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Maybe I wrongly understood you, so I beg you pardon if my answers is not useful.

From what I understood you have ton of duplicate product pages. So you decided you use rel="canonical" in order to say to the SE that all the 99 product pages of 100 are dupes of the first one.

That means that you are suggesting (rel="canonical" is not a command, but a strong indication/suggestion to the search engines) to not consider for indexing those 99, but just the 1 canonical page.

Therefore, if your problem is to have SE crawling all your pages, and you consider those product pages as to be crawled, therefore canonical tag is not the right thing to do.

If you want all those duplicates to be indexed... then you should have to differentiate all of them, making them unique, as you write in your note.

To use Google or any of its websites as an SEO example is by itself a mistake

Links are links... hence, if you earn an editorial link from an authoritative website, even if it is in English or not explicitly targeting your country target, it will count in terms of pure web popularity.

A stronger link profile will improve the overall SEO performances, therefore also the ranking for dutch keywords.

Said that, it is safer to maintain a balance between "national" and "International" backlinks, so to improve the geo-targeting. Moreover, a .nl website that has only or a big percent of backlink from site not targeting dutch can become suspect.

As Stramark said in his answer, having an English version of your site in a subfolder can justify, and even offer better opportunities for using a an International link building strategy for improving also the national SEO efforts.

Nope... never use google translate... it may lead to horrible results also from an SEO point of view.

Linkscape doesn't crawl and "index" all the links existing in the web. Just those that they consider having a real value.

If you want to see if you link building in directories is working, I suggest you to use Majestic SEO, that has a larger but less "selected" links' crawling.

Having canonical tags on pages that don't have any duplicate content is pointless, as it may actually stop you for ranking on keywords specific to pages not relative to the tag.

Please, may you present me a document that assess what are you saying? because it is the first time I hear this thing.

#curious

Hi Mozzers. I've a client that has done a little bit of mess rewriting the URLs of its site. In fact, also the data base driven URLs are rewritten, but the dev forgot to change the space with "-", so that now the 95% of the URLs are like this one:

http://www.portalesardegna.com/search/Appartamenti e Residence/

Obviously not really a pretty URL.

I am not so sure if this issue has an SEO consecuences (in fact, the site ranks pretty well also with those kind of url), but I am thinking more on usability issue.

Could you suggest me any easy fix to this rewrite problem?

Thanks for the clarification... and sorry for the delay in this answer.

If you're targeting located in Spain only, then you have to geotarget your domain to Spain via search console and then using hreflang for telling google that speaking English users in Spain must see the EN version of it.

So the hreflang annotations should look like this:

<rel="alternate" href="www.domain.com" hreflang="es-ES"></rel="alternate">

<rel="alternate" href="www.domain.com/en/" hreflang="en-ES"></rel="alternate">

<rel="alternate" href="www.domain.com/en/" hreflang="pt-ES"></rel="alternate">

As you can see quite different from how you wrote the code.

"ES" is Spain (target Spain only), and "es" means "target Spanish speaking people" and "en" "target English speaking people"...

if you use this: , you're telling google to target Spanish speaking people in Mexico, and not "target Mexican Spanish people".

Ciao

Your situation is quite "simple" to solve.

The .es and .mx site are automatically targeting their corresponding countries (Spain and Mexico).

In order to make sure Google that you know that the content of both is identical, but that you wanted to "duplicate" it because of some localization reasons (i.e.: currency), then you should implement the hreflang mark up, as it is explained here by Google itself:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077

SEOmoz linkscape presents both, that's why you can filter them to see just external nofollowed links or just internal ones.

Mmm, that could be an idea, but maybe it not the best one. From what I see, the reason of the duplicated content is because the same product is listed in different categories and sub-categories. What I would do is to strip the category id in the URLs, and - when it comes to products - have this kind of URL: www.domain.com/product This way, no matter the category, there will be always just one product URL and no duplication issue. Done that, I would 301 all the old duplicates urls.

Ehehe... I think you were answering to my question while I was doing the same with yours.

My question was really about those second order benefits you talk about.

Thanks for link.

Social signals are not a ranking factor.

Moreover, it has been demonstrated by Buzzsumo that the theory of social media amplification = more backlinks is false, because, as that study says:

1. only a small percentage of all the blog posts published daily are able to obtain a minimum number of social share and
2. in order to obtain at least one backlink, thousands of social shares are needed.

_1) if i will change the geo settings in webmaster tool will effect the ranking i already managed to achieve in US? _

Yes, but that can be avoided (see answer to question 3)

_2) In the list of all the countries in Google webmaster tools what does is mean "unlisted"? _

"Unlisted" is what you have to choose if you want that your site is not targeting any country specifically. More about that here.

3. Can i select more than one country to target and if I can how?

Yes you can... for instance, in your specific case, you have your domain - which I suppose is a generic domain name, not a country level one - targeting US and is starting ranking well for a set of keywords. But you would like to open your chance also globally.

Well, even though it is usually the contrary what happens, you can create a subfolder for the "global market" in English, create a GWT profile for that subfolder and, finally, geotarget it in Setting as "Unlisted".

Then, as the US content and "Global" subfolder's content will probably duplicated because both are in English, you should have to implement the rel="alternate" hreflang="x-X", as it is described here by Google itself.

You can do it using the rank checker tool. From what I know that tool will see a revamp and totally integrated in the app, where - I suppose - a manual actualization will be available.

From what I see, yes.

Just a question: what em89917-x2. in this product URL

http://www.spiderofficechairs.com/officechairs-officestarproducts-em89917-x2.html

corresponds to? product's id?

Mmm... to SEO that subdomain exactly for the 5 days promotion: no I would not do it.

To SEO the subdomain for a keyword like Brand Name Promotion (+ another couple of keywords), yes. It is not very difficult to do and you can gain more brand visibility.

This answer is good, because of the tools that are shared.

However... creating unique content doesn't mean your site will start earning links like crazy.

Umberto Eco once said that there are thousands of exceptional books that nobody ever read. The same can be told about all the "great content" published on the Internet. If you don't

If you don't put the same effort you put in creating your "quality content" into promoting it, then you're not going to obtain any backlink at all.

Therefore, more than thinking about what tool to use for creating content (please, don't confuse content with formats), I think it's better to suggest checking out the posts here on Moz under the Link Building category.

The answer given by Olaf is substantially correct.

I would suggest the solution you have in mind too. And, as Olaf wrote, be sure to localize the UI (menú, URLs...) for a correct user experience and Spanish SEO.

Personally I have not seen any change actually. And reason is simple: the farmer update still is not alive in the regional Googles, as advised Matt Cutts in its post.

What would be interesting would be to see:

1. how the web farms affected in the Google.com ranks in the regional Googles? This can be especially interesting examining all the english based regional Googles (discounting the localization factors);
2. how big the difference in traffic will be when the algo update will affect also all the Googles, as - I suppose - then we will see its effects over all the translated/international versions of the websites, which are seriously vampirezed from local farmer sites.