As far as I'm aware this is OK to do as they don't always have to be different URLs. Alternatively, I would make sure that you can focus on en instead of en-US so that it would avoid the language everywhere.

@tuomashaapala I looked specifically at Ahrefs data, I would say it's all relative (keep that in mind). In the end if 20% of your links are Finnish but if for the average site in the UK/US you notice that it's about 1% you're obviously still signaling to Google that you're likely having a Finnish audience. These metrics are hard to influence, just giving you my take on the signal itself. You're likely already on the right way to solve this, it might just take some time. Especially with the low amount of links.

Hi Gary,

Could be, but just submitting your articles usually isn't good enough as you haven't proved that the topic you're writing about can be interesting for the editors that work at these publishers. I do work in/with a media company and the content that we get pitched is 9/10 terrible and the pitches even worse most of the times. Build up a relationship, work with the editors and make sure that you can create great content together with them instead of just writing what you want and hoping that your content will get published. By following this approach you'll always start to build a win-win solution.

Martijn.

Completely agree, just 1 character might not influence anything. Search engines are very well able to understand what that specific character means in the context if you add 360 next to it.

Hi,

1. Usually won't work and with 50k extra rules in your htaccess file it will for sure slow down the site as for every request to your server it has to go through the htaccess file.

For now I would recommend going with 6. with the information that you've provided. By doing it like this you can do a very quick check on your database and also in the request have the user send to the right page.

Martijn.

Hi,

Parameters are definitely not always a bad thing, if you use them for filtering or pagination they have a great use case. Also for tracking purposes which I think is what you're talking about here it would be fine. But you probably want to put some support in place to make sure you don't mess up your SEO. You have a few ways of doing that:

• Define the URL parameters in Google Search Console, read more about it here.
• In some cases if it's just for tracking purposes but would trigger an actual pageview or 200 status code. Then it might be good to implement a canonical URL that would link back to the original page.
• Robots.txt, way more aggressive but if you don't want search engines to look at the pages at all you can exclude the parameters through the robots.txt. I would advise against using this if you don't have great SEO knowledge.

Hope this was useful!

Hi,

I'm afraid I have to help you with this dream, there is no connection whatsoever between the rankings and the feature to Fetch as Google within Google Search Console. What likely is happening is that you're already getting personalized results and within a certain timeframe, the ads won't be shown as the results will be different as Google thinks that you've already seen the first results on the page the first time that you Googled this.

Fetch as Google doesn't provide any signal to the regular ranking engines to say: "Hey, we've fetched something new and now it's going to make an impact on this". Definitely not at the speed that you're describing (within seconds).

Martijn.