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Roy, Did you optimize images (make them smaller in size)? Is the traffic real? Spam hits will not utilize data like a real person on your site. Also google could be serving cached pages so the information is not as large as downloading your actual assets from your site. Thanks, Don

I would also 2nd Disqus. I have used it on the DNN platforms and like it a lot.

Hey there Shahin, make sure your breadcrumbs reflect the path the users took. It's a navigational aid that's meant to help the user and creating a canonical version of the breadcrumbs would just create a confusing experience. If your user was trying to get back to the mountain tours page but the breadcrumbs only listed glacier hiking, wouldn't that be odd? Since the URLs are already canonicalized it shouldn't hurt your SEO to set things up this way.

Thanks for the response Bronn. While I am not sure what a PBN is, it sounds like it is outside Terms of Service.  I am trying to avoid anything that will harm our website so it doesn't sound like something for us. The video seemed within Terms of Service/Webmaster Guidelines though so I am not sure if they are related. Is there anyone who can reassure me that this process described is within Google Webmaster Guidelines?

Hey, The rule of fist is that readability is the most important aspect of your URL. The /category/ folder does not add to relevance, neither does it make the URL easier to read. I would therefore say it's better to remove the folder. I guess you don't use the /category/ folder as a page itself and have the visitor land on /destinations/ right away? As long as the content on your /africa/ page is valueable and unique, I wouldn't remove that. I hope this answers your question!

Yup, if you fetch it, it's more likely to appear fresh in the index. If you don't fetch it, you'll have to wait for Google to crawl your site again. This does not mean that your site is instantly indexed as soon as you fetch it; you just send a signal to Google that you want it crawled again and you'll see a status next to the page.

Hello! There are a few parts to this answer; let's pull it apart a little. Firstly, setting geographic targeting in search console is unlikely to positively impact your rankings, visibility or traffic from the UK - this tool is more to do with helping Google to understand which users should not find your website, and to help manage brand who have websites with different areas (or multiple websites) which target different countries. That said, there's no harm in enabling it, and I'd recommend that you leave it set. It'd also be helpful to understand what you mean when you say that you've "set geo-targeting code at the back end of the website". Are you referring to hreflang tagging? And if so, what does your configuration look like? A partial or erroneous implementation of this can cause more problems than it solves! I'd also double-check what your on-page language tags/attributes look like - there are a number of signals which you can send through your language markup, which might potentially help or confuse google. I wonder how much of this might be a measurement issue I'd be interested to understand if you've selected the option in Google Analytics to try and filter out common bots and crawlers? It may be that much of the traffic you're seeing from India isn't human. That rules out most of the technical and measurement challenges. The next areas I'd look are more challenging, and a bit 'bigger picture'. Are you using tools like Moz, Search Console and SEMrush and others to measure how and where your website is ranking for various queries? Can you see the kinds of keywords which you're visible for, which are driving this traffic? Is your content, brand, product and/or service relevant to a UK audience? Does your website provide a good experience for searchers who are looking for the content you provide; and how does that quality of experience compare to other websites who serve that audience (particularly in the UK)? Is your website well-constructed, managed, and generally _good _and usefu__l? Is it differentiated and distinct? Is your content well-written and helpful? Do other websites, blogs, communities and social audiences link to, talk about, promote and cite your website - again, particularly in the UK? Things I wouldn't worry about: It doesn't really matter where your website is hosted. In an age when most hosting and routing infrastructure is cloud-based and international, this isn't really an issue. Where this _might _affect you is around speed and performance (hosting which is geographically far away from your visitor might mean a slower response) - I'd check with tools like Pingdom and WebPagetest to see how you're performing, and to spot ways to speed things up. I'd not worry overly about directories or submission of any kind - any effort you'd spend submitting your site to these kinds of listings could be better spent on improving your content/website/service and engaging with the communities you operate in, with an aim of encouraging people to talk about, cite and engage with your brand. I appreciate that none of these are easy, quick wins - however, hopefully they'll provide a starting point for you to think about! Let me know if you've any follow-up thoughts or concerns, or if anything I've signposted leads to any further questions.

Hi Bridget thanks for share

Good luck with the meeting and the project

It's unlikely that they'll stop counting at all. I think that at least part of the value should still flow to the domain. i think it would be better if you could create a better version of those pages with good links and canonicalize the old ones.

Great pleasure - good luck with it all!

Hi there, Our UK-based company was facing this problem a while ago and we decided for the first option. Originally we had .com + /uk +/us and what we decided to do now is: we are keeping .com (we changed /uk to .com - it became our global) and the /us remained the same. We have hreflang tags. Basically, from the point of view of SEO, you might already have a strong site that will outperform the /au. Especially if you have a number of backlinks, you might drop in performance, you are right. The 301s won't help either. To keep it simple, I would go with what you have - you have started your journey and you might be pretty established there. Have a look at how you can improve your existing site further and don't risk the drop. I would keep the .com - I am saying it from the point of view of a global company launching in the US that can't afford any mistakes. I hope this helps. Good luck! Katarina

Roy, Are you trying to get the several pages of each tag indexed?

Nigel, Thanks for the feedback. The product pages do not have the categories in the breadcrumbs. It is just home > product. The thing is, the category pages that were indexed are already deindexed. And, we didn't build any links to the category pages as it was a new e-commerce site. I will try to see if there is a faster way of mapping the native categories to the hosted navigation pages. Although it is much faster and more user friendly, I do regret using hosted navigation on the site now. Also, I may not use the hosted navigation service at the end of the year. I am wondering if I should hold off on the 301s, as will have to reverse the 301s if we cancel the service. What are your thoughts?

Hi There It's more beneficial for you to keep abc123.com. You have 60,000 visitors a month to the main site. You will then move to be a directory of the main site - they keep the 60k and you are now banking on visitors clicking the link to the US site. Yet the main .com is a US site. You will only, therefore, get a fraction of the visitors you had before. The other issue, of course, is that I would assume that the main site will be in US English? the same as yours? So yours will not only be a new subdirectory of the main site but now a 100% duplicate, which will kill both sites in search engines.Google will pick the main site as the primary and yours will never feature independently in search. Also the fact that yours duplicates theirs will impact badly in search for them. If you have an option you must keep the original and let them set up separate country sites. Or you take the missive from above and do what they say - but populate your new site with vastly different content - if you want to rank. Regards Nigel

Hi Taylor They don't provide all the keywords, Just 10 keywords Thanks Roy

The mobile first index is not live as of today This is from March of this year http://searchengineland.com/googles-mobile-first-index-still-months-away-271851 "Don’t freak out. That’s what Google’s Gary Illyes repeated this week — at least three times — to SEOs and webmasters who might be concerned about the upcoming switch to a mobile-first index. “The team behind the mobile-first index wants it to launch this year,” Illyes told our SMX West conference on Wednesday. “We’re still experimenting. We don’t have a timeline. It could be a few months or quarters, but it’s definitely not weeks [away]. Don’t freak out, especially if you have a responsive site.” Later in June of this year http://searchengineland.com/googles-mobile-first-index-likely-not-coming-2018-earliest-277074 "Google is “probably many quarters away” from launching its mobile-first index. So said Gary Illyes, Google webmaster trends analyst, during a crowded session Tuesday afternoon at our SMX Advanced conference in Seattle. “It’s going to be a big change, but don’t freak out,” Illyes said. SEOs and webmasters have been wondering and waiting for a couple of years now for news on when the mobile-first index will roll out. Illyes wasn’t able to give an exact answer to that question today. “We don’t have a timeline for the launch yet,” Illyes said. “We have some ideas for when this will launch, but it’s probably many quarters away. Our engineers’ timeline was initially end of 2017. Right now, we think more 2018. ” The point I am making here is that you need to follow the current Google guidance as Roman mention so that you can rank now. Yes, you will probably need to tweak things once the mobile first index comes out, but until it does and Google then updates guidance on how you should setup the canonical and alternative tags as suggested. You other option to act on now is to convert to a responsive site, work with one set of URLs and make sure that when your responsive page shows that it passes mobile friendly tests etc. You may end up with a slower page, but you would need to test and see how much of a difference makes. If the page is still fast overall, you should still be good.

kadut, Eventually Google will cache all indexed urls, however it does not always cache them right away. Thanks, Don

I think it depends on what you wish to accommodate on the screen. We have adopted a more mobile based design from 300 to 767 which makes certain items more prominent or vertically aligned and then from 768 up to 1600+ is our dedicated "all elements" visible desktop version. That way our desktop style generally works on the majority of tablets and larger screen sizes where more data easily easier to absorb. Hope that helps.