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Hi All, We are experiencing issues with pages that have been 404'd being indexed. Originally, these were /wp-content/ index pages, that were included in Google's index. Once I realized this, I added in a directive into our htaccess to 404 all of these pages - as there were hundreds. I tried to let Google crawl and remove these pages naturally but after a few months I used the URL removal tool to remove them manually. However, Google seems to be continually re/indexing these pages, even after they have been manually requested for removal in search console. Do you have suggestions? They all respond to 404's. Thanks

Hello, Currently, we have a .com English website serving an international clientele. As is the case we do not currently target any countries in Google Search Console. However, the UK is an important market for us and we are seeing very low traffic (almost entirely US). We would like to increase visibility in the UK, but currently for English speakers only. My question is this - would geo-targeting a subfolder have a positive impact on visibility/rankings or would it create a duplicate content issue if both pieces of content are in English? My plan was: 1. Create a geo-targeted subfolder (website.com/uk/) that copies our website (we currently cannot create new unique content) 2. Go into GSC and geo-target the folder to the UK 3. Add the following  to the /uk/ page to try to negate duplicate issues. Additionally, I can add a rel=canonical tag if suggested, I just worry as an already international site this will create competition between pages However, as we are currently only targeting a location and not the language at this very specific point, would adding a ccTLD be advised instead? The threat of duplicate content worries me less here as this is a topic Matt Cutts has addressed and said is not an issue. I prefer the subfolder method as to ccTLD's, because it allows for more scalability, as in the future I would like to target other countries and languages. Ultimately right now, the goal is to increase UK traffic. Outside of UK backlinks, would any of the above URL geo-targeting help drive traffic? Thanks

Hello, Our company is international and we are looking to gain more traffic specifically from Europe. While I am aware that translating content into local languages, targeting local keywords, and gaining more European links will improve rankings, I am curious if it is worthwhile to have a company.eu domain in addition to our company.com domain. Assuming the website's content and domain will be exactly the same, with the TLD (.eu vs .com) being the only change - will this add us benefit or will it hurt us by creating duplicate content - even if we create a separate GSC property for it with localized targeting and hreflang tags? Also - if we have multiple languages on our .eu website, can different paths have differing hreflangs? IE: company.eu/blog/german-content German hreflang and company.eu/blog/Italian-content Italian hreflang. I should note - we do not currently have an hreflang attribute set on our website as content has always been correctly served to US-based English speaking users - we do have the United States targeted in Google Search Console though. It would be ideal to target countries by subfolder rather if it is just as useful. Otherwise, we would essentially be maintaining two sites. Thanks!

Hello, I have a broken plugin creating hundreds of WP-Content directory pages being indexed by Google. I can not access the source code of these pages to add a noindex to them. The page URL's all have the plugin name within them.  In order to resolve the issue, I wrote a solution with javascript to dynamically add in a noindex tag to any URL containing the plugin name. Would this noindex be respected by Google and is there a way to immediately check that it is respected? Currently, I can not delete the plugin due to issues with it's php. If you would like to view the code: https://codepen.io/trodrick/pen/Gwwaej?editors=0010 Thanks!

Hi All, The site I am working on is built on Wordpress. The plugin Revolution Slider was downloaded. While no longer utilized, it still remained on the site for some time. This plugin began creating hundreds of URLs containing nothing but code on the page. I noticed these URLs were being indexed by Google. The URLs follow the structure: www.mysite.com/wp-content/uploads/revslider/templates/this-part-changes/ I have done the following to prevent these URLs from being created & indexed: 1. Added a directive in my Htaccess to 404 all of these URLs 2. Blocked /wp-content/uploads/revslider/ in my robots.txt 3. Manually de-inedex each URL using the GSC tool 4. Deleted the plugin However, new URLs still appear in Google's index, despite being blocked by robots.txt and resolving to a 404. Can anyone suggest any next steps? I Thanks!

Hello All, Our website currently has a general solutions subdirectory, which then links to each specific solution, following the path /solutions/ => /solutions/solution1/. As our solutions can be quite complex, we are adding another subdirectory to target individuals by profession. I would like to link from our profession pages to the varying solutions that help. As both subdirectories will be top level pages in the main menu, would linking from our professions to **solutions **be poor architecture? In this case the path would look like: /professions/ => /professions/profession1/ => /solutions/solution1/. Thanks!

Hello, I would like my website to remain crawlable to bots, but to block my wp content and media. Does the following robots.txt work? I worry that the * user agent may conflict with the others. User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /wp-content/ User-agent: GoogleBot
Allow: / User-agent: GoogleBot-Mobile
Allow: / User-agent: GoogleBot-Image
Allow: / User-agent: Bingbot
Allow: / User-agent: Slurp
Allow: /

Hi all, I have suddenly noticed a massive jump in indexed pages. After performing a "site:" search, it was revealed that the sudden jump was due to the indexation of many pages beginning with the serp title "Index of /wp-content/uploads/" for many uploaded pieces of content & plugins. This has appeared approximately one month after switching to https. I have also noticed a decline in Bing rankings. Does anyone know what is causing/how to fix this? To be clear, these pages are **not **normal /wp-content/uploads/ but rather "index of" pages, being included in Google. Thank you.

Hello, We are ranking for an acronym, which I understand can lead to fickle rankings. However, we have two pages ranking page one - two for the same keyword, but they do so in spite of each other. By this I mean, one page will rank, while the other is nowhere to be found. It seems that the one page (a blog post) is more likely to rank on the weekends while the product page is more likely to rank on the weekdays. I would like the product page to rank all the time, and to target another keyword with the blog post. Would removing the keyword from the blog post allow the product page to rank all the time - or would it lead to no pages ranking during times when the blog post would otherwise be ranking? I should note the blog post has more external links and is not exactly optimized for the keyword, while the product page has more internal links and is optimized for the keyword.

Hello, We have moved our site to https, Google Analytics seems to be tracking correctly. However, I have seen some conflicting information, should I create a new view in analytics? Additionally, should I also create a new https property in Google search console and set it as the preferred domain? If so, should I keep the old sitemap for my http property while updating the sitemap to https only for the https property? Thirdly, should I create a new property as well as new sitemaps in Bing webmaster? Finally, after doing a crawl on our http domain which has a 301 to https, the crawl stopped after the redirect, is this a result of using a free crawling tool or will bots not be able to crawl my site after this redirect? Thanks for all the help in advance, I know there are a lot of questions here.

After doing a site crawl using the moz tool, I have found two home pages-www.domain.com/ and www.domain.com. Both URLS have the exact same metrics and I have set a preferred domain name in google, will this hurt seo? Should I claim the www.domain.com/ as well as www.domain.com and domain.com in the search console? Thanks