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Moz Community,

I have just noted a competitor using some meta information i have not seen before, Just wondering if anyone has any experience or feedback on using these tags and if they are worth implementing,

Seems very similar to the meta description, i don't really see the point unless potentially this abstract could be more topic based if your meta description is designed for Click-Through optimization.

Isn't this defined in the sitemap anyway? , and most of the time we will Tweet and Google Plus share any new updates to our site also Google seems to do a good job anyway of crawling anything new we publish or change,

Any advice or feedback would be great please,

Thanks

James

Robert,

From my experience we have set our targeting to UK and have as long as i can remember as we are a UK company, with a .co.uk website,

I think Google see's it as more of a guideline, as this targeting has never held us back internationally as roughly 60% of our traffic comes from worldwide and we rank well in the states particularly,

My advice is to go ahead and target UK especially if the website is only applicable to UK

Hope this helps

James

David,

If you have Google Adwords running by any chance, Most of our keywords are set to 'phrase match' but then daily i look further into the specific keyword details by ticking all of my keywords within the adgroup and clicking 'Details' and Search Term 'Selected'. If your ad text is relevant then you are looking at the exact search terms that our ads and content is most relevant too, I have tightened up on this by building up my negative keywords list,

Also although Google have tightened up on keyword information, Bing certainly have not so we use the keyword data from Bing webmaster tools, their is absolute tons of keyword information from Bing

Thomas has a great list of good tools already mentioned,

I hope this helps

James

Have these rankings always been different like this or just changed recently ?

Possibly your content is just more relevant towards US searchers, have you set geo targeting in your webmaster tools? ,But i would expect the results from different countries versions of Google to be different,

Is your website using a .com TLD or a .com.pk ?

Are you sure your results are not being altered for personalized when you are looking at this ?. i use the browser extensions from Yoast to which i think is the best way to ensure your results are accurate and un-personalised for different countries? Also you could use the Moz rank tracker for different countries and see what it gives you ?,

https://yoast.com/tools/seo/disable-personalized-search-plugin/

Hope this helps,

James

Is the page new ? ensure that google has indexed it fully, I do this by fetching as google with webmaster tools, and possibly take a look at the version of your page google has cached from the search results,

If the meta information is cached and upto date then, DJ123's answer applies, Google has found some text content it prefers to show, possibly based on the users search query

Try rewriting your meta description and make it as relevant as possible if that is an option for you,

Hope this helps

James

Sounds like use for Rel="Alternate",

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

The bullets that seem to apply recommended by google here are,

• You keep the main content in a single language and translate only the template, such as the navigation and footer. Pages that feature user-generated content like a forums typically do this.

• Your content has small regional variations with** similar content in a single language**. For example, you might have English-language content targeted to the US, GB, and Ireland.

Sounds like the case for me,

Hope this helps,

James

Hi Andy,

So basically we have our primary .co.uk website , with a duplicate .com version of the website, my question is how should i markup to avoid a penalty,

Thanks, James

Hi All,

I was hoping to just get some advice on my situation as to the right markup to use for our situation,

We are working on a more user/mobile friendly redesign for our website and are hoping to release it soon, Our primary URL is www.cirrusresearch.co.uk as we are a UK based company, This has stayed as our primary international website for historical and political reasons as we still get good traffic from overseas, the .co.uk doesn't really seem to hold us back internationally,

However underlying we do have the www.cirrusresearch.com pointed all of our pages, which is not a general redirect but is giving us a duplicate of each of our pages but with the .com extension, we basically have an exact duplication of our .co.uk website but with the .com extension, we are not looking to switch to the .com as a primary domain,

I have noticed when doing some USA ranking research that Google is preferring to display the alternate .com versions of each page (Understandably) We have not noticeably been penalized by Google for being a duplicate.

I took a look at the documentation on the webmaster support on the use of REL Canonical and REL Alternate and am unsure which of these would be most suited markup for my crazy situation,

Any advice on this please?

Thanks,James

I use the Moz crawler to crawl my entire site and export it to an excel spreadsheet to navigate, its one of the first columns on your report

http://pro.moz.com/tools/crawl-test

Although i agree with Anthony and think its a very good idea to track any duplicate mentions from Google's perspective in webmaster tools

On-page SEO checking tool  was a big draw for me to moz, i would go through your websites landing pages with the moz on-page grader tool

http://moz.com/researchtools/on-page-grader

Actually most of the tools you get full access to are pretty sweet, Opensite explorer for your own link profile and looking at competitors i also find very useful.

https://moz.com/researchtools/

James,

I am also having the same problem

Here is the link to a questions with a solution i found earlier

http://moz.com/community/q/connection-to-google-analytics

Hope this helps

James

From my limited experience in my opinion i find it a strong factor, we have a couple of websites in different countries that seem to rank particularly well with the correct country code,

But i remembered this Matt Cutts video which should give you a better idea http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJqZIH_0Ars

Hope this helps

James

Have you tried a Fetch as Google within the >crawl menu in webmaster tools? If Google can fetch it ok then i wouldn't of thought that anything would be wrong with your page, and then it could be just Google taking its time to crawl your website, i find it takes even longer before our new pages/articles start showing and ranking for our competitive keywords

Hope this helps, James

Thank you,

i did look at this particularly how the competition was typing the keyword on the page and they all still use the umlaut, but as for the url structure it could be an idea for me to make changes so it would be http://www.cirrusresearch.de/produkte/schallpegelmessgeraet/ yea thanks, i may look at changing this structure slightly, but i am still not quite sure that would be a reason for my current ranking to be so poor

Hi Mozzers,

I was hoping i could get some advice/opinions on a website ranking problem i have been working on, in particular one of the pages.

This is our German language website which is hosted from Germany and a flaunt German speaking member of staff from our German office moderates the text content of the website for us.Our website seems to get good traffic ,visitor navigation and conversions.

One of the keywords i focus building around is Schallpegelmessgerät which is one way of basically saying Sound level meter in German. The keyword uses an umlaut which i cannot use in the URL, but google is picking up and putting into the snippets, but apart from that our on-page optimization is good according to the moz tool.

I have been trying to improve our content and we post many blog articles around the topic/keyword but google.de seems to choose not to even display this on the first couple of pages and sometimes ranks our blog articles around the third page. We are even been outranked by some low quality cheap online shop websites some of which with low quality content and low page and domain authorities.

I had accepted this but after looking at bing.de and doing a search i find our page in the top 5 results, i understand that google and bing's algorhythms are different but just struggling to get my head around it all.

Here is our website & page - http://www.cirrusresearch.de/produkte/schallpegelmessgerat/

Any advice on this situation would be greatly appreciated, thank you very much for reading this

James

Just as a side note,

From what i understand Google doesn't have to show your custom written meta descriptions, if it see's some text on the page it thinks is more relevant to the general page topic, it may just display that instead anyway

Hope this helps

James

A competitor with maybe a couple of hundred pages throughout their website has recently added an image alt tag of a keyword to their company logo which links back to there homepage. The homepage is not particularly optimized towards this keyword and do not use the keyword within the text content at all apart from within the page title, So the image and link destination are not relevant towards the keyword.

They seem to rank well for this competitive keyword in our industry using what i see as a slightly unethical internal linking strategy.

We are currently working on some solid content to compete with this, but i was just wanting some advice on the situation, How does Google not see this as manipulative having the same link in the template from each page?

Thank you very much Simon and Tom, i remember watching this video in the past but clearly didn't take it in as well as i should of

We have a local German speaker so i intend to have the content accurately translated and i should be ok, so thank you

I was hoping anyone could give me some advice on my situation

Our blog is a huge traffic source for us, we frequently release fresh blog articles on our English language website bringing lots of relevant traffic for a variety of different relevant topics

Some of these articles would be very useful and relevant for visitors to our German website so i would like to get them translated and posted on our separate German language blog on our separate German website.

The article text will not change much as the information is the same for Germany also

How should i go about this without running into duplicate content issues with Google

I looked into rel=alternate and realized  that i cannot use this over two separate websites, i also thought about rel=canonical but it doesn't look like this would be suitable either

Can anybody please give me any advice or thoughts on this ?

If you are using multiple language sites, make sure you set your geographic target in webmaster tools. Also make sure your content is well written for the local language and if possible i think it could help to have a local contact address in that country displayed somewhere throughout the website.

Hope this helps slightly

James