Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hello Bee,

As for internationalization purposes, leave them in their own ccTLD. Just add hreflangs to the other country websites and you'll be just fine.

If you choose to go down the road of having all under a .com/country/ configuration, I'd suggest you installing separate wordpress on each country. Also, if you plan on expanding on more countries and having an overall control, take a look at Wordpress Multisite Network Administration.

Also, just for clarifying, take a look at these articles:
Multi-regional and multilingual sites - Google Search Console
International checklist - Moz Blog
Using the correct hreglang tag - Moz Blog
Guide to international website expansion - Moz Blog
Tool for checking hreflang anotations - Moz Blog

Hope it helps.
Best Luck.
GR.

Yeap, Google stats that its enough:
Multi-regional and multilingual sites - Google Search Console

Hello Sam,

Go with the OPT 1.
Also create and validate a Search Console account for each language, so there you can select the preferred language+country targetting.
Be sure to have the hreflang correctly applied.
Take a look at these articles, it might help you:
International checklist - Moz Blog
Using the correct hreglang tag - Moz Blog
Guide to international website expansion - Moz Blog
Tool for checking hreflang anotations - Moz Blog

Hope it helps.
Best luck.
GR.

Hi there,

Yeap, that's perfectly normal and there is no way to ensure that you will rank the same or higher position, its likely but no one can guarantee that.
After a change like that, Google tries to re calculate the "ranking strengh" your page has for the selected keyword.
Give it a little more time, a few weeks, 3 or 4. Then evaluate if the impact was the correct.

Hope it helps.
Best luck.
GR.

Hello everyone!

Personally I think this is too recent. As Danny Sullivan (I think was him) said, we should not go as lunatics trying to re-optimize our meta descriptions.

My advise to everyone that asks about this: Lets give Google a little time ( how about until Q2-18?), so then we will know how is the real impact.
Of course there is a direct metric about the CTR, with longer descriptions snippets the better is the chance to call the attention of the searcher. How ever, we still dont know for sure how Google creates that descriptions.

That's just my point of view. I'm more of a cautious person.

Best luck to all.
GR.

Hello Bee159,

On one hand, Google (though their spokemen) said that the algorithm is pretty good finding and diminishing the strenght of spammy links. So, if you talk to someone from Google right now, they might said: leave them, probably the algorithm will consider those as spammy and there will be no harm.

On the other hand, If you are absolutely sure that those links are spammy and malicious... then go ahead and disavow them. Remember that it's possible to disavow an entire domain.
More info here: Disavow backlinks - Search Console Help

Answering the list:

1. Its up to you.
2. Google might eventually recognize them as spammy and ignore them in your site's backlink profile
3. I don't know any good way of reverse engineering how backlinks end up in spammy sites.
4. I don't believe that Google might think more of your site just if disavow some links. Sure, if the penalty is caused by any of those links, then you will lower that risk.

Hope it helps.
Best Luck.
GR.

Nope, you should not believe what your dev is saying (in this particular case).
As William said, Google suggest us to verify all your versions and set the preferred to be considerd.

Hi Cath,

If you've uploaded recently to Search Console those sitemap, give it a little more time. It usually takes many weeks in order to index a big site like this.
You might try by manyally request to index an URL and its links. This can be done in the option: Fetch as Google, then ask to index and follow its links.

Also, There could be some other issue in your URL structure and/or internal linking. Tried to crawl your site with Screaming Frog, starting from the root domain and from a random url and couldn't get more than roughly 1300 HTML pages. 
I know that having a sitemap is a way to ensure that every URL is seen by google but if you dont have a good internal linking it makes it more difficult for GoogleBot.

My advise, again, be patient and wait a little longer. In my experience it could take over 8 weeks to index a site that size.

Hope it helped.
Best luck.
GR.

Hi vtmoz,

The most mandatory way to prevent any page to be indexed is by using a meta robots tag with a _noindex _parameter.
Then using robots.txt will help to optimize your server resources and is a way that prevent google to crawl any new page that do not have the meta robots tag.

And yeah, its very common to have indexed pages even the robots.txt file blocks the entire website.

If what you are looking for is to remove from index the pages, follow this steps:

1. Allow the whole website to be crawable (or at least that specific pages/section) in the robots.txt
2. add the robots meta tag with "noindex,follow" parametres
3. wait several weeks, 6 to 8 weeks is a fairly good time. Or just do a followup on those pages
4. when you got the results (all your desired pages to be de-indexed) re-block with robots.txt those pages
5. DO NOT erase the meta robots tag.

Hope it helps.
Best luck.
GR.

Hello there!

There has not been any discovery in how Google analyzes pages to fill Featured Snippets nor any other rich result, yet.
Personally believe that this is really new and Google AI is learning how to be better at finding the right information for enchances results.

It's nearly a lottery to be featured, althogh there are some pages that have some tips to be selected as FS, none of them worked for me.
Also, remember that being in a rich result page will diminish the CTR for every one.

My advise: Focus on bringing the best of the bes content you might do.

Best luck.
GR.

Nigel,

I've made myself that question many times and found: that metric refers to the amount of _thumbs up _you've received in blog post comments.

Best luck.
GR.

Have you created and updated an image sitemap on Search Console?

That might give Google a hint to index more images from your site

Hello vtmoz,

That site's (seo.oldsite.com) backlinks are suitable for the new site? 
Rememer that if you've made a full redirection of the subdomain site to the root new domain, there will be tons of links pointing to that root domain.. and if those links dont share the topic nor are from good sources its probably that Google might penalyze you or just ignore them.

Monitor closely your rankings and the Search Console account for any manual penalty message.

Hope it helps.
Best luck.
GR.

Hello Sam,

Besides de question whether Wordpress or Blogstpot is useful, analyze every site as equal: Check its backlinkprofle, where visits come from, content quality and frequency posting and any other SEO metric you know.
Remember Google will like the links coming from good quality sites, without thinking too much about the platform where its published.

There are some folks out there saying that using free platforms (wordpress, blogspot, drupal, blog.com or any other) have less "power" or "SEO Juice" assigned by Google. I have not read any good case study that proves that.

Hope it helps.
Best luck.
GR.

Hi there,

Noup, having external links will not hurt you unless you add links in a spammy way (such as tons of links and/or to low quality sites.
In the case you think this can hurt you, add a nofollow tag and you´ll be fine.

Best luck.
GR

Hello Jacky,

You do not have an issue. There are houndreds images indexed.
Take a look with a site:search

Best luck.
GR.

Hi there,

TLDR; The solution to deindexing and never index again:

1. Allow (with robots.txt) the web to be crawable
2. Aplly meta robots tag: noindex,follow
3. Wait somte weeks to be completely deindexed
4. block the entire site/section with robots.txt

Robots.txt and the robots meta tag can make the same effect, but to understand them must be analyzed separatedly.

• Robots.txt, here you just tell bots where they can go BEFORE they crawl any of the website. This is just a signal, not a directive... Because robots can choose to ignore the what's in the file. Here you can block from the entire web, to an entire section or just specific pages. More info: Robots.txt official page and a really cool and complete guide to robots.txt

• Robots meta tag, with it you have more signals to tell, the most used are: noindex, nofollow and follow, due to the usual issues about indexing. More info: Robots.txt offical page, Google developers, Meta Robots directive - Moz and a complete guide to meta robots tag - YOAST.

Hope this is what you wanted.
Best luck
GR.

Yeap, internal links can make a difference and DA also helps a little.

Be patient, its recommended by Moz to wait at least 2 updates to get the metrics of your pages.

Hi!
I don't think that a Good UX will improve PA nor DA.
Take a look at the Moz Glossary and you will find this definition:

_Page Authority (PA) - indicates how likely a page is to rank based on how authoritative search engines consider it to be because of which sites link to it. _

Hope it helps.
Best luck.
GR.

Hi!
I don't think that Moz's bot is selective. If your site was once in the index, will be crawld the next update.
Also remember that PA counts different for every page and depends in almost the backlinks that Moz crawled that pont to that page.