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Hey sym_admin, thanks for your response! I'll relay your suggestions to our devs, and I'll certainly be in touch if I have any more questions. Thanks again!

Hey guys! Hope you're all doing well.

I need your smart brains for a problem the company I work for is currently facing in the realm of SEO. They wanted to hire someone to find the problem, but I thought I would reach out to you guys, first, to at least try and narrow down the long list of things we could look at/investigate.

I put the info (briefly) on 3 slides, and would really appreciate any and all insights you can offer me: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/12d0YH7BNdCIpJ86d95uBOtOWphWQ3NB1kwDYeOzIt-U/edit#slide=id.g19145c9fa5_0_0

Thank you in advance!

Hi!

I did not think I was going to have any issues, but figured it couldn't hurt to be sure. It's mostly because we get a lot of traffic to the old site versions through those flags, but we're phasing those old URLs out anyway.

Thanks so much for taking the time to answer and share that article!

Hi all,

On www.simplesite.com we used to have a separate URL for each language (123website.nl for the Dutch version, 123siteweb.fr for the French, and so on). Soon we will be switching over to a sub-domain solution, as all our language versions will now be called SimpleSite. So instead it will be nl.simplesite.com, fr.simplesite.com and so on.

If you go to www.simplesite.com and scroll to the bottom, you will see flags that lead to each local version. Instead of that we will get a language selector in the top menu. My question now is... can I simply remove those flags from the footer? Or are there things I should keep in mind?

True story, Highland. Very useful case, thank you!

Hey John,

I think you're onto something there. Putting it in a context of "us against them" and showcasing that we're actually falling (and staying) behind because we don't have these basics in order could be very effective. I think I got stuck in their mindset demand of "show us quantitative data!". So thanks a lot for offering me a different perspective, appreciate it!

Hi Carlos, and thanks!

Yeah, for sure it will help out a lot of our users (which is just as much a priority for me as optimizing SEO for our own main site). Our own main site (www.simplesite.com) does have just words in the URL. It's just the sites from our users/customers that has numbers. Which is just endlessly frustrating for me AND our users, because they obviously want their pages and titles reflected in their URLs. So yeah, CTR is a really good point. Thanks again!

Thanks again, MattAntonino, really appreciate it! Enjoy the rest of your Friday.

Thanks so much for your quick response, MattAntonino! Totally agree with it.

Unfortunately, that's also exactly my problem. I personally agree that it is clear and tells us exactly what we should do, and I know most (if not all) SEOs would agree with you/the above statement. My problem is that I'm trying to convince people who are not sitting with SEO every day, and if I cannot give them more than this, they simply won't prioritize it over other projects.

Hey guys! Need your many awesome brains. This may be a very basic question but am hoping you can help me out with some insights beyond "because Google says it's better".

I only recently started working with SEO, and I work for a SaaS website builder company that has millions of open/active user sites, and all our user sites URLs, instead of www.mydomainname.com/gallery or myusername.simplesite.com/about, we use numbers, so www.mysite.com/453112 or myusername.simplesite.com/426521

The Sales manager has asked me to figure out if it will pay off for us in terms of traffic (other benefits?) to change it from the number system to the "proper" and right way of setting up these URLs. He's looking for rather concrete answers, as he usually sits with paid search and is therefore used to the mindset of "if we do x it will yield us y in z months".

I'm finding it quite difficult to find case studies/other concrete examples beyond the generic, vague implication that it will simply be "better" (when for example looking at SEO checklists and search engine guidelines). Will it make a difference? How so?

I have to convince our developers of the importance and priority of this adjustment, or it will just drown in the many projects they already have. So truly, any insights would be so very welcome. Thank you!