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Hi Angelos, Each one of your ccTLDs require their own unique SEO process, as they target different audiences that will search differently (language, seasonality, product/service preferences) and different competitors in each market, that will need a specific keyword research, optimization & link building actions, based on the characteristics and goals that you identify in each one of them. So, my suggestions to start doing international SEO are: 1. Do a specific keyword & competition research for each one of them. Support yourself with a native speaker (even if it's in English and you also speak English, if it's a research for the UK, then have a British doing the research, as they might search with specific, different terms). Based on this research you will be able to identify your keywords target. 2. Do a technical, content & link audit of each ccTLD. Beyond the typical optimization related elements you will validate, it's important that you compare each of your ccTLDs link profile vs. the ones of your competitors for each country market: What's the gap? What are the link characteristics and volume? What type of links do you need to close the popularity gap? Where do these links to your competitors for each country come from? Based on these data you will be able to establish the necessity and strategy for a link building campaign. 3. Verify how you're ranking with each ccTLD in Google SERPs for each country and the organic search traffic from each country. You mention that you are redirecting the traffic although don't specify how. In general, I wouldn't recommend redirects only in very specific circumstances. To avoid country visibility and traffic misalignment issues what I would recommend is to use hreflang annotations instead. 4. Start tracking and monitoring your results independently in each country market. Most rank trackers support this. You should monitor each independently in Google Search Console, as well as they should have their own Google Analytics to monitor their traffic & conversion behavior per property and country. So as you can see: Each property focused on a specific country market will require a specific SEO process, analysis and effort. Check out this checklist: https://moz.com/blog/the-international-seo-checklist as well as post here: https://blog.kissmetrics.com/how-to-international-seo/ to start. I hope this helps

Hi James! Did Luke's resource help? Do you still need some help?

Thank you! I just always felt like, why use the plugin? When I could hard code it in on a server level. It wouldn't even need the website to still get the redirects!

You definitely don't want to appear as though you're running a private blogging network for links. Google's gotten way more sophisticated these days about detecting who's connected to whom, even beyond your domain registration Who.is info. That said, if your sites naturally work together, you shouldn't have much of an issue, especially if you're getting outside traffic and links.

Awesome - thanks for your help Mike! I really appreciate it! Jeff

Hi Steve, First of all, don't worry about internal pages being added that have a 301 feeding them. Remember that link juice flows all ways, not just continues down a site structure. I think I understand what you mean above, and I would copy the content from the old pages, produce them on the new site and then have a 301 that points from the existing pages to the new pages on the mens. All this tells Google is that the content has moved from one location to another and it doesn't need to get any more complicated than that. By all means, rewrite the content if you feel it needs a bit more of a mail spin, but a cross-domain 301 is not an issue. Google talks about these issues here as well. -Andy

Hi Faisal, On the local part of your question: yes, if you want to target 3 different cities, the most common proceeding would be to create a really strong unique landing page for each city. This blog post may help: https://moz.com/blog/overcoming-your-fear-of-local-landing-pages

Just noticed this response. I got a hold of someone at Microsoft and what happened was the site was never re-indexed as https. This drop in traffic lasted a few 6 weeks or so while the site was being re-indexed. It is now back to normal. So strange there was a year delay in htps indexing.

Hi James! I'm not sure what happened, but your 2 queries are most definitely not in your question. What can we help you with?

No problem Cliff. I hope you found it helpful, and I'm happy to hear this has been cleared up for you. It's something I'll keep in mind if anyone else has a similar issue.

Oleg is right, you should be using canonical tags in this case. However, keep in mind that you can also tell Google, in Google Search Console, which parameters to ignore. If you're using tracking parameters on a regular basis then you'll want to do that, as well. And you should tell Bing Webmaster Tools, as well, to ignore those parameters. Another option is to list those parameters in your site's robots.txt file so that they're not indexed.

Hello CHolidays, I don't see the pop-ups. Has this been changed since your post? Often times on eCommerce sites you'll have a "quick view" window to see the item in a larger photo, and possibly read the product description. There is no single answer as to how this affects SEO because there are many ways to implement it. If I could see an example I would have more feedback. I noticed while checking out the site that you have a broken link in the main navigation. It's the one that goes to the Island-Escapes page (Vacations).

Hi, Thank you both for your replies. I am working through onsite optimisation as this has been overlooked in the past, but it's a huge task for such a big task and taking up all of my time. We do have schema and I have tried implementing the sitelinks search box but nothing shows in Google - I thought they chose who to show schema for? I'll read the articles Thanks!

Hi there Donna nails it here. You can't predict DA in the future. The best you can do is make sure your onsite and offsite SEO is on point and that you are following best practices put forth by Google. There is a great resource from Moz on Domain Authority and what you can be doing to make sure that you are taking proper steps to ensure higher DA in the future. Best practices + time = higher DA. That's the best prediction you get, but at least the future is bright! Hope this helps in addition to Donna's answer - good luck! Patrick

Hi Sachin, AMP isn't really meant yet for product pages as it's mostly something that works for publishers on pages that have a lot of content and not really a next step as in e-commerce store. But because of a plugin you would already be able to instantly create the millions of pages as the code takes care of the data and it won't mean you have to set it up everywhere.

Hi there! Apologies for the long wait for a response! It's sort of a convoluted answer. For practical purposes, the search engines treat subdomains as their own separate domains. So, even though Blogger.com has a DA of 92, if you were to start a blog there you'd still be "starting over" when it comes to building link authority. A new blog there will notbenefit from blogger.com's existing authority. Where Open Site Explorer and the Mozscape index are concerned, though, you'll still see a DA of 92 on that new, not-yet-established blog. In the simplest terms, that's because OSE calculates _domain _authority, not subdomain authority. So, in this case, Page Authority would be the better metric by which to evaluate your new blog, as it will be specific to the home page at yourblog.blogger.com. Does that make sense?

The page wasn't a time sensitive query at all, it's a product page which we traditionally rank well for. I've checked out links to the page as well and i haven't seen anything out of the ordinary. I'm hoping it's testing related with the new Penguin release like you've stated. Thanks!

I always find these discussions interesting mainly because of the "nobody knows" factor. What I want to point out more than any one particular thing is that there are a limited number of 'ranking factors.' Whether that number is 200, 50, 3, or 3000, it's limited. Whenever one tactic loses its effectiveness simple math says that other factors increased in importance. Google is very, very good at messing with SEOs. If keyword density is limited or removed, something took its place. Something that isn't "create quality content."  Most serious competitors are creating high quality, relevant content. If you think the difference in ranking one bank over another is "quality content" on a target page for "home loan" you're lying to yourself. Backlinks, age of the page, age of the site, internal links, anchor text, and some level of "keyword density" (though I think it's much more sophisticated than that" definitely helps. H1s still matter, as do H2s and H3s, tbh. I have competitive keywords ranking with NO on-page content AND no backlinks. The page literally has a title, H1 tag and the surrounding menus & sidebars. It ranks for gambling-related keyphrases in a supposedly hard to rank niche and has ranked for months (with zero on-page text.) SEMRush shows that same site rank for over 1200 keyphrases. It has ONE backlink to the homepage. That's it. I wish that was the only example. But I am ranking semi-competitive marketing & SEO related keyphrases on a site with about 8 links and virtually no content. If content + links = SEO, these would never rank. So again, it's beyond that. Age of the domain? No, one is brand new. One is older. One is registered for more than a year, one for less. One is an EMD, one is not. We've had new clients struggle & struggle to rank for really easy keyphrases with no backlink spam, technical on-site looks good and titles/content/links are all in line with other (ranking) clients. We put all their content on a new domain & it ranks just fine. NO links. SEO is just weird. Let's face it - we're all attempting to do the best we can for clients but at the end of the day, none of it truly makes that much sense.

As far as the dropdown menus are crawl-able and Google can see what content is available in those menus I don’t think there is an issue. The only reason why I will go for first option is because, it will work great on mobile and other devices. With old style menu, there will be UX issue on mobile specially. Just a thought!

In my opinion: No, you should not. The result will be that those URLs are indexed but with a standard description to the effect that google knows the URL exists but not what is behind it; titles may be taken from links or past data. Canonical is the way to go. Regards Nico