Hi,

According to this article by Moz on hreflang, yes, having an hreflang tag with the language only will help you cast your net out to English speaking searchers from other regions.

Hi Rena,

You technically can do that, but it's not recommended - for the exact reason you state above. More often than not, 2 sites aren't going to have the same set of disallow rules.

Additionally, you should also be using robots.txt files to direct search engines to your XML sitemap, and if you're sharing a robots file, then you can't specify 2 different sitemaps on 2 different domains.

The best way to mitigate this problem would be to update the destination URLs in your Adwords Campaigns. You can do this in bulk relatively quickly using the Adwords Editor desktop application.

No problem!

Hi Steven,

You'll definitely want to apply 301 redirects to any site that you move to HTTPS. For most sites, this can typically be done with a single redirect rules that essentially replaces http with https, so you won't have to comb through each URL and apply one-to-one redirects.

No need to worry about losing link juice, Google views these types of 301s differently than a typical 301, and all authority will pass through them.

Canonical should also be applied, this will help search engines learn your new URL structure and ensure they index the new HTTPS URLs.

Cryus Shepard wrote a great post with all the necessary steps for a secure migration, check it out here: https://moz.com/blog/seo-tips-https-ssl

Good luck!

In your HTACCESS file (of the redirecting domain) where the existing redirect is located.

Yep, I've used that exact syntax for some of my clients.

Hi,

You won't be able to see that information in Google Analytics unless you tag the resolving URL in the redirect with UTM parameters. i.e. www.mywebsite.com >> www.yourwebsite.com/?utm_medium=301&utm_source=mywebsite.com

Hi,

Google will count this as duplicate content, regardless of 'affiliate' status or not. You've got a few options here:

1. Have the affiliates canonicalize to your client's URLs
2. Require them to write their own unique product descriptions
3. You could (or have the client) write unique descriptions for the content on the client site

I think option 3 is the most viable, since you won't have to ask the affiliates to make any operational changes.

Hi,

It sounds like you're going down the right path. Disallow and section of the site that has personal information, as there's no value in having bots crawl that, keep them on important content longer! In addition to Checkout and Basket/Cart, you should also disallow the My Account area if your site has one.

Your next grouping, I'm assuming these are the parameters by which you pages can be sorted. If so, yes, disallow all of those, they're only going to cause duplicate content flags for you in the future. I'm not sure which CMS you are using, but some eComm platforms also have 'email to a friend' URLs that are a major source for dupes and can often be identified and disallowed by another parameter.

Hope this helps narrow it down for you!

They will show up in Open Site Explorer, I've seen shortlink URLs show up there for a handful of clients.

Hi,

You can use bit.ly for backlinks, but keep in mind, they are 301 redirects, so you lose a bit of link juice when search engines step through them.

If you chose to do this, you'll also want to tag the URLs before you shortlink them, otherwise your Google Analytics reporting will show all that traffic as Direct/(none) in the Channel report.

Yes, I typically reserve the homepage for branded search. On most sites, the content of the homepage is too broad to really be a helpful entry point from organic non-branded search.

Heyo!

I would not recommend your homepage exists at any URL other than example.com for the following reasons:

1. It's web development best-practice
2. Most of the links you will acquire naturally will point to example.com
3. Some citations won't accept a URL with anything after the .com
4. It's confusing for people
5. If bots can't access your homepage at example.com, they most likely won't find your robots.txt or XML sitemap files either

I'm sure other could drum up more reasons, but the ones I've listed here should be enough to dissuade you.

You can typically fare much better by giving non-branded keywords interior pages that are specific to that topic rather than the broader homepage content. This will increase the likelihood of people finding what they're looking for and is a better way to tailor your content to your audience and to algorithms.

Hi,

This isn't necessarily a problem, but XML sitemaps should be as clean as possible before they're uploaded. i.e., no 301'd URLs, no 404s, no dupes, no parameter'd URLs, no canonicalized, etc..

Are they duplicates in the sense that one has caps, and the other doesn't? As in /example.html and /Example.html. If so, you'll want to fix that.

If they're identically formatted URLs, there should be no problem, but you're at duplicate content risk if they're different in anyway and not canonicalized.