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Hi,

I'm fairly sure you can put the tags in a sitemap rather than the header.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2620865?hl=en https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

Placing the tags into the header is a much bigger technical issue for us at present.

Cheers

Moz is flagging a lot of pages on our site which have duplicate page titles. 99% of these are international pages which hreflang tags in the sitemap.

Do I need to worry about this? I assumed that it wasn't an issue given the use of hreflang. And if that's the case, why is Moz flagging them as an issue?

Thanks.

Hi Mike,

I did see that there was an update last week, but as far as I can see we weren't impacted until Sunday/yesterday.

In terms of pages indexed there has been a slight drop, but only 700 out of 19,900. So in line with the variance we get on a week to week basis.

The drop in ranking seems to have only effected non branded keywords. Would a penalty effect both?

Thanks for the input. I got another site crawl from Moz today (i have campaigns running on the regional subfolders and one on the domain) at domain level. We have 1,292 404 errors at a domain level. All of our links are broken, so every URL in the sitemap is pushing Google to a 404. If you actually browse the site it works but every URL has index.php injected into the middle of it.

I have manually checked every non-branded keyword we were ranked no.1 for in Australia. We were ranked #1 for 23 keywords I was tracking. We are now out of the top ten for 20, ranked #9 for 1 and #1 for two others.

I came in this morning to a swath of email updates from Moz. Our site had jumped in ranking in the four geographic regions we target and we were seeing (more or less) the best results we've ever had. Most of the jumps were only 1 - 4 places but they were for our most competitive keywords.

Late this afternoon I did some spot checks on keywords to confirm that we were still holding roughly in the same positions and before I reported this to the wider business. We're not. What's more we have dropped off the first page for some terms and don't seem to be ranked at all for for others. The only keywords we're getting good rankings for are branded search terms.

I can only assume this is due to a technical issues over the weekend our developers caused. I'm not completely across this but I at some point our sitemaps stopped working and a huge number of links on the site were broken. Could a massive surge in 404s cause this? I'm checking google analytics and I can't see a drop in organic traffic yet although I don't have the full figures for today.

Thanks

No. There is a No Follow tag on the link so while Google will see the link no 'juice' passes on.

Yep. Checked in the tester at the time and did some more spot checks this morning.

I used Disallow: /*?key which I thought was generally recognised by bots?

I've blocked a large number of pages which Moz were showing as duplicate or giving 404's in our robots.txt using /?key and /?p etc.

However Moz crawler is still showing as being an issue. I assumed Roger picked up the robots.txt file, or is that not the case?

Looks like Page Rank for all our key product listing pages has taken a hammering. They're all getting a PR of 1, even though our domain authority remains ok (it has dropped too, but not as dramatic).

What we're seeing is a lot of yo-yo'ing. This week we had 30 SERP drops and 17 rises, which has been typical for last month. Prior to that we'd see about half of this.

e.g. 'home security cameras' SERPs since mid-Oct has been: 4, 4, 8, 4, 7, 6. This is pretty typical of what I'm seeing. We've not made any real content or site changes in this time.

Traffic wise there has been a 3.5% dip in search over the last few weeks. So not huge.

We have several country specific sites set up as folders of our main domain. We use hreflang tags to get the relevant site served in each country, with mixed success. In about 60% of searches the US site appears.

Beginning in late October our rankings for the US have slowly, but reasonably steadily dropped. Each week we'll see 10 or so keyword rises and 15-30 keywords drop. Generally by 1-3 places. This is much more movement than we were seeing in the months prior to this.

Is this a result of penguin, or just coincidence? The US subfolder is the only one which has seen drops overall, the rest have actually improved slightly during this time period. I would expect any impact due to Penguin to effect the whole domain?

I've been checking through our backlinks and we do a have a handful of bad links, along with a 100 or so which look a little odd and not completely relevant. I have contacted sites and had some of these removed, and created a disavow list with the worst of the rest. I haven't asked for the site to be re-considered yet.

We haven't had any message in webmaster tools re: bad links or similar.

Cheers.

Thanks.. it took me a while but I did realise that one eventually.

Thanks Thomas. That is how our sitemap now reads. It just seems odd that when you access map via a browser the hreflang tags don't appear...

I've updated the site maps but the hreflang tags still aren't showing when you view the site map...

I think I might see the problem. I'm only referencing the alternative pages with the hreflang tag, I've not included the site itself. it should be:

<url><loc>http://www.swann.com/uk/dvrs-kits</loc>
<lastmod>2014-07-23</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority></url>

This is the beginning of my sitemap for the UK subfolder, as far as I can see we're following both the case studies you posted and the Google advice on the structure. But as you point out when you view the sitemap online it's not showing the hreflang tags.

<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9" xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><url><loc>http://www.swann.com/uk/dvrs-kits</loc>
<lastmod>2014-07-23</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority></url>
<url><loc>http://www.swann.com/uk/dvrs-kits/1080p</loc>
<lastmod>2014-07-23</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority></url>
<url><loc>http://www.swann.com/uk/dvrs-kits/960h</loc>
<lastmod>2014-07-23</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority></url></urlset>

Thanks for running this.

The deeptrawl says that there are no hreflang tags in place. If you view the sitemap.xml files on the site you can't see any there either. However they're definitely in the files I'm giving to my colleague to upload.

I matched the structure of the tag to the two case studies you put in your first post...

Hi,

I did have a read through those two case studies previously. My understanding was that we could implement the code purely on the on the sitemap, and that nothing on the site was needed. Are you saying we also need some code on the site as well?

The verification tool doesn't say we have it implemented, but I wasn't sure that it would check the sitemaps or just the sites HTML.

Hi,

We've had hreflang tags implemented on our site for a few weeks now, and while we are seeing some improvements for the regional subfolders I wanted to double check I had the tags implemented correctly (a couple of examples are below). However while the regional subfolder sites are now ranking instead of the US site for some keywords, some key search terms are still returning the US site. Could this be due to incorrect implementation for that specific page?

Due to complications with using Magento we're implementing the tags in the site maps. Also magento appears to be inserting a rel canonical tag automatically for each page and self referencing e.g. On www.example.com/uk/security-cameras (one of the pages we're having issues with) the canonical tag is http://www.example.com/uk/security-cameras" />. Is this an issue?

Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks.

<url><loc>http://www.example.com/uk/dvrs-kits</loc>
<lastmod>2014-07-23</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority></url>
<url><loc>http://www.example.com/uk/dvrs-kits/1080p</loc>
<lastmod>2014-07-23</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority></url>

Yep they're indexed.

We're going to implement webmaster tools on each subfolder and then set the location to see if that makes any difference.

I thought hreflang was just if you had full translations but I'll take a look at adding that as well.

Thanks.