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Bob, No - hidden text isn't exactly Google's favorite - to quote John Mulller (source Seoroundtable " I think we've been picking up on that for quite some time now to kind of discount that information" rgds, Dirk PS I noticed quite a lot of open questions from you - do you ever bother to mark a question answered when you get replies?

Has this ever been done? Would be very handy.

What if instead of creating a new page every time Team A has a match with Team B, you reused the same URL, updating the content to reflect the new match? (You could even build additional content by listing the results of previous matches on that page.) Not only would you then be avoiding the duplicate title tag issue, you'd also be building a long-term presence for that recurring matchup on a single URL.

Thanks. These are good things to consider. I suppose in my case I'm primarily wanting to just find a new home for the old content since eventually I will just get rid of those websites and domain names. And then if it adds a bonus to the new website, then great! The old content is automotive, diesel truck related, which the new site is too. The difference is the brands. So I think the old readers would just like the content to be live and not be too worried about where it's hosted. And the new readership would probably find it all interesting as well...thanks for helping me think it through!

Hi Pulkit, This phenomenon, called domain crowding. You should happy your two pages coming in search results. I think your two pages appearing because location is slightly different first is mumbai and second is navi mumbai(a locality in mumbai city). First of all It is not good practice to create pages for city and every locality of the city so If you don't want to appear both pages either you can block them or optimize other page for other keywords by placing different keywords in meta title , h1 tag and web page content. You can also watch This video @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxv-AvNPoh8. Hope this helps. Thanks

HI Rod, That should have fixed your duplicate content problem.

Well I maybe biased because this is what I wanted to hear but personally I think spot on, particularly the Kissmetrics article from a later response. I have set geo-targeting already and will also sort the HREFLANG tags. I plan to leave both sites on .com domains - In the UK .com's are just as 'normal' as .co.uk's.  All content has been updated to US english and with specific relevant info so I think it's just down to the usual link building and adding content to get it to rank. I genuinely appreciate all the responses, fantastically useful, thank you! Mat

Personally I'd start with a link analysis to answer the question, "Are they stronger than you?"  You'll want to look at their sheer volume as well as the quality and when they were built to get a feel for their current activities. After that I'd obviously look at your content.  Does your content comply with current SEO best practices in it's type and formatting and down to the technological questions such as "Do you have clean and fast code?" and "Are you formatting properly?" If you're looking for assistance in the process Moz actually offers a list of their recommended SEOs.  It's a good list.   You'll find it at https://moz.com/community/recommended.

Our site was scraped by a past empoyee who started up a competing buisness with our inside trade secrets, client list and designs.  As they launched they immediately tried to put us out of buisness by: A. hired hacks to hook us up with tons of spammy links along with a high mix of porn and virus injections sites. B. hired hacks from the same cesspool and had them submit our images to same bad types of sites that would take the customer somewhere else C. signed up email address to our newseltter so that when we sent out an email it would initiate a chain reaction to zombie computers and launch a DDOS attack on our site and make our own email campaigns stop sales and trash the confidence in the rest of the customers on the mailing list. D. Gave out every know email address in our company to spammers, to the point of making it difficult to get or send emails to customers. E. Submitted our phone number to every robot call and junk call site possible tieing up our phones and filling our voice mail. "Regarding Panda timing- the site took the big hit three years ago."  We to had this exact timing happen to us on top of everything else because we were too busy defending ourselves to keep up with the Google changes. Regardless of all the horrifying past events, we have completely rebuilt the business from the inside out and migrated to a BigCommerce website from our custom site, plus added 5 social media platforms.  BUT..."having to wait for Google" to reindex and give us another chance is killing us and we are concern that we may never get back in the good graces of this SE titian. All though we have survived the battle, we still may loose the war!  Even with continuing efforts to optimize our site to death and with only a fraction of the traffic, orders and income, we have to wonder: A. What else is wrong such as trying to determine if there are duplicate content on sites out their we are unaware of. B. Seriously considering dumping our domain (owned since 2000) and going to a new domain that would have to be reindexed and treated as fresh, hopefully optimzed content per the Google requirements, and take our chances. Input on considerations of A & B would be appreciated as we are pretty worn out after 3 years working at this.

Thats great advice, i'll be sure to put it to good use! And thanks for the Yahoo analogy, i'll keep it in mind!

Thanks for the great reply!  I think your assessment is correct!

Ok, cool. To reiterate - with escaped_fragment you are just serving the same content in a tweaked format and Google recommend it rather than frown upon it. Good to be sure though. See you at SearchLove!

Hi Rene, Thanks for the input and insight - much appreciated. So expanding on your example and my specific question what do you believe the difference would be (if any) on search results for someone looking for Birkenstock sandals when you had two URL's of the below (considering all other SEO aspects were equal) http://companyname/collection//sandals/birkenstock  V http://companyname/collection/sandals-birkenstock The restriction I've got are kind of forcing me to go with the first URL but with a fair amount of work and possibly ongoing maintenance I could go with the 2nd URL.  However if the SEO result between the two is minimal then my decision on how to structure is easy - I go with what's easier to set up and manage. Does that make sense? Thanks...

This is a touchy ethical question for SEOs. I think there are some questions you should ask yourself. First, are you sure the company in question placed the links? Is it possible that they were the victim of negative SEO that didn't work? Second, do you actually deserve to out rank them? Is your content truly better? Do people want your result more than theirs? If you can answer yes to both of these, then I think you can feel comfortable in moving forward with a spam complaint. If not, you risk either kicking someone while they are down, or hurting user experience overall - neither of which are particularly ethical.

If you want an image to rank high for a certain keyword, we would suggest updating the "alt" with logical keywords. Don't stuff it with keywords, think of it as what you would like to show if the image wasn't available. Think of it as images for people who can't see, if you were going to describe the image what would you say.

So, do I just put in a redirect from the old t-shirt page to the new (demoted) t-shirt page? The old one has built up value so I wasnt sure. Yes, you do redirect. It doesn't matter that page has built up value. If people come to it and it's not what they expect - they gonna be bouncing like crazy. If you think that it's the same or very similar, then you can leave without redirect, but I wouldn't do it. But more importantly do I need to redirect every single navigational URL for the old URL's and redirect them to a new page?It seems a bit unnecessary. So, how would you handle it? Leave them be as 404s?

Hello, https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2604777?hl=en That would be your main guidelines. Now, here are my questions/suggestions. How did you translate that website? Is it automatically generated through google translate? Have you done any other spammy stuff? Is your backlink profile clean? According to Matt explainations in video above, it would have to be very good reason to mark your website as pure spam. So, if you just translated (properly) english website, then it shouldn't be the reason for taking manual action on your website. So, check everything else. Now, as to your questions. I think that would depend on is your "healthy" website really healthy. Because if it's actually as spammy (at least in the eyes of google), then you'll basically tell google "Hey, look at my another spammy website". But, I believe, if english website is all good and has no spam attached to it, then it shouldn't be a problem. According to Matt, it will be pretty difficult to unmark your website and you'll have to spend a lot of time and effort on proving it. So, roll up your sleeves and get ready to work. If you're translating it, you're pretty much rewriting it. I used to work as a translator and there is no way to translate word to word, the proper way of translation is when you translate the idea/thought/intent, not words itself. Hope this helps.

Thanks very much for your feedback! It helps a lot.

Thanks Tom, I guess I made a mistake going with Wix, I will see if their support or forums can help out more with the issue. Our current website is a Wordpress one, but it has almost nothing on it, and looks like a blog. I'm just an admin at the company, and the owner wanted a website with his bio.  I did a couple on the Godaddy Web builder, and thought I could make him proud with a bigger website.  It looks like that was a mistake as his only goal was to get a page about him near the top, and instead he'll have a website he didn't want, not achieving the only goal he had. Sorry, went into vent mode there.  Thanks again for the help.

I  put an end to that, mostly because it was absolutely pointless and not user friendly. This..