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Hello, it's good to be concerned about duplicate content. After doing some searches I've found that Google is indexing both Spanish and English versions of the products. The English version typically appears first.

I've found that you are correctly using the rel=canonical tag to point to the original content source. This should relieve any worries you might have about duplicate content.

This is very good especially considering your products can be accessed from different URLs as in your example.

However, I would suggest you take a look at any Spanish language product pages that have 100% unique content to make sure the canonical is not pointing to the English version. This will hinder the search rankings for the Spanish version of the product if you want that to be ranked well.

Best of luck with your optimization efforts. If you have any questions feel free to respond.

This is cause for duplicate content concerns unless you specifically have tagged this type of page as no-index or included a rel-canonical tag pointing to your homepage. You would not want a 404 page being indexed.

I think your best option is to create a functioning 404 error page without your homepage content or to designate the pages no-index with the following tag.

Hope this helps.

Hello,

Any of these are acceptable. Picking between digital marketing and search engine optimization in the URL is up to you. You can always pick one, then utilize the other keywords within your page. For additional information on URL structure.

Hope this helps.

Chris

Adficient.com

Richard,

If you're going to copy the content word for word, or scrape, a news site it's best practice to use a canonical tag on the duplicate content. The content is crawlable and you won't be penalized for duplicate content issues. The tag basically says 'here is the original source', giving credit to the proper source.

Chris

Adficient.com

Sam,

As Andy mentioned, depending on the size of the site you may want to consider only adding certain pages to the sitemap. With that being said I would suggest using Screaming Frog to develop your sitemap. This is my favorite tool for creating a sitemap, it's quick, easy, and thorough.

Hope this helps.

Chris

Adficient.com

Hello,

Although it's important to do a link audit if you feel you have been penalized, for some sites a link audit isn't necessary. With that being said, and you feel you need a link audit there are a few options. Ideally, you would go through each link and review it to see how it may be impacting your site, but often site owners don't have the time to do this.

1. Review obvious links - Grab 50-100 links at a time and do a quick glance at each one to determine if it should be on a list of potentially bad links. This way you can quickly overlook links you know are not hurting your rankings. Over time you can slowly tackle your list and hammer out which links are bad.
2. Focus on spam analysis links - Run your site through Moz open site explorer and review the spam analysis. Now you're not going to get every single link here, but you can get an idea on what links are lower quality.
3. Look into other companies - $2 per link is quite high, and there are other companies out there that will do a link audit, removal, and disavow for much less. If you would like a quote please contact us. Look into multiple options, don't get sold on just what one place tells you.

Hope this is helpful, if you have any additional questions please feel free to ask.

Chris

Adficient.com

As Gaston mentioned, SEO is a long process that won't happen over night. You'll need to develop a well planned out campaign that you can track and monitor. Here are a few steps to get you started, you can get more information on each one with some of the guides mentioned above.

1. Site Errors
2. Optimize your site
3. Create Content
4. Build quality back links

These steps are vague, however once you get a better understanding of SEO these will make more sense. Continue to move the graph in an upward trend. Review what your competition is doing and see what works for them.

Good Luck!

Chris

Adficient.com

Hello,

You are not being penalized for these crawl errors, but it's important to monitor these. Continue to mark them as fixed and double check to make sure there are none that are broken. Many people have encountered the same issue you are mentioning, it seems to be inaccuracies within Google. Another option is to 301 these 'fake' URLs, however this may be time consuming for you. Also I would double check your sitemap, and make sure the links are not in the sitemap.

Hope this helps.

Chris

Adficient.com

As Dmitrii mentions, disavowing links isn't going to change your rankings, especially overnight. Removing poor back links is an excellent first step, the next step is to get a well balanced SEO campaign planned out. Start creating some entertaining, helpful content pieces, then get that content in front of people. Build some high quality back links to the site, and continue doing it. Show the search engines you've made changes to move in the proper direction. It'll take time, but it'll be beneficial.

Chris

Adficient.com

Jordan hits some very good points. Realistically you're not going to be pursing just one keyword for a website. Look at variations of your focused keyword, and any other keywords related. Really you should analyze about 100 different keywords.

Are you familiar with the industry? If a customer calls or emails about a technical question on the product are you able to provide a valid answer? If you are creating content on the niche are you familiar with what issues people are having? You can always hire someone that can handle these issues, but it's always a plus to have some knowledge of the industry you're working in.

Chris

Adficient.com

Mark,

The Moz tools offer some excellent competition comparisons. You can create a campaign, input keywords to track and follow competition. The tracking shows DA, linking C blocks, etc. and will track on a line graph how your site is doing against the competition.

As far as selecting an industry or niche, this will take lots of research. My suggestions would be to find something that you're knowledgeable or passionate about. This way you have lots of content you'll be excited about creating.

There are many things you need to consider when selecting a keyword to go after. But in your situation i would tell you to look at these two, keyword competition and indexed pages for the keyword. This will help you see how much competition there is for a specific niche.

There's lots of tools you can use to get more information, and if you're going to go forward with launching a site do your due diligence and research. Good luck to you.

Chris

Adficient.com

Leszek,

This is a very common question that comes up with many clients. Realistically you only need one site, this site should be your main focus with optimization, linking, and content. I would suggest having your exact match domain redirecting to your branded website. This way the exact match domain is still in use, but your company's name is associated with the main site.

Many people think they need their exact keyword, or keywords, to be in their domain, which is not true. Many sites (Google and Moz for example) do not use keywords in their domains, yet rank very well in their industries. Now these are extreme examples, yet if you create a well thought out marketing campaign you can rank any domain for just about any keyword.

I hope this helps, if you have additional questions please let me know.

Regards,

Chris

www.adficient.com

Emily,

If you have it created and it has followers, then I would suggest keeping it active. Once you publish an article or content on your site, or external sites, then share it on your Google+ page. It only takes a few minutes to post to it, and you may see a few visitors coming in from this source. If the content is compelling this can help the SEO, if people see it, share it, link to it, click to additional pages on the site, etc. If posting to Google+ is taking up too much time, I would suggest reviewing your social media campaigns.

Hope this is helpful.

Chris

Adficient.com

1. For content on your landing page keep it simple, but use keywords that you want to rank for. Obviously, don't stuff them, make it organic. Have each page have events, news, or any other location specific news on the page.
2. I wouldn't worry about placing the city in all the title tags, use it within the content and have internal linking to the city specific landing pages.
3. Keep adding new content to the site. This is a great way to keep readers engaged and also places to continue using your keywords. Remember, use variations of your keywords.

Hope this helps.

Chris

Adficient.com

Hey Chris,

Fellow Coloradoan here, first I would like to mention it can be very difficult to out rank some businesses no matter what the industry is. Of course SEO is going to be competitive and it can be very difficult to get a new site out ranking businesses that have been around for years. My suggestion would be to look into alternative keywords that you could possibly go after.

I've ran into situations where clients ask about a specific keyword and we have to be honest and tell them it would take quite a while to reach the desired position. Some times you need to come to terms with the competition of a keyword. Now every keyword is possible, the amount of work varies.

Hope this helps.

Nick

Adficient.com

Bad SEO can be really disruptive to your ranking performance. It sounds like this person may have been using black hat link building techniques and decided to remove them once you parted ways.

There are ways to monitor and remove bad links that may negatively impacting your rankings. We have done this for many clients at GetBackOnGoogle.com to recover rankings after bad SEO work. It involves identifying incoming negative links and strategically requesting removal. In some cases you may need to disavow backlinks through Google Search Console, but the best option is to get them removed manually if possible first.

You can use the Moz Open Site Explorer to review and monitor inbound links.

If you truly think someone may have done something malicious, I would also recommend a full SEO audit to see if the setup of your website or SEO plugins have changed in any way and to make general improvements since your rankings have dropped. You'll also want to start working on content and building legitimate backlinks of your own from related sites in your industry.

Mark / AdFicient.com

As Stephen mentioned there's not an exact time frame on how quickly the changes will be seen. We at GetBackonGoogle.com submit many disavow lists for many different quality sites. Every site responds different, and it's important to continue building new, high quality links. Show the search engines you're making the proper changes and playing by their rules.

Did you try having the site remove the link, before adding it to a disavow list?

Often when you see the rankings jumping around that's a good sign. Search engines are moving your listing around to see where it fits properly. This is a great time to monitor the bounce rate and time on page. Make sure users are staying on the page and clicking through to additional pages, search engines will notice these things.

Nick

Adficient.com

It sounds like you are doing everything right

Is the site mobile friendly?

Is your content, fresh, relevant and helpful? Make sure your content is adding value, not just creating content to create content.

My suggestions would be to continue focusing on back links, I would suggest staying away from paid links. As mentioned above, create some compelling content people want to read. Use tools like Ahref's content explorer, BuzzSumo, Moz's Fresh Web Explorer to get an idea what people are reading. Once you create these pieces of content, get it in front of people. Show it to people writing similar articles. Get them to link to it. Syndicate that content!

I hope this helps, if you would like PM your URL and I can look into some other suggestions.

Nick

Adficient.com

Dylan,

There's lots of monitoring platforms available, I would try a few free trials and see what you like. Like Thomas, we use Agency Analytics, it's decent enough for social monitoring, mostly we use it for ranking monitoring.

I would suggest reading some reviews here, https://www.g2crowd.com/categories/social-media-monitoring. You can get an idea of what people like, and what they are using.

My suggestions, read reviews, then try free trials.

Hope this helps.

Nick

Adficient.com

Hello,

It won't have any negative effects on your site, I would suggest calling it a different section. For instance, you could have Blog, Expert Opinions, Breaking News, etc.

Going forward I would suggest making sure the URLs are set to what you would like, it will save time in the future.

What platform is this company using? You could integrate a Wordpress blog and create your own URLs through WP. It sounds strange that this company cannot create unique URLs.

Hope this helps.

Nick

Adficient.com