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Hi Herb,

Thank you for your feedback. I think you are right. We are dealing with very  short lived up-to-date information so it is vital that as few sites as possible have the information we have. For this reason I was considering to "hide" our sitemaps. Some of our competitors do that but probably we need to find some other measures to achieve our goal.

Cheers
Thomas

Is there a way to protect your sitemap.xml so that only Google can read it and would it make sense to do this?

We observer that the Bing bot is crawling our site very aggressively. We set Bing's crawl control so that it should not crawl us during heavy traffic hours, but that did not change a thing. Does anyone have the problem and even better a solution? 

Thanks to Donald's post, we could improve the value we get out of moz.com. As our keywords are phone numbers and the "best" numbers are changing a lot, we are now updating our keywords on a weekly basis. This gives us a much more relevant visibility value.

Donald,

Thanks for your reply. When it comes to keywords we are a kind of strange animal. Our keywords are phone numbers. As I said we are a directory of spam numbers. Users who search for us find us generally by phone number. So if I understand you right, search visibility looks at the keywords I gave to MOZ and determines the visibility by these keywords, right?

We have several web pages with the same structure released in several countries. Each website contains information about spam callers in the country the website has been released for.

Now I have the problem that I see a slow degradation of search traffic in the US. The UK website on the other hand is doing quite well, actually improving.

According to MOZ our mobile search visibility dropped significantly in the last week and I am at the moment not able to pin this down. Can anyone please give me a hint at what data best to analyze to find the source of this problem? TIA

Best
Thomas

Hey Jono,

Thanks for coming back to me about this. I guess, we understood the concept of hreflang wrong. As I understand it now, a page in English on our US website cleverdialer.com would have to have a corresponding page with the same content but in German on our German site cleverdialer.de. This is not the case, as the spam numbers usually are active in one country.

If this is so, the hreflang on our phone number pages would not make sense as we have websites with the same general structure for different countries but the content differs.

Hi Igor,

Thanks for your reply.

I still would have one more question: The only pages which are really identical are the start pages, so there is no problem in placing a hreflang tag there. All the detail pages with phone numbers I have are different for every country. Would it make sense putting a hreflang on every detail page pointing to the start page or would it be better just not to put a hreflang on these pages?

Hi,

we are running a site which is a directory consisting of numbers of phone spammers. It contains descriptions, comments and so on. We are currently present in 9 countries. The websites all have the same structure, but, of course, the spam numbers in each country are different ones. If I want to tell Google that our website is available is several locations/languages, do I only put my hreflang tag on the start page then?

Thanks 
Thomas

We have several web pages with the same structure released in several countries. Each website contains information about spam callers in the country the website has been released for.

Now I have the problem that I see a slow degradation of search traffic in the US. The UK website on the other hand is doing quite well, actually improving.

According to MOZ our mobile search visibility dropped significantly in the last week and I am at the moment not able to pin this down. Can anyone please give me a hint at what data best to analyze to find the source of this problem? TIA

Best
Thomas

Donald,

Thanks for your reply. When it comes to keywords we are a kind of strange animal. Our keywords are phone numbers. As I said we are a directory of spam numbers. Users who search for us find us generally by phone number. So if I understand you right, search visibility looks at the keywords I gave to MOZ and determines the visibility by these keywords, right?

We observer that the Bing bot is crawling our site very aggressively. We set Bing's crawl control so that it should not crawl us during heavy traffic hours, but that did not change a thing. Does anyone have the problem and even better a solution?