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Hi!

Actually you are doing well, as creating original product pages is the best option in order to avoid duplicated content issues.

If I was you, I would eventually see how to implement a UGC review option, in order to have product pages becoming even more unique with the pass of time.

About Overstock... sincerely I cannot give you an answer why it doesn't seem as suffering consequences for its duplications. It would be needed a deeper investigation, for which I don't have the time right now.

Mmm... may I ask why all the site is under the https? Would not be more logical to switch to https just after the login?

Anyway, maybe the best solution is to use the canonical tag showing as canonical the https version of the home page.

Ciao

Actually Magento offers also a blog option also in the free edition.

Said that, Magento is not surely the easiest eCommerce CMS of this world.

D surely is an option to take into account (see my answer just above).

Said that, I would monitor constantly the % of traffic from BE and NL and if one of them starts being relevant, I would use that data so to propose the migration to a .be and/or .nl domain name.

Remember that, in that case, you will also start thinking in implementing the rel="alternate" hreflang="x-X", in order to solve the duplicate content issue between the two sites.

Hi Alan,

honestly I have no knowledge of anything similar.

Anyway it seems quite strange to me that a sub-domain may affect the root domain or another sub-domain if Pandasized.

I say this because to move from the main site to sub-domains the duplicates or thin contents that caused the Panda ban is the solution used by many big sites, which were hitten by Panda and claimed they have recovered.

I don't say that is "bible", but it seems suggesting that the sub-domain maybe it is not the real cause of your site poor rankings.

Hi David!

I think that you may miss part of the potential organic traffic because your category page are somehow thin when it comes to words. Maybe you could use this plugin by Geoff Kenyon, which may solve this problem.

Said that, I would not worry that much for having such a small % of Search traffic - obviously I don't know the total amount of organic traffic to your site. That means that you don't have to worry about Panda and Penguin that much, because you are not Google-depending

What I would maybe suggest, more than guest blogging (which could be an idea, but just now and then and in very targeted blogs/portals), I would make your photos embeddable and/or starting asking for credits using the Google Reverse Images Search, catching those sites using your photos without crediting.

Related to "social" or new opportunities of referral traffic... I would go for Forum specialized to Japan and Japan-lovers oriented people. I would also target sites like Fodors or Lonely Planet or the same National Geographic, due to the affinity your site has with theirs.

Hi Carla,

the best solution to your problem is using a Plugin like WPML, which will create a structure like the one you are looking for. I linked to the site and not the WP Plugin page, so you can read all the features of the plugin.

The best feature, from an SEO point of view, is that is 100% compatible with WordPress SEO by Yoast, hence you will be able to use it for every language version you will be creating. Here a link to a short but useful guide about how to use both plugins

Hi!

I must admit that I am not sure if I have understood correctly your question...

So, you are saying that when you do a search with your domain name, you see Google presenting you all URLs from your site. That is normal, because Google is offering you exactly what you were looking for with that search: pages your site domain name. That means that Google presents you also pages from others sites than your, but which have your domain name present in their content.

In the case of your competitor, Google present a different kind of Search Result Page. In this version www.emergencycity.com appears as first and with six sitelinks. This is also normal and usually it is a good health signal, because it means that Google present it as an online entity and with a better organized snippet (home page + the 6 pages it considers are the most used thanks to its own knowledge base).

After that snippet, you see all sites that have your competitor's domain name in their content.

And now it comes the part that I did not understand:

However when you do site:www.------.com All of these site are indexed in Google.

May I ask you what kind of query did you use? I mean... www.------.com is not a logical query, is it?

Finally, with a very fast view on Open Site Explorer, your site and emergencycity.com seem almost identical, but - even if your site has a better Home Page Page Authority and a bunch of unique domain names linking than emergencycity.com, the DA (Domain Authority) of your competitors is higher, because it owns backlinks also for some of its internal pages. Personally I would suggest you to not limit the linking to your site only to the homepage, but also to other pages in order to have a better DA, a better link equity distribution and offering Googlebot more entrances for crawling your site.

Hi James, when we talk of duplication we do not mean just plain duplication, but overall duplication too.

Moreover, duplication is not just about main content, but about all the code of a page, therefore sidebars, menu, header and everything a page is composed by.

As you have noticed, those three pages are substantially identical, and the differences are to few respect the similarities.

What can you do? For instance you could provide a text to these sub-category pages. I know, it seems hard to write original and different content when products are very similar... but it is possible.

For instance, if you can why don't you ask for feedback from clients who have bought those product and add them in the sub-category pages as testimonials? That's just an idea, but surely that a good brainstorming around a beer can present your more ideas

You may use this SEOgadget tool.

It is thought for Infographics, but it works perfect for photos too (and aren't both images?).

For reverse images searches you can use http://www.tineye.com/, but it still present the one photo per time issue...

The same Tim wrote, but adding an extra step: check out if your site suffers some sort of vulnerabilities, like cloaking that could justify the unexpected interest from international users.

HI and sorry for the delay...

haven't you considered that that domain is still ranking in Google.de because of its old link profile?

In fact, it can be possible that links it earned in its past existence as a German website may be the cause of its still good rankings in .de.

On the contrary, the percentage of links from dutch sites may be too small to allow the site to rank properly in google.nl.

That's all I can tell you, without knowing the site name.

Do you really need to 301 those pages?

I mean, if you don't need them, if they are substantially a manipulative way of influencing ranking, the best to do is to not add them to the new site.

To redirect them may be a solution, if you can't simply delete those pages. But do it to a safer page than the homepage: why not to a page where you add: "noindex, follow". Not being indexed, that page won't harm the site from eventual penalization.

The answer is very simple, independently if you are publishing the post on subfolders or subdomains or even country code domains names:

1. The canonical URL of the copies must be the URL of the original article. This is must be so because the content of all the articles is the identical. If you don't use the rel="canonical" as I suggest you'll fall in the duplicated content issue;

2. You use the hreflang annotations to tell Google what post's URL to show to the users using English and searching from the different blogs' countries.

Remember: the hreflang is not meant for solving the duplicated content issues, but only for suggesting what URL to show to users in a given language and country.

For duplicated content issues the solution is the rel="canonical".

Actually I don't think it exists any public list of meaningful directories per country.

Said that, apart very very few, almost every directory is at least partially penalized or doesn't pass pagerank (because it was cut off by Google).

So... sincerely, I would think in another link building tactic

Hi!

I consider that your first original idea of justifying the rating system (aggregatereview in Schema.org) bounding it to the "how much this answer was useful?" is correct.

Said that, I did not really understood if to a question is possible to offer more than one answer.

In that case the aggregatereview value should be something like "the average quality of the answers given to this question is 3/5).

So you should use the Schema just for that average of all the starred answers, and not adding Schema for every aggregatereview assigned to every answer.

To not rank for your own business name is a sign a automatic penalization. The fact links have not changed (as you say) suggests that the penalization is because of the links (as far as I have not seen any apparent misuse onpage). Panda in not working in this case.

No.

Translated sites are not duplicated sites, hence don't worry and proceed (if it was so, almost all sites going international would be banned :-)).

Hi Christopher Lee (¿Is it your real name or you just like the Count Doku?).

Sincerely I wouldn't take into consideration the Title Tag advice from the Moz Crawler, also because it is based over Google best practice, not Baidu; and they are a little bit different.

I strongly suggest you giving a look to this page, that explains well all about the Title Tag for Baidu.