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Hi Ravi, Looks ok now. Did you already see changes in WMT (number of url's indexed). To speed up the process you could do a "Fetch as Google" in WMT for the sitemap & submit it to the index. rgds, Dirk

Thanks Dirk! Will look into it now.. I wasn't checking the source but rather looking in Chrome Dev Tools

That's great news that you got the penalty revoked. It can often take a few days for the manual spam actions viewer to show that there is no longer a penalty.  Also, keep an eye on the manual spam actions viewer.  I've seen a number of sites lately that got a pure spam penalty revoked and then a few days or weeks later got either a thin content penalty or an unnatural links penalty.  Hopefully that's not the case for you though!

Hi Patrick, Many thanks . I will look at the article and what you suggest. Many thanks Pete

Cloaking no. What you would be doing is trying to help Google understand the images. I feel this would be similar to detecting a language or IP and serving an image with text correctly translated. The purpose isn't malice in fact quite the opposite. I have been leery of CDN's for any other purpose then delivering script for exactly the reason your client is in. When you think about it you can have 2 to 200 urls delivering the same images. Every time a bot crawls the site it sees X image is from a new location. How is the crawler suppose to understand what is actually there? Anyway my thoughts, hope it helps. Don

So far so good - every URL I try to my site is now redirected to the www subdomain and, to date, I am unaware of any side effects. I will keep monitoring but all looks good at this point. Thanks again to everyone who helped with this. Mark

Many thanks Patrick for your help. I will look at those links etc you mention above. Just quickly, most of my articles are actually how to articles e.g How to aerate your lawn etc , so I am guessing these would come under  -https://schema.org/TechArticle   as oppose to Blog . Is that how it you would do it. thanks Pete

Hi S. Good issue you have here. I agree with your sentiment below, if you can't maintain separate ccTLDs, they might not be right for you. I am not saying don't do it, as a ccTLD is a strong signal still, but if it doesn't work for you, the structure you mentioned works just fine. Just to make sure you have the right structure though, can you visit my tool here, answer the questions, and let me know what the result is? It's the best way I have found for determining international site structure. Once you have that, we can discuss what the right structure is for you. Kate

That's my point, you only need to worry about the pages that had external links Thanks

Hi, For situations like this, God invented hreflang... Basically with hreflang you tell search engines that duplicates of the content exist that target other countries/languages. The exact definition can be found here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en There is a great article on hreflang here on Moz (and more important) a tool that you can use to generate them): https://moz.com/blog/using-the-correct-hreflang-tag-a-new-generator-tool - once implemented you can test it here: http://flang.dejanseo.com.au/ Hreflang needs to be implemented on all the pages on your site which have equivalents on the other sites. It's not necessary to change the content or the images. Hope this helps, Dirk

A clarifying question: Is this one page we are talking about, multiple pages, or an entire site?

Hi Mark. Thanks so much for taking the time to look into this and helping me find a solution. It does seem odd that a message board (of any kind) would rank ahead of the actual company but who am I to question Google (sarcasm)? If you take a look at the first image I attached, I still think the drop from hundreds of impressions to basically 0 in a few short period of time indicates some sort of radical shift in how I have been indexed. I'm not sure if it is Google or my site...or both. But I DO know that something is "going on" and I need to figure it out. You mentioned the caching issue and I'm wondering if it has something to do with the mobile usability update. Whatever it is, the end result is almost a 50% drop in organic traffic over the past month. That seems a bit extreme for even an algorithm change. It seems punitive in nature. Alas, I'm not qualified to determine the origin and your guess is FAR better than mine. Thanks so much again Mark. -G

Bing does not use the rel=”alternate” hreflang=”x” markup. As written by Duane Forrester in this post, Bing relies over a series of signals, the most important being the meta equiv=”content-language” content=”x-X” tag. And, yes, you can use the meta equiv and hreflang in the same page

Hi I've got the same problem. Theres got to be an easier way to do this? Our subdomain is a banking product which doesnt allow for external access (for some silly reason). Any assistance or advice would be fantastic as a long term strategy would probably annoy a few customers. Cheers

Many thanks all. I will look at those articles and give it a go and see what happens. Pete

Thanks!

Hi Marty, I don't think this will hurt your SEO, but I'd think of this more in terms of user experience and your goals for the website. For instance, if the site is primarily an ecommerce site, perhaps driving traffic from the money pages to the blog is not advisable.  On the other hand, if brand awareness and the blog are a big part of your overall strategy, then maybe driving traffic to recent posts makes more sense. For user experience, recent posts may not be relevant to all pages like you mentioned, so you have to make a judgement call regarding how many pages they will provide value and how valuable they will be on those pages vs how much value they take away on other pages where they aren't as relevant. Make sense?  Feel free to message me with any other questions Mark

Hi Jac, If you keep the content on your homepage quite similar to the existing homepage, you should normally be able to keep the rankings for the keywords that are currently generating traffic to your homepage. If everything goes well, Google should be able to figure out that for some keywords, other landing pages on your site are a better choice than just the home (although it's never a guarantee - just browse the q&a section and you'll find plenty of questions wondering why Google seems to prefer the home page rather than the skilfully crafted landing pages on the site) rgds, Dirk

You got it!

Hello bizzer, 1. I dont know... it's up to you! Maybe you prefer to start no indexing the forum, check if your users like it, and then start indexing it after a while. In my opinion, create the forum, add the "no index" tag, check if users like it and wait for some results,... and if you decide to keep it, then change the "no index" tag, and do everything necessary to have it SEO-friendly (probably Discourse forums are already SEO-friendly). 2.  I answered you too fast (I was in a rush), sorry. For sure, the best option is going to GWT and delete your indexed URLs. But the other option may work too! Luis