Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Small update - if I compare the results of both old & new site - the order of the results seems identical (don't know if the order of the results was different before migration)

You cannot resubmit as long as the problem is not solved. Like Richard said - do a site:yoursite.com and check for suspicious url's. If this doesn't work - try searching your site for typical spam terms (cialis, viagra, vuitton, chanel,...etc) Figure out how they breached security & make sure that you prevent new breaches; clean the site and then resubmit. Make sure you do this fast - the longer your site is hacked, the bigger the impact on your traffic will be. More info here: http://www.google.com/webmasters/hacked/

rgds,

Dirk

Hi,

I tend to disagree with the answers above. If you check the "official" Google point of view it states: "This (=duplicate content) is generally not a problem as long as the content is for different users in different countries"

So - you should make it obvious that the content is for different users in  different countries.

1. Use Webmaster Tools to set the target geography:

• set weddinggarterco.com to UK
• set theweddinggarterco.com to US
  You could also consider to put weddinggarterco.com on weddinggarter.co.uk and redirect weddinggarterco.com to the .co.uk version (currently the redirection is the other way round). This way you could leave theweddinggarterco.com without specific geo-target (if you also would target countries like AU)
  2. Use the HREFLANG on both sites (on all the pages). You can find a generator here and a tool to check if it's properly implemented here. Other interesting articles on HREFLANG can be found here and here
  3. It seems you already adapted a few pages to be more tailored to the US market (shipping, prices) - not sure if you already put the content in US english. 
  4. I imagine the sites are hosted in the UK. Make sure that the .com version loads fast enough - check both versions on webpagetest.org with US & UK ip's and see if there is a difference in load times. If you're not using it already - consider the use of a CDN

If you do all of the above, you normally should be fine. Hope this helps,

Dirk

Summarising (this thread is becoming extremely long):

• redirects seem to be implement as they should
• user engagement seems to be improved after migration

Performance seems to be & has been an issue - with unresponsive scripts & pages which are loading quite slow. Quality of HTML is (was) quite lousy.

I would stick to my original advice - and ask an HTML / CSS guru to have a look at your code, clean it & implement some of the performance improvements that were already mentioned before (to reduce the time to first byte). One thing you could already correct in the code is the location of an embedded javascript - it should be in the body or head - currently one script is outside the HTML tag.

Good luck

Dirk

I guess you are referencing the geo targeting in the Search Console - there is no geo targeting in Analytics.
If you have a country specific TLD like .co.uk your site is automatically targeted to the uk market. Geo targeting is only possible for 'neutral' TLD's like .com,.net,.org,...etc. If you site is targeted to one specific country it's very difficult to rank for keywords outside the geographic area. On a .co.uk domain it's virtually impossible to create a section that targets Australian customers.

In that case - you would need to buy a .au domain or a generic domain. If you want to target multiple countries and buying different local tld's is not possible - you can buy a generic one (.com) - and target parts of the site to a specific country like

mydomain.com/uk => target uk
mydomain.com/au => target au ... etc

Don't know what you mean with "canonicalising new url's with relevant keywords" - for international content you shouldn't use canonical url's to point to your main content - rather use href lang tags to make it obvious to search engines which part of the site is targeted to which audience.

Some useful resources:
International SEO checklist (Moz) Hreflang attributes (Google)
International SEO (Moz)
Country Targeting (Google)
Geo-Targeting Your Pages for Specific Audiences (Bing)

It's nothing to worry about - they will disappear after a while (if you don't link to them on your site). It's quite normal to have them & they have no SEO impact (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2409439?hl=en)

You could check this advice from Matt Cuts here: http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2334932/ecommerce-seo-tips-for-unavailable-products-from-googles-matt-cutts- for larger sites he advices to use the "unavailable after" metatag (http://googleblog.blogspot.nl/2007/07/robots-exclusion-protocol-now-with-even.html)

Dirk

Hi

it's an attempt to combine analytics spam & being funny. In each case you're not the only one - see this discussion posted yesterday : http://moz.com/community/q/analytics-spammer-can-haz-humors-who-else (the image is a bit better - the words are not in a foreign language, but are funny faces made in symbols)

rgds

Dirk

Found this one recently - look promising: http://kwgrouper.huballin.com/

For Google there is no preference for upper or lower case - so the proposed change will bring you no benefit. Even if the migration risk is very small, if you are close to your most important sales period - don't do it.

Dirk

Hi,

I don't really agree with the answer of Patrick. Depending on the level of personalisation you apply, it can hurt your rankings for locations outside California (our eventual other ip locations for Google bot).

As an example - you manage a chain of Chinese restaurants spread around the country and you have the domain mychineserestaurant.com.

If users accesses the site directly in New York, he will see the address, picture, phone number etc. from the New York restaurant. Googlebot however will never see this content - the bot will only be able to access the content from your branch in Los Angeles. While this is great for the user experience, there is no way to show Google the other locations, as you are obliged to show the bot the same content as normal human users, and hence show the information based on the ip of the bot.

The example of Groupon given by Patrick is not exactly the same - they personalise the homepage based on your ip - but if you search for Groupon New York you go to http://www.groupon.com/local/new-york-city

What you could do is automatically redirect the user to the appropriate page based on ip - but still have the other pages accessible via normal links. In the example above - accessing the site in New York I would go by default to mychineserestaurant.com/newyork but with the option to change the location. This way Google bot would be able to crawl all the locations. It's also the advice coming from Matt Cutts: https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/give-each-store-a-url/

If the personalisation is only minor (example only the local address on the homepage) and if you already have targeted pages for each location it should not really be a problem.

To be honest - it's rather my own opinion than something which is supported by hard facts.

Hope this helps,

Dirk

try checking the http status with other checkers like httpstatus.io or web-sniffer.net

Could be that your server is blocking access to Rogerbot - change your user agent (using a browser plugin) to

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; rogerBot/1.0; UrlCrawler; http://www.seomoz.org/dp/rogerbot)

and try checking the status of your homepage.

If this isn't helping - try contacting Moz directly (help@moz.com)

rgds

Dirk

Hi,

Did something similar in the past - although the timeframe was a bit different (at least 5 years between the alpha & gamma version) - we also skipped step 2 as at the moment we migrated to the gamma version we didn't know the url's of the alpha version anymore.

Changing url's is always a risky business from a SEO perspective and I hope you're certain that you will stick to the gamma version for the next couple of years.

To reply to your question - the method you propose looks good and is probably the best way to migrate the url's. I would advice to check & double check the 301's. Put the new structure on a test server (mytestdomain.com or on a subdomain like test.mydomain.com - block it for indexing). Activate the redirects on the test server. Use Screaming Frog (in list mode) with both the alpha & beta url's to check that these are properly redirected (you will need to update the url lists and replace the current domain by test.mydomain.com or mytestdomain.com for test purposes).

Also check do a full crawl on the test server (in crawl mode) to see that all the internal links have been updated (there shouldn't be any internal 301).

If this is ok - you can put the redirects & the new url structure on the production server. Doublecheck again with Screaming Frog to make sure that everything is ok (same tests as above put on the production environment. Monitor both Webmastertools and Analytics (make sure you can identify your 404 page in Analytics) to see if the number of 404 increases. If so, check the causes & correct them asap.

If tested like this, normally you shouldn't have a SEO impact.

Hope this helps,

Dirk

I just tested the url on web-sniffer.net with mobile user agent - it seems that the tool you use to detect if the user agent is a mobile one doesn't work. I get a normal 200 status (from the desktop site) - idem like Patrick

rgds,

Dirk

Click on your profile picture (right upper corner) - Select Billing&Subscription - then Billing Information -> your invoices are listed here.

The script worked for the previous version of the API - it won't work on the current version.
You try to search to check if somebody else has created the same thing for the new API - or build something your self - the API is quite well documented so it shouldn't be to difficult to do. I build a Python script for the Search Analytics part in less than a day (without previous knowledge of Python) so it's certainly feasible.

rgds

Dirk

Hi,

I would first put a noindex on all your search result pages and leave the tags on the pages to allow Google to crawl them & "read" the new instructions.

I would also try to block these result pages in the robots.txt - it accepts pattern-matching ( https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6062596?hl=en&ref_topic=6061961) - if you try this make sure that you test it properly to avoid unwanted side effects.

You could also try the url removal tool - it's quite easy to delete an entire directory with the tool (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663419?hl=en) - you must make sure however that the pages cannot be crawled again (so do it after the modification of the robots.txt). If your search is on the root of your site and not in a separate directory, not sure if it's going to work.

Just removing the links to these pages without other modification is not going to help - they will just remain in the index.

Hope this helps,

Dirk

Hi,

It's probably better to contact Moz Support directly - https://moz.com/help/contact 
Don't panic - Moz is quite customer oriented. I am sure they'll find a solution.

rgds,

Dirk

If you check your rankings in Search Console - do you see major fluctuations after the relaunch?

How do you track traffic - in the forum you seem to use Google Analytics. The other pages however do not contain an analytics tag.

Dirk

Hi Martin,

This should not have an impact. Google is focussed on providing the best user experience, providing relevant content to its visitors, adapted to the device they are using & served in an efficient way (performance). How you organise your technical architecture behind it should have no importance. You would certainly not be the first to have a website running on different servers for different parts of the site. Typical example is a shop using Magento or some other e-commerce application on 1 host, and a blog on Wordpress on another host.

That said - there are still some points you need to take into consideration:

1. Server location - while probably not as important as it's used to - it's probably better to keep the location closer to your main audience (mainly because it can have an impact on performance. Quote from http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com.es/2010/03/working-with-multi-regional-websites.html on location as ranking factor

Server location (through the IP address of the server) is frequently near your users. However, some websites use distributed content delivery networks (CDNs) or are hosted in a country with better webserver infrastructure, so we try not to rely on the server location alone.

If both servers are in the same location it should not be a problem.

2. You might consider to shift the subdomain to a directory as Google seem to prefer all content on one subdomain. You might want to check this WBF on subdomains vs directories: https://moz.com/blog/subdomains-vs-subfolders-rel-canonical-vs-301-how-to-structure-links-optimally-for-seo-whiteboard-friday

Even when using a directory - it is still possible to use two different servers.

Hope this helps,

Dirk

Hi,

It's quite simple - just go to https://moz.com/subscriptions/cancel

(you can also go via the navigation - click on your avatar (upper right corner - select "Billing & Subscription") - on the next page click "Cancel" on your current plan)

rgds

Dirk