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Have worked out how to check in sitemaps and can see that there are upper case urls being referenced so have instructed dev to force lower case and update sitemap to dynamic

A few months ago

Good point I'll ask , should that be a quick task for a dev to carry out ?

Also is it something i can verify myself ? (i have looked in GWT but cant see any urls listed only the sitmap itself)

Cheers Hutch

Hi

I have a client e-com site who's dev platform is on a windows server

Their product pages have been auto-named after the product title, with the first letter in each word being upper case, which has hence translated to the URL having upper cases instances too.

I asked them to set up 301 redirects for all url's that had upper case instances to lower case versions, which they say they have done.

However I'm still seeing url's with upper case instances showing up in webmaster tools and moz crawl reports but when I copy & paste them into a browser they do redirect to, & resolve in, the lower case version. Its also upper case versions reported in the Google cache!

So how come webmaster tools & Moz etc are reporting the upper case versions, surely if redirected it should be the lower case versions

All Best

Dan

ok thanks !

nothing has changed just hoped it might do something

thanks Donna ! yes its all there and cache date is 15 Jan but still thought worthwhile fetching & rendering & submitting again, or does that do nothing more if its already indexed apart from asking G to take another look ?

Thanks for commenting Donna !

And providing the link to the interesting Q&A although this isn't the scenario i'm referring to with my original question.

The page isn't ranking at all although its very well optimised (and not overly so) and the keyword isn't that competitive so i would expect to be somewhere in the first 3-4 pages but its not even in first 100

Very similarly optimised pages (for other target keywords which are more competitive) are ranking well. Hence the fetch and render & submit to index i did, just to double check Googles seeing the page.

Cheers

Dan

Marvellous !

Many Thanks Robert !

All BEst

Dan

Hi Robert,

Thanks for your help again !

That's great thanks, but what about 'submit to index' which i did also ? As in did i need to do that or not ?(since GWT says all pages submitted are indexed in sitemap section of GWT, so i take it i didn't need to, but did anyway as a precaution) ?

All Best

Dan

Hi

I have a clients nicely optimised webpage not ranking for its target keyword so just did a fetch & render in GWT to look for probs and  could only do a partial fetch with the below robots.text related messages:

Googlebot couldn't get all resources for this page

Some boiler plate js plugins not found & some js comments reply blocked by robots (file below):

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/

As far as i understand it the above is how it should be but just posting here to ask if anyone can confirm whether this could be causing any prrobs or not so i can rule it out or not.

Pages targeting other more competitive keywords are ranking well and are almost identically optimised so cant think why this one is not ranking.

Does fetch and render get Google to re-crawl the page ? so if i do this then press submit to index should know within a few days if still problem or not ?

All Best

Dan

Hi Dirk

i had heard it was possible to geotarget sub domain and sub folders by setting up new profiles for them, but havnt tried to yet but pretty sure its possible

In this case its trying to attract 2 different regions/areas via one tld: worldwide english with the domain.com, then Turkey via domain.com/tr. Then there is a domain.com/de subfolder with German content but thats domain mapped to domain.de so is essentially a second TLD to target German language and region.

Thanks for sharing that interesting info, i think for the moment at least and as you and others have suggested not to tinker with geotargeting in GWT yet and see how things develop first

All Best

Dan

thanks Lumina

Once again Robert, Many thanks for confirming that !

All Best

Dan

Many thanks for confirming that Robert

All Best

Dan

Thanks Lumina,

just to confirm its not a sub domain, its a sub-folder that been domain mappped to a TLD, so i take it no 'link-juice' will pass on to it from the parent site

so brand.com/de has been domain mapped to brand.de hence i take it the brand.de cannot receive any share of brand.com domain metrics after mapping ?

cheers

dan

Hi

I take it once you have domain mapped a country specific subfolder to a country specific TLD (for better local region targeting reasons) Google perceives it as a completely separate entity and it no longer shares any of the parent sites domain benefits (such as domain authority etc) so from that point on requires its own dedicated link building etc ?

All Best

Dan

Hi

Is there an expected ranking benefit from geotargeting regional focused subfolders or domain mapped TLDs' in the target countries ? Or does it just prevent these pages from showing up in other regions search results ?

For example i have a client with a main .com site targeting english worldwide generally, then a /tr subfolder in turkish to target Turkey. Then another subfolder /de targeting german in germany (but the de has also been domain mapped to .de top level domain too). Im leaving the main .com site non geotargeted since its job is to achieve english language results wherever possible and wandering whether to geotarget the turkish subfolder & german tld

The Turkish regional subfolder & the German tld are achieving some ranking results already in their target countries googles, but also getting traffic from other countries too (which im happy to get, dont really want to stop this traffic unless there really is a local region ranking benefit for the main target country by gwt geotargeting).

So should I use GWT international targeting tool or not ? Since the tld site is clearly on a german domain with german language pages and the Turkish subfolder /tr site is in Turkish the i presume Googles got no probs working this out which is demonstrated by the regional & language ranking results

So I presume if achieving results in target countries already then no real need to set international taregt in GWT especially if it may stop traffic from other regions too. BUT if its likely to improve those rankings further in the main target countries googles significantly then i would happily cut off or reduce the other region traffic in favour of higher rankings and hence targeted traffic from the main target country

.All Best

Dan

Thanks for sharing the interesting info Evan !

Have a great weekend !

All Best

Dan

thanks for commenting hashtag

and are you now going to try and show that content as per John Muellers/Googles comments that they will be discounting hidden copy ?

Have you noticed any change in ranking conforming to when you hid the copy ?

all best

dan

Thanks for the excellent response Ray, this is exactly the info i was after

Re crawling indexing, Absolutely !! I think people presumed because it was still being crawled and indexed then everything was ok, but theres no reason why being crawled & indexed means that Google is not heavily discounting it and i think given JM comments that this is now very likely, so as you confirm, best to show all unique copy

Thanks

Thanks Sheena

The scenario im looking into this for is for a client for whom i wrote a load of home page body copy which they then got dev to hide 2 3rds of behind a 'read more' button and then text drops down.

The text inc keywords anchor tex rich links to sub pages to help on page seo so I presume that i should request this recently hidden copy should now be re-revealed since likely not counting towards the on-page seo anymore ? (the sites just been redesigned so no option to redesign again) but can get the copy unhidden or leave 'as is'

All Best
Dan