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Hello. Thank you for your detailed reply. To answer your points: I don't think the exension of the domain will make any difference at all to our customers. Yes a ,com might be better from an international point of view but this is not a major point at the moment. I understand that no exension will make a difference. I think though that the point for me was that we were ranking fairy well for the .com but the .co.uk has never performed as well. The last SEO company did say this was due to Google's updates but I heard that excuss nearly everytime something didn't work out. Really is there any way to tell if changing back to the .com would benifit or does google pass all the link juice over with a 301 anyway. Paul

Thank you for the advice. I am not keen on leaving pages with no products to offer as I do feel it may annoy customers.

Haha, you wrote this as I was writing my reply to you both below. Yup! That earlier Q&A is a great resource. Screaming Frog should give you insight into where the links might have gone bad. 301 redirection is always an option as well for the few links that may be causing issues.  Cheers!

Thanks for the quick response, Patrick. Why, if this robots.txt file is incorrect, does it yield no errors on other sites we use this on? Cheers, Lewis

Hi there! When searching in OSE we'll deliver the page specific details, screenshot attached. When you go into root domain specific data this will be much larger! Hope this helps. 00000767.png

We are having issues with crawls for all HubSpot hosted sites as well. We love Moz so we are hoping there is a workaround for the issue. If anyone has an update on this topic, I am all ears. Thank you.

Hi Richard Honestly, I really don't know.  A lot of me wants to say that: "Surely Google will know this isn't deliberate and manipulative duplicate content".  You could take a couple of those URLs and do a Google search with them.  Do: site:www.example.com/page?query1 info:www.example.com/page?query1 With the first result, if your URL hasn't been indexed, that's a good thing.  For the second result, if the info search returns the original URL (without the parameters), that's also good, as it means Google will be counting the one with parameters as just a variation and to be ignored.  However, if it's returning the result with the parameters, that would indicate that the web crawler is indexing the version with parameters and treating it as a separate URL - raising the duplicate content risk.  Silly Google! Regardless of those results, I would look to implement the canonical tag anyway as it takes any guesswork out of the equation.  And ultimately, a lot of this work with Google is guesswork as we can't see the algorithm - although it's an informed guess due to experience etc.

Hi Patrick, That's the problem. I advised them to not use any extensions. This makes no sense in Holland as they only speak one language over there. The agency responsible for the creation and the maintenance of the website says it is technically not possible to set up the website in Holland without an extra extension. I'm not that technical. What if there is no other way? Or is it not possible that there is no other way? Thank you so much for your help!

Hello John, Thanks again for your help – it is much clearer now. We don't want to trick our users, but we do want them to use the piece of content we have created without being overwhelmed by the brand. What we're probably going to so is host the content on our corporate URL but create a whole new design – much less branded  – for that content.

Did you look up the site in https://archive.org/ ? you should be able to recover lots of the content that was deleted! Its even possible that some was curated across the web as well, if you need some help looking let me know.

I have a few listings that are not recognizing our Google + pages even though they have been verified. Should I just wait for them to be re-crawled or is there someone to reach out to?

Thanks to those that posted and emailed! I'll be reaching out in the next week to set up some time to chat.

hey guys, Any updates on the ahreflang tests? I'm in a similar boat - one site got a manual hit in Feb2014...sitewide penalty, at one point brand name was even deindexed. Got penalty lifted in 5 months. But traffic has not recovered one bit since then.

Hi there I want to say that it may have to do with your canonical tags. For instance... http://www.craftcompany.co.uk/pme-rose-leaf-veined-plunger.html has a canonical tag for http://www.craftcompany.co.uk/pme-rose-leaf-veined-plunger.html But, if you use http://craftcompany.co.uk/pme-rose-leaf-veined-plunger.html has a canonical tag for http://www.craftcompany.co.uk/pme-rose-leaf-veined-plunger.html?SID=1c501bb25ab64ab687f30b714dee9969 Your non www. URLs seem to have a SID parameter attached to their canonical tags. I would check out Google's resource on duplicate content. There are links to help you clean these up. I am not saying that's the reason, but I would definitely clean those URLs up in canonical tags. Hope this helps! Good luck!

We are looking into an MVC plugin for our umbraco site. I believe there can be custom elements, such as the sign-up process. Would you say it's better to host it on a sub-domain? I'm thinking this is the way forward. What are your thoughts? Within our niche there are three very popular forums, none of which seem to have severe spam issues. I expect they are well moderated (and I've said this is a necessity). Ours will have someone looking after it (moderating) as well as people dedicated to answering specific questions. Thanks for your advice! It's greatly received.