Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Neither.  Duplicate content is not a punishment. It is a relevance issue. Google simply thinks the duplicate site is a clone of many sites and there irrelevant. Some sites with greater authority it does work for - but google will only pick one site to display. Hence the other site considers it a punishment as they have the same content - but not displayed. Think of it in fashion, people do not usually line of for mass market product, they line up for the limited edition. Google does not want to show mass market, the same thing over and over again - it wants to show unique relevant content.

Hi Kristen, I did this recently and it worked. The important part is that you need to block the pages in robots.txt or add a noindex tag to the pages to stop them from being indexed again. I hope this helps.

Yep, there are no pages below /mobile/ so it should be all good. Thanks.

Hi Guys, Thanks so much for the responses - I will speak to the client.  They were totally unaware of the impact that this would have on them and they were in fact told they must do this (this was by one of the largest web dev. companies in NZ btw!)

Thanks Matt

Thanks everybody for your help. We are still figuring out why the click rate in WMT has dropped but we discovered the main reason of our traffic drop. Our external advertising company had added a Analytics tracker in an external script which was interfering with the normal measurements. When I checked the codes last week with the Chrome plugin everything was fine but I was visiting the site with my Ad blocker activated (so the external script wasn't called). When I visited the site today with Ad block de-activated it indicated that our tag wasn't measuring. The external tracking code was removed & traffic went back to previous levels (it's a bit scary to realise that about 50% of our visits have the ad blocker activated) Dirk

Hello HoosierCrane Did anyone come back to you on this? Did you install the plugin? If so have you been satisfied? Best regards, Peter

Hi, This won't give you any issues as long as there is not two different visions of the same page e.g https and http. Some sites have different parts of their site in https and other parts in http. You just need to see if there is two different visions showing up. If there is than you need to look at cleaning this up. I won't lie it is hard doing this in bigcommerce because it's a closed system not like wordpress or another open source system. In saying that I personally like having it one way or the other but to go back to your question. It is fine as long as there is only one vision.

So because my entire site is a marketplace of personal trainers (and only personal trainers) I won't need to create another category Correct. URL structure is such an infinitesimally small ranking factor, it's not worth your time trying to change it at this point.

Hi Peter, Both really good answers to your questions above but maybe it would be good to give you some further pointing in the right direction. Perhaps you could answer the questions below and I can give you my personal opinion on which method would be best: will you be putting an equal amount of marketing (content, PR, etc.) into the Spanish version for example compared with English? are you able to offer  fully localised service eg, Spanish customer service, Spanish sales team etc.? is your company well-known globally? It's important not to also forget that another option is using ccTLDs (eg, .co.uk, .com.au). These give the highest signal to search engines about the country being targeted and also importantly make you look more "local" which can do wonders for increasing conversion rate in countries where your company is not well-known.

Strictly speaking - you are not using the correct url in the link. Your code:  => however this url doesn't exist but is 301 redirected to https://de.yourdomain.com/**a**bout-us Could you try changing the url to small caps & test again with the hreflang tester flang.dejanseo.com.au  (which is also indicating the same error as WMT) Dirk

Thanks so much!

Thanks Dmitrii, your thread helped me a lot to understand.

Hi Robert, Thanks for your prompt response. Then what do you think the reason for my sites drop in rankings when Panda 4.2 was updated. I have attached my index status as well as Organic Traffic. Panda 4.2 started on July 17th and on July 19th my index status increased and from July 19th my organic traffic went down. Any advice on this. pRs1jfs.png hoy6uIj.png

Sorry, I meant 'disabled' not 'enabled' which is the default

Thanks, Josh. I'm certainly focusing on content creation and site optimization, though this looks like a manipulation on their part. If the 301's are not being counted, would they still redirect to the site they want to value? Thanks, Scott

I think Tom lays this out quite well and I would follow this advice.

Thanks alot!

Hi. Wow! Never heard of such problem ever before. I'm not even sure how that's possible. Are you sure that it's OS, not certain machine/virus etc? Also is it happening in every browser? As for redirect, as far as I know, there is no way to intercept OS versions. Even if there is, it would be extremely weird and not making sense. I'd look into other SSLs which are "normal".

Hi Cyrus, Thanks for the feedback. I'm concerned that some of the other more urgent on-site optimisation changes will already impact traffic volume in the short-term so I don't want to compound this further by making the switch over to HTTPS. So this is off the table for now. Thanks everyone for the feedback on this. More on the discussion side, Google shouldn't really be re-evaluating URLs when there is a protocol change in my opinion, especially when moving from http to https. It seems this would discourage site owners from making the move as organic traffic would be more valuable than user privacy. -Jason