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Luke, This technically wouldn't cause any ill-effects on you SEO efforts since your URLs aren't changing. However, according to our good friend, Mr. Cutts, auto translation via Google Translate isn't recommended and can be seen as spamming. https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=UDg2AGRGjLQ

Thank you for your input, your hypothesis that the initial increase to page 2 or 3 allowed the site to get traffic and gain traction through improved user engagement is an interesting one; however the traffic to those sites has been so minimal with the non top 10 rankings that I don't think it can be a key contributor. I continue to wonder why these recoveries happen so gradually; I also noticed that the higher the keyword volume for a key word the slower the recovery.

I suggest you to dig into the possible issues Dirk is talking about, especially if there are some JavaScript and cookies on the works. In fact, I have seen several cases where a not perfect JavaScript use may end up screwing things. i.e.: I go to domain.com - english - and then go to its russian version - domain.ru - from the selector and then go back to domain.com, but now the version I see is the russian in domain.ru because of bad JScript and cookie management.

Depending on the business strategy, you may think to to create specific versions of the site targeting those countries. This solution, though, apart needing a more sophisticated use of international SEO techniques like the Hreflang mark up, also will need a stronger investment in term of single site's promotion (link building, digital PR, localized content marketing...). A better solution in the short term can be to use only one "English Global Site", which targets all those countries at once, but trying to earn trust, relevance and visibility also in the "foreign" markets thanks to campaigns targeting also sites/influencers in those countries. Once you start having a meaningful set of data, so to understand how your site is responding in the several countries you are targeting, and if you see that - for instance - Australia is offering good traffic and conversion metrics, then you can start thinking in creating a specific Australian version of your site.

I have came across similar situations before and I have to say that Choice 1 should be no problem at all as long as the content is fairly unique on each site. This should rule out the chance of duplicate content. I guess it all depends on the volume, but for me I would go with choice 2. Simply because you then get to cover more spread and aren't stuck in one specific niche. Truth is there is no right or wrong, both will work fine. It just depends on volume/competition

Hi Logan, These pages will be eventually transformed into unique landing pages for each state so I don't want to get rid of them as of yet. I will try demoting them. Any ideas to how they are getting the anchor text of TX and NY? Thanks for your valuable time!

Hi Becky! Just a reminder, if EGOL, Peter, or both answered your question, please mark one or more responses as "Good Answers."

Here's Matt Cutts on this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9Ka0fzyZbk His answer is basically saying that in almost every case you could not be affected by the fact that there were other spammy sites sharing your hosting. He said that there are really rare cases whereby if one host has a crazy amount of spammy sites they may take action on all of these sites, but he made a point of saying that this is really rare. So no, I'd be looking for some other cause for the rankings to drop.

Hi, Thanks a lot for your help. I will then use one hreflang per URL. Cheers,

Hello Rox, I hate the idea of you going away unsatisfied with unanswered questions. Let's try to work through this. Let me approach it from a different way, as I may have misunderstood what you were asking. https://sub.domain.com/quote/?affiliate_id=xxx https://aff_xxx_affname.domain.com/quote/ The first URL is the one I'd go with because it's easy to rel canonical back to the base URL and you're keeping it all on one subdomain. The second version creates a new subdomain for every affiliate, which I don't think would be a good thing. Please let me know if I have understood your question this time. Thanks!

Hi! This is where I think the misunderstanding of hreflang shows itself. There are others that disagree with me, but the following is my opinion. You have one page in one general language. hreflang markup is for identifying language changes on multiple pages not for geo-targeting. What you have here is content in two general languages and attempting to mark it up for 5 regional dialects. If this is all the content you are going to make and you are keeping it on .co.nl, you will be telling the search engines that you are targeting the Netherlands with the content in English and Dutch. If you want your English and Dutch content without any geo-targeting, you will need to have it on some kind of general TLD like .net, .com or something like that. Then you can use hreflang between the languages for English and Dutch. If you want to target those countries as well, that gets a little more complicated. You'll need to determine the best structure, how you are targeting the content to those regions (this means changing the content somehow), and then implement something with multiple ccTLDs or on a gTLD with regional subfolders. Then we can talk about translations of that regional content. I'm assuming that your best route is going to be transitioning to a more general TLD and offering the two translated content sites as you have that right now, but I can't promise that is what is best for your audience. Take a look at this tool and see what works best for your business and go from there: http://outspokenmedia.com/international-seo-strategy/

I'll be honest.  I do not build links.  Have not done it in many years. All of my retail sites have lots of content that engages people and gets spread without the need for linkbuilding, hiring SEOs or any kind of marketers. If I owned a forum, I would make sure that it is optimized properly, occasionally trim thin posts that bring in no traffic from search, contribute vigorously to threads that are about evergreen content topics. "hey, check out this cool discussion about this totally niche area of government regulation!"  So, by "good content," it can be super in-depth, opinionated, fact-filled and authored by folks who know what they're talking about. Does that qualify as good enough material for a reputable link builder to work with? In my opinion, your content might be good enough that it does not need a linkbuilder. Don't underestimate old geezers.  Many of them are more websavvy than you think.  Your visitors sound like influencers to me.  And they are not that old.  If they are about 50 years old then I was in college when they were born!

It's important to remember that the on-page grader only looks at how well optimized your page is for that keyword, which is just one factor out of many different things Google looks at to rank your site. Fixing technical problems and building additional links to your page and site will be very important to your ranking well. Good luck!

Thanks for the response, Eric. My research suggested the same plan of attack: 1) fixing the canonical tags and 2) Google Search Console URL Parameters. It's helpful to get your confirmation. My best guess is that the parameters you've cited above are not needed for every URL. I agree that this looks like something WebSphere Commerce probably controls. I'm a few organizational layers removed from whoever set this up for us. I'll try to track down where we can control that.

Thanks Gaston Riera. Just the answer I was looking for.

Thanks Peter. Duplicate content was never an issue before this month. We're really stumped because most of the duplicate content even is years old. The content from last year is all new. But as you mentioned it could be that Google Finally Woke up. The same content btw was responsible for our 92 very highly trafficked KWs. I'll have our SEO team look at it. Sigh! hope it's just temporary. Thank you so much for taking time out for me. Really appreciate it.

Did you read prerender documentation? https://prerender.io/documentation/install-middleware#apache Because there you can find two examples (Apache + nginx): https://gist.github.com/thoop/8072354 https://gist.github.com/thoop/8165802 How they works? Simple - bot's are received proxified version from this url: http://service.prerender.io/http://example.com/url this works as your server is switch to specific proxy mode called reverse proxy. This works similar as proxy. Proxy caches results from few computers/network to the internet. Computers are clients, they sent requests, proxy go in internet and execute it, then return result to clients. This is normal way. In reverse way - internet is client and proxy serve requests to internal infrastructure. This allow hiding internal infrastructure, easy scaling or even make complex site with few internal servers (one will process /blog, other /shop, third /support, etc). But - this "prerender" version is served only to bots. Normal clients (not in list) received AngularJS version of HTML. Since everything is served from your own server you shouldn't hesitated. Second - do not (!!!) sent prerendered version to clients because prerender can't load pages from your server to make it prerendered. You can make easy overload your server in redirect loop. Also prerender server's too.

What page do you rank at? I can't find your website in rankings at all. P.S. on .net jobs in title it says "jobs jobs", as well as in url.

Yep got it, thanks - will Google therefore not pay attention to those products on the second+ pages? Also Ive seen on if you're on the second page of results we still have rel="next" href="http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/plastic-storage-boxes?page=2" > And haven;t got the rel="prev" which I had requested, Do you think the unfriendly URL may be a problem? I've been looking at this site and wondered if having products when you scroll is better for SEO? http://www.dunelm.com/category/home-and-furniture/storage/storage-boxes

I understand the difference between what you're doing and what Google shows, I guess I'm just not sure when I'd want to know that something could technically be indexed, but isn't? I guess I'm not your target market! Good luck with your tool.