Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks for your help Logan. This is exactly what I was looking for.

In Google Search Console, you'll want to verify ALL of those versions of your site. Then, in each version, tell Google which version that you prefer--the www or non-www version of your site. So, verify these: http://www. http:// https://www. https:// Choose to use ONE of those versions of your site. Then set up 301 redirects from all other versions to that version. Even though the redirects are in place you'll still want to verify them all in GSC.

Whenever you have products that are similar (but only different in color variations or size variations), you should use the canonical tag to specify this. Keep these URLs indexed, but generally speaking the canonical tag is there to help in these situations. There are literally thousands (or hundreds of thousands?) of sites using the canonical tag successfully.

Thanks Miriam - that makes good sense - many thanks for your feedback Luke

Hreflang is used at a page level, not at a site level. So no, you should not just set the hreflang tag on every page of www.mywebsite.com to read: So yes, if the German translation of the page www.mywebsite.com/page.html is available at www.mywebsite.de/page.html then you must do 2 things: 1. On www.mywebsite.com/page.html  use  <link rel='alternate' hreflang='de' href='http: mywebsite.de="" page.html'="">and <link rel='alternate' hreflang='en' href='http: mywebsite.com="" page.html'=""></link rel='alternate' hreflang='en' href='http:></link rel='alternate' hreflang='de' href='http:> 2. On www.mywebsite.de/page.html  <link rel='alternate' hreflang='en' href='http: mywebsite.com="" page.html'="">and <link rel='alternate' hreflang='de' href='http: mywebsite.de="" page.html'=""> </link rel='alternate' hreflang='de' href='http:></link rel='alternate' hreflang='en' href='http:> What this means is that the English page should link to itself and to all other language variants. And there should be "return tags", i.e. each of the language variations should link to themselves and to all other language variants.

Search engines won't index anchor URLs so that's not an option. I agree.   And, I would try to redirect to a URL that the search engines already have in their index.

Hi Dmitrii,  Thanks for the response! Our brand is quite known in our more established territories, but not where new locations are launching. Our industry is exterior painting, so we want to capture those users searching locally (example, exterior painters in (city name)).  My thought process was to optimize the "microsite homepage" for a local keyword query since our main website's homepage already ranks for our brand-name. So if there are branded searches, users will still land on our site. I'm new to SEO, so I'm just not 100% sure this is the best strategy.

It might be difficult to pin point it and we are still not out of the park, as we still need to get sitelinks for the normal brand phrase with the spacing. Thanks for your help!

There are a couple options that I see here: Go through the list of pages, find the most relevant equivalents on your current site, and 301 redirect them. Yes, 20,000 pages is a lot but you'll quickly fall into a groove where you find whole sections of pages that can be redirected to the same place. I did it with 65,000 or so URLs when SEOmoz moved to Moz, and it took about a month to plan out alongside my other tasks. It's tedious, but doable. Figure out which pages have the high-value links you want to preserve, 301 redirect those to their most-relevant equivalents, and redirect the rest to the home page. This won't work quite as well to preserve link equity or any traffic/rankings they might be getting, but it will be faster. Either way, once you've got those redirects in place I strongly recommend taking a look at the sites that link to the old pages, and seeing which ones you might be able to reach out to to get the links updated. That way, you won't be losing link value through the 301 - plus, you might strengthen or re-establish some relationships that could result in future links. Good luck!

No problem!

While that is kind of odd to do, it should not have any effect on your site's search engine rankings or visibility. Simply providing a sitemap file is not going to help or hurt rankings in any way. It will help them discover and crawl pages. That's all. A sitemap file is not required at all, and in fact some sites don't have them--they rely on Google's spiders to crawl their site through the links on their site. The sitemap is only a tool to help them crawl.

Thanks, this is super helpful

Your welcome.

Hi all, sorry for the delay, I am away on a business trip, this is why I stopped communicating the past few days. I can confirm that the latest entries (those after March) come as a single instance. However there are some minor exceptions like the one here Example of a recent article indexed in both desktop (even though desktop url is not the canonical) and mobile URL https://www.google.gr/search?q=site:neakriti.gr&biw=1527&bih=899&source=lnms&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiIxODGt5_MAhUsKpoKHdcUAkYQ_AUIBigA&dpr=1.1#q=site:neakriti.gr+1315539&tbs=qdr:w&filter=0 Also I noticed that with the "alternate" and "canonical" links the mobile version of the site doesn't get indexed anymore (with minor exceptions like the one above).

Every Subdomain is a domain with own Domain Autority. In general I would not use sub-domains - in a few special cases it is a good decision, but normally a sub-domain is a new domain starting at zero. I like Landing Pages and Blogs in subfolders wich helps a lot for the existing domains autority. By the way, links from subdomains du other subdomain (www, etc) are treaded like internal links. Q:whether having subdomain like this would affect the traffic metric and ineffect affect the SEO and Rankings of our site A: It would be better if it's a subfolder, but yes it will affect in traffic and that allways could lead you to better rankings Q: does not affect the increase in domain authority A: correct Q:considered as seperate websites A: yep! Q: wanted to make sure that it does help in the overall domain A: Like I said in A one it would be better with a subfolder (special the blog) but it wont hurt you

What if you use a concatenation formula in excel? If you have a list of all the old pages, and all the new then you could put them in separate columns and run a formula to fill in the required areas to the code. Seems like if there's a specific code that just needs the copy and paste touch, that could work in a pinch.

Danny is right. You can't geolocate a site to a continent. Goelocation assumes you're targeting a country or language. I wouldn't bother with a site.asia domain either if all you're worried about is latency. Instead, what I would do is work on geolocating your site. For instance, Amazon offers geolocation in their Route 53 product (country or latency). So you could host your site in the US and a copy in one of their Asian datacenters. This way, your visitors (and robots) will always go to site.com, but be served the fastest instance of your site. This avoids the duplicate content problem entirely. There are some other services and hosting out there that could probably help you do this as well.

Lauren, I don't think I would be concerned based solely on the basketball issue. My first guess with the outdoor vs. indoor basketballs or rubber vs. composite is that for whatever reason, there is less competition for the composite search or you have in some way out SEO'd one over the other. For me, the consumer, I like comparisons that are straightforward and abhor lengthy narrative. Why not have your narrative be about your product for sale and use an ordered list of some type for the comparison. So on left side vertical you would have many pebbles, rougher to touch, indoor, outdoor, both, etc. then have each of them at the top with a column underneath. Simple checkmarks show which is best for what. By having your narrative be about the product you are selling, you don't confuse others or the search engines. Also, I am assuming you are using product markup for your items? Hope that is helpful.

I'm gonna have to second EGOL on this. Sounds like you've got a pretty sweet thing going.

I honestly think that Google is aiming to be smart enough to understand that a red widget, green widget and blue widget are really all the same thing in different colors, and that at some point in the near future that kind of nuance will kill the need for 89 mostly duplicate pages. That feels really, really thin to me. As for getting the words on the page in a way that isn't utter spam, what about serving a photo caption along with a color selection? Making sure your images are appropriately named like "red-widget.png", working the colors in in such a way that they're providing useful context to the image being displayed?