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Hi David, I'm not really sure how you would get to this page from let's say the homepage but besides that there could be a couple other ways that Google found this page: via a sitemap, via a link on another Web site or via social media. In all cases would Google be able to view the page and be able to index it. It really depends on what kind of form you use but I've seen some cases where Google was able to use select boxes etc.

Any chance you can screenshot and redact the domain - I am not sure that this is being read right...

Hello Henya, this is a great strategic question and ultimately relies on your long term growth initiatives for the United States and beyond. Having .ca as your country-code top-level domain can prove beneficial for local search queries. This could be a contributing factor as to why the .ca site has brought in more traffic. Using site analytics can provide you with your referring sources to confirm this. Additionally, have .ca as your ccTLD will provide you with the ability to market to the French speaking provinces more authentically as you have the "home town" advantage of being a Canadian retailer rather than a U.S. domain. If the U.S. marketplace is determined to be a growth opportunity I recommend maintaining the .com domain. Having the .com domain will serve U.S. and _should _ultimately convert your U.S. customers better than U.S. customers shopping your .ca site...again you can verify this using analytics. The lift in conversion should provide enough incremental revenue to support maintaining both domains. Also, if your client decides to open a brick and mortar store in the U.S. the .com site will become incredibly more valuable. Hope this helps! Matt

It's good practice, especially if you are operating a CMS that can create accessible URLs that cause duplicate content problems, create "junk" pages, etc. For example: http://www.asos.com/robots.txt Google dislikes search results pages being indexed, so you can block those off, e.g. http://moz.com/robots.txt You can disallow the archive.org bot if you don't want old versions of your site appearing in its search engine, and as others have said you can point to your xml sitemap. It's not a bad resource to have at your disposal for site hygiene / maintenance reasons, but it's not an absolute necessity either.

I personally get phone calls/emails claiming to be Google and to "confirm" business information for rankings.   Likewise, if they receive a call/email from "Google" and choose not to respond because they are used to spammers, they would be unfairly dropped lower in rankings even if they have great CS. I get calls like this all of the time.  They make me angry because I believe that they are spammers calling.  But could they be from Google? ** If there was an official setup like that, the two could get confused and people taken advantage of.** Yes, how can Google discover who takes care of their customers and who does not?  The small company selling nationally often can't afford the feedback and ratings systems that google can monitor, or support for their website and Google Plus. I can't put myself out there to do tech support for all of the third party sellers on Amazon, WalMart, Sears, ebay and dozens of other big brand sites that sell my product.

Best way I've found to handle this is setting up your site so that all versions of a page with parameters features a rel="canonical" tag pointing at the version of itself without parameters. Edit: As necessary, depending on the nature of the parameter and how heavily the parameter affects the contents of the page on your site.

Always nice to know that it's not something I'm missing...Thanks to you both!

Thanks for the feedback. I agree, it seems to be google specific. Scratch that, webmaster tools is showing manual action. Now the fun part...

Hi Wayne, I vote for a good mix of: Locally relevant sites, like local newspapers, local business organizations and possibly local blogs Industry relevant sites, like industry publications, industry organizations and industry blogs I wouldn't focus on one over the other. I'd go for both!

Thanks, Michael. have put in the disavow so hopefully that's fine. One would hope that Google could tell that a furniture site wouldn't intentionally spam for jewellery related terms!

Thank you for your answer. We are already in Wikipedia, both in Swedish and English, and they are ranking higher than the negative posts. We are running a blog where we post something new every week. We are on all social media channels there is. So, we have lots of good stuff that we would like to rank even higher. I read somewhere that Google love forums and these kind of communities. So i guess it will be harder to push down these kinds of posts.

We were linking regularily from the website to both Facebook pages (posts that contained links to the website) - each page from its respective language on the website. Otherwise, the English website has more link-building done on it than the other language.

Hi BobGW,    I actually have experience in doing exactly this for one of my sites.  I created a free academic archive - in the same niche as my site - as link bait.  My results were mixed. I got quite a few new links coming back to the resource, and still do.  The problem has been so far that the links are generally from low DA pages like blogs.  There are exceptions as I did get a .mil and a few .edu links from it as well.  Now, the traffic to the site definitely went up due to the new section as did social engagement.  So, just for this it may be said that it was worth it. But despite all of this, I have not seen any major changes in SERP (up or down) in the last 6 months since this section was released.  It just seems like the "link juice" is not transferring in any meaningful way despite a pretty simply site structure.  I have also not seen any marked increase in conversions on the site.  So, while Google does not seem to be punishing the site for this section, it also does not seem to be giving it credit for this either (even though it ranks well for its own keyword). In the end, it is as Andrew said, it depends on how much   time and money this section will cost you.  Based on the current success of this section on my site I would still say the 2 months to create it were worth it.  I just hope that the SERP benefits will propagate to the rest of the site in the long term Good luck.

Hey Mark, Your old URL might drop in ranking b/c it lose an internal link; it depends on how many links (both internal/external) it currently has. If it has a lot, the loss of an internal link may not matter that much. The new URL should rise in ranking for green shoes. There's no guarantee it will rise to replace your old URL. It depends on its link profile, competition, and on-page SEO. Here are some additional thoughts on strategy: If you can, maybe ADD the new link instead of REPLACING the old link. Then you won't lose the internal link. I'd test it out for a week by making the proposed changes. If you don't like the changes, revert the menu. Hope that helps. -- Andrew

Hi Karl, I second Dany's advice. Additionally, and while it doesn't give you the direct data you are asking for, you can use Google Analytics Flow Reports to get a better idea of what your readers are looking for. Since you had mentioned conversions, this type of data will give you insights beyond just click numbers, and help you optimize the most sought after content. -Josh

Not to mention time-of-implementation. I agree, SEO is very much is a balancing act. You could embellish the content (add to make it 300 words) to warrant its own page. Then the question is: is it worth my time? Best of luck!

Interesting - I wonder how widespread this bug is. Does it seem to be effecting your actual visits & unique visitors numbers, or just the charts?