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Hi Bulserik regarding those two questions, if we look just at Google, they are not taken into consideration by Google for International SEO. On the other: because they don't harm a site; because they are used by Bing for geolocalization and geotargeting (Bing does not use the hreflang) then, it is a good idea using them. Check this old but still valid post on Bing about how to geotarget for them: http://blogs.bing.com/webmaster/2011/03/01/how-to-tell-bing-your-websites-country-and-language/ Finally, just to be sure: remember to create Google Webmaster Tools profile for each subfolder and geotarget them for their corresponding countries.

There is really nothing to say about the mistakes made by SMB owners who believe that they've contracted with a great SEO firm - and find out later that is not so true... Which gets me to the real value of a referral. Look for - always look for an SEO firm that has the 'added value' of offering up a set of referral clients for you to check on yourownself. That is so important in that a real live SEO firm will always be able to supply that list- long or short - but that you can call on the phone or email to the CEO and ask "...hey, the XYZ SEO firm said you're a client...tell me about your experiences with using them...." type of contact. Without that - on what core values are you really buying an SEO contractor? Oh - the "recommended" list of companies can also be a great starting place too - use that list to drill down on, visit each of your final candidates from and THEN call/email their list of referral clients.... Anything else I'm afraid is just "burning" your money....sad to say...

Hi, What is the % of mobile visits - could you check the page speed within Analytics with segment 'Mobile'? I prefer to use webpagetest.org rather than pingdom - because it seems to give more realistic results (pingdom always seems to load faster than webpagetest). On your desktop version everything seems ok - site loaded in 2.3 sec - images are very heavy though: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150103_1M_SYT/ Different story on mobile: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150103_CT_T0H/ - initial page load = 14sec - mainly because of the images (900K). I would check if these images could be compressed - or remove the slider and replace it by 1 image. rgds, Dirk

Hi, Paramaya raises a good point, you should use Google Webmaster Tools to set certain URL parameters to be crawled, ignored, ect. However, I wouldn't rush to say you don't want Google crawling those pages, since they may add value in some way. I think you should add canonical tags to the pages with URL parameters that point back to your site's main page. This way, Google knows and crawls the URLs with parameters and attributes value and relevancy to the page being pointed to through the canonical tag. I help run a top 50k ecommerce website, we use canonical tags and GWT to handle such issues.

Three essential resources: The resources guide of Google on getting rich snippet data: https://support.google.com/webmasters/topic/4599102?hl=en&ref_topic=4598337 All the data types that you can think of with an explanation on how they work: http://schema.org/docs/full.html To see if Google correctly picks up the integrations of Schema.org: www.google.nl/webmasters/tools/richsnippets

IMHO, Google has essentially tied our sites together, looking at the rankings and other metrics. We've upgraded some product pages with the same result - the upgraded page and the old page on the other side are stuck on page 2. They even mirror each other in the SERPs. They both move up and down by similar numbers. If Page A drops 2 slots, page B drops 2 slots. It's like the pages are attached at the hip...

- many products no longer exist and visitor redirected (404) to a same not found page. Rather than a 404 page give a 410, this tells search engines that page is gone and its never coming back rather than just not found, will help remove the pages from Google as well. Google's pretty cleaver and Moz doesn't always get it right with duplicate content and canonical if you feel a lot of the pages are justified or serve the user as they are (e.g. telling them the page no longer exists) then it will be fine. In the large scheme of things the duplicate pages are not going to do you harm but its worth keeping an eye on it and doing your best to avoid them if possible using the canonical tag etc. but if you have done all you can i wouldn't loose any sleep. Lastly You can try Screaming Frog to help you find duplicate content if you want another look from a different tool. Hope some of that helps. Good luck!

It's a big site, and the most important category page. It explains a lot.

Yes, good point. Thanks for the advice.

Class names are part of CSS code, therefore crawlers read the class names. While 'class names' are not considered in ranking factors specifically, there are other factors that are impacted by them. In addition to issues related to robots.txt files disallowing a crawl of the assets and directly harming how well Google algorithms render/index content, resulting in suboptimal rankings." [c] Here are a few more items to consider: External resources like CSS & JavaScript help algorithms understand that the pages are optimized for mobile. And this is a factor in ranking. [b] Some JavaScript removes content from the page rather than adding, which prevents Google from indexing the content. This is also a factor in ranking [b] Speed is a factor and google publishes a CSS/HTML style guide and best practices for faster loading pages, to optimize the serving of CSS / number of calls. [a] [e] 

you're off on a tangent here....let's not do that...my comments referred to the 'why' not the cause.... go to the 'recommended' list and pick a few to vet....then get a deal and they will undoubtedly do that complete web audit first to see where you are and why... all else is rhetoric here....time to get the tasks started, eh!

Really, I think people have gotten themselves all twisted up unnecessarily over dynamic URLs and hiding the fact that they're dynamic. If you're dealing with a URL that really is dynamic, I'd stick with the ? & = notation that's pretty standard for this sort of thing.  In my experience, Google is seeing ANY of those characters as word separators, and I'm not really seeing any downside in terms of ranking for terms when using those terms as traditional parameters, e.g. www.homes.com/listings/ca/san-francisco/?q=single-family-home&b=3-bedrooms&t=2-bathrooms&u=swimming-pool-garden-wood-exterior I'd be careful with using a "+" sign if you go that route, as various conversions from text to URL-safe to HTML-encoded etc. will replace spaces with + signs...and if something is un-encoding that, you might end up with spaces there. FYI where this all came from was URLs like this: www.homes.com/showproperty.asp?pid=115235423ion=ABX&type=723 In THAT case, those numeric parameters (which tend to be database record identifiers) are NOT of use to Google in terms of relevance or ranking.  But the english parameters in my example further up ARE useful, as they may match some of the query terms.

Exactly that's what I am worrying

This would be correct and a simple job. Find a WordPress developer and have them make an edit to the theme to include an H1 tag. Send me a message and I could help.

thanks for the reply. I can understand your point but the issue is that there are hundreds of sites for each of hundreds of keywords. It is almost impossible to contact the webmasters and report that their sites are hacked. They also keep on adding new sites

Hi I would install it on part of your site so example.com/blog if possible, if you have to put it on a sub domain that is not as good, but still better than trying to embed (i.e. blog.example.com). We use wordpress and is very easy to use, never used blogger so don't know what can and cant be done, but we was about to install wordpress on our server. Hope this is helpful. Thanks Andy

Thanks for the answers folks.

A similar thing happened to me once. In my case, the DNS settings were incorrect. Check that