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I would recommend you go by the MOZ's Beginner's Guide to SEO here: http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo

Dan,

If you have an English page that is also available on Turkish (same content but rewritten/translated) then an hreflang tag is recommended, not mandatory, but recommended. Although as you said you are already writing in Turkish and geotargeting in GWT, there are other engines too, that regardless their market share, shouldn't be overlooked.

HOWEVER, if you have a page in English not matching a Turkish page, then you don't need the hreflang in that page. The tag is only used when the same content is available on other language/location to tell engines which version they should serve.

What you mention about using x-default and removing the canonical is nonsense. Those are 2 different things and one would not interfere with the other. The plugin I recommended does not mess with Yoast, leaving the canonicals as they should be and adding the hrefland tags as specifies. Check this example on my site English and Spanish using both Yoast and the hreflang Manager plugin:

• English: http://viberagency.com/blog/6-reasons-shouldnt-put-intern-charge-companys-social-media/
• Spanish: http://es.viberagency.com/blog/6-razones-por-las-que-debes-dejar-un-pasante-cargo-de-los-medios-sociales-de-tu-empresa/

Check the source code, both have their canonicals and hreflang tags just fine. We chose to use the English version as the default, as you can see in the x-default.

The hreflang tags should be used only when the content is the same (but targeted to a different audience). Of course of the translation from one language to the other some lines must be rewritten to make sense.

In my example, I used two very similar (if not the same langs), however there are things that change, but those are minimal (take as an example a car "hood", in England a "bonnet"). As those are such minimal changes, I don't think a specific version for GB is needed if you are already serving a US version (that's up to you). In that case (1 english version to all english speakers), you only specify the language, instead of the Language and Region:

<link rel="<a class="attribute-value">alternate</a>" href="http://www.example.com" hreflang="<a class="attribute-value">en</a>"/>

Now, just to make sure we have an example that DOES apply a different GEO in en-US and en-GB, could be a page that explains what are car repair centers, plus below it shows a list of repair centers. In these scenario, the content is the same, but the list of repair centers change, you would like to display those in GB to your GB audience (still, from my point of view, useless, but was just an example).

Hope that clears it up

Hey Dan,

If I understood correctly, you should use both. Canonical tags are used tell search engines that the content is located on the canonical content, while hreflang points which version should be served to each visitor depending on the user's location/language.

If you Yoast, then they already handle the canonical tags and there's nothing you need to do. For the hreflang, if you have at the moment only 1 version served to all visitors, then those shouldn't be used. However, if you have 2 versions quite similar, like en-US and en-GB then you will need to choose the one that's default, let's say the US version and have the following on each version:

en-US:

• Canonical pointing to it.
• Hreflang x-default pointing to it
• Hreflang en-US pointing to it
• Hreflang en-GB pointing to en-GB version

en-GB:

• Canonical pointing to it.
• Hreflang x-default pointing to en-US
• Hreflang en-US pointing to en-US
• Hreflang en-GB pointing to it

This applies if the en-US and en-GB versions are NOT exactly the same. If the language changes (that's why you create a specific version to each country) you need a canonical in each version pointing to itself.

If the en-US and en-GB have the same contents, then the canonical should point to the en-US version (but there's no need to have the en-GB version really, which makes it useless / expendable).

As you mention that at the moment you do not have any extra langs/regions, then you could leave the tags empty or better remove them.

There's a plugin for wordpress that handles hreflang tags (paid) hreflang Manager

Hope that helps!

Did you try manually fetching as Googlebot the robots.txt file via the webmaster tools? If not, do that, then click submit to index. Then do the same thing for some of the images or better if you have a file linking to all images (like an image sitemap). Once that is done, let Google recrawl everything for a few days (even a week) and try again.

Joanne,

I'm afraid there's no way to know which pages are actually indexed from your Webmaster Tools. You can use a simple search in Google: site:domain.com and it will list "all" your indexed pages, however, there's no way to export that as a report.

You can create a report using some "hack". Login to your Google Drive, create a new spreadsheet and use the following command to populate rows:

=importXml("https://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.yourdomainnamehere.com&num=100&start=1"; "//cite")

This will load the first 100 results. You will need to repeat the process for every 1000 results you have, changing the last variable: "start=1" to "start=100" and then "start=200", etc (you see where I'm going). This could really be a pain in the butt for your site's size.

My recommendation is you navigate your own site, decide which pages should be removed and then create the robots.txt regardless what google has indexed. Once you complete your robots.txt, it will take a few weeks (or even a month) to have the blocked pages removed.

Hope that helps!

Does your client have that much content to regularly update a tumblr and a custom on-site blog? I would actually go with the on-site blog.

What's your customer's reasoning behind the change?

What do you mean by "optimize drop down menus"?

I am guessing you are referring to "how to let search engines crawlers to recognize your menus"??. Well, there's really no need to do anything.

Drop down menus actually use CSS or Javascript (or a conjunction of both) to load. Search engine crawlers are already smart enough to recognize and run JS/css code, that means that there's no need for you to do anything (unless your menus are really messy and unusable to users..?

Hope that helps!

Adding more internal links so the linkjuice isn't diluted over 1 link would be like playing black hat SEO... I'm sure it will be seen as spam. A nofollow is enough. Still, a directory of only 7 sites without the inner pages is useless.

Couple of questions:

The Website is a directory and yet it points to only 7 outbound Websites?

What about using nofollow for all those links?

On the content side, you are about to loose much of the site's content, you should expect a massive traffic drop. What's the point of a Directory if it only links to 7 Websites without offering any extra valuable content?

Hey,

If the grid/list view have the exact same HTML code, then it is something in the javascript that already show one or the other.

I would actually find the way to avoid the reload and change from grid to list and back without leaving the page. If you manage to accomplish that, then you don't need any robots tag or canonical, etc.

Hope that helps a bit.

Ufff, took me a while to find this one, and I'm sure I saw another one talking about nameservers, too (back when I was researching SEO impacts of using cloudflare, you know, hundreds of sites using the same nameservers).

watch?v=Z9Ka0fzyZbk

Whois data, nameservers, ips, etc, are no longer used to rank Websites, according to Google (you can't penalize a site because another stepped into a dark area. Lots of sites use private whois, reverse proxies, etc).

If you had a penalty on one of your sites, are you sure you didn't make the same mistake on the other sites?

Those metrics show you in fact the times that the URL was twitted. If you publish a tweet with yoursite.com/targetpage then that tweet will count towards that page but not towards yoursite.com

In any case, no one knows the extend of social signals on ranking algorithms... I don't think you are going to get a higher position because you have more tweets... (all those links are nofollow anyway)

FYI: If you put a tweet button on a page, you can "tell" the button which URL you want to tweet or it will use the page where it is placed (same applied for the count that it shows).

404s. Remove them from existence.

Why will you have content that is pure spam on the site? if it is spam, delete it.

Steps you should followÑ

• Clean ALL the blogs, remove any trace of spam (document everything in the process)
• Go back to the first point and make sure you have NO SPAM left (again, if anything comes up, document the changes you make)
• Once you are completely certain that there's no spam left, you can send another reconsideration request, make sure you show them the work you have done to clean the site.
• Wait for their response, and if you still get a negatory, repeat the process as most likely you still have spam in your site.

Hope that helps!

Is there anything in your site that isn't available on other sites? You mentioned that you developed some of the games, but they are also listed and available in other sites, so there's no benefit to you, either. You are listing the same games that most likely hundreds of other Websites.

You need to use another approach, what makes your site unique? Why would Google list your site instead of others?

Why is that those pages have redirects? I'm guessing you are pointing to them (with a 302 redirect) from other page instead of linking to the directly.

To solve that you can simply identify those redirects, change them to 301s or even simpler, link to the appropriate page instead.

Hope that helps!

The way you are managing the widgets just fine, those links should be nofollow, as they are now.

If you haven't receive a manual penalty notification it could be just as you said, a new site, with few links. Keep working on it, post content, etc so you can earn links the right way.

Hope that helps!

Perhaps this can help: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/schema-org-eight-tips-incorporate-rich-snippets-conform-google-hummingbird/75435/

You can also read all about schema here: http://schema.org/docs/gs.html

There are several other sites that re entirely dedicated to check keyword rankings. But no matter which one you choose, checking rankings for 10,000+ keywords will be expensive as hell.

Examples: serps.com, trackpal, positionly, etc.