for travel related ecommerce site.

Faceted navigation type sub pages for existing destinations, but with lots of unique content for each facet.

My concern was that I did not want to raise any kind of alarms with google where triplication of number of webpages under one domain  from one day to another may raise flags for appearing unnatural or manipulative.

We are going to launch about 60.000 new web pages under one established domain (google pagerank 6), which currently has about 30.000 web pages. So web pages will triple.

New pages contain keyword variations of existing pages with pages targeting specific niches. All pages with unique and useful specific content for visitor. All pages heavily interlinked among each other.

Would you recommend to stretch launch of new pages over some time period, or do you see no problem to launch them all on one day?

In about 3 months we plan to launch another 180.000 new web pages.

Thanks.

excellent.. will do so.

Takeshi, thanks  for the advice.

thanks.

I am not concerned about ranking of my facebook or google plus page in google.

I plan to publish same posts on facebook and google+.

As they are in 10 different languages, I would rather not make modifications for facebook and google+ respectively.

1. Do you see any problems with this?

2. Do you think it matters whether I first publish on google+ or first on facebook?

3. Any problem if I publish posts on one social media account which I already published in another social media account for another company of mine some months ago?

thanks

Very good point relating to credibility of review and great relief  that I do not have to perform spellchecks of thousands of reviews. Thanks.

Still may follow also Cristinas suggestions as poor spelling in user review may also reflect on visitors perception of website's credibility.

Christina, excellent idea integrating spellcheck upon submission. Will have a look at google spellcheck API. Thanks.

We have a lot of user generated reviews on our key landing pages.

Matt Cutts recommended using correctly spelled content.

Would you perform a spellcheck of all already published user reviews or would you leave already published reviews rather intact and only perform spellcheck for new reviews before they are published?

Since reviews have been marked up using schema.org, I am not sure whether posterior editing of lots of reviews may raise a flag with google regarding manipulating reviews.

Thanks.

some doubts about implementing rel=author:

1. I have no google+ account so far and I have no intention to start activities in google+. Shall I still add rel=author and create a new empty google+ account (without google+ activity but using gmail) or would you recommend rather not to add rel=author in this case?

2. I have 2 sites ranking in top10 SERP for my targeted keyword. One online shop and on another domain a non-commercial site with information on the topic. Would you rather associate same or different google+ accounts (from different people) with these two sites for both rel=author and rel=publisher?

thanks.

thanks. Marc.

interesting links.

Still my doubt remains. If I have two synonyms which are both very important key terms, would you build 2 seperate optimized pages? I see that google is getting better at recognizing synonyms in some occasions, but still detection does not seem very consistent.

For searches involving keywords like "lessons", "courses", "classes" I see frequently pages in the top rankings which do not contain the search term in the title tag, despite these terms being quite competitive. It seems that when searching for "classes", google detects that pages about "courses" may be just as relevant.

What do you recommend?

option 1: creating 10 pages optimized on 10 different keyword variations, each with a significant part of unique content

or

option 2: one page and dropping throughout the page 10 keyword variations in body and headlines

Given that keywords are all synonyms and website has already high domain authority in the niche.

thanks

We will be launching 60 new ccTLD country versions of an established core website.
Quality, human translated content in 35 languages.
We have a CSS dropdown menu with the 60 country flags and country/language name as anchor text. Formatted as deeplinks to the corresponding pages in the 60 country versions, that we planned to add on each page.

How would you recommend to implement the interlinking between these 60 ccTLD?

My concerns are:

1. won't we dillute the link value of our links in the main page content too much with links to 60ccTLD on each page?
2. may we trigger a google penalty as the new ccTLD have no other links yet and each page will have the same anchor text and links from exactly the same 60 domains.
3. would you  place the country dropdown rather at the bottom of the page (e.g.  footer) to avoid that google will not crawl all links in main content page.

Any thoughts or suggestions are appreciated

thanks for confirming it is caused by webmaster tools.

I may give it a try to change server location via proxy instead of using geo setting in webmaster tools.

our online shop targets clients in the US and worldwide (same URL - no subdirectories - currency changes based on IP).

when searching in google.ie or google.no for our site google displays in the SERPS "US" or "United States" after the URL for our site, but for most other US competitors it does not show the country in the SERPS.

I deleted our google places listing 2 weeks ago, since I suspected it may be related, but no change so far.

In google webmaster tools we have targeted the shop domain to United States, which may be another factor. Unfortunately we can not undo this setting since without it our google US ranking for the most relevant competitive keyword drops from position 8 to position 100+. Server location is in Germany which despite lots of US links and US contact info and USD currency appparently makes google think that the site is not targeting the US.

Does anybody know what triggers the country name in the SERPS (google places or webmaster tools or other) and  can give advice if there is any way to get rid of it.