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Don't have hard evidence - but from my personal perspective: My browser is set to be-nl (Belgium)- when I'm in the Netherlands (nl-nl) I am automatically redirected to google.nl & all the results I get are from the Netherlands (even for international sites were Dutch Belgian versions exist). Browser language will have an impact - but in my opinion proximity will be more important. Dirk

Hi Everyone, I just wanted to follow up on this thread to see if I could provide any further assistance. I would be happy to look into your site if you could provide the URL that is giving you trouble.:) If you want to to work 1:1 with a help teamster I would recommend sending an email about this to help@moz.com. In the meantime if you have any other questions or concerns please feel free to ask. Have a great day!

Hi there, Just checking in to see if you looked through the things Kevin mentioned and if you are still experiencing the indexation problem after the HTTPS switch? Cheers, Jane

First, is this content dynamic? Depending on how the user progresses through these choices a search engine may not even see this information. Second, as long as those aren't the pages you are trying to rank I can't see them actually having that big of an impact (if any) on your overall SEO. There is a difference between having pages that have the same content, and having pages that are duplicate content. Rel canonical would be another way to save your skin, and making sure that the choices themselves are no-follow links (as long as there is some other method to get to the deeper pages). Personally for the sake of SEO and user experience (which is far more important) I'd talk to the company about creating a dynamic selection wizard that could be a popup and once the user makes all their choices brings them to the right HTML page. The HTML pages would be open, crawl-able, structured and sitemapped and the wizard would by a dynamic widget loaded in from a page that was robots disallowed. Helping both the human and spider experience - just my two cents! Best of luck!

I have the same problem with so of the sites I manage. Luckily the search engines have never found or indexed the duplicate url i.e. domain.com/secondsite. Have the search engines indexed it for you? If not is it really a problem? I have considered a 301 or robots.txt but due to it never being found/indexed I did not see the point.

I think you have a PDF and all you want to do is to promote the website within the targeted audience and get down downloads for the ebook. More downloads means more email subscriptions and this you will use further for promotional emails. To be honest, If I will be at your place i would have plan the promotion even before the content, but now when you have done this here is the recommended action plan you can follow! Decide Clear goals: This will help you identify that your overall promotional plan is getting any success or not. Try to make few clear, measurable goals from the promotional plan. With the ebook you should consider the following goals as important Specific number of email subscription. Specific number of links you will get on an ebook How much quality traffic i should receive Specific number of leads for my business. Number of tiwtter followers should increase Number of facebook followers should increase to a certain extent. Once the goals are decided now it’s a time for a promotional plan and to achieve each part of the goal you should promote accordingly. Like for example for Facebook and twitter you can invite the people and pass them a book upon a tweet or a facebook like... Blogger Outreach is also a good idea, you can also try Press Release... as this is a guide, contacting institutes and schools that offer related course can also be of great help... This is a creative game to think, scale under your budget and do it...

using subdomains for locations is a technique that spammers took advantage of and as a result is no longer recommended. Use directories/folders or simply targeted landing pages in the same folder. a) You can code it so that you don't show a global phone number in the header b) it's your site, you don't have to create links that take the user to deeper location pages if you don't want to c) Regardless you need to create unique content anyway, if it's on a subdomain or directory it's still using the same template and you need totally unique content for each page, don't just swap out location names.

Agreed - although I think a 301-redirect or canonical tag implementation would probabyl be ok. If there's a database lookup that can translate the DocID into a URL string, the canonical is easy (I write some CF code, so I can at least tell you it's doable). Keep in mind that "article.cfm" is only one template, so if you can find a solution that's data-driven, it's just as easy for 1,000 pages as it is for 10. You could also create a dynamic 301-redirect via <cfheader>- the core logic is the same. Basically, you look up the URL from the DocID and dynamically create the tag. You just need someone who understands your CMS and data. The actual code is only a few lines, but understanding your setup is the time-consuming part.</cfheader>

Do you still have good success by just doing content? Yes.  We have a few niche retail sites and an info site that are all competitive in their niches. How much content do you usually need to produce before you start seeing good rankings for shorter-tail keywords? It is not about quantity.  It is all about quality.  When  we put up content it is usually the best page on the web for the keyword that we are targeting.  We post it onto the site, it usually does not rank very well at first, but a year or so later many of the pages that we have made are at the top of Google.   Some are not.   Put up the pages and don't worry about them.  If they are good their rankings usually rise. Would this same strategy work in a local setting (ex. 'insurance London, Ontario')? or is it mainly for global/national sites, where location of visitors is irrelevant? If I was going after local terms I would be using local search optimization methods.   Most of the queries that we are going after have nothing to do with a local service or product. How do you promote the content that you've created? Post everything that you do on your homepage.  Send it to everybody who knows you (and has opted in).  We have a couple of blogs that each get several posts per day.  All of those posts automatically displayed on relevant pages across out site.  They go out to twitter and FB.... we also have email and RSS feed subscribers.  We use addthis buttons all over the site to make it very easy for visitors to share. A few times per year we have a topic that we are excited about and will submit it to sites like reddit, digg, slashdot.  That usually doesn't work - but when it does the traffic is great. Finally, do you work on multiple sites, or just for one company? I only work on my own sites.

Hi Corey! Since they are so similar and basically just variations of the same keyword, I would say to stick to one page. What you can do is research which variation has the highest search volume and use that on the title tag. You can then make sure to use that same variation on the H1(on-page title), then you can use a couple of the variations throughout the actual on-page text (don't over do it...). Also, if you have an image, make sure to use one of the variations as the alt text...Lastly share it socially, and work on some inbound links using the variations above as anchor text. Best, Margarita

Wow you are easy. You've got it right, there is no reason to make different landing pages for each of these terms. Your plan is correct.