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Hey there, when I check in search console for "Links to your site" and "your most linked content" I see incoming links pointing to the wrong (country and language) subdirectory? When I check those same backlinks with opensiteexplorer they seem to point (after redirects) to the correct subdirectory. Anyone out there with similar experiences or thoughts on this? I would be happy to give access to search console if you wanted to have a look at this. Cheers, Jochen When I check in search console for "Links to your site" and "your most linked content" I see incoming links pointing to the wrong (country and language) subdirectory? When I check those same backlinks with opensiteexplorer they seem to point (after redirects) to the correct subdirectory. Anyone out there with similar experiences or thoughts on this? I would be happy to give access to search console if you wanted to have a look at this.
Cheers,
Jochen

Hey there, since a client's global website has a very complex structure which lead to big duplicate content problems, we decided to disallow crawler access and instead allow access to only a few relevant subdirectories. While indexing has improved since this I was wondering if we might have cut off link juice. Since several backlinks point to the disallowed root directory and are from there redirected (301) to the allowed directory I was wondering if this could cause any problems? Example: If there is a backlink pointing to example.com (disallowed in robots.txt) and is redirected from there to example.com/uk/en (allowed in robots.txt). Would this cut off the link juice? Thanks a lot for your thoughts on this. Regards, Jochen

Hey there, we have recently implemented hreflang on the sitemap level for our global website. The website has 57 sitemaps that are all referenced in a sitemap index file (www.buschvacuum.com/sitemap.xml). Google is showing several errors in search console ("Sitemap provided URLs and alternate URLs in 'en-AU' that do not have return tags."). However when I try to verify this I do find the return tags. Can this be caused by the fact that my hreflang tags span several sitemap files? To pick one random example (see screenshot for search console error message):
The Originating URL-hreflang-Tag is in www.buschvacuum.com/sitemap_3.xml, the return tag is in www.buschvacuum.com/sitemap_4.xml. It would be great if someone with experience regarding those errors could help me explaining that behavior. Thanks a lot. Jochen WXYQoUH.png

Hey there, just a brief opinion question: Do you see any benefit of adding schema.org structured data markup to my breadcrumbs if they are already displaying in SERPs without markup? Are there mayble other long term benefits to using the markup even if I will not notice any short-term effect in SERPs? Cheers, Jochen

Hey there, 
certain pages of our website have mobile versions like m.mysite.com/content-xyz. On the desktop pages (i.e. mysite.com/content-xyz) we have "rich snippets for ratings" marked up and displayed in SERPs. However the ratings also appear in mobile search results when SERPS reference the mobile version of the page (m.mysite.com/content-xyz) which doesn't have any ratings or markup? I am trying to figure out how Google treats mobile versions of a page in relation to the desktop version in relation to structured data (breadcrumbs etc.)? Would you always mark up both versions to be the same? Any ideas and thoughts on this are greatly appreciated. Cheers, Jochen rich Snippets for Ratings

Hey there, I am doing a website audit at the moment. I've notices substantial differences in the number of pages indexed (search console), the number of pages in the sitemap and the number I am getting when I crawl the page with screamingfrog (see below). Would those discrepancies concern you? The website and its rankings seems fine otherwise. Total indexed: 2,360 (Search Consule)
About 2,920 results (Google search "site:example.com")
Sitemap: 1,229 URLs
Screemingfrog Spider: 1,352 URLs Cheers,
Jochen

Hey there, my clients website was set up with subdirectories for almost every country in the world plus multiple languages in each country. The content in each subfolder is (almost) identical. So no surprise: They have a big problem with duplicate content and ranking fluctuations. Since they don't want to change the site's structure I recommended limiting the languages available in each subfolder with robots.txt. However before doing this we marked the contents to be exluded with noindex, nofollow. It's only been 2 days now but I hardly notice any decline in the number of indexed pages. I was therefore wondering if it would speed up things if I marked the pages with just noindex instead of noindex and nofollow. It would be great if you could share your thoughts on that. Cheers, Jochen Hey there,
my clients website was set up with subdirectories for almost every country in the world plus multiple languages in each country. The content in each subfolder is (almost) identical. So no surprise: They have a big problem with duplicate content and ranking fluctuations.
Since they don't want to change the site's structure I recommended limiting the languages available in each subfolder with robots.txt. However before doing this we marked the contents to be exluded wiht noindex, nofollow. It's only been 2 days now but I hardly notice any decline in the number of indexed pages.
I was therefore wondering if it would speed up things if I marked the pages with just noindex instead of noindex and nofollow.
It would be great if you could share your thoughts on that.
Cheers,Jochen

Hey there, we have some ranking issues with our international website. It would be great if any of you could share their thoughts on that. The website uses subfolders for country and language (i.e. .com/uk/en) for the website of the UK branch in English. As the company has branches all over the world and also offers their content in many languages the url structure is quite complex. A recent problem we have seen is that in certain markets the website is not ranking with the correct country. Especially in the UK and the US, Google prefers the country subfolder for Ghana (.com/gh/en) over the .com/us/en and .com/uk/en versions. We have hreflang setup and should also have some local backlinks pointing to the correct subfolders as we switched from many ccTLDs to one gTLD. What confuses me is that when I check for incoming links (Links to your site) with GWT, the subfolder (.com/gh/en) is listed quite high in the column (Your most linked content). However the listed linking domains are not linking at all to this folder as far as I am aware. If I check them with a redirect checker they all link to different subfolders. So I have now idea why Google gives such high authority to this subfolder over the specific country subfolders. The content is pretty much identical at this stage. Has any of you experienced similar behaviour and could point me in a promising direction? Thanks a lot. Regards, Jochen