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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!

I have been through this with other sites.   Nightmare.  Every time.

There is a period of time when any properly designed, optimized franchisee "site cloud" is built  before it ranks, and most franchisees will freak out - making the CMO's life a living hell.  Search engines, analytics, paid search programs, ratings/review sites and social networks are not set up to help manage the parent/child relationship inherent in franchises. There are no super-user, admin setups so that, for example, you could have all of your franchisees in YELP with normal capabilities, but have a superuser which could manage them all from a single page, fix things, and even remove them if needed.

Anyone out there thinking of starting a franchise needs to lock "imminent domain" rights onto any website created right in the franchise agreement. The franchisor needs to state, with clarity, that they can make any change to the franchisee's provided website they wish, and that all franchisee-initiated online marketing programs must be approved by the franchisor.  No rogue sites, no rogue facebook pages, instagram sites, etc. are allowed.   If they do they forfeit their franchise license and ultimately could be sued for trademark infringement.

But this implies that the franchisor must come out firing on all cylinders, with a seriously good plan and best practices giving the franchisee the best chance of success.

Many franchisees are horrible business people, who have been mad at the franchise since the first week of ownership.  This is often their life savings we're talking about, and after grand opening is when the hard work starts, and poor decisions come back to haunt.

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.

Yes thanks.  The issue is not the functionality of reporting but the numbers themselves.  +/- 2000 link variations between weekly runs is not okay and freaks out my clients.   I'm sure we have not had that much change in link numbers.

I do think I need a 2nd tool to cross reference to.  Majestic is a good one to consider.

Please, everyone keep ideas coming.

This question is not about how to use SEOMOZ Link tools.  It's about the numbers themselves and how their fluctuations are causing confidence issues....

My client wants to track inbound followed links over time.  But as I understand it, this number will vary depending on the Linkscape crawling success (or even outages or partial crawls.)   In the past few reports, we've had wild fluctuations which have made them very nervous.

If my client wants to track inbound followed links over time, what SEOMOZ metric should we use for the most reliable progress checks?

In one case, which uses subfolders, the number of authority high page rank sites linking to the individual franchisee subfolders (and therefore contributing to the TLD's link equity) is substantial, yet the overal site cannot seem to break into page 1 of Google (despite weak competition.)   Their SEOMOZ crawl and LInkScape profiles are good.  They also have sporadic local ranking regionally despite linked Google Place pages and decent local citations (BBB, chambers, etc.)  Other competitors, with less attractive link profiles are eating their lunch - out ranking them at every turn and at every region.

I explained the Penguin issues to the client a few weeks ago (in this case it could be Panda also) and nobody was willing to rip out an entire site architecture (including the CMS training of hundreds of owners... and other related issues) just in case their page 2 rating was caused an algorithmic penalty.   That's especially a hard sell when the entire system is providing good consumer experience and doing no fringe SEO.  The "new" architecture would look very similar to the old one - so nobody's buying that plan

the downside here is pretty obvious - Google Adwords. Having the same top level domain name in multiple accounts is a problem. This means that in a dense metro, several franchisees could not show adwords ads at the same time. This causes squabbles and fits.

But I'm trying to figure out in a post-Panda and post-Penguin world how to make sure my legit franchisee network does not look like we're trying to manipulate listings.  We just need to display the right listing in the right territory

Sadly, Google is not your friend when it comes to scaling this up.  Especially on Google Places.  Neither is Bing.   It's a mess.

I really appreciate your response and those from others

This is not a question about how this can be done but which is truly better for organic SEO, especially for the local franchisees.

I have several clients in different industries, each with their own deployment, none of which I think is ideal

I'll go as far as to identify:

• home service, 220 locations.

• health & fitness, 315 locations

• healthcare & wellness, 42 locations

I really do not follow the answer.   Did you read my original question through?

Hi all.. this is not a question about how this can be done but which is better for SEO.

Franchises make up 8% of the USA small business market.  This is no small potatoes.  But everything about Google seems designed for the unique, stand-alone business (Places, Analytics, Adwords, Duplicate Content Rules, etc.)  ... I think about this issue a lot so wanted to put it to the community.

Imagine a franchisor with 200 locations.  This company licenses its brand and business operations system - that's what a franchise is.  So each local franchisee starts out with a "content ready" website template which they are required to use for brand compliance.

(Each local franchisee has a Google Place page and a Local Website in their territory.)Assuming each solution has the same number of local citations around 50% duplicate content on its services pages (e.g. branding text)... which of the following does Google like best?

1. A single, customized CMS (e.g. Drupal) which places each franchisee site in a subfolder of the TLD.  Highly duplicated services pages are given canonical pointers to the main site's version.
   domain.com/location
2. A single, customized CMS (e.g. Drupal) which places each franchisee in a subdomain of the TLD.  Highly duplicated services pages are given canonical pointers to the main site's version. location.domain.com
3. A multi-manager dashboard (e.g. ManageWP) which operates an individual Wordpress installs on a single server (dedicated self-install server, sites share IPs)
   _localdomain.com _
4. A multi-manager dashboard which operates an individual Wordpress install on multiple, diverse servers (e.g. shared hosting on diverse hosts.)
   localdomain.com

I know that the best case would be for each franchisee individually to be so motivated to set up their own site and properly use brand elements, get links, etc. but this is impractical (trust me.)~~~~~~(*update 4/4/13 - I have written a blog post which describes what I think is the ideal franchise web marketing & SEO program and would welcome additional comments!)

Not at all.  I guess my feeling here is that there is a sort of untapped social graph defined by blogrolls.   If it were simple to harvest them upon visiting a blog (e.g. this blogger recommends...) one could do a stumble-on-steroids approach to a niche.

Hi Keri,

That is a very cool tool, but is overkill for this.   It takes far too many steps to accomplish only part of the desired goal of grabbing all blogroll URLs (within the blogroll DIV tag) and exporting the list to a valid OMPL file or URL list.

thanks!

nothing I saw there would do this.  It looks like it could manage to list all external links, and I suppose you could manually pick the blogroll out of it.

This question is entirely in the whitehat realm...

Let's say you've encountered a great blog - with a strong blogroll of 40 sites.

The 40-site blogroll is interesting to you for any number of reasons, from link building targets to simply subscribing in your feedreader.  Right now, it's tedious to extract the URLs from the site.  There are some "save all links" tools, but they are also messy.

Are there any good tools that will

a) allow you to grab the blogroll (only) of any site into a list of URLs  (yeah, ok, it might not be perfect since some sites call it "sites I like" etc.)

b) same, but export as OPML so you can subscribe.

Thanks!

Scott