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Hi!

1. Even if it's true that Google determines the importance to give to content - especially internal and external links - depending in what section of a web page it is (header, sidebars, footer, main body), it is quite a myth thinking that "additional" content explaining, for instance, the league table, should be put before for obtaining a better impact. Moreover: is it the table the most important element of your content, the one your users are interested the most? Then burying it under a "text" explaining it would be offering your users a poor experience.
2. Topic modeling should be not perverted into a something needed just because so "Google" will make the page rank better. The consequences will inevitably be horrible, as creating "SEO texts" with almost no value for the user, and even dangerous, because Google could start applying spam filters as keyword stuffing et al. Write naturally, as if you were describing something to someone speaking. If during the description make sense using synonyms and/or introducing related concepts (i.e.: electric guitars in a page about acoustic ones), then go for it. If it doesn't make sense, then don't it. Finally, if with topic modeling you mean "LSI"... then know that LSI is another myth.

First of all I really suggest you read this post by Aleyda Solis in the SEERInteractive Blog, which practically answers to all your doubts in a very extensive way.

Second, the subfolder option seems the best one for your case, at least from what I understood about your businesses' needs. In fact, business's objective in middle/long term should determine what option for International SEO you should choose, and not simply the mere SEO aspect.

So, if you choose to the subfolder option, you must:

1. create the subfolders (obvious)

2. geotarget them in Google Webmaster Tools

3. implement the use of rel="alternate" hreflang markup, especially because you are using the same content in different subfolders, hence, if you want to be really sure that Google shows the correct URLs for the given country, better to use the hreflang.

4. even if you do 2) and 3) I strongly suggest you to localize the content of your site. The Spanish spoken in Mexico, Argentina and Spain is quite different, as it is the English spoken in UK and USA. The more the language used is fitting the culture of the countries you are targeting, the better not only in SEO terms, but also in the conversion potentialities ones.

Finally, related to buying also the Country Level Domain versions of your main domain, actually buying them and redirecting 301 to the respective subfolders doesn't have really any SEO effect, but it may be an useful way to "reserve" those domains for a potential future use.

Doing a domain migration without doing a 301 is totally useless.

The rel="canonical" solution is too risky IMHO, because - albeit effective in most of the cases - the rel="canonical" still is only a strong suggestion we give to Google and not a directive. So, personally I consider your idea quite risky.

I don't know the specifications of your site (how big is it? what kind of site is it?...), so do not take my answer for granted.

Personally, I would consider the idea of creating the USA site in a subfolder /en-us/, which you can easily geo-target to USA.

This way you would not have to fear any possible risk related to a migration, even though you should preview a dilution of PageRank because of the internal linking toward the new USA version.

Then, using the hreflang (that you should have to use anyway also if you choose to go forward with your plan), you will avoid the "duplicate content" issue.

On the other hand, what you're describing is a migration, so (honestly) you should work it as a normal domain to domain migration and schedule it so to have concluded before the first half of December.

I understand that all the complicated solution you presented to us is due to the fact that the soon to come USA site will be substantially a duplicate of the UK one, so the problem is:

I've the 301 set -up and running, but I've to quit the 301 if I want the USA site to be visible.

The simplest solution is to create the USA site in a subfolder www.domain.com/us/ and use the homepage www.domain.com as country selector, which can useful in the beginning also to comply all the things you are telling about informing the UK users of the new .co.uk domain.

Just adding the /us/ subfolders all the URL of the new site will be different, hence you can maintain the 301 on place.

Having a ccTld like the .es and trying to go international is not the ideal, because:

1. the domain is automatically geotargeted toward Spain by Google;
2. because, for instance, the .es will be easily recognized as Spanish, and if you are trying to to target also Latin American countries, that can be an issue for psychological reasons.

Said that, it is not impossible to rank well with a ccTld also outside of its main country, it is only more difficult.

Not so much if you share the language (i.e.: .es but also targeting Mexico with a subfolder /es-mx/), but surely more difficult if you are targeting UK.

The only way to overcome the automated geotargeting limitation, more than the already classic stuff like hreflang et al, is local link building and brand awareness campaigns.

That means that if you are using a subfolder strategy, and even though the popularity of the "base language version" is passing through internal linking to all the other versions, you will need to push hard for link earning campaign in every targeted countries... and this can be hard because it is not easy to make people link to a www.domain.com/en-gb/ kind of URL.

So, as a TL;DR, it is possible but surely hard.

Yes.

Hi Geraldine,

the answer given by mememax is correct.

I would add something that I don't really like: tidy.books.eu is not really a great way for targeting the European Countries... because it is not really a ccTLD. It is like the .asia termination, offcially to show the european nature of a site, but it doesn't have any geotargeting power within Europe, as a .co.uk domain name may have in google.co.uk

More over, you can geotarget Europe in GWT.

So, my suggestion is to implement the very new rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" mark up, combined with the more classic rel="alternate" hreflang="x-X" one.

That mark-up is telling google that the URLs with it is not targeting any specific language or country, and should be used to be shown in the SERPs to all those users who are  targeted by your other sites.

That way your .eu site will be shown in all the European Googles but the .co.uk one (also if they are in another language - i.e.: Spanish - but with the common currency: Euro).

<rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="http://www.tidy-books.eu"></rel="alternate">

<rel="alternate" hreflang="en-UK" href="http://www.tidy-books.co.uk"></rel="alternate">

<rel="alternate" hreflang="en-US" href="http://www.tidy-books.com"></rel="alternate">

<rel="alternate" hreflang="en-AU" href="http://www.tidy-books.com.au"></rel="alternate">

The only "problem" with this solution is that users from countries you are not targeting with a country targeting site will always see the .eu domain.

Just a suggestion to add to the answer by Gary:

1. Clicktale: the free version and bronze option are not enough to see the recorded sessions of more than the most visited page. Being the form page the second, you would not be able to see any record. Subscribe for an higher option (silver, for instance) for just one month. Time enough to record a sufficient number of sessions in the form page
2. Clicktale offers also the possibility to see a form funnel analytics, that show you if people has filled or not a field.
3. To verify if people is not filling the form because of the phone number, you could ask to your client customer care (or who answers to phone calls to that number) to simply ask to the client how he got to know the number itself
4. Heatmaps can give you hints about the google maps success.
5. Another way to track the use people of the form is to use jQuery and Google Analytics as explained by Duncan Morris in this post on Distilled: http://www.distilled.co.uk/blog/conversion-rate-optimisation/using-jquery-and-google-analytics-events-to-track-form-abandonment/

Hi Jeremy,

option 1 is surely better, because you are quitting a level (or click).

Regarding redirecting users, you can maintain the redirection via GeoIP even if you put the USA "site" under the root and not in a US subfolder.

Said that, I strongly suggest you to order the redirection just when a user come for the first time on your site, so:

1. To give users the freedom to visit also the others versions, which is less dumb then you may believe. For me, living in Europe, is a real nightmare when I cannot visit the "Spanish" version of a site just because I am travelling and I am visiting it from another targeted country;
2. To not always redirect googlebot to the USA version because of its American IP. Even if Googlebot started crawling from countries other than the USA, from the logs' analysis I still see how the highest percentages of visits Googlebot does are from Mountain View.

Finally, correct a mistake you are doing in your URLs:

DE is for Germany (DE = Deutschland) and not Denmark. The name of the Danish subfolder should be DK.

I warn you about this because this mistake would probably end being replicated in the hreflang implementation, with obvious geotargeting issues.

Your mistake is that you probably used relative URLs and not absolute ones (these are the ones like: http://www.domain.com/)

So, the hreflang in sitemaps.xml for your home page should be this (please note that I put /it/ but you should put the real italian version home page, and that is valid for all URLs:

<url><loc>http://www.domain.com/</loc></url>

As for your second question - mixing matching and not matching URLs in the hreflang annotations - I would not suggest it.

Hi mcardenal,

you should not use OSE for checking if your site has crawling issue, but the crawl report.

And remember, the Moz crawl report can be ok if your site own a limited number of pages. If it is composed by undreds of thousands pages, then the Moz crawl must be considered more a parsing than a complete crawl.

For that reason, even if the Moz crawler is an amazing tool, which present very well the biggest issues a site may have (especially exact and substantial duplicated content issues), for having a complete crawl of your site as if it was crawled by Googlebot, I suggest you to use the Screaming From Spider SEO.

With that tool you will be able to understand if bots can access correctly to all the pages of your site.

OSE is a tool for analyzing the link profile of a site, not its state of indexation.

Hi!

In order to not have your "parked" domains being a duplicate of your main site, you have three options:

1. assign to everty domain its own space separated from the others. In that space would have to be present a parking page, better if personalized in order to be unique;

2. redirect them 301 (permanent redirect) via .htaccess, You say it does not work this way, but I recommend you to verify if you are writing correctly the command in the .htaccess file. Here you can find how to do it correctly: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-web-developers-seo-cheat-sheet

3. use the option the hoster offers... even though it could be a 302 not permanent redirect.

The extreme solution is to transfer the domains you are not going to use in another hosting, the cheapest.

I do not agree.

The root is for your main market, and the subfolders for your international ones. It is so since the dawn of international SEO and it always worked well.

In GWT (Search Console), Jeremy should have to geotarget the root domain to USA (or maintain it not geo-targeted, so to target all markets but Danish and Japanese), and geotarget the dk and jp subfolders to Denmark and Japan.

Thanks for citing my WBF Dirk!

About your doubt, Harry, there are few things that are not that clear:

1. Do the migrated domains had a strong home page PA, but a not so strong DA? Or the contrary (stronger DA than home page PA);
2. When the migration had been done, how the backlinks of the migrated domains were treated? Did you ask to update at least the most relevant ones so to point to the new URLs, or you just considered that 301 would have solve this facet of the migration?

I ask this because if the migration was correct in every facet, and the home pages were strong, than the PA  of the new "home pages" on level 1 should be almost the same.

On the other hand, DO NOT confuse PA  with PageRank. They are two very different metrics, as PageRank calculates just the value offered by all the links (internal and external) pointing to a URL, while PA consider also other things (on-page, for instance).

A loss in PR is quite normal, because the new internal linking (links toward deeper levels, but also the link toward the new home page), are redistributing PR (and possibly PA in how PA works) so that a 1:1 coincidence between old situation and new is almost impossible.

"This girl" is Vanessa Fox, and she is one of the most reputed SEO out there, apart being an ex Googler and having worked in creating Google Webmaster Tools.

Said that, the number of people circling her has no effect on rankings.

What may have an effect is the old good PageRank her Google Plus Profile may have (and PR of the people who follow her).

In fact, every link on G+ that shared with the "Share link" function (and not reshared), is a followed link, hence pass link equity.

So, what people sometimes attribute to an until not ghostly AuthorRank, in reality is a more classic Link Graph effect.

Your SEO maybe is not aware that now Google Images doesn't really drive that traffic it was used before for the simple fact that you can see the image (and "steal it") directly from Google.

Said that, creating a single page for every single photo can be tricky if not done properly.

If you don't provide a text description of the photo, apart the title and the alt text, all those pages are going to be extremely similar one each other, so much that you could fall into a substantial duplicated issue.

Finally, think to the users: clicking back and forward from one image page to the other is good? Personally I have my doubts.

The use of subfolder or ccTlds (or subdomain) should not be decided because of SEO, but because of business reasons.

For instance, if Jeremy does not have already a consistent organic traffic from Denmark, maybe is better starting with a subfolder, which inherits some of the overall domain authority via internal linking, hence can obtain a first boost in organic visibility.

Once the business started having recognition and consistent and continuous traffic, Jeremy will be able to consider to migrate to a ccTld solution (if really needed).

On the contrary, let's say that Jeremy's company has physical offices in Copenhagen and it is an already known brand. Then in that case it would surely better to go for the ccTld way.

Apart the two good answers here above, your situation explains why one of the most important (and sadly forgotten) facets of on-site SEO is Internal Linking.

Be always sure to create justified opportunities for internally linking your deepest levels for your strongest upper ones.

For instance, we usually see in the home page that real estates are presented in different ways:

1. New appartments;
2. Most viewed;
3. Most reviewed (if you offer a way to "thumb up"/review/star them
4. etc etc

What we almost never see is using this way of showing "products" on a category and sub-category level. That method, though, would help you giving a strong internal link, which will make stronger the apartments pages that matters the most for your business, because those internal links let the bots to "jump" directly to the apartment's page without the need to pass through too many levels.

That is also one the functions of what I define as topical hub, about what I talked in the WBF linked by Dirk in his comment.

When it comes to Authorship and Schema (or Structured Data) visualization in SERPs as rich snippet, a big part seems to be played by the authority of the domain.

What does this mean?

That even though the Structured Data Testing Tool is saying to you that everything is fine, if your domain is not authoritative, probably Google won't render any rich snippet.

This possibly is a way for trying fighting the "rich snippet spam" and in the second half of August I saw that many sites, which had aggregate reviews in their snippets, lost them.

Be aware that not having rich snippets doesn't mean Google is not reading the structured data information in your site, and use it for better understanding its content.

Hi Kevin,

unfortunately I suspect that the answer is going to be the classic "depends".

I think that - beside best practices - the only good thing to do is pondering:

1. your real business needs;
2. how realistic is the idea of eventually having a developer dedicated for few sprints to SiteSpeed solutions.

If your company's web site has a strong dependency on mobile traffic (in general, not just from Mobile Search) and you can rely on a full time dedicated developer, than I would first of all see how to optimize your existing platform for Mobile/PageSpeed.

Regarding commercial/free platforms:

• I don't know that much about Joomla (a platform that I don't particularly like), but it's community is quite big, so I would at first look there (click on Community & Support in the main menu);
• Magento is a solution that I love/hate in the same percentage. I do not know if the community there has created extension that expressly are dedicated to PageSpeed & Mobile issues;
• Drupal is something that really needs a dedicated developer for being optimized, but it is a solid CMS
• Odoo... honestly I do not know it.
• WordPress... I can suggest you this slideshare, which present amazing technical solutions (very technical, so a dev is needed) for optimizing it and make it über fast: http://www.slideshare.net/DistilledSEO/searchlove-london-jono-alderson-turbocharging-your-wordpress-website

If they are contextual links, then you should not have any problem and can maintain them as they are.

No need "to hide" them to Google.