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company.com (root)
USA - lang="en" | GSC target: USA (shows US site in SERPs for "companyname" search)
company.com/hungary
Hungary - lang="hu" | GSC target: Hungary (shows Hungarian site in SERPs for "companyname" search)
AWESOMENESS

company.com/ireland
Ireland - lang="en" | GSC target: Ireland (shows US site (doh!) in SERPs "companyname" search)
NOT RIGHT!

It is our theory [please weigh in!] that because we don't have a company.com/usa folder, the TLD targeting (EN) is overriding other English language sites in some manner.  In other words, the reason it's not overriding Hungary is because it's a different language.

What must we do to get the Irish site ranked for "companyname" searches and to show by default in Ireland?

First, this is not a question about whether 301 redirects pass page rank.

My question is that if your hreflang alternative page URL is a 301 redirect*, are there any downsides.  In all cases with our situation, the 301 redirect is single-hop and working.

Tools, such as SEMRush seem to flag this as a non-canonical hreflang error, but I'm not able to find any cases where Google has suggested a redirecting hreflang is a problem.

I'd appreciate any information on this issue before we invest extra time on a large international site.

*In Drupal, there are scenarios where it's all but impossible to avoid having a 301 redirect in your hreflang alternate URL without significant custom work.

Looks like the epic products have shut down.

Feedly is a feed aggregator so I'm not sure where it fits in.

I had Buzzsumo but don't recall it offering this kind of thing.  I guess I should revisit that.

Thanks!

My client, in a large industrial sector, is trying to find or purchase good data for their industry as far as benchmarks for social engagement.  While the DIY tools have social trackers, many require you to connect to the account you want to measure - so competitive research is a non-starter.

What would you use to build a spreadsheet of social engagement metrics from a set of, say, 10 competitors in a niche vertical (e.g.  industrial robotics?)

As a site-wide issue, any page URL exhibits the behavior (if you remove www)

The site's preferred setting in GSC is on www.domain.com, but I don't think this is a guarantee on indexing following that suggestion completely.

It seems to me the risk vector is dependent on googlebot's behavior in Google's black box so no guarantees.

I don't think they need to treat this as an emergency, but will work repair in soon.

thanks!

S

I have a potential client who doesn't seem to be using wildcard SSLs in a multi-site scenario (over 40 sites) - what I'm wondering is the scope of Google's inspection of a site's SSL in this case:

• https://www.domain.com (good to go)
• https://domain.com (certificate error)

Will Googlebot/Google possibly consider the entire TLD insecure?

• Could the secured, www-version of the site end up with the "Site is not secure" message in the SERPs as well?
• Could this invisibly affect the client's rankings?

PS:  Yes, I know that the right thing to do is go wildcard, but I need an answer to this before recommending a large purchase to them.

Working with a multi-location business with hundreds of locations, there is always a certain amount of churn (closures, new locations.)    In some cases, the business owners never claim listings, or claim them in only the major local business listings such as Yelp and Google Places.

Does anyone know of a good post or discussion about how to do a "cascading mark as closed" which will make its way through the LBL ecosystem eventually?   In other words, is there a few upstream places to mark a business closed that will influence the consumers of their data feed?

thanks!

I used to think of myself as a heavy hitter SEO  LOL

I'd welcome any other answers on this, and will try to talk to Bing.

If I find a solution I'll report back.

We have a brand with a major website at ourbrand.com.   I'm using stand-ins for the actual brandname.

The brand is a unique term, has 200 local offices with sites at ourbrand.com/locations/locationname, and is structured with best practices, and has a well built sitemap.xml.  The link profile is diverse and solid. There are very few crawl errors and no warnings in Google Webmaster central.  Each location has schema.org markup that has been checked with markup validation tools.  No matter what tool you use, and how you look at it t's obvious this is the brand site.  DA 51/100, PA 59/100.

A rouge franchisee has broken their agreement and made their own site in a city on a different domain name, ourbrandseattle.com.  The site is clearly optimized for that city, and has a weak inbound link profile.  DA 18/100, PA 21/100.  The link profile has low diversity and generally weak.  They have no social media activity.  They have not linked to ourbrand.com <- my leading theory.

**The problem is that this rogue site is OUT RANKING the brand site all over the USA on Bing.  **Even where it makes no sense at all.  We are using whitespark.ca to check our ranking remotely in other cities and try to remove the effects of local personalization.

What should we do?   What have I missed?

This thread is fantastic and very helpful to me - thanks to all who chimed in to answer questions.  After a lot of thought and a few months' drafts, I created a post which I hope describes the current "state of the art" for franchise/franchisee web marketing and SEO.  I would be happy to have commentary/debate on the solution!

As a site-wide issue, any page URL exhibits the behavior (if you remove www)

The site's preferred setting in GSC is on www.domain.com, but I don't think this is a guarantee on indexing following that suggestion completely.

It seems to me the risk vector is dependent on googlebot's behavior in Google's black box so no guarantees.

I don't think they need to treat this as an emergency, but will work repair in soon.

thanks!

S

My client, in a large industrial sector, is trying to find or purchase good data for their industry as far as benchmarks for social engagement.  While the DIY tools have social trackers, many require you to connect to the account you want to measure - so competitive research is a non-starter.

What would you use to build a spreadsheet of social engagement metrics from a set of, say, 10 competitors in a niche vertical (e.g.  industrial robotics?)

This is a B2B client, selling services in the $20M US range.   SEO attribution can be a challenge because of the way due diligence gets conducted.

In addition to traffic, we measure several stages of the conversion funnel and do lead scoring attribution on the CRM.  But, in progress meetings, I need to discuss results of SEO groundwork between observable events such as ranking changes (they are top 5 in hyper competitive phrases with some powerful uncumbants.)

Inbound followed links seemed to be one good metric to report on.  I was using Linkscape for this but may need to change my approach.