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In theory - yes, but here is how look in practicle: http://www.stateofdigital.com/google-broken/ Just check examples with "bandwagon" or "carro". I'm not sure how this happen but i can often see similar results since our Bulgarian language is close to Russian. So in bulgarian SERP i can see sometimes russian results. Of course result is relevant, just different country. I also have site related to Greek language. But this site can be visited from Cyprus and other worldwide locations due keywords. I can attach SearchConsole and Analytics screenshots if you don't believe it.

Can I have multiple defaults for a single URL when not using x-default? Could you explain better? Hreflang is alternate annotation... so - for instance - in the en-US home page you must indicate the alternative home pages for en (meant for global use of the en-GB, british version of your site), fr-FR (or fr only), en-CA and zh-hans, and vice versa in all the pages. If you mean if the x-default can be different on a URL by URL situation - for instance if you want to set up a british product page as default for all users not targeted with specific geotargeting version of the same product page - in theory that is possible, because the hreflang is URL specific and not domain wide. Said that, you should always state that the british version is meant for all English speaking users apart the geotargeted one (hreflang="en"). The xdefault will tell Google to show the british version URL to all the users from countries and languages not specifically geotargeted (eg.: Spanish speaking users from Spain).

Patrick nailed it, but I'll add that when you see a drop in DA, the first thing you should do is look up your competitors in Open Site Explorer. If they've dropped too, then it's very likely you're just seeing the effects of an index refresh.

Hi Tyler, I think about AJAX and Google this way: if you can see all of the content on your site that you want Google to see without AJAX, you're good. It looks like all of the content loads without JavaScript, it's just the filters that Google won't be able to use. So, if you have 12 items for sale like this example, I think you're in the clear. The problem is going to come if you start to have more products than you can fit on this page. Site architecture is a big part of rankings; you don't want the crawler to miss out on new products because they're on page 15 and the crawler never gets there. I see that you have a Popular Tags box, which may help with that, but you'll have to be very aware of that as you grow. This set up may also make you miss out on category pages, which can be extremely valuable. With this set up, I'm not sure that you'd be able to have a landing page for "Android Phones," for example. If Google could crawl your filters, it would be able to come up with that combination.Then again, you may have thought this all through, and are just asking about this specific page. Either way, I hope this helped!Kristina

I see. In that case, sure, any short folder would be fine.  Maybe even 'a' as it reads a little nice: website.com/a/us-en/store/product-name.html.  Reads like, "Website, a US, English language store with the product named X."  Someone seeing the link would have a pretty good idea of what it is going to be.

Hi Tyler, Is this still going on? My first reaction would be to say that Google will probably figure it out over time and the notifications will disappear/not reoccur. Have you seen new notifications of duplicate content since you made these changes? Are these pages still appearing in the index? If not I wouldn't be super concerned - WMT updates lag behind what's going on in the index by quite a bit. If they are, take a look at the cache date - it may be that Google needs to crawl these pages again to find the canonical tag. Since Google doesn't always "get" canonical tags, you may not see this error go away in WMT - as long as those pages are no longer ranking for anything, though, you should be OK. The redirects should stop registering as duplicate content sooner rather than later, though.

Screaming Frog

This kind of depends on the size of the site, how frequently Google tends to crawl the site, strength of site, etc. Since this change is part of a larger structural change within corporate I'd ask them for a press release and link(s) from the main site to the new domain in conjunction with its launch.  That will add another additional layer to what you're planning to do: GWT change of address 301 Redirection New links at time of redirection pointing to new site. All three of which will induce further crawling by the engines and help speed up the process. Since you're dealing with mature sites it shouldn't be a dramatic amount of time if you stay on top of it.

You can think about presenting the "related products" or the "related recipees" or the "most popular recipees" (if you have a user rating system up, so that users of the site can upvote a recipe or another) as normally blogs do with "related posts". I would present them below the product description and below the recipe, depending on the case. I would not hide them behind a tab, because of that alert Tim is writing about in his comment (which, if it is really so - someone should test it - could be an interesting option for hiding content that you don't want Google to consider for ranking reasons).

Well, that depends on the structure of your website and how you want to use category pages. For example, I manage an ecommerce website that sells Widgets. I have a high ranking XYZ Widgets product page. It sells amazing and since my price is so awesome, people link to it from their blogs and such. However, XYZ widgets just became discontinued. When the product page disappears, it creates a 301 to my main Widgets Category. My Widgets Category page isn't going anywhere (not being removed from the site anytime soon) and ranks high in the SERPs. All those 301'ed product pages help improve its authority and allows me to rank high for a broad industry term - it also acts an efficient landing page. That's just one store setup though, it could be that your category pages do not add value and you use a different page for that type of use. If you're not using your category pages to rank in the SERPs, then I would find which broad pages you do want to rank and have the product pages 301'd to those pages (to save any authority gained). In terms of Internal linking, since I want my category pages to rank, a clear internal link structure helps that case. It also ends up that my category pages have a higher internal link count because of the structure I have in place. That all contributes to the category pages ranking higher for broader terms and allows my product pages to rank higher for the specific terms.

Hi, when you click on the error, it should list the URL of the page which has one title, and then underneath that, the other page(s) that have the same title.