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Thank Jane.  I think i'm understanding this better now.  I need to create more relevant content for the keywords with F grades on homepage and make sure i link back to optimized pages from homepage.  Great.  That shouldnt be to hard a task. by the way.  I think I duped this question.  Look at this question How to optimize home page for several keywords Not sure if I could have just sent you a link lol Didn't want to log off for that sorry.  But there was alot of input here for me and I also sent alot of info regarding my site  thx. again. thx again

This is a complicated question that I can't give a simple answer for, as every site is set-up differently and has it's own challenges. You will likely use a variety of the techniques mentioned in my last paragraph above. Good luck.

Short answer: Using the same content on different country-targeted TLDs is generally not a problem. The explanation: 1. Matt Cutts, the head of Google's web-spam team, says in this video that what you describe is generally not a problem (because you're not being a spammer who is trying to game the system). You can have the same content on different international domains under the same company / brand. 2. I'd review the international best SEO practices described here by Google just to make sure you're all in the clear. Google says you shouldn't worry too much about it, either. But I'd be sure to follow all of these guidelines -- geo-targeting settings for each domain in Webmaster Tools, for example -- in general to "tell" Google that you've got different TLDs targeting different countries. So, having sites with similar content at multiple international domains should be fine. Good luck! I hope everything's clear.

Contraire mon frere! You can have the content appear to visitors above the fold but have the content of the code appear far down the page using CSS content folding. That's definitely worth a read! Search for articles on that and you'll see what I mean.

I support Jane's advice here to make a custom 404 that is as beneficial as possible for the user. I would only worry about 301 redirecting old property pages to their city/neighborhood subcategory if the page shows up in Google Webmaster Tools 404 section and shows an external link pointing at it that is worth saving. A process you could do about once per month or quarter.

It really depends what the content is like, but I'd recommend using Wistia as a rule for anything very product focused. YouTube is more like a social marketing channel than a video hosting platform and you have to ask yourself "is this content relevant for a YouTube audience". You can qualify this by using the YouTube keyword tool to get some ideas about what people are searching for and also look in your YouTube analytics to see how many of your views are actually coming from other youtube.com pages, rather than referrals from Google or other sites. If the content isn't relevant for a YouTube audience, then there is no benefit to having the content on the platform. Additionally, YouTube.com pages can outrank your own site for branded queries, which is suboptimal. The only other thing to bear in mind is that contrary to popular belief, YouTube is not normally a good source of referral traffic. People don't often click from Youtube videos back to your site, so don't rely on this as an option if you're trying to drive traffic to sell products. Your best bet is probably using Wistia, getting rich snippets for pages on your own site and driving all the traffic to your owned resource, rather than Youtube.com... since your audience can't buy from YouTube, so you're just adding a step into your conversion funnel unnecessarily.

Hi Conrad, What a tricky situation. Ultimately, these kinds of issues are hard to call perfectly because it's never pure search considerations in play and, especially with each business being different, it's impossible to be certain how search engines will treat you. With those caveats in mind, here are my thoughts: Question 1 Your thinking is solid. Whether it is the right call or not is impossible to know (even in hindsight) because there are simply too many moving parts. Nonetheless, I think you have sensibly weighed up the pros and cons and made the decision with open eyes. Just for completeness, I believe that point #2 is only a small benefit if at all (and probably declining) but the only part I'd really challenge you on is #3. I would personally only go down this route if the company truly is a specialist in each destination. If that is true, then great (and they likely have specialist country managers who can push forward the marketing of each site). If it's not really true and you're more just "seeking the perception" that it's true, then I might stick with the benefits of an integrated site. Question 2 Errant 404s are a nasty and annoying problem precisely because errors do not necessarily undo quickly. I would be prepared to wait 6-8 weeks to see a recovery. You need to bear in mind, of course, that the drop could be associated with the downsides you identified in #1 (lower aggregate domain authority etc) and so you may not see a recovery from the 404s specifically. If you haven't seen a recovery after 8-10 weeks, I'd believe this was the "new normal" and would be looking at growth from there rather than "recovery". Question 3 It's impossible to be sure. The number of "reversed migrations" that any of us have seen is tiny and they're all different so I'm afraid that your guess is as good as mine. If it turns out that improvement isn't on the horizon, then I might be tempted but I think that my approach would be to stick with the decision if you think it's the right one - see my comments in answer to q1 above. I'd change (back) only if you think benefits you expected haven't come to pass (e.g. Has conversion rate increased on dedicated sites versus how it was on an integrated one?) and the balance of benefit has shifted. I hope that helps.

Awesome. That Cutts video was exactly what were were looking for. Thanks Samuel!

Hi Matt, Thanks for your reply - this very aptly timed blog was written on the subject yesterday: http://moz.com/blog/hreflang-behaviour-insights.

Thank you for your answer. I would love to do it this way, unfortunately our current system wouldn't allow it. With more than 5000 products on our website, different content for each color variation would be time consuming. My question was about "noindex,follow" on children products (with the proper canonicalisation) and its SEO impact. But my guess is that canonicalisation should be enough to address the issue.

Did a 301 fix things?

I am using the latest version of sh404sef (4.4) and I am still getting a duplicate content issue. What about using URL parameters in GWT to fix this?   If so, what settings do I use? I see 1,035 urls monitored for "start" on my website. Should I set the URL parameter to "Representative URL"?

Hi, You shouldn't have to do anything in WMT as there isn't an option for preferred URLs between HTTPS and HTTP (whilst there is an option to say if you prefer http://site.com/ or http://www.site.com/). Google should pick up and acknowledge the 301s if you choose to do this, ranking only your HTTPS URLs. It used to be the case that this wasn't recommended for SEO, but Google has come a long way with dealing with secure URLs. Just a quick search for inurl:https will show you how many sites are indexed with SSL URLs. Some have done it properly; some have not.

You should be fine if his version of the content has disappeared before yours goes live. It's fairly normal for content to appear in more than once place over the course of time, so you won't fall into a filter or penalty situation with this, as long as his content has been deindexed. Best to check that it is no longer cached before yours goes live, but it should not take long for Google to drop it.

The only thing I might add is that, depending on the business, it might be worth building a "Red Widgets" category (as an example). However, you would treat this like a sub-category and write its own category description. You would give it its own rel canonical tag, treating it as the root of the "Red Widgets" category root. Nine times out of ten it isn't necessary to give sorting and filtering options their own category page though, and a rel canonical tag to the canonical version of that page is the second best option. The first best option would be to not change the URL at all, only re-order the items, hiding some and featuring others. Most eCommerce platforms don't have this functionality at present, however. Rel Canonical was made to span the gap until they do.

Thanks Gianluca Fiorelli Based on your response I will leave the pages indexable and encourage my client to add extra testimonials in the beginning of each page.

That's great new Amelia - so glad I was able to help -Andy

At this point you can only wait to see the results of the reconsideration request and hope they provide you examples if more clean up is needed.

This video is nearly 2 years old and people are still saying to use sub-folder. not sub-domain. I am knee deep in setting up a proxy to deal with this because my ecommerce site runs under tomcat and we use wordpress for our blog. Simple to get going but keeping it the way it was would be easier..

lol, nice one.