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Gianluca. that is excellent news. Just curious since this is quite an important issue for us. Do you speak from own experience with a similar case? I did not find anywhere other references that contextual links should be fine. Do you remember anybody who wrote about it in the past? Just noticed that tripadvisor actually removed now all their contextual links to alternative language versions that they used to have in their footer. Instead they now implemented a flag drodpown where contextual links are not showing up anymore in the sourcecode.

99% of internet users are aware of only two TLD, their homeland ccTLD and .com If you use .eu most of people who actually type the domain will either try their ccTLD extension or .com, so if you own the .com too you should redirect the .com to the .eu, but why do so? If you own the .com just use the .com, if you don't, change domain and use one with .com

Thank you!!!!

First of all, let me see if I understood well the situation... You are going to have to websites: .co.uk targeting Great Britain .com targeting USA and CA And then you want to use IP detection for redirecting users to the "correct" website depending on their location... Honestly, I don't like this tecnique... in the 90% of the cases googlebot comes from an USA IP... if you redirect via IP detection you are always redirecting googlebot to the USA/CA website, substantially not letting it to enter and crawl the UK one. as a user who travels a lot, I hate when a website always redirects me to the version it consider I am interested about just because of the IP address. For instance, if I am in Great Britain for travel and I want to visit the USA version of your site because I most interested in it (eg: because of currencies, or because my account is for the USA site), I would rant like a troll if you were obliging me to use the GB version. I always consider that the best option is offering the users (and the bots) to visit the website version they want  but using this "tactic": if you detect (from IP or Browser agent) that somehow located in the USA/CA entered in the UK site, you can present an alert saying >>> "We saw you're visiting us from the USA/CA. Maybe you are more interested in visiting our USA website [link to your .com version]" This is what Amazon does. As an alternative, use redirection based on user browser detection and not IP. That is safer in regards to googlebot. Said that, the redirection should be automatic just the first time someone enters in your site, and not always present. With this I mean that if someone from USA enters in your .co.uk site, he will be redirected to the .com, but once landed in the .com site, he will be eventually able to click on the link pointing to the .co.uk  and not being redirected again the to american version.

Thank you for all of your responses - they have given me a lot of very specific help and a clear direction to move forward!

Hey Edward, Yes, even I could submit the same. For now, I'd suggest you to try submitting your site (.com) in US category again and see how editors responds. Sometimes, editor or the staff respond you back and you can explain them your situation.

Hi, There is no problem with international SEO and duplicate content, as long as you follow the rules around this. Start by reading this checklist from MOZ as it will give you a great grounding. I would also read this article from Google as this will walk you through what you need to do. HREFLANG will be used to explain to Google about international pages with duplicate content. I hope this helps. -Andy

Thank you! I completly agree!

There are few other reasons why bounce rate from Google Analytics doesn't affect ranking if you think about it not everyone uses GA, so that wouldn't be a fair measure. Another reason is the spam, most of it doesn't even get to your page, so there is no interaction whatsoever leaving fake data, and by now Google is more than aware of it. However, you are right, as you mention the algorithm Google uses is complex and constantly evolving, so there might be another way to measure the time spent on your page after a search, for example, the back button of the browser. So we can split it if the high bounce rate comes from fake traffic/spam in GA, then there is nothing to worry about. If it is from valid traffic, then it shouldn't be taken lightly since Google might be using other ways to measure it rather than GA. Again Google knows the one and only truth, so we can only make educated guesses based on what we see Carlos

Hi! My first (warm) suggestion is to allocate budget for content localization. Having just the template translated is not enough for having visibility in markets like Spanish, Chinese or Russian, and this is not just because you won't rank at all for queries in those languages (hence you won't be discovered by users in those markets), but also because English is not so known, so it is possible that people will bounce out very fast, and that is going to be a very bad user signal, one of those that Google more and more is going to take into consideration in its algorithm. Said, that, you are doing right using the hreflang, because it is suggested by Google itself also for cases like yours, when only the template is localized: You keep the main content in a single language and translate only the template, such as the navigation and footer. Pages that feature user-generated content like a forums typically do this. What I don't agree is about the use of the rel="canonical". The combined use of hreflang and rel="canonical" is quite tricky in international SEO, so let me try to explain my negative to cross canonical use with hreflang. The rel="canonical" is used to suggest Google that a page is identical to another one. Google, then, will not consider the canonicalized URL and show in the SERPs the canonical one only. But with the hreflang you are giving Google a signal that is contradicting the rel="canonical" one. In fact, you are telling Google two opposite things: Do not consider this URL because it is canonicalized to this other one; Consider this URL because I want you to show it in this specific market (i.e.: es-ES). What Google must do? My suggestion, then, is to quite the cross canonical and leave the hreflang annotation only. Google, infact, finally is able to understand that - albeit the content may be substantially identical to the one present in another page - that specific URL targeting that specific international market has tiny differences that means a big changes in meaning (i.e.: currency) for that targeted market, hence Google won't consider it into a Panda schema. I hope I was clear enough

Let's remove all possible instances in which you might been seen as targeting Ireland. It sounds like the https caused a reclassification of the site. Second question, did you add the https in Search Console? Do you have both there and both are geo-targeted to the US?

Hi Christy, Just wondering if you were able to give any feedback on this, it seems that the issue is still showing up Would appreciate some advice around this Cheers

Hi, Yes you've got it spot on, 301s are there to keep old things pointing to the new, but only the new should be in the sitemap. When you've crawled the live site ready to make your sitemap you can manually right click and remove a URL you would not want in there before generating it. Kind Regards Jimmy

Thanks for the comments. They have been very useful

Very interesting answers. Thanks to all of you!

Thank you so much Gianlucca! Lots to take away and get fixed.

I do not see that function in the free version of cloud flare? I am adding the "challenge" rule to hopefully cut back. My client does not have the money for the paid plans. My next step is to go disavow those links.

Hi Martijn, thank you for your answer. I am basically trying to decide if I should geo-target or language target a website. From what I understand from your answer (correct if I am wrong), if I geo-target a website for the UK, it will appear in SERP optimally not only if the searcher IP belongs to the UK, but also if the search was done from google.co.uk outside the UK. I need to get this right, since the market I am in is rather competitive

Google explicitly advice to use 302 in case of redirection because of IP/User Agent detection, which is what it always says in others similar cases (i.e.: redirecting from desktop to mobile version of the site).