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Unfortunately, hreflang does not support regional level targeting and is confined to country-level at this point.

We were faced with a similar issue with one of our clients, and in order to solve this, we had to rethink our URL structure so that it fits with hreflang's country-level targeting and allow us to have region-specific and service-specific pages under each country.

Hope that helps!

I agree with all that was said above and would add a couple of other points for you to check:

1- Check if there are any "Manual Actions" on Google Search Console for the domain and if there are any, see what they're about.

2- Check the backlink profile of the website using ahrefs, Majestic, SEMRush, MOZ, and see if there are any spammy domains. And if so, you'll need to disavow those domains through Search Console.

Hi Tara,

Since you already placed a 301 redirect from the old post to the new one, then you're all set and there is no need to delete the old posts because as soon as you, or a crawler, access the old page,s you'll be redirected to the new ones without "seeing" the old content.

If you are referring to deleting the content from your CMS, then you can go ahead and do so as they are not accessible anymore. Just make sure that the 301 redirects are still in place.

Hi JC,

I can see that the pages are indexed and showing up when running a "site:" search . So you're good on that front. The fact that its not ranking high enough is probably due to a number of factors.  I would suggest running a query for what you think each page should show up for, and seeing what's actually ranking in the first page. Check the content of the ranking pages, the main website, and run a high-level backlink analysis to give you an idea of what you're up against.

Once you identify the gaps, you'll get a good idea of what needs to be done to rank higher.

Great to hear all is sorted.

Do you mean you'll use the same URL for both ZH and ZH-TW languages?

I'm trying to fully understand what's the setup & the suggested approach. Ideally, you want a URL for ZH and a different URL for the ZH-TW page equivalent.

That's possible but really very difficult to answer with certainty. One of those things you'll need to accept that you'll really never know

Hi Pat,

I would avoid both options and advise redirecting the ranking pages to other pages of similar content in order to preserve their "value". Redirecting to the homepage is considered "bad practice" - more here: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-redirect-urls-home-26270.html

I would also advise serving a 410 HTTP Status for the pages that don't rank at all. This way you'll help search engines understand that those pages are permanently gone from your website.

Happy to answer further questions.

You can try this out:

• Define your main keywords

• Run them on https://answerthepublic.com/ to see all kinds of questions being asked around those main keywords. A lot of these questions can be good Blog topics.

• Take the output of that and run it in Google Ads Keyword Planner in your target country/region to see how much search volume (demand) exists for the topics/questions

• Run a manual search to see what's showing up for these topics/questions

• Write the blogs based on all the above, publish it,and then start promoting it

You can also try out Quora and see what questions are being asked about a specific topic, and repeat the above process starting from research in Google Adwords.

Hope that helps!

Its not a big problem and there is no need to start on a new domain. In fact, this is common with WordPress websites that are not updated regularly.

I would advise the following:

• Try to identify how did the hack take place - if its WordPress you can install the Sucuri Security (free) plugin that will help identify any compromised files.

• Cleanup the website by deleting all the spam sub-folders & pages.

• Update your WordPress, Theme and all Plugins (if this is a WordPress website).

• You can have a quick fix for all the 404s by submitting a 410 response code for these URLs. This can be done through a number of free redirection plugins on WordPress. If its not a WordPress site, there are a number of other options to get this done too.

Hope that helps.

Yes - the .co.uk is a stronger local signal than a .com

There are other factors that matter as well including you hosting  IP and you Search Console settings (International Targeting)

I would also take into consideration any future growth plans for other countries? If that is the case, then maybe a .com would be a better option.

This could possibly be because of the different filters and combinations you have you your category and sub-category pages. I would recommend doing the following :

• Block access to unwanted pages through robots.txt

• Setup the canonicals properly so that all different types of filtering combinations will always point to the main category/sub-category pages

• Make sure your Pagination is properly setup with each page having its canonical pointing to  itself and the "rel=next/prev" included (although Google has mentioned that it has stopped supporting those, I would still recommend implementing them)

Here's a good guide on Magento SEO:

https://paulnrogers.com/magento-technical-seo-issues-to-look-out-for/

Hope that helps!

Hi Ken,

Running a  quick "site:" query on both URLs, I can see that they are indexed.

You can use the robots.txt tester from the Old Search Console interface and comment out the lines that could be contributing to the block.

In all cases, the pages are sitting in the index as of this writing.

There are a number of points to mention here:

Firstly. hreflang is not a ranking signal, and therefore it will not provide a ranking boost.

Secondly, Google will not auto-translate the pages because hreflang was implemented. You'll need to do the translation yourself.

Thirdly, you don't have to translate all pages of your website to Duth, only the ones that would make sense to translate. For example, there could be blog posts that would resonate with an English speaking audience, but not a Dutch one, so there wouldn't be a need to translate these posts. The opposite could be true too.

What hreflang does, is that it helps search engines understand which pages are meant to rank for which languages and in which countries. The actual implementation can get tricky if you have multiple languages and several countries and I would recommend looking into a few tutorials/documentation on this, including:

• Moz's hreflang guide: https://moz.com/learn/seo/hreflang-tag

• Yoast's hreflanf guide: https://yoast.com/hreflang-ultimate-guide/

• Google's documentation on hreflang: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

Hope that helps!

I wouldn't worry about it as search bots "should" understand that these pages are part of a paginated series.

However, I would recommend you ensure that "rel=next/prev" is properly implemented (despite Google announcing that they don't support it).  Once the pagination is properly implemented & understood, bots will see the pages as a continuation of a series, and therefore will not see duplicate H1s as a problem.