Is it related to a time-of-day query? I see what I can only describe as QDF fluctuations sometimes.

We have run the same keyword rankings every hour for 48 hours before. All 48 were unique sets of results ... the top "100" ended up including almost 300 different URLs. A lot of the fluctuation was on page 1. We saw that a search that "deserves freshness" ended up fluctuating MUCH more. Say "restaurants near Melbourne."  In the morning we often saw different results to dinner-time.Over a couple days it's hard to say but especially on mobile, those things are changing fast.

(It's the old context question. If you type "who is the President" you get info about Obama. If you type "who is his wife" you get random info. But if you say those two questions in Google mobile, it returns Michelle Obama info.)

I do think your exact issue may be some testing, though. We have an idea that the newest/last release Penguin is coming soon. Testing makes just as much sense in your case. (The results often shift, go back, shift, go back.) I would start checking links & cleaning up in any case.

Google will do this somewhat in the search but I wouldn't do it on your site. You won't be telling Google what the page is about, you'll be asking Google what the page should be about. That's a very weak position to come at things from.

With the very little amount that Google actually passes you the search query, it's probably not very useful to attempt to implement this on pages.

On your Adwords, for sure. But not on your actual website, imho.

1. It's not bad to have pages that are not directly linked to your site. In fact a good lot of PPC landing pages aren't typically linked from anywhere within the navigation or website itself.

• Keep the page in the sitemap if you want it to remain indexed but if you only care about the direct traffic, it doesn't need to stay.

• You can definitely 301 the old page to the new one but you said you previously hid the parent? I would only 301 redirect if you're 100% sure this is the way it will stay forevermore.

So it really depends on why you're removing and what you essentially want to happen.

I love the way you phrase things. lol

I agree with EGOL here - it's definitely not helpful, it's definitely not needed, it could be harmful, and it's a sign of other potential issues. I would definitely work to remove it from the title.

Plus,
.... I mean what's it trying to accomplish? This tells me it's auto-generated or (stealing EGOL's word) "dumb." because it's a line break. You can't line break a title. I mean I could see some example of code that are meant to do something in a title (for instance, **for bold) but not BR? It makes no sense. **

By far the most SEO-friendly platform overall is going to be Wordpress.

While other platforms can be made to do what Wordpress does, almost a quarter of websites online are powered by Wordpress which gives it a huge community to draw resources and information from.

I don't mind Joomla (i'm the one guy, I know) and I have friends who prefer Drupal or other things for security reasons (the biggest always gets attacked most, right?) but Wordpress has Yoast SEO plugin and that is a huge help.

I have a few ecomm stores online and I use Woocommerce with Wordpress for most. I have a Magento store but ... shew. It's so much harder, it's so much more resource intense and it's not as good for anything unless you're a developer.

You said you don't like the idea of redirecting the root domain to a sub dir - but why? It's passing the full value of the UK site to the new location of the UK site. Makes perfect sense in my head. I would definitely do so.

I would only recommend the /US version because of the hreflangs. You can do it the other way, it's just a bit more technical to build the hreflang tags. You can use this example I've used before, though:

" hreflang="x-default" />
" hreflang="en-uk" />
" hreflang="en-de" />

This will do the trick, I believe. Then will display that in the header of every page and the request URL will grab the URL you're on so you'll end up with hreflangs for the two URL structures.

You said you could migrate .co.uk to .com/UK asap - do it as soon as you can, as long as the URL structure won't change. If you're moving from say .co.uk/about.html to .com/UK/about-us/  then you can't do it until those URLs exist. I wouldn't move the existing site over now if the URLs are going to change. This is what I was saying above - you don't want to go from .co.uk/about.html to .com/UK/about.html (and then in August) to .com/UK/about-us/

Make sense?

If it were my site, I would move the UK site to .com/UK, then have .com/DE and .com/US.

Then I would 301 redirect all the UK links back to their counterparts on the new site, keeping as much authority as possible. Point the main homepage at .com/UK and all the inner links as they currently are.

Doing this now will definitely help your expansion in the future as well.

I would do all this after you've rebuilt the site, though, because you don't want to do 301s to 301s. Figure out what the new site will be, do the 301s to that one directly. No intermediate jumps ... it's a longer time to implement but you're better off in the long run.

Anchor text on backlinks will help Google sort it out, as will the content itself. Generally you won't want to rank two pages for any keyphrase but say in the SEO example - because you're pushing those pages so hard sometimes one falls. It's not that they replace each other in a bad way, it's because one is "sort of" being pushed too hard that it may fall and get replaced by your backup.

In a plumbing example, you'd target the homepage to say "Melbourne plumber" because of Google My Business but over time you may add services and swap it to another page.

If your site is only in English you don't need to use hreflang tags at all.

Well, you have two .com.com in there ... so that's in general wrong.

But yes, it's en-gb, not en-UK.

You just have to have all the tags on all the pages. You can use Flang to see what's wrong as well.

Generally when you get the no return tags error it means that you put a hreflang for one page but not the referring page.

Let's say your pages are:

• website.com/en
• website.com/es
• website.com/fr

If you put hreflang tags on /en but not the rest, you'll get the no return tags error.

So just put the full hreflang tag set on every page that uses any one of the languages and you'll solve this error. Also see Webmasters Support for more info.

A link can't be direct to your site, then refer back to shareasale, then redirect back to your site unless you've set it up that way somehow.

So if someone builds a shareasale link like:

Link to your product

This is going to shareasale. If you quit shareasale and they said it would still go directly to you, they're just not planting their tracking cookie on the intermediate step. Everything else would remain the same.

If the link is something like:

Link to product and somehow that goes from your site, to shareasale, back to your site - well that's definitely not helping you very much for SEO and if you quit, yes that would then go directly to your site - but only if you reconfigured how the links were working since this type of linking would require a lot of special work to make it happen. It's more likely it's the 1st example.

In any case, they both pass through Shareasale and, per Matt Cutts, Google is attempting to not give you credit for that link. Whether or not they do, I can't say - but they're attempting not to. I'm not sure which part of my previous answer may not be "completely true."

I've seen many pages optimize both the homepage and an inner page. Think about how most SEO agency pages are organized. Homepage has some SEO content - and most pages that rank for "SEO" are homepages. But then you have the same sites also inevitably have an /seo/ page on them or /services/seo as well.

So doing both is sort of standard operating procedure for some businesses but it really depends.

• Best for ranking would be as Eric said. Optimize as if you're writing a book. Homepage should be optimized for the title / main topic.
• Best for conversions may be to have a dedicated landing page for each topic and use your homepage to tie them together.

These type of links are generally demoted/do not pass juice in the first place.

Matt Cutts said in the past in an interview with Eric Enge:

Matt Cutts: Typically, we want to handle those sorts of links appropriately. A lot of the time, that means that the link is essentially driving people for money, so we usually would not count those as an endorsement.

To me, Shareasale is a huge provider of affiliate links so I would assume Google is well onto those links and doesn't count them. You aren't going to get a ranking benefit from these links, IMO.