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Hey there, Personally, I don't look at footers as duplicate content, whether they are the same across multiple domains or multiple subdomains. More often than not, footers are pretty generic and contain social links as well as a few links to secondary pages on the site such as 'terms and conditions'. Unless you're packing your footer with a large chunk of text, I wouldn't worry about duplicate content issues as there aren't going to be any. Duplicate content on main pages across sub domains will ALWAYS be the biggest issue and that should be concentrated on above site footers - I would have a word with your outsourced specialists and ensure they're concentrating on the biggest wins for the site rather than the nitty gritty bits that would have little to no impact. All the best, Sean

Thanks. As  mentioned, however, I'm really just looking for advice about a quick experiment i could perform (solid authority domain one may be possible, but would hope to try something else first).

Have you tried fetching those URLs as Googlebot within GSC? -Jake Bohall

Hi Chris, Thanks for your reply. Any idea on "why" people do this? It's an obviously spammy URL that they would go to over and over. And for Robots.txt file for these spammy links, are you referring to using the "disallow" function for this file name? Thanks Chris, Michelle

Hi Brandon, It isn't possible to target YouTube channels by location, so I wouldn't recommend creating and maintaining several different channels. Given that you seem to be talking about videos which are designed to convert (or are viewed close to the point when a customer does convert), I'd actually suggest that YouTube is not the right platform for you. The videos that you're putting all this effort into are going to cause youtube.com to rank—not your website. And the click-through rates from YouTube to your site will be poor. To really get the most from this kind of video, use a service like Wistia, because it'll allow you to host the videos on your own site, and get credit for that in search results. Phil Nottingham gave another answer on this forum which explains this really well. In a nutshell, YouTube is good at mass reach, spreading a message, raising your profile—think "Dollar Shave Club"—but performs poorly for video content that's designed to convert. Very few people will click through from product description videos on YouTube, so you'll leak traffic unnecessarily. For product descriptions, demos, etc, you're better hosting it on Wistia and embedding on your site. This will also allow you to fully control geo-targeting, because you can use hreflang on your product pages. Let's say that I have a UK shop in the /en-GB/ folder, and a French shop in /fr-FR/. I can now have the same product listed in each, using the appropriate video and translated description, and use hreflang to tell Google that these pages serve an equivalent function for users in those different locations. Stephan

Hey there, Typically, some tools claim to be able to push Google to reindex fixed URLs faster but this is, more often than not, a claim that isn't backed up. I would proceed with caution when looking to purchase a tool that claims to do something but without telling you how it's doing it. All the best, Sean

You're welcome. Hreflang is the tag you should use. There are plenty of tutorials and articles about it. I'm on the phone now, as soon as I get a PC I'll update with some links. ----UPDATE--- Resources that I've promised: The hreflang Tags Generator Tool - Aleyda Solis (Moz's associate) Use hreflang for language and regional URLs - Search Console Help Hreflang Attribute - Moz Hope it helps. GR.

Hi there, They are both competing for the same search terms. Probably, one will never out rank the other and you have double work to do. Also, the duplicate content might be hurting both sites. My advise is to create a second directory in the older and global site. Then, use hreflang telling google the country specifics. Then you can use some of the leverage the older domain has.  I'd do: sample.com (global) and sample.com/uk/ (for UK). Here some  resources: International SEO - Moz.com FAQ: Internationalisation - Google WMT central The International SEO Checklist - Moz Blog. Best Luck. GR.

Yes, you can easily do this. Here is a post from SEW that details this: https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2409081/can-you-reavow-links-you-have-peviously-disavowed Also, be careful with what you choose to disavow, as it can take Google a while to process these requests. What you don't want to do is get rid of good links, suffer a ranking loss, and then have to wait a long time while they re-process your request.

Hey there, There are so many factors that could be affecting this - geo-location, search history, the Google account you're using when you browse - all of these things will be personalizing the search results that you see. To get a fairer comparison, either go incognito in a fresh browser window with browser cache/history deleted or use another rank tracker to compare another set of unbiased results. All the best, Sean

Hi James, If Google is not showing a 3 pack for your most important term, but, rather, is treating it like a branded result with only one business in it, there's not a ton you can do about that. Is there any chance you're able to share the name of your company and term you're trying to rank for? If not, it's okay, but if you can, it will help the community target their suggestions to your specific case.

Hello, Thank you for this information, but I have a followup question. The links you sent me refer to images and PDF's, but this isn't relative to my situation. I need to write in follow/no follow and rel=canonical via htaccess because I do not know how to do it for each individual page on my ecommerce store - additionally, htaccess is easy for me to edit if ever I need to undo something and it is nice to have everything in one place. Can you give me a formatted example of how a follow/no follow and rel=canonical can be placed into a page via the htaccess file please? I intend on doing this for every product category, product and also my home page on my ecommerce store. Thank you

No problem, best of luck

That's great news Dusan - glad you figured it out -Andy

No problem - best of luck with it all

Answer to the quick question: The reason of having the same content (e.g. solution/product/reference) page, is that the international content can be used for a local (e.g. /us) page as well. Sometimes, it's really needed to localize the content, sometimes the same content as the international one can be used. 1. Good, that's how it's done now. 2. Yes, very good explanation for this question. Thanks Thomas! 3. True. Perhaps we should not look this from an seo point of view but from a market perspective. I got some ideas, thanks

Theoretically, if the URL is blocked  by  robots.txt it should not appear in the index results no matter if they are in the sitemap but I have seen URLs indexed that are blocked by robots.txt but are in the sitemap and have good links pointing to it. If you want to block pages that have good links pointing to them, my advice is to remove them from sitemap. #justathought. About URLs from multiple domains, I personally create separate sitemaps for different subdomains and link to main sitemap and I see better indexing that way. Again, these are my personal experiences and not rules so please do keep that in mind as things can be different fro them.

Thanks David.

Sounds like you have a good awareness of where to start looking. Without seeing what you have it will be difficult to diagnose. Can you PM me the URL? Could be another external factor besides the links that is causing the ranking issues.