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Hello,

Thanks for the answer.

if I merge all the similar pages to much fewer pages what will happen with the internal links?

Hello,

I have a website which from February 6 is keep losing positions. I have not received any manual actions in the Search Console. However I have read the following article a few weeks ago and it look a lot with my case:

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-cut-down-on-similar-content-pages-25223.html

I noticed that google has remove from indexing 44 out of the 182 pages of my website. The pages that have been removed can be considered as similar like the website that is mentioned in the article above.

The problem is that there are about 100 pages that are similar to these. It is about pages that describe the cabins of various cruise ships, that contain one picture and one sentence of max 10 words.

So, in terms of humans this is not duplicate content but what about the engine, having in mind that sometimes that little sentence can be the same?

And let’s say that I remove all these pages and present the cabin details in one page, instead of 15 for example, dynamically and that reduces that size of the website from 180 pages to 50 or so, how will this affect the SEO concerning the internal links issue?

Thank you for your help.

You're right. We checked the thing in detail and in fact there are a lot of collateral follow links created from certain viral pins.

No mystery after all!

Hello Dmitrii,

I will agree with you but the case with this website is raising to us a couple of more serious questions which I did not mention. This website was severely hit by penguin 1. It lost many positions, many #1 positions and throw it to ranking to page #2 or #3. However due to the mid to low importance for the certain website by the owner no actions were taken toward regaining the positions or refreshing the link profile.

So the only difference between the 2012 link profile which led to the penguin punishment and the 2017 link profile which led to recovery, not a full one though, is those 500K+ pinterest links. To be honest we haven't made any thorough research on the case of collateral link gaining caused by pinterest but in general terms no further links were added.

This is what is making us having second thoughts about the actual value of the social media links.

Hello,

First of all I know that all the links which come from Pinterest are no follow.

However about 4 years ago we made a campaign to pinterest for one of the websites we are managing. Although the thing was going well we had to stop it for various reasons.

Right now, 4 years later, this thing has grown big without any move for us! All these years our pins, which were great in many aspects, were continuously reppined. This has lead to the point where the Google Search Console is reporting that about 500.000 links are linking to our website from Pinterest.

We know how this has helped us or not concerning the actual refferring traffic from Pinterest but our main question, and this where we want the Moz's community help, is how is this helping from a SEO aspect.

Thank you!

Hi Dirk,

Thank you very much for your answer!

Hi,

I noticed that some websites host their images to a different url than the one their actually website is hosted but in the end google link to the one that the site is hosted. Here is an example:

This is a page of a hotel in booking.com:

http://www.booking.com/hotel/us/harrah-s-caesars-palace.en-gb.html

When I try a search for this hotel in google images it shows up one of the images of the slideshow. When I click on the image on Google search, if I choose the Visit Page button it links to the url above but the actual image is located in a totally different url: http://r-ec.bstatic.com/images/hotel/840x460/135/13526198.jpg

My question is can you host your images to one site but show it to another site and in the end google will lead to the second one?

Hey there,

Thank you all for helping with this...

Hi,

It seems that multilingual sites can be very tricky sometimes. This is the second problem we are facing with a client this month...

A company which already has a presence in Spain wants to expand now in Portugal, Brazil and Argentina.

There are some linguistic differences between Spain Spanish and Argentina Spanish so we will have a slightly different content but same url (check below)

We will also cover the linguistic differences between Portuguese and Brazilian but with different urls, so we will have 4 pages serving the same content in 3 ( technically 4 ) different languages:

company.com/idioma -> (original Spain Spanish page - url stays the same.)

company.com/es-ar/idioma (Argentina url)

company.com/pt-pt/idioma (Portugal url)

company.com/pt-br/lingua (Brazil url)

Normally we know we should use alternate hreflang to all 4 pages, but now that the url changes, e.g between Argentina and Brazil, the case is the same or we can omit it for these two countries?

Thank you!

Hey Patrick,

Thank you very much for your answer, it is very helpful.

Hi,

We want create 2 company websites and each to be targeted specific to different countries. The 2 countries are Australia and New Zealand.

We have acquired 2 domains, company.com.au and company.co.nz . We want to do it like this and not use different hreflang on the same version for maximum ranking results in each country (correct?).

Since both websites will be in English, inevitably some page are going to be the same.

Are we facing any danger of duplicate content between the two sites, and if we do is there any solution for that?

Thank you for your help!

Hello,

I am in a very complicated situation.

I have a site in Itaian which is targeted in Italy by webmaster tools so the majority of the organic traffic comes from there and everything is fine.

However this site got a link from a major international site. So now I get traffic from all over the world but I can't take advantage of it. From the Italian traffic I get from this site I see high pageviews numbers and many minutes in average visitor time.

The problem in this situation is that for many reasons this website cannot be translated so I can put many language choices in this site.

I want to ask, If I put, let's say an English flag in top of my site, that will indicate the English language, but instead of the user to see an English version of the site he/she will be redirected(no follow link) to another site of the same content in English, will this violate any of Google's guideline or hurt the seo of the original site?

Thank you all!

Thank you, this was helpful!!

Hello,

I will ask something that is probably been asked before, but I cannot find the answer, so excuse me.

I have a website, www.example.com, and I want to add a binding to my server so when someone also hits example.com (without www in front) to be landed normally to my site.

The question is if this will affect the seo of the site in any way - duplicate content etc?

Thank you!

Well people, thank you for your responses!

It is gonna be under my domain in a blog section in my website!

Thanks!

Thank you Brad.

Your answer is very enlightening!

which site?

Hello,

I would like to create a blog but i do know where. The options are to create a blog on a platform like blogspot or wordpress or make a 'blog' section to my website - travel content.

Which do you think is the best?

If I create it in my website, would that boost my ranking or authority?

Thank you!!!!

Mat,

There was a massive production of pages in the mid October 2011 and there was a drop in traffic around November - there was a panda update then.

The problem is that for that the certain niche there is always a small drop for the site concerning Oct, Nov and Dec so it is not so clear to judge!

Hello,

I am in a very weird position. I am managing a website(EMD) which a part of it dynamically creates pages. The former webmaster who create this system though that this would help with SEO but I dought!

The thing is that now the site has about 1500 pages which must look duplicate but are they really duplicate? Each page has a unique URL but the content is pretty much the same: one image and a different title with 5-8 words.

There is more: All these pages are not accessible by the users but only for the crawlers!!! This URL machine is a part of a php - made photo gallery which i never understood the sense of it!

The site overall is not performing very well in SERP, especially after Penguin, but judging by the link profile, the Domain authority, construction (ok besides that crazy photo gallery) and content, it never reached the position it should have in the past.

The majority of these mysterious pages - and mostly their images - are cached by Google and some of them are in top places to some SERP - the ones that match the small title on page - but  the numbers are poor, 10 - 15 clicks per month.

Are these pages considered as duplicated, although they are cached, and is it safe for the site just to remove 1500 at once?

The seomoz tools have pointed some of them as dups but the majority not!

Can these pages impact the image of the whole site in search engines?( drop in Google and has disappeared from Yahoo and Bing!)

Do I also have to tell Google about the removal?

I have not seen anything like it before so any comment would be helpful!

Thank you!

Hey Reymond,

Thank for the reply.

From my experience on penguin, concerning EMDs, I agree with you on the devaluation of certain links which used to give me the #1 in US, but what about the #1 in Canada?

Tricky situation!

Hi Stefan,

Before penguin the EMD was at #1 solid. The other websites that came above after the 24th of April were not even the 1st page of SERP.

That is why I think it is the penguin.

I own an EMD which was hit by google penguin.

I lost my #1 position to Google US SERP and went to #5 for the keyword which applies to the EMD.

What I have tried so far is deleting the exact anchor text links from the footers of my c-block sites.

That did not seem to help because i did not gain any position from that change.

I also altered my meta title, description and keywords because they were spamming a bit. Things did not improved.

My  Links w/ Exact Anchor Text is at 5%,

Linking Root Domains w/ Exact Anchor Text at 3%

The web pages that are above me are to 0% to both categories because they are not showing up with their main page.

What is going on?

The thing that confuses me the most is that i am also targeting for two other markets, Australia and Canada. In Canada I have maintained my #1 and to Australia I lost my first position falling to #2.

I did not receive any message to my webmaster tools account and never made any black hat link building.

Is the EMD fact the problem, but why not for other markets except US?

Penguin has run to other markets(CA, AU) as well becuase i have seen a drop to other keywords and also to my traffic.

Really what do you think?

Well, you have been very helpful!

Thank you SEO people!

Hello,

On the last crawl of a website of mine, seomoz pointed out about 1500 errors (ouch!) on my site. I have made some corrections and i just want to see if they are at the right way but the next crawl is in a week.

Is there any way so i can force a crawl before the scheduled date?

Thanks!