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Thanks again for answering. One version does seem to have better links. Perhaps Moz will eventually see them as the same domain as the redirect has only been in place for about 1 month. I may ask the developers to verify and set the preferred domain also. Thank you!

Hi Jason, This is something I can't really give a confident answer on unfortunately. Our list of clients these days don't really lend themselves to legitimate causes for a press release so we haven't done one in a little while. My best suggestion would be to look at them very closely before submitting and check for the usual quality factors (trust, authority, linking practices etc) and more importantly, try to find sites that actually have real traffic to amplify your efforts rather than just being launched into the ether to be seen by nobody

You bring up a good point Nico. I've had bloggers/reviewers who have no followed link to my clients and it has been a little frustrating to know you did all this communication just to know they didn't give you an equity link. What your saying is true, if its relevant why would you nofollow it. What i think it might be is that when you link to a site, you are also linking to its domain. The domain may be fine, but in the future it might start engaging in black hat seo and other things that would be detrimental. It kind of sucks to say it, but I feel like its almost like you have to make a call on the site's integrity for the future. I'm sure there are other cases, but this is what came up to my mind first. Love to hear from other people.

This happens more than you'd think, and it can be frustrating. It can, on occasion, be a sign that Google is on the fence about your category page. In other words, it could signal quality issues, although that's not always the case. Could you tell me what search you were running when this originally happened? There are ways to see how Google is viewing the pages on your site that match that search.

If your girlfriend wants to target Russian living in Russia, then you have to go for a .ru domain name and optimize the website thinking at Yandex as main search engine, even though Google is growing very fast right now in Russia too, especially thanks to Android Smartphones, which obviously have Google as main search engine. Here you have the Yandex guide for webmasters. The problem of a .ru domain is that - in Google - it is automatically geo-targeting Russia, so it would be impossible (or very hard) to have a subfolder like www.domain.ru/en/ being able to rank well in Google.com or Google.ca. For that reason, my suggestions is to create the English version using a generic domain. Regarding to your question about hosting the .ru domain in Russia or in the US, you could go for a third option: Hosting in the USA but with a Russian Ip. Finally, ranking in russian in Yandex is not all that easy as you may imagine

I'm looking into landing pages now. trying to find a decent plugin for call to action and landing pages. l looked at inbound now but the bad reviews gave me concern

Hi Marcel, Content duplication shouldn't be an issue if you are using ccTLDs targeting to each country (as you are already doing with The Netherlands & Belgium), the geolocalization feature is disable in the Google Search Console already when you are using ccTLDs as they are "automatically" geolocated to the country of the extension. In fact, this is the "ideal" way to internationalize your web if you're targeting to countries (and not languages) and give the best possible signal to Google that you are targeting to different countries, as in this case. Nonetheless, additionally you should also implement hreflang annotations: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en in order to avoid the situation that due to a higher authority -with stronger link profile- one of the domains rank instead of the other in the non-relevant country. I've seen that you are already including hreflang annotations on your sites pages, however these are not correctly implemented because you are only pointing to the other country URL and specifying its language and country. You need to always specify the language and country of the own page where you are adding the annotation as well as its alternative (check out the specification I included above). Please read: https://moz.com/blog/using-the-correct-hreflang-tag-a-new-generator-tool and use this tool to see the type of tags you need to add: http://www.aleydasolis.com/en/international-seo-tools/hreflang-tags-generator/. This is how you're going to avoid showing a result for the NL in BE and viceversa. However, the problem that you describe though sounds like if you have suffered from a lost of organic search visibility due to other reasons that don't have to do with internationalization: whether being affected after an update, a configuration change or issue on your site, etc. since I went to check your SEO visibility profile on SEMrush for NL: https://www.semrush.com/nl/info/lavistarelatiegeschenken.nl+(by+organic_positions)?positions=lost that show a few keywords with a negative trend and an overall negative visibility behavior on the site: https://www.semrush.com/nl/info/lavistarelatiegeschenken.nl+(by+organic) since January specifically. My recommendation is that you run a full SEO audit, instead of just focusing on international configuration that is very unlikely to cause this -unless you had release a new international version that wasn't correctly targeted, but is not your case- and verify especially if this coincides with a recent update (in January there were a few that you can see here: https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change and https://www.seroundtable.com/google-fluctuations-continue-likely-not-penguin-21489.html) and if you are suffering from content optimization issues for example that could have triggered this. If you have any other question just let me know!

Hello Dmitrli, This does make sense. Just wasn't sure if you could "over optimize" for the Schema. Thank You for your response. B/R Will

According to the official website, AMP is for content producers and not for e-commerce sites. Two relevant questions I found in the FAQ: Who will be able to use Accelerated Mobile Pages? The project is open to all players in the ecosystem - publishers, consumer platforms, and creators. What type of content will work best using Accelerated Mobile Pages? The goal is for all published content, from news stories to videos and from blogs to photographs and GIFs source: https://www.ampproject.org/docs/support/faqs.html

Hey Tom, I see how this could be problematic. In general, Local SEOs will cite the guidelines Joey has, in which Google states they don't want this: Location information, such as neighborhood, city, or street name, unless it is part of the real-world representation of the business. So, short answer here is that you need to leave your name exactly as it appears in the real world on your websites and the citations that you can control (and, of course, your Google My Business listing). I wonder if it would be possible for you to reach out to the top 20 aggregators appearing for your core search and ask them to edit your listing name. If not, then the consolation here is that the playing field is level if competing colleges area all suffering the same fate with the aggregators. In other words, their percentage of NAP inconsistency would be the same as yours. Anecdotally, what you're experiencing is also experienced by all multi-location businesses that list their locations on Facebook. Facebook won't let you have more than 1 FB Place with an identical name, so you have to be Joe's Diner Boston, Joe's Diner Chicago, Joe's Diner St. Paul, etc. Again, because their competitors are all in the same boat, it's something they don't really have to sweat. 100% NAP consistency isn't normally achievable. You want to be as consistent as you can, but don't stress about attaining absolute perfection, and my bet is that the inclusion of your city names on these aggregators is not hurting you very much, if at all. So, this would be a see-what-you-can-do-and-then-leave-it-at-that situation. Hope this helps! Interesting thread.

I like Robert's ideas about making a site structure that segregates the topics by folder and by internal linking. My sites have very diverse topics and they rank well.  I believe that it is more about the vigor of your publishing efforts, the quality of your content, and how well your visitors engage it.

Thank you. These are some good answers for me. I will focus on brand building and kickass content!

Thank you Logan and Matt for your answer. The reason why I wanted to change the URL was that it contain the year 2011 and to make it look updated, I wanted to remove the year 2011. But now, I am going to leave it because I don't want its ranking to go down.

Thanks Ruth! Much appreciated. I wonder why the heck Google thinks an apostophe and an s is better to use than the page title, wierd!

Great thank you both, I will read up on this a bit further and put some recommendations together. Thanks!

There we go. Thanks for the reminder.

Yes it's better if you put all the other suddomains as sections. Good luck M

Thanks, Chris. That's a great point. We'll certainly keep that in mind as we approach our messaging and targeting.

Totally Agreed... webmaster tool (now search console) gives the functionality to tell google about your site updates instantly using Fetch facility in the tool, so you can index your site's new or updated content as well you can find the errors on your web pages like crawl errors, indexing errors, and more. you can see the manual action as well if your site spreading spam on internet. and after fixing the issues you can send reconsideration request also. so, it is a big benefit for verified site in Google webmaster tool.