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Hi Rhys, Yes, I'd say if there's any ambiguity at all, it's better to implement hreflang. Even if there's only a small chance of confusion. For example, assuming there's an English-speaking customer based in China, you probably want them to see your English-language site. Google might get it right without your guidance, but if there's no hreflang, they might send the user to the .com.cn site because it seems more geographically appropriate. (And yes, I know Google pulled out of China but they are preparing to re-open there in some form, so now is a good time to prepare). Basically, yes: hreflang isn't very complicated—especially with just two languages—so do sit down and think about the most suitable site for each combination of language and location, and then write out your hreflang tags from there.

Hello! Interesting question. I'd like to probe a little, but let's tackle the easy stuff first... You can use a canonical URL tag in the header of each of your pages to reference which version you'd like Google to consider the 'correct' version of a page. For example, on www.domain1.com/page/, you can set a canonical URL tag of www.domain2.com/page/. This acts as a 'strong hint' to Google that you consider these pages to be equivalent, and that you'd like the www.domain2.com version to inherit all of the signals from the www.domain1.com example. This isn't a perfect solution, mind you. If you still have lots of links (internal or external), equity, coverage or other forms of attention pointing at the www.domain1.com example, this page might still have some of the authority and signals. You're essentially asking Google nicely to move the value, and hoping that they agree that that's OK / the right decision. From a technical perspective, I'm assuming that your setup will involve serving a single site from both domains, and in which case, the content/tech/templates/URLs are the same, apart from the domain. Assuming that this is the case, you need to make sure that every page is a one-to-one, like-for-like match. You shouldn't point everything at the homepage, for example, and you should also make sure that things like category pages, listings, and other templated or procedurally generated pages also use canonical tagging. If your tech setup is more complex than this, you'll need to do some thinking on how you 'map' canonical tags between the various versions of your pages and content - something which might require some planning and further investigation. As an additional consideration, there's no guarantee that the www.domain1.com won't show up in search results if people search for it directly, or if that version of the page has disproportionately high amounts of authority (as I outlined above). And whilst you could use meta robots noindex tags on the www.domain1.com pages _and _canonical tags, there are mixed schools of thoughts on whether this is safe - it may be that Google interprets this as an instruction to inherit the noindex attribute on the www.domain2.com example. As for your particular scenario, I'd be interested in understanding why you want to maintain the original/current version of the website 'for users'. If I can understand a bit more about the business requirements and what success looks like, it may be that I can refine your options a bit. I note that some of the other answers have referenced domain forwarding/masking, and 301 redirects. I'd be hesitant to do anything with either, without a better understanding of your setup. Conditional and user-based 301 redirects can be risky if not implemented very carefully (and don't solve for your canonical / equity challenge), and domain forwarding is rarely an SEO-friendly solution (you're just making your website available from more/other domains). Hopefully this is helpful; it'd be great to dig deeper.

Hi, You can use any separator like |, - or comma. No removing brand name doesn't hurt you any way. I would suggest you to use Brand name in hompage, about us and contact us page and you can leave rest of the page due to character count limit. I'm sharing a latest whiteboard on Title tag by Cyrus @ https://moz.com/blog/title-tag-hacks-whiteboard-friday Hope this helps. Thanks

Hi, At the moment, sitelinks are automated. Please also check below thread. https://moz.com/community/q/how-to-get-sitelinks-in-organic-serps Thanks

Pleasure jurginga

Hi Mirko, I think you'll find that Google (almost) always re-writes titles with the brand name at the front when it's the homepage. For that reason, I always write homepage title tags with the brand name at the front. Are you seeing other pages on your site having the title re-written in SERPs? Cheers, David

I've seen that happen before Martin. Is it possible the old (.nl) version of the site is still sitting on a server somewhere and getting accessed (and indexed) by Google?

Hi Alick, I should explain that we're a landing page platform so the /clkn/ tracking links that are getting indexed are getting indexed on our customer domains, not ours. Therefore we'd have no access to Google Search Console to make any tweaks. i.e.  http://customerdomain.com/clkn/http/destination-url.com Secondly, this URL ^ does not contain any parameters, so the fix you mentioned above doesn't apply. Any other ideas?

I don't think that's the correct use of these tags. See here. Possible negative side effects are only the blog post considered as "page 1" would be indexed. Pagination is for paginated content where one blog post or article is split up into several pages. In this case you'd want to send readers to page 1 usually. I would remove the tags. You can have links to the previous and next article for the user though.

As Martin has said (and others in the helpful link he provided), it's perfectly normal for fluctuations to occur. Before you decide that it's a problem with your site or page, you should check to if your competition is experiencing similar fluctuations. Check out Mozcast too. There has been a lot of fluctuation in the SERPs lately.

Many thanks, Donald - hugely appreciated!

Thanks for clarifying and explaining Cristian. I know the speed is awful! I've just recently inherited the project so I'm trying to redo some of the pages aesthetically and work on speed issues in the near future as well. Thanks

If you want to rank for local you should try to implement schemas at your website. Another option is to make a research of your competition. So if you are in the second position why don't you are making a research about the first place? backlinks / anchor text / referring sites. Instead of trying to optimize everything, I always try to optimize those factor that will help to beat the competitor next to me on the top.

Hi Robert, There was a google update in March which Gary Illyes jokingly referred to is as "Fred" - Fred Update. The main purpose of that update to target websites with thin content, low-quality content or spammy links. I think your keyword is the victim of that update. Hope you find your answer. Thanks, Shahzad A

If you set it up your site (blog) on the settings as non-www version. you should add some 301 redirect plugin

Let me understand your question. Your website is indexed but when you check on the search engine your website won't appear on the search result, right? So here is my advice first you need to check your search console. Search Console > Search Analytics > Download the report, then you will have a clear idea of your keywords ranked, anchor text, position, CTR and so on. Organize your keywords by themes and then start to optimize your site with those themes/keywords.

Thanks for the response @Nicholas White . We are thinking about duplicating the site and updating the content and imagery on the new site and leave the other one active. Once we hit critical mass then we setup the redirects as to now take the hit in the short term. What do you think? Anybody done this before?

Hi Zack! Migrating your site to HTTPS all your URLs will turn into HTTPS. So, there will no need to keep the old sitemap alive or keep track of the http indexation. Of course you must keep track of the indexation of the new site. Remember to create a new Search Console profile for that. Here, an excellent article and a checklist on everthing you should do in a HTTPS migration. The HTTP to HTTPs Migration Checklist in Google Docs to Share, Copy & Download, from Aleyda Solis. Hope this helped you. Best luck. GR.