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Hi,

I highly advise you to acquire a Google Webmaster Tools and a connect that with your Analytics account to facilitate and monitor the change in your target audience. After you have set both up, here are the 2 main features that help to solve your problem:

1. Hreflang attributes. Google states at https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

Many websites serve users from around the world with content translated or targeted to users in a certain region. Google uses the rel="alternate" hreflang="x" attributes to serve the correct language or regional URL in Search results.

Hreflang offers website or subpage targeting per language (English not French), country (so Australia not the UK). But note that it requires manually changing your site's mark-up.

2. Also of use is Country Targeting https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/62399?hl=en

If your site has a generic top-level domain, such as .com or .org, and targets users in a particular geographic location, you can provide us with information to help us determine how your site appears in our search results. This improves Google Search results for geographic queries, and it won't impact your appearance in search results unless a user limits the scope of the search to a certain country. See a full list of domains Google treats as generic.

Yes, that's how I did it.

Hi, here's what Google officially has to say:

Webmaster Tools data and reporting work best on a site level. For example, if your site http://www.example.com has separate sections for different countries, we recommend adding each of those subsites or subfolders as a separate site. For example, if you have a travel site with specific subfolders covering Ireland, France, and Spain, you could add the following sites to your Webmaster Tools account:

• http://www.example.com
• http://www.example.com/france
• http://www.example.com/ireland
• http://www.example.com/spain

Following this I have solved the exactly the same problem you had for a client.  And it works perfectly.

• _The question is does this ["sitemap"] now need changing to make it specific for each country. _What I have done is add the sitemaps for each subdirectory as well as the main domain. It works (tracking and all that) and is easy to do.
• _Also in order to Geolocate this in WMT would this need to be done for each directory version instead of the main domain? _Yes, that is the way to go.
• _Currently the WMT account for the UK site is verified at www.domain.com, would this need reverifying at domain.com/en-gb? _Yes, it does. And so do every other subdirectory you add down the line. That allows precise international targeting per subdirectory via the hreflang and country targeting settings and setting the main GWT site for the root domain to be for global traffic.

To answer your question: No, it's not okay. Duplicate content is to be avoided. Ask your programmer to do a 301 redirect one of these pages to another, that automatically redirects users and the GoogleBot, or at least add an canonical url meta tag which defines which page is the "original" or "canonical" version for the content.

See more at Google Support.

As to why it is happening. Difficult to be precise but would venture that one of the URL-s might be a category "page" that gets created automatically, with an url thanks to your page's category structure and the other a real editable "page".

Hi, the field of User Experience is vast. There are many books and online courses that go directly at the topic or show how to solve tasks with specific tools such as the now popular Sketch app for Mac and so on. I am sure others will post those. Others will also mention HCI and more academic subjects.

But a thinking man's or woman's guide to UX combines a wider sense of the subject — allowing you to communicate with ad agencies, clients and colleagues alike:

• Modern graphic design. Exemplified as a book in Josef Müller-Brockmann's "Grids in Graphic Design"
• Statistics, testing and data analysis. The best book might be a more general introduction such as "How To Measure Anything".
• To be honest, classical advertising also plays a role so reading "Ogilvy on Advertising" might place UX in a wider context.

Still, the most important thing is good knowledge of javascript.

• You need not rely on an external developer to implement many of your designs,
• You can quickly and easily test the various ideas found in popular books and academic papers alike.
• You can develop your good taste for the aesthetics of your products with small details that go beyond ordinary. We call them delighters.

Google states on their support page:

_If we’ve detected that a particular result has [...] issues with its title, we may try to generate an improved title from anchors, on-page text, or other sources. However, sometimes even pages with well-formulated, concise, descriptive titles will end up with different titles in our search results to better indicate their relevance to the query. _

There’s a simple reason for this: the title tag as specified by a webmaster is limited to being static, fixed regardless of the query. Once we know the user’s query, we can often find alternative text from a page that better explains why that result is relevant. Using this alternative text as a title helps the user, and it also can help your site. Users are scanning for their query terms or other signs of relevance in the results, and a title that is tailored for the query can increase the chances that they will click through.

What to do? Here's the answer:

• make your title mean something as a sentence or a phrase. List of keywords is not descriptive of what is on the page. Therefore Google will not use that. There are exceptions for e-commerce or product sites but that is the rule.
• If you want to highlight a certain keyword — simply place that at the start of the said phrase in the title.
• try to think as an user searching for your page when composing the above mentioned phrase. What do they desire?

For more, please see my previous answer at http://moz.com/community/q/title-tag-issue-2

Wondered about that as well. Officially they state they publish new data every 4-6 weeks so if they do not publish by next week, then it's time to raise some noise.

Meanwhile, the domain authority and so on are updated in the Moz's Open Site Explorer. Which is strange come to think of it — because many of the metrics tracked are quite similar in the two tools.

Hi, please clarify whether the 3 separate domains will be all new or will 2 of them that you handle be new and the other one be the old domain? That changes how you can do 301 redirects obviously (leading to more questions like if all 3 are new, what happens to the old domain? etc..)

Couple of steps to take:

1. Analyse your old site thoroughly with Open Site Explorer or with other Moz (or other provider's) tools. Specifically make a list of the top 200/500/.. pages with most external links, page authority and so on. It is going to be an hefty Excel file but a breeze to put together with the help of Moz professional. Takes a couple of days or so.
2. Keep the same URL structure when designing the old site, make it simpler to scan via breadcrumbs if possible.
3. Do specific canonical URLs for at least the  200/500/.. most important pages in the 1st page
4. Do the 301 redirects and verify them with the help of online tools.
5. Notify Google Webmaster Tools. Again It is hard to give specific instructions because I do not which domains will be new and what will happen to the old.

In theory and according to Google officially setting the canonical URL should pass the external links along to the new domain:

• Consolidating link signals for the duplicate or similar content. It helps search engines to be able to consolidate the information they have for the individual URLs (such as links to them) on a single, preferred URL. This means that links from other sites to http://example.com/dresses/cocktail?gclid=ABCD get consolidated with links to http://www.example.com/dresses/green/greendress.html.

On a first look I would propose that the following paragraph just before the reviews themselves is problematic:

_"Natural World Safaris tailor-make gorilla safari holidays to meet your requirements. This gives you complete flexibility and allows you to choose your preferred travel dates, areas you wish to visit and the standard of accommodation that suits your style and budget. Please see below reviews from clients who have returned from our gorilla tracking safari holidays." _

Try rewriting that or removing that. Your page is already über-optimised and the first sentence is just over-the-top keyword stuffing. Also rethink hiding your reviews behind a plus button. Because the reviews are hidden as secondary content the Google bot sees the above paragraph as the same review for all the different pages. Thus thinks this is review spam across your otherwise very beautiful and, again, extremely optimised pages.

It is reasonable to expect that Google will want to combat review spam since many people use review mark-up for nefariously ranking higher.

drWVAnY

Hi,

1 authoritative way is to use Google's own tool in Google Webmaster Tools, under "Crawl" you'll see "Fetch as Google". If the tool returns "redirected" as the page's status you may resubmit it to the index

See more at: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6066467?hl=en and https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6065812?hl=en

Edit: or you can use the Crawl Tool right here on Moz.com: https://moz.com/researchtools/crawl-test

Hi Gareth,

that's a very beautiful website in terms of the SEO work your team has put in: breadcrumbs, semantic markup etc. Google understands tabular data very well (even inside PDFs or Excel files) and doesn't consider it spamming.

Accidentally I have had lengthy lists of items rank very well previously. You should be doubly safe since you already have the Education Event semantic markup wrapping every table row.

Looking forward, don't think keywords will be the issue. Google is aiming more and more towards understanding the usability of each page. Personally, I would test different versions shortening this list (pagination, tabs) for conversions.

Generally, there are just too many big corporate websites with duplicate content and repetitive keywords for Google to automatically degrade one's site for what SEO software finds problematic in these areas. Matt Cutts as said as much.

Hi, Joost De Valk wrote a great article on this subject in 2011:

“You see, sites don’t rank: pages rank. If you want to rank for a keyword, you’ll need to determine which page is going to be the page ranking for that keyword....Adding that keyword to the title of every page is not going to help. Nor is writing 200 articles about it without one central article to link all those articles to. You need one single page that is the center of the content about that topic. One “hub” page, if you will.”

Now that you understand that you should probably create a page in an url http://www.domain.com/keyword rather than trying to rank http://www.domain.com — here’s the answer as best as I can give easily since Google is secretive.

3 Basic Factors:

1. relevancy signals
2. internal and outbound linking
3. content freshness

1. Relevancy Signals

Bryan Dean's article gives, among other ranking signals, a good overview of relevancy for a page (not a site), many of which you mentioned:

• Keyword density and latent semantic indexing
• Heading and meta tags. See: http://cbutterworth.com/do-h1-tags-still-help-seo/ and much more..
• Content length. See: http://blog.serpiq.com/how-important-is-content-length-why-data-driven-seo-trumps-guru-opinions/

It is reasonable to presume that when Google goes through your site (perhaps via an sitemap) it does make some minor conclusions about the general themes of your site and that may affect your homepage’s rank.

2. Internal and Outbound Linking

Now, this is the easiest way to affect the rank of your homepage with the help of the posts you are doing. Make sure to link to the latest news, categories and tag cloud on your homepage.

You may show posts from a specific category, where the category is the keyword for which you want to rank. Thus Google sees that your homepage displays keywords and links about that topic prominently.

Don’t go overboard obviously. 3 latest news items in the category defined by the keyword, a link to the keyword as category and as tag or two is plenty enough for the homepage.

3. Content Freshness

Cyrus Shepard’s 2011 post on the Moz Blog serves as a good introduction to how content freshness might impact your site:

“Websites that add new pages at a higher rate may earn a higher freshness score than sites that add content less frequently.Some SEOs insist you should add 20-30% new pages to your site every year. This provides the opportunity to create fresh, relevant content, although you shouldn’t neglect your old content if it needs attention.”

Google also measures how your users react to your content:

“As content becomes outdated, folks spend less time on your site. They press the back button to Google's results and choose another url. Google picks up on these user behavior metrics and scores your content accordingly.”

Hi, according to Google's official documentation canonical URLs are sufficient:

"In the world of content management and online shopping systems, it's common for the same content to be accessed through multiple URLs. With content syndication, it's also easy for content to be distributed to different URLs and domains entirely. For example:... Your server is configured to serve the same content for the www subdomain or the https protocol..."

Proposed Plan of Action:

1. Decide which of non-www or www should be your preferred domain. Set the canonical urls and the preferred domain in GWT accordingly.
2. Divide your site into dozen or so sections and every day for the next 2 weeks correct the duplicate titles and content of each section. At the end, leave a day to go over the work and at the start give yourself a day to get familiar with the work. So you will not be overwhelmed by the details, even if you don't finish everything in a day.
3. See how the work done affects your sitemap and overall SEO when you go forward. If possible, only implement changes to the CMS after this SEO work has been done. Why? Because by then you will be familiar enough with the CMS and with the goals you want to achieve to fruitfully communicate with the developers. I see you are running a CMS based on ASP.net — changing these boutique CMS-s can be quite expensive, as you stated

Google Webmaster Tools has a blog post about this very subject:_"In order to see your data correctly, you will need to verify all existing variants of your site (www., non-www., HTTPS, subdirectories, subdomains) in Google Webmaster Tools. We recommend that your preferred domains and canonical URLs are configured accordingly.__Note that if you wish to submit a Sitemap, you will need to do so for the preferred variant of your website, using the corresponding URLs. Robots.txt files are also read separately for each protocol and hostname." _So:

1. Add all 4 existing variants as Fede and GWT guys mentioned above.. and as have you have done already..
2. .. but also: set your preferred domain to be https://www..
3. .. and finally: don't forget to set your canonical URL-s to be https://www.. on all pages

**My solution if the above doesn't work: thinking out of the box — have you connected the the preferred domain, https://www... with your Google Analytics property for the https://.. site? **

What Google writes in their official documentation seems to imply that your GA and GWT site share information between each other. Among other things, for search queries. Now for that to happen successfully both of them must establish in their algorithms what is the real preferred domain / site where the queries go right? Maybe that will force GWT to work.

Reference: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1120006?hl=en

Final risky way too force GWT to track your preferred domain (at least the main page and it's direct descendants of your site):

1. 301 redirect all your http:// to https://  See for example with htaccess, if you are running Apache and not Nginx: https://sites.google.com/site/onlyvalidation/page/301-redirect-https-to-http-on-apache-server
2. For your http://.. site in Google Webmaster Tools user interface under "Crawl" go to "Fetch as Google". Leave the URL field blank to fetch your main index or homepage and click on Fetch for it to fetch for http://.. main index.
3. After it has fetched your http:// homepage and displayed an icon with the word "Redirected" — you can click on the "Submit to Index" button that appears next to the "Redirected" sign and from there choose "Crawl this URL and it's direct descendants" — that may result in Google Webmaster Tools knowing that you really want your preferred domain to be tracked.

I offer this solution only as a thought experiment and because it seems you have replaced your http:// site completely with the https:// version.

Hi, had a similar problem just last week and solved it by strengthening the interior page ranking factors. Here's how:

• my page was domain.com/services/page, changed that to domain.com/keyword/page on both the URL and breadcrumbs (that becoming brand -> keyword -> page).
• better internal linking, added a couple of internal links with or in context near the keyword throughout the website's news section and corporate pages linking to the interior page.

Hope this helps you

Hi Chris, Robert here, Eli Overbey answered that question with a preference for the subdomain in his article at: http://elioverbey.net/subdomain-vs-new-domain-better-seo/ because:

• subdomains may inherit and pass ranking metrics
• subdomains give an impression of an consistent brand
• concentrating all your links on one domain

Please note that Eli’s answer might note be right for you. Let’s place this in the context of your question. You are starting 2 brand new enterprises. Therefore the transfer of existing ranking metrics from domain to subdomain is not that all that relevant. And you have to consider how much more prominent your real estate domain would be over the vacations rental subdomain to make it worthwhile.

Further note what Eli stated, URL length is an issue. In your case. it is reasonable to presume that both of your subdomain and domain will be quite long. So keep in mind the anecdotal testing on URL length that John Doherty did back in 2011: http://www.johnfdoherty.com/lessons-from-google-about-url-lengths/

You might also suffer from stuffing too many keywords in an URL if your sub-pages or blog posts happen to become, let’s say vacationrentals.pumpkinrealestate.com/10-unkown-scenic-locales-in-pumpkin. Search Engine Journal cites Google in their article at  http://www.searchenginejournal.com/url-structure-seo/11801/

“Best SEO URL practice: it is recommended to have no more than 3-5 words in the file path (note: this is not really about the whole URL but the actual file path after the last / in the URL but should be mentioned anyway as it indirectly demonstrates Google’s overall treatment of the URL length).”

And Matt Cutts is cited to state: “Google algorithms typically will just weight those words less and just not give you as much credit.”

Therefore it is wise to consider also whether you will be having a lot of sub-pages or blog posts under your vacation rentals subdomain. Because while the sub-domain main page may pass the mustard, for Google, it is reasonable to expect that pages under it may not.

As far as branding is concerned, I like to think of the brand in terms of the social signals you are sending to the public and to the seach engine(s).

Therefore think of it thus: would you like to have a single social media channel for both of these properties? Let’s say for tweeting out the latest news items. Or organising a Facebook page that people can like to get the latest offer. If yes, then reasonably, having a single brand is important to you. If no, and these two properties require seperate channels then these two properties really are seperate brands (as brands these days are all about being social, right? - we face them through social media more and more). And therefore, that tends to suggest that seperate domains may be the way forward for you.

Finally, when it comes to concentrating links — consider how rare people linking to your site will actually be (you might be part of a legitimate real estate association that promotes each others offers) or you plan to do viral or mini-viral postings. It also might be that your vacation rentals subdomain might be getting more links than your main domain for more people may be interested in short-term vacation rentals in an attractive lucrative place where owning property is cost prohibitive for most.

Chris and everyone, this is my first post on Moz Q&A so if you like the answer — make sure to like/upvote it.

PS! Take a look at the screenshot attached. I did a search for “Maui Vacation Rentals” on Google.com in English from a continental US IP (Boston). As you can see, there are only 3 organic results beyond the fold. It is very visually striking how paid advertising from Google AdWords and Google Maps dominate over even those 3. And add to that the factor that 2 of 3 of these organic results are from TripAdvisor and HomeAway who, one might reasonably presume, might be prominent on your SERP pages for your exact domain match as well. So perhaps focusing on Google Maps / Google Places whatever you decide should be a key thing to do?

PHIYygN.png?1

On a first look I would propose that the following paragraph just before the reviews themselves is problematic:

_"Natural World Safaris tailor-make gorilla safari holidays to meet your requirements. This gives you complete flexibility and allows you to choose your preferred travel dates, areas you wish to visit and the standard of accommodation that suits your style and budget. Please see below reviews from clients who have returned from our gorilla tracking safari holidays." _

Try rewriting that or removing that. Your page is already über-optimised and the first sentence is just over-the-top keyword stuffing. Also rethink hiding your reviews behind a plus button. Because the reviews are hidden as secondary content the Google bot sees the above paragraph as the same review for all the different pages. Thus thinks this is review spam across your otherwise very beautiful and, again, extremely optimised pages.

It is reasonable to expect that Google will want to combat review spam since many people use review mark-up for nefariously ranking higher.

drWVAnY

You should aim to be closer to 1, rather than 50.

Why? Because the numbers indicate the ranking or placement of your page on the search results page(s) (SERP). Number 1 indicates a page on top of the search results page (at least for the organic search).

Google states on their support page:

_If we’ve detected that a particular result has [...] issues with its title, we may try to generate an improved title from anchors, on-page text, or other sources. However, sometimes even pages with well-formulated, concise, descriptive titles will end up with different titles in our search results to better indicate their relevance to the query. _

There’s a simple reason for this: the title tag as specified by a webmaster is limited to being static, fixed regardless of the query. Once we know the user’s query, we can often find alternative text from a page that better explains why that result is relevant. Using this alternative text as a title helps the user, and it also can help your site. Users are scanning for their query terms or other signs of relevance in the results, and a title that is tailored for the query can increase the chances that they will click through.

What to do? Here's the answer:

• make your title mean something as a sentence or a phrase. List of keywords is not descriptive of what is on the page. Therefore Google will not use that. There are exceptions for e-commerce or product sites but that is the rule.
• If you want to highlight a certain keyword — simply place that at the start of the said phrase in the title.
• try to think as an user searching for your page when composing the above mentioned phrase. What do they desire?

For more, please see my previous answer at http://moz.com/community/q/title-tag-issue-2

Hi, the field of User Experience is vast. There are many books and online courses that go directly at the topic or show how to solve tasks with specific tools such as the now popular Sketch app for Mac and so on. I am sure others will post those. Others will also mention HCI and more academic subjects.

But a thinking man's or woman's guide to UX combines a wider sense of the subject — allowing you to communicate with ad agencies, clients and colleagues alike:

• Modern graphic design. Exemplified as a book in Josef Müller-Brockmann's "Grids in Graphic Design"
• Statistics, testing and data analysis. The best book might be a more general introduction such as "How To Measure Anything".
• To be honest, classical advertising also plays a role so reading "Ogilvy on Advertising" might place UX in a wider context.

Still, the most important thing is good knowledge of javascript.

• You need not rely on an external developer to implement many of your designs,
• You can quickly and easily test the various ideas found in popular books and academic papers alike.
• You can develop your good taste for the aesthetics of your products with small details that go beyond ordinary. We call them delighters.