Hi Brant,

What you are talking about is Multilingual SEO processes. There are a few ways you can go about doing this.

You can either go with:

A) go with the following setups for the domain with regards to the site URL/sub-folder structure.

www.mysite.com (english)

www.mysite.com/sp/ (spanish)

www.mysite.com/fr/ (french)

www.mysite.com/de/ (german)

etc, etc, etc..

Or:

B) Or, you can also go the route of picking up the same domains name with needed country level extensions that are part of that country (like .ca for canada, .de for germany, .com for USA) etc, etc.

I prefer option A for many reasons, but everyone has their preferences

If you go with A. Keep the domain setup the same and build /folders/ with duplicates of the site pages that are target focused in the target language.

If you go the route of using sub-folders - you will need to inquire about setting up geo-location services at the domain/hosting level (through IP detection)

If going with the sub-folders - don't forget (from a user and experience perspective) on the site to make sure to allow users to 'choose' which element/language manually from the sites' homepage, if offering more than 1-2 languages (expansion) if you go to 3-4 or 5 versions.

This process is very intensive, and needs to be done carefully. You want to use professional services for translation, as Google Translate, or other online services aren't always accurate in sentence structure.Google does not recommend automatic translations.

If you go this route, you will also need to redo a complete KW audit from a search engine optimization perspective, so you have the RIGHT keywords that people use for that market (products), in their own languages. English isn't always a market parallel when languages are involved. Keyword translation is very important here to be successul with customers and target search.

** Using sub-domains can also be done - but sub-domains are considered to be independent domains by Google and therefore don't pass link juice' and value for inbound links across the whole site. Sub folder structures are best for allowing link 'juice' from link building effort' to be passed to the entire site.

If you go with A) - because you are using /folders/ for each of the domains you want to target for each users language. This type of setup is less expensive as well (cost of purchasing more domains, hosting etc)

Try to avoid using geo-location at the hosting level (from an IP address perspective) as it isn't always the best option for your user experience. Giving users the option to choose the language they want to use/see. Allowing users to choose the language they want to view the site in, will help them. Just becuase someone visits a site from the U.S - doesn't mean they are English (they could be Spanish, Chinese, Russian etc) and want the option to choose the language of the site you are promoting.

Remember to use UTF8 for non english language character encoding (on pages, URL's etc)

Presenting sites in multiple languages isn't 'duplicate content' when breaking it out into various /folders and then languages.

*** This is also great user experience and if done properly can help you retain the visitor and convert them into a customer/client as you have taken the time to build out information in their native tongue.

A couple of good articles on MSEO (Multilingual SEO) to help you along. With this, you could probably dig for more information too.

http://searchengineland.com/globalizing-localizing-e-business-five-steps-to-multilingual-seo-success-47127

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/multilingual-seo/19903/

Sorry for the long book of information and links! Ideas just kept coming to me while I was writing!

Cheers, Rob

Hi Patri!

OK, don't get frustrated too easily, it's really not that difficult but I could understand how it might look confusing to a newer client with the site redesign.

NOTE: MOZ doesn't work like Screaming Frog, with instant results upon crawling a domain, this you need to take into account first and understand. You need to setup a profile (campaign) for the website you want to crawl for data. With each PRO account, you get 5 campaigns to build and track while working on them.

First, sign into your account from the homepage

Second, click the MOZ logo and go to the site's main homepage. Look to the far RIGHT MARGIN at the TOP and click the button saying CAMPAIGNS & TOOLS. Once you are on this page, you will see a BUTTON in Blue titled SETUP A CAMPAIGN. Follow the steps to enter the URL, search engines to track, a few keywords to get you started and possibly the Google Analytics profile, to start gathering the information. This will create a CAMPAIGN for the site you are trying to crawl. It will start automatically and email you when the report is ready to be viewed. It's not automatic and might take some time, depending on how big the site is to get your crawl and data report.

You can access all the Products MOZ offers at this URL: http://moz.com/products and from here, click on the old disk (looks like an old 8" floppy disk), titled TOOLS and DATA. In this section, you can get to all the various tools we use as SEO's to analyze and get work done

Hope this helps! Cheers

You definately don't want to use a 404 error code, so avoid that at. There would be a lot of 301 redirects after that as Google isn't a big fan of 404 pages and it doesn't help your 'user experience'.

Because your product pages (individually) might be gaining links and resources/mentions/social mentions, etc, from customers as they find products, a 404 would produce a loss in valuable inbound linking juice into the domain.

I would simply keep those pages live at all times, but build on the pages/products description, history, talk about it's features, etc, keep those deeply seeded and index'd pages in the domain. Then when they come back online (if they do) ir provides users excellent content about the product and in parallel works with thier user experience.

If the product after time doesn't return, then just work to find a solution for those specific pages. Perhaps a directory of 'out of date products' that visitors could reference if they were looking or searching for something in particur on that site - and offer an alternative (if available) to them in it's place?

Hope this helps a little. Rob

Hey Justin,

I've done the complete DistilledU training. It's advanced in sections and at times, very basic. It's pretty much covers everything tho. It's very much learn at your own pace, as is MarketMotive and I have all my strategists or consultants work through Distilled and Moz as part of the their training for in house work. I don't know anyone who has done the Market Motive courses, but I can tell you after spending a little more time on it today, that I will be going through and possibly ordering it. We are also HubSpot certified as an agency so many of these certifications would benefit that tie we have with their products.

My guess, the advanced training you would be looking for - would be MarketMotive.com as I am looking at it myself for our agency and our teams! That's my 2 cents I plan on getting budgets set aside and getting it all lined up. I'm sold and going to move it into the pipeline.

It could be noted that depending on the DMOZ listing you are going after, in the vertical or niche you focus on, it could be months to get a listing approved depending on the moderator watching that category. Just a little something to consider after you submit the site, if you haven't already. Don't submit multiple times

Also - if you are using the DMOZ listing (after it's live and approved), and have a specific "description" or "title" for the site or page you are using, and don't want to use it across Google's search index, make sure to use the META field on your page. NOTE: This will only apply after your listing if/when is approved in the DMOZ directory. I took a small piece of the content from Google's product support page below and pasted it in right here:

One source Google uses to generate snippets is the Open Directory Project. You can direct us not to use this as a source by adding a meta tag to your pages.

To prevent all search engines (that support the meta tag) from using this information for the page's description, use the following:

To specifically prevent Google from using this information for a page's description, use the following:

If you use the robots meta tag for other directives, you can combine those. For instance:

This is a good Google Product Support page to visit about TITLES and DESCRIPTIONS and how they handle sometimes overriding the TITLE or DESCRIPTION field based on your DMOZ directory listing.

Cheers and good luck!

Absolutely! This is probably a priority project in my eyes if you are serious about building this up and going in the right direction now.

Moving the BLOG to your domain.com will not only improve the relation to your site and content, but brand it as well. Having the BLOG on another  domain (as it is now) might help you from a link building perspective (more than likely not helping very much) due to the fact Google would know you own that domain, and perhaps place  less emphasis on  the inbound links to the main site.

First - setup your site/domain to host the BLOG as you mentioned. www.domain.com/blog.  There are a  few reasons for this.

1. It will allow you to reap the rewards of the  content you build (supporting your site/company/mission) and support the main domain,  and it's

2. The content you build, share and move into the social sphere and space will allow for inbound links to be shared across the entire site/domain. (don't build it into a sub-domain like blog.domain.com as this  is considered to be a completely separate domain and  won't pass any link value and  juice across the domain).  sub-domains are considered to be domains by themselves in the eyes of a search engine like Google.

3. The content you build (and load daily to the BLOG) will keep search spiders coming back for more

4. Keeping the BOG content on the main domain, allows you to share the content of the BLOG to your web visitors who might be searching via BRAND or specific, helping associate the brand with the content marketing resource you are building. This in itself is a gold-mine, as it will also act as another source for long-tail traffic opportunity, but you'll have to do  your due diligence on this from  a research perspective to capitalize on the traffic.

5. Content marketing is going to be BIG  (as it's already on the rise and exploding now). This will all fall under your efforts for the BLOG and  should be focused on.  The value here is  that  over time,  Google will begin to apply TRUST and AUTHORITY factors to the content you write  and submit - helping to support your brand as a  quality resource of shared information for people.

Make sure to use rel=canonical from  the old location URL's and point those over to the new URL's on  the domain.com/blog listing. Also make sure  to use rel=author for each of the articles on the new blog from a META position.

NOTE:  Handling a migration such as this is very complex (especially if the BLOG is extremely large with thousands, or 10's of thousands of posts and articles). Even a few hundred can be TRICKY!

Not only do you have to setup the files (BLOG) on the new domain, but you will have to write and execute 301's for every single article on the old location/domain and point that over to the new one.  Some CMS's like Drupal can assist with this if your programmers can handle writing the scripts. This is a  very technical undertaking, so make sure to do your research.  If it's a small resource, you can still follow the same protocols, but it will take much less time to complete.

I recently handled and oversaw a technical project like this months back that took quite a long time to do, troubleshoot as it had over 30K articles and 25K in image files over the past 6 years! It was a huge undertaking that  went extremely well, but you have to be patient.

Hope this  helps some!  There's probably a little more I didn't mention as I'm late for a  meeting with a client!, so if  you have questions -  let me know!

Rob

That's pretty straight forward and almost answers itself

What you need to do is rework all the product descriptions you sell (that are/might be duplicated on 1 or 25, 50 of 100 sites). You need to work on then optimizing the framework of your site (technical work), write great compelling titles and description tags, good H1-H2 usage throughout, copy placement, integrate UGC (user generated comment) to write product reviews and notes on current inventory or sales experiences, and of course have some sort of plan sketched out for a social media and marketing push to build awareness and traffic to the site - it'll be difficult. All the while and doing all this you need to consider some sort of content development strategy (blog?) which could highlight certain products daily? weekly? monthly? Integrate that into a media delivery email campaign to gain new potential sales leads from site visitors, offer promotions too, etc? Opportunities are endless here and sometime frustrating as you work through and find the right formula that works.

I always fine these problems fun to work out. Sometimes I get carried away!

It's not an easy job, I won't lie. I recently had a client on a site for a client like that with over 1000 individual products (and that's small compared to some enterprise-level sites now) and it's a long process to do, but as you work through it, optimize it, test it, re-test it, re-work it again and again, you'll find the right formula to get those page indexed and ranking. Adding that personal touch to descriptions by re-writing them as well, gives you opportunity to leverage other potential KW's for POW (points of entry) from/through organic search, keeping in line with the primary KW's you are trying to target.

Create a great user experiences as well Look to see what the other sites are missing. Look at the site from a 'buyer' perspective', what can you improve on? image galleries? sign ups? search function to improve product location? etc.. I don't think the other sites who are ranking above you, have all that nailed down, unless they are a global client like Target, Walmart, etc, etc. There is always room to improve !!

Hope some of that helps. It should get you started for sure!

Hey Ruben,

Are you looking to build out content for your own blog as you mention in paragraph 1, or for other blogs and media sources, that would be hosted on alternate sites/blogs etc? I found this to be slightly confusing, but not in a bad manner.

Creating content is the first part of the puzzle You then need to figure out how to best get that content out to the world, and 'shared' across the web and in front of people to view, read, share and share more!

I would look Rand's recent WBF posting and figure out where you fit and into which path. Of course, you want to provide great content, that's the ultimate goal, but at the same time you are in the long run hoping for inbound links to be sourcing your content as an authority, right? This was a great Link Building vs Content Marketing post. It'll be very useful and help you identify which path you need to take or which one works best for your firm's resources. As you will handling your content development or content calendar, you will essentially be working as an SEO to get that content created around target keywords you have or research and topics you want to cover in the legal industry - while also trying to engage users and readers to read and share it across the web with other groups.

I would consider, if you haven't already, creating a LinkedIn page for the Law Firm. I researched it quickly and couldn't find the firm itself, but did find 2 of the people/attorney's that work there now. By creating your firms page, you will have a place to publicly share your content to build a following of readers. LinkedIn is a great resource for networking as well - and building that trust there is a key factor. Having your blog setup with RSS will help move the content into the media stream, which could potentially share the feed across other sites looking to pull in RSS links to their blogs or sites of similar niche markets. Don't forget all the social media profiles you should have, FB, Twitter mainly. Perhaps if you wanted to start doing video and media marketing a YouTube channel for the firm? Remember, you have think about the ways to get your content out to the marketplace, to share Tie any social media accounts to tour site, law firm online and the LinkedIn profile so people can find you quickly and easily. Maintain consistency among all the profiles (descriptions, pictures, info, phone numbers, etc) to keep everything lined up too.

This was also a great resource in Link Building and Growing Popularity by Moz. It's part of the Beginners Guide to SEO series, but should also help you wrap your head around the processes involved. The 2013 Link Building Survey by Moz offers some great up to date insight as well. Read that here.

Doing reverse search might also help you. Find legal firms that are ranking in positions you want to try to achieve. Research and profile their back-links and see if there are sites/blogs/sources/news or sites that you should be getting links from, or want links from Then it's about 'outreach' and contenting them to see if they might be interested in allowing you to guest post on their media sources. It's a long process, but worth the effort and time. You really identify some sites that you want to set as goals to start ranking against. If time isn't an issue - this is a perfect avenue to take. They might even be interested later in guest posting on your site/blog. If you want your blog to be a source for valuable content, don't always assume you should have the posting done in house of by your staff. Find sources that might help you build a valuable community with information that matters, and work to build that community into the best blog about legal information/etc ever!! Keep them coming back - and that might mean working with guest postings, guest authors, professors, other lawyers, etc, etc.

You might want to consider running an analysis of your site now (back-links)- see if you have broken links in your profile that you can repair and reuse. A great way to fix possibly 404 inbound errors that might be driving traffic nowhere!

NOTE: Do watch how you handle the anchor text now though going forward. Really work to keep a totally organic and not 'indexing footprint' with overused anchor text. This should and will keep you in the good graces of Google Ross Hudgens had a great post I just linked to for you above

You might also want to consider reading the following article on Scalable Content Production. It's got some really great insights on building content and scaling it out. This will help you plan going forward as you start producing content for the web.

Do you have a program to start tracking projects, and processes going out for content creation? I have been using Trello for some time and it's great for SEO or content writing project tracking. Try it out, it's free and a great source you can tie into anyone involved with your ongoing projects.

Anyways, don't want to keep you forever and a day! Hope some of this helps you out and gets you started. All the best.

Cheers!

Yes! I actually find it very frustrating. I'm not happy with the new tool by Google, and with the new tool, we will be losing more valuable search data to make decisions from the old Keyword Tool. I'm currently use Jaxxy (testing it out) and Bing. I'm still using the old Google keyword tool, until the take it out of commission in the coming months.

Although the Moz software is awesome, it only works to configure and setup campaigns if you are a PRO member which comes with a 99$ fee per month. This isn't for everyone unless they can use the software more than once.. I would suggest grabbing a few free tools online to use. You can check out : ScreamingFrog and/or Xenu Link Sleuth

Each will provide you with detailed reports to filter through and see content from your site. ScreamingFrog will provide you with data for up to 500 URL's for free. You will need to purchase the license to go deeper, depending on your site.

This one is a great for getting HTTP header checks and site wide duplicate content error notifications.

If you want to try a tool to verify online duplicate content - PageSpotter is a checking and monitoring tool.

A great post by Google Webmaster Center Blog about Duplicate Content and why you need to address it to help with your site.

If you plan to go the route of moving the site to a new domain/URL this is a great forum piece on the steps you need to plan and execute for a clean move.

Hope some of this helps you out!

Great response. I would have given you exactly the same steps. You should follow John's advise:)

Link building to these individual ccTLD's will be the biggest obstacle to overcome, especially in short amounts of time (if that matters), but, if you have time and resources, this will help the geographic level of your brand on a global level. It's just too bad when you have to break up one master domain (pooled together), and go with individual domains for each country you are targeting.

Cheers, Rob

Yes, it looks spammy too and really isn't helpful to users and visitors who are reading the information you are writing and sharing. Don't scare your users away with spammy looking links. It's probably affecting the on page elements as well as constantly reproducing the same (internal or external links) on all these blogs posts. These type of 'footer' links at the bottom of all the posts also look spammy to the engines. If you do keep them there, select only 1-2 that are of importance and rel=nofollow the others. I

My recommendation if to link naturally inside the site and blog. Don't just link to yourself., your products, or your pages. Be bigger than that Link to other outside sources as well. Don't be afraid to expand on the type of links you use inside your content. Most people are, but when you link intelligently, and for the benefit of the user, the page's performance, click through, time on page/site, etc will improve. It's a win/win for you and your users experience. Not only will you see in time that you are linking to other really valuable sources for your clients, those sites will be watching who is linking to them, and might garner the attention of the staff there for a natural link mention on their site, or request for a 'quest post'.

Hope some of that helps! Cheers

My advice, even with 13 years in the industry now is to get a personal reference from someone you might know who is currently working with someone who is good at what they do. Plain and simple

Personal references for work like this are always #1 in my book. I also find it easier to talk with the client, becuase they already have a sense of who you are having gotten the reference from someone they know and trust.

Just my 2 cents Cheers,

Sounds like the indexing issues are causing some drops in ranking, even though good based content and domain authority are present.

Also, the .v1 site looks to be a testing platform?Could that be possible? I recently had an issue with an enterprise client site with very similar issues - with multiple testing versions of the domain up and indexable, causing massive amounts of duplicate content, indexed content and indexing issues.

I would plan to assess any content that could me migrated over to the main site from the .v1, and 301 redirect (and rel-canonical) the old .v1 site pages. Keep those in place for a few months to ensure that all the value of the 301 take effect.

By migrating some of this valuable content over (or all of it), just make sure you use both properly executed 301 redirects, and to take it a step further, apply the canonical tag on the .v1 pages with redirects to the exisiting and correct pages on the main domain. This way, we know for sure all any value is being passed.

SIDE NOTE: Having that many pages, indexed content doesn't mean the site will do well. In fact with this poor setup, the site's massive amount of page URL's might be causing more damage. Too many pages will bad page quality scores can and will bring a site down. Plan to migrate the pages or sections of the site to the main domain (that hold the most value), 301 and rel-canonical the other's, and remove the bad pages with little to no value that may be causing site wide damage in search indexing.

In dumping lots of content from the site - redirect those URL's (being dumped) to a helpful 404 page, which will try to salvage any user hitting the page, and redirecting them to back into sections of pages of the site. Also - make sure that page has a useful 'search' option that is clear to allow them to search for something they might have tried to land on through organic indexed content.

Finally, once you see indexing improve and redirect those pages automatically in the SERP's through reporting in weeks or months to come, then you can shut down the old .v1 pages without fear of losing any value you had.

It's a lengthy process and a big project, but the client (and site) should see huge value in the time you are taking to manage it. It will maintain value for the site in the long run and help build a better platform going forward.

Cheers!

Jesse's right. AS much as your client doens't want to upgrade and rework the entire site (build an equivalent in HTML or PHP), there isn't much you can do. This is a full FLASH site, locked SWF and Google isn't going to crawl or index any of the content or information.

You could do a few other things to help the business on a local level:

1. Build up all the social profiles and media needed to support Google local search. Social media, Google+, FB and Twitter sould be a good start. Even a LinkedIn profile to support the company and business.

2. Add in a WORDPRESS customization feature to the site, and build up a blog for content marketing and development. Work to create content around each of these categories and redirect users back to the company site. You don't have specific landing page URL's to use and optimize, but it's a cost effective start if they are unwilling to bend on going the route that will benefit them the most.

I've had clients like this and it's the hardest thing to tell them everything they have or are doing is wrong on many levels. It's probably the most sensitive area when dealing with a client you don't want to upset Tough road ahead for sure.

Cheers!

I would take some time and check your other traffic and analytics sources. Ensure that everything is still up. Even take a few minutes to manually verify some of your known KW rankings. See if the site has plummeted or dropped severely. There would be some correlation between that and the impressions loss with GWMT. The overall algorithm might have some impact on any losses attained that you saw so take some time to look over the data..

I would be safe to assume if you don't see any major problems anywhere else in your research that things are find and Google has just had a glitch in reporting, which engineers are probably already working on

Might help you start identify the source of the issue on the site.

Hey Bob,

This might be an older post from 2011, but Cyrus does a great job getting to the root of what you are searching for. I don't want to rewrite his suggestions, but let's say I have this page bookmarked to reference whenever I need it Understanding Google's freshness factor and how it affects search rankings

Oh, and read Justin's post on this as well! Great insight into the technical Google patents and breakdown.

1. Remove the punctuation. Although it doesn't really damage search listings or impact how SERP's look at your site for rankings, as Chris said, you only have so many characters to work with in the <title>field and it's best to really optimize the <title> to improve end-user experience :)</p> <p>2. Craft custom <titles> for each and every page, and consider where you place the KW in the field. Importance will be taken into account as well as position and meaning of the KW in relation to the <title>. Try mixing things up to see where you impact ranking positions. I would still remove all punctuation (but perhaps, keep a few pages ranking now, with punctuation to see if you impact the rankings) See #3 below.</p> <p>3. Look at choosing a few test pages in the domain to work with to monitor rankings for this very test, and analytic's data like bounce, exit, click through, etc. </p> <p>4. Doing this will also help you reveal how the customer reacts to the page once they click in, after the find it in the organic SERP listings. Did the punctuation impact your rankings, and if so, was the click through higher, while also decreasing the bounce and/or exit rates from said pages from end-user? A great experiment and test platform :)</p> <p>It's not an exact science, but more a art and science mixed together ;). I wish you all the best with this, as it sounds very interesting. Keep us all posted on your findings!!</p> <p>Cheers.</p></title>

Hey There, been there, done that!

The old sites' pages and value have more than likely been lost due to many things (lack of new content, no fresh content, lack of content updates, abandonment, etc). Most of the value is most likely lost over the last 2 years.

I would still map out and put in place the 301's. You will need to have an exact match of any relevant pages from the old domain - and 301 redirect them to relevant pages on the new site/domain. The back-links might still be there, and there may be some value to trickle through in old page-rank but I wouldn't count too much on the value. From a user experience, it's always best to send your customers to the right pages, rather than a site with outdated information. That won't support and help build the brand

You should also ensure that WMT in Google and Bing are configured correctly for the new site. Run profiles on both sites in OSE to map out any links that may be list. If you have access to the old profiles for WMT, check into that as well. Correct anything out of date for the profile on the site.

You may also want to map out any links in the profile that are of really high value and authority. Isolate these in a Excel file and profile them to contact later. Perhaps establishing contact with them, you can get them to find interesting material and content on the new site they would consider linking too or sharing.

All in all, first map out and complete a full 301 redirect to ensure it's in place. Map out the link profiles of both the old and new sites, and try to align things over time as the 301's take effect. Watch for any broken links and 404's in your reports and ensure those get corrected too. Don't leave anything to chance. Cover all your bases.

Cheers !

Hope some of this helps and good luck

Absolutely. It makes total sense!

You are referencing the keyword you are targeting in the TITLE and Article TITLE (make this an H1 in your HTML) and as well the URL TITLE reflecting the article H1 targeting. It's all relevant to the goal of trying to signal the engines about the great content you are creating.

Make sure to write unique TITLES for each URL you create and target the keywords for each you are mapping against those URL's. Keep the Page TITLES in line as well and tie it all together. Very important to have a planned strategy around either working on a site that is already in place (and you are changing everything), or a new site with completely new development in and search targeting in place.

I have worked on a few sites with issues exactly like this (Drupal, Joomla, custom based CMS), with lengthy periods of time since the changes took effect at the search level. Overall, we did see increases in traffic related to <kw>related organic traffic. My input, is although it's a lengthy process, the benefits outweigh the length of time or complexity to implement.</kw>

Shortening the URL, will increase the <kw>relation to product and brand. It also opens up doors for later expansion if needed, as you want to try to minimize the URL's length. Getting rid of that slug folder will save you character space at later points in site development, if you choose to go another level deep in URL string/folder.</kw>

Devanus is right in most likely losing some related searches to people searching for 'category product name', but in your life an experience, how many times have you actually searched for that yourself? A good thing to do would also run by your analytic's and keyword metrics from organic traffic and determine the potential loss of any traffic related to direct 'category' related product searches.

Just my 2 cents Everyone has different experiences when implementing changes like this, and it may not all be the same across the board.

Good luck. Cheers!

I would say there is another option Julien. Just because your 'primary' KW is the focus of the homepage, it doesn't mean it is the highest converting KW for your company/site or for that specific product. Of course, you have to dig for data a little looking at how best to approach it and how that internal page performs, what KW's drive traffic (digging deeper than not provided)

Yes, your homepage has the most domain authority value (mainly, but not always). It's again, not the best page to rank for all your terms, if the bounce and exit rates are above average and/or high. This indicates that those KW's are not converting for your homepage at the best possible rate.

In the past, I have moved the KW focus to the actual product landing page and taken the focus away from the homepage, optimizing and working on improving the UI/UX, information, product, image, video etc, on that specific page - in hopes it would outrank the main primary page and thus, convert at a higher rate. As these product pages when worked on helped the 'visitors' get directly to the page that they are looking for, without having to search for it and navigate to it from the homepage (yet, another click). Why not simplify the process sending them directly to the main page of information?

Work to identify other KW's you can use to draw focus for on the main homepage and shift that focus around.

When building out your product page for the KW, I suggest as I mentioned above - work everything about the UI/UX, design, information, photos, videos, etc etc making it an extremely valuable page (think - make it THE MOST valuable page you can think of) to help visitors, thus, more than likely converting at higher rates, decreasing bounce and exit rates to the page.

As well, the added page authority, which will strengthen the domain authority overall on the site will improve the overall experience to users.

Just a thought to help you out on success I have had with similar issues.

Cheers, Rob

As Mike said, it could take months for Google to remove all the indexed content from the DEV side (that was crawled and indexed). Looks like you did it all right too. I wouldn't worry, let it filter out. You won't be able to rush it any faster.

My advice is to purchase a domain you can/will build a brand around. Stick to the brand URL/domain as exact name match domains have been flagged by Google for top rankings. Optimize the site for both targeted traffic and local and national/international search traffic. I'm a big believer now of brand domains, and developing links to those sites with links that reflect, brand mentions, KW mentions for correlation, social mentions and inbound related marketing content development to strengthen the domain's total overall market presence.

Another reason to keep the domain 'brand related' is about the UI/UX for recalling it. If it's some crazy long typed domain name with KW's and brand mentions, it becomes tedious to remember and type out Using the brand name as the focus and URL will keep it straight to the point for the user and marketing behind it. NOTE: Make sure to research out the social profiles of any URL you are looking at, to build up around as you want to ensure you can lock them all up prior to purchasing anything

Either way, your best bet with a completely new domain will be to focus on developing out a local SEO strategy and supporting that with targeted content and social media profiles. This way, when you are ready to gain and target a larger audience (national?), you have the backbone profile on the site to reinforce the effort.

Hope some of that helps

Are these FORUM posts/page URL's part of the primary root domain? Are they in a separate FOLDER or DIR within the ROOT of the site? How is it structured? Are they still being crawled and indexed? Are they still indexed?

My bet is that you could map out these old post/URL's and possibly 301 them to more relevant information on your site, that deals with, or discusses the topic at hand. You don't want to flat out remove them, have a pile of 404 error's show up and then have to worry about salvaging the damage later. Map out the pages you want to dump - see if there is relevant more up to date conversations that are within the same topic and 301 redirect them to those locations.

You might want to considering removing the one's you can't 301 to more up to date relevant information, if there is no page to do so. You could map these out and possibly create content on the site or BLOG that answers the forum's post, but that might take time and money? That way, future people would find information to handle that very question and not be posting a question about it in the Forum

Unfortunately, in my experience, FORUM's have this issue and I think will continue to have this issue. There is no once recipe to fix the problem of outdated forum posts, or outdated URL's  - but you can leverage some of that and turn it back into traffic for the site - and traffic that is still valuable if it has a purposes (redirect). If not - you can remove the old URL's/posts, let them 404 and remove them through GWMT systematically as they begin to populate your crawl reports from Google.

Either way, it's an option to look at to clean up the site and site pages/depth if you feel those pages have little to offer UX or visiting customers Remember, Google has confirmed that pages that hurt your overall site score, can pull down your natural rankings in the SERP's if pages that are of low-quality don't help the site, users or the user/customer-visitor experience.

Hope that helps a little! Cheers

Hey there,

Are you linking these domains just form the main level TLD (homepage), or all the product pages from within each company/country site.

If yes, absolutely! Use <nofollow>on any of the domain/brand or country level TLD's to avoid any kind of penalty. Penguin being as picky as it is, you would want to stay away from any of that to in a 'safe' zone. I would stear clear and use these best practices for interlinking cross country domain sites and products. </nofollow>

Work on building your outside links to the site through content development and social media/mentions, while using the <nofollow>links within the site at the brand and product level. </nofollow>

Thanks, Rob

Both Lance and CleverPhD have some good points. Really go page by page and map out the entire domain. Both on the PR4 and PR5 sites. Create excel spreadsheets to align up the location and destination of your 301 redirects.

Then, calculate the # of pages you have listed on the PR4 site that need redirecting but really don't have a home. IF the number is small enough, just redirect those pages/URL's for visitors to the homepage. Google doesn't like mass 301 redirects to the homepage, but if those pages have small inbound links, and some value - that will get pushed back to the main index URL.

You could also let it 404 as CleverPhD said, but what I would map out, is a kick-ass 404 redirect page. Include elements like a search function for people to look for new content, add a link to a form that people can fill out to advise of the 404 error. Offer up alternatives and/or pages-URL's that might offer something similar. Have fun with it and add some creativity to help convert those almost lost users to possibly visitors and then clients. Don't just let the 404 page be the end all of the site visit. I have found by really focusing on 404 error page improvements, you can improve both the bounce and exit rates of said pages, and as a result retain users that become clients in the end - all because you were able to take the time to build something that caught their attention, and thus - kept them inside the site Some great examples of creative 404 errors might include this or some creatively funny ones like that. This is another one I liked here.

Hope some of that helps Cheers!

Mike and Jesse are both correct!

Here's an old video from Matt Cutts and Google which might help explain a little further what is happening and why. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35624?hl=en . This talks about the site TITLE and DESCRIPTION elements for Google indexing. Always a good reference point

Another good article I have referenced before is: http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/google-changed-my-title (from 2011)

Thanks!

You generally want to have the

tag at the top of the page, above the content paragraph. Keep it close in relation to the content that is below it also for correlation. Typically, you don't place a

inside the HEADER of the page, but rather the of the site.

Make sure to limit your use of the

to only 1 time on a page. Use other elements of <h2-h4>throughout the page, but again, only use each element for various sections 1 time on the site page. I've worked on clients sites that had 5

tags, 10

tags, 15

and so on. The pages focus was a real mess. It gets a little stretched out, the engines have trouble determining /or narrowing down what and where the importance of what you are trying to say on the page is, thus affecting you negatively in the SERP results because they can't figure it out.

Keep it clean, watch the code on your site, use elements carefully and do not overuse them. Keep this in mind, and you should be good to go!

Cheers and good luck!</h2-h4>

Oleg might have a point. A quick tool you can run to get a snapshot of his analytics, overlayed with the various updates for Penguin and Panda (and other non-named updates) that could have affected it. Use this tool quickly, and you should could correlate a penalty with his traffic. Titled the PANGUIN tool It's useful to get a quick look at his analytics when you connect the Google account. You will see a drastic drop in organic traffic, and it will align with an update Google did which may be the penalty Oleg was referring too.

Without direct access to his analytics, the site, his URL, the non-ranking keywords, the competitor site, etc, it's about the best we can do!

Hope it helps, if it's the case!

I'm not a big fan of breaking language sites into sub-domains because you break the value of the link structure and link juice in the domain. So for every single language you break out into a sub-domain - you then end up having to build more links to the sub-domains.

Each SEO is different and has difference experience, tactics and strategy from testing and previous work on sites. Sub-folders have been more successful for me in work than sub-domains in terms of rankings and language (MSEO) techniques.

Cheers! Rob

No trouble! Glad I could help out

I agree here, but with the Panda updates this past year, just having pages up won't really do much. You'll need to improve the user experience to build on the page.

I would build on the page, but look to improve the landing pages of the products that are either no longer available, or the pages that are or will still be online but with products that are not available 'at this time'.

Bring in social media, product landing pages, perhaps a posting 'comment' section for customers to review the products (to offer some user generated content), alongside other features like customized descriptions (don't copy the supplier site), features about the history of the product, the origin of it.. etc..

If it's no longer available, redirecting to a products page of similar relation will help keep the client on the site - while also offering various products of similar needs for their use.

Do all this - I and I see a win-win for you

This information might help you make a decision, but it sounds like your strategy will be mainly focused on the Signapore marketplace. I would read this to help you decide which domain you want/should run with based on the business or personal site and geolocation for operations. Hope this helps you a little. Without more information from you, it's difficult to give you points on which one would be better based on your goals

|

The .SG domain has 9 extensions as shown below :

|
| sg | This category is available to all with a valid Singapore postal address. A foreign applicant may apply for a domain name in this category as long as it appoints a local agent having a valid Singapore postal address as the Administraive Contact. |
| com.sg | Commercial entities may wish to register in this extension. Applicants registering for a .com.sg will need to be either registered, or in the midst of registering, with the Accounting & Corporate Regulatory Authority (ACRA), IE Singapore or any professional body. A foreign company which is not so registered may only apply for a .com.sg domain name if it appoints a local agent as the Administrative Contact. This local agent shall be a legal entity that is similarly registered by any of the afore-mentioned organisations and is duly authorised by the foreign company. |

Really detailed overlook. Nice touching on everything.

Just something to add if you want to consider this in your planning scope. My proffesional opinion is surely sub-folders, keeping away from sub-domains (unless for a very specific reason needed).

1. If you are building a multilingual site, you should also consider how you will be building back-links through various methods (content development, company blog, etc) and will those be done in each language to support the authority needed to build rankings in each language you are working to expand on?

2. If you are going to be building different divisions of the domain (Chinese, and perhaps later going French, German, etc), consider building out TLD's for each domain that's needed in specific languages and focus on building those separate sites. That way you can focus on content development, social media and marketing efforts specific to each language, thus improving your options for the search in each country.

Just some thoughts to think about depending on the scope of your project and sites.

Cheers!

Note: You should make sure all the canonical versions of this render properly as well. This way - all links and 'juice' or value are passed the the domain name you specify.

www.mysite.com

mysite.com

mysite.com/default.aspx

www.mysite.com/defaults.aspx

Checking Google webmaster tools will also help see any errors when handling duplicate content issues (for homepage or entire site). as this was also a new feature in recent months added by Google.

Cheers!

Also consider that each sub-domain is considered by Google to be a separate domain.

So, actually building out sub-domains (like www.google.com and adwords.google.com for example) would be considered 2 separate sites wihtin the same company, and when starting to expand and build links too, those links to the sub-domain only stand for value to that actual domain - link value and 'juice' isn't passed through the whole domain to the rest of the site naturally.

It would be better to run with building sub-folders for the main domain like (google.com/adwords/ as an example) as the value of any links to /adwords/ sub-folder is passed all the way through the entire domain, even from a sub-folder.. as well as the other mentioned list above! It makes links building easier to manage without having to build links to all these individual channel sub-domains.

Hope this also helps you out!

Everything else also counts EGOL mentions above.

Cheers! Rob

Make a list of each site you want to look for guest blogging and posting opportunities. You are geo-located in the UK, so I would even segment those lists into 2, .com and .co.uk sites. Then look at the domain profiles, DA/PA and back-link structures. Map out all the data to profile each site you can (use Moz! tools) and list out all the data.

I would then start to prioritize them in each category. I would certainly look to use the .co.uk sites over the .com, unless the .com sites are heavily authority related. That's about that. The .com's aren't a total loss, and consider using them when the domain profiles you gather show that they are themselves authorities in their niche markets.

Cheers!

You could look at AWR 's (Advanced Web Ranking) software. I use it and it's awesome for tracking and reporting. Has the largest search engine depth for reporting (add any search engine you want/need) and product support will help you get it if they don't have it! It can be tailored to track any language KW needed and in any country. Reporting is awesome if you buy the PRO or AGENCY level software (I included the link above), but does require a little time to learn. It's costly as well, but proves to be a tool I can't operate without in my practices for client projects.

I totally agree with Alan on this. You really need to look at each individual URL, and 301 redirect to ensure they are in place, page by page. It's a sensitve issue for sure and proceed with caution for sure.

It's also not condusive to 301 all URL's and links to the homepage URL. This doesn't make for a great 'user experience' and can cause confusion to the user visiting the site, looking for the specific material. It can also confuse the hell out of a search engine (where did all those other pages I had index'ed go!)

You might also damage the inbound link quality of pages in place now that have links pointing to it. Sure that would pass on to the main domain URL (losing value of 5-15% in the 301), but it's just not a great strategy tpo blindly 301 everything to the homepage. Alan said it right below - you need to look at the links, inbound anchor text, where it's coming from and redirect to the right page via 301) for the best user end experience.

I would map out all the URL's that are new, and then map out the URL's that correlate to those pages exactly. Then setup the webconfig file to have individual page level 301 redirects and put those into place. He provided a link below to his webconfig file for 301 redirects.

Cheers, Rob

The 301 redirect also tell the search engine where the NEW location address of this page is (the final page you want to have ranked) while passing all other page value from the links built to the page exist.

Well, that makes more sense now !! I didn't read it correctly then. Sorry, my mistake. Well, to address your question in that regards then;

1. If I were you, and you have access to their amazon-like site, code and ability to modify, you could very well implement the canonical tag, and redirect all value and links to your clients domain. I wouldn't count on that other site driving any traffic at later points though once the value shift takes place. Those product pages will become mute.

2. Option 2 -> By keeping both sites open (amazon and client site), you have the possibility of driving multiple sources of traffic for the client domain and products, and building the main client site out to out perform the amazon-like site.

Still, following the steps above will help you plan a good solid strategy going forward and will help support the sites performance, user experience to ultimately improve sales conversions and revenue

Cheers!

Absolutely. Probably your best bet.

On a sidebar note, try to keep your link count on any domain pages to a maximum of 100. Anything above and beyond that, are not counted on pages and usually the BOT won't follow anyways. The more links on a page, the less value can be attributed to them.

If you want to help the link profile of the site, decide which links could be <nofollow>and place those tags to help with improving the link quality on various pages. This also helps Google with trust as you are not trying to 'game' the linking profile of the site or structure to improve various pages SERP rankings.</nofollow>

We also shifted focus away from other CMS systems in Wordpress (unless the goal of the site and traffic is built around a Blog marketing strategy), and moved to using mainly Drupal 7 at this time, but I also am a big fan of Joomla.

If I were you, take some time to look into sites build on these platforms and explore the options. They offer incredible flexibility.

My testing has not shown any improvements with regards to this effort - BUT you could try it, and share the results with the rest of us!

Best practice for SEO TITLES is something like:

Optimal Format

Primary Keyword - Secondary Keyword | Brand Name 
or 
Brand Name | Primary Keyword and Secondary Keyword

See this article on from the Moz team and a pretty good read too!

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/title-tag or

http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo

Cheers! Rob

It all depends if you want (or are going too):

1. Short URL's usually work best with regards to indexing and product correlation (too long means characters get left off by Google when indexing). Keep things within a short URL length also helps Google index the full length and get the full value of the URL - using your <keywords>to reinforce the URL relation.</keywords>

• Also - Having these URL's linked too from the main page will help flow 'link juice' through the site, providing you keep the amount of links on the homepage to a minimum amount, and mix with other links that are <nofollow>. Usually links beyond 100 will not be crawled by Googlebot.</nofollow>

• Also - If your URL's are strings - make sure to have 301's setup for URL's that include any type of string (?=question123456 or something to that alignment) Make sure to change that string = www.domains.com/keyword-rich-content. This might be nothing for the site/domain you are working on, or might be a step that needs to be included in the site's overhaul project work.

2. Longer URL's (like adding directories or sub-folders) can be good too, depending on your product breakdown in you site architecture. It might not be needed though. If you have hundreds of thousands of products, directories will most likely be needed to sort the data and organize the database being used to work alongside the CMS. Then you would want to go this route, other than having an unorganized ROOT directory with thousands of pages in it (even if dynamically generated)

Each option works, in their own way. Each with supporting documentation and methods. Just something to consider in helping you steer the SEO sea

Cheers!

Thanks. Great point I neglected to mention in detail. !!