Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey Alex,

That is tough - after reading the title of your post I assumed this would be a quick "add hreflang tags and set international targeting in Google Search Console." How long have the hreflang tags and international targeting been set up? The answer may be just to 'wait'.

Do you have offices/locations in both the US and UK? If so, you could set up Google Business pages for each and link to the appropriate site given the region. This would also allow you to build local citations and/or business listings using country specific directories/websites and make sure those go to the appropriate site. Example:

Submit UK Site to Yell.com ("The UK's leading online business directory")

Submit US Site to YellowPages.com ("YP is a leading local marketing solutions provider in the US")

If you are not seeing anything in the manual action report, security issues report or in the SERPs, I would say that Google has detected that the hack was addressed and has removed your manual action. Is organic performance still being impacted?

Hi Jeffrey,

Hard to draw conclusions without knowing the website. Is the site actually 2.3 million pages or did Google deindex a bunch of duplicate or thin content? I feel this could be what is happening.

Are you seeing a decrease in organic traffic and/or rankings since this happened or were these thin-content pages that were not generating any traffic?

An average load time of 4 seconds is likely not the issue. It's not ideal for UX (particularly on mobile) but I have seen Google fully index websites with higher average page load times than this. Were you getting these index numbers from Google Search Console or from performing a site search? ("site:")

If you want to DM me the site, I can take a closer look for you.

• Joe

I would keep an eye on organic performance for the next week or two (regularly checking the security issues/manual action reports). If you do not see a downward trend nor receive another message from Google, you should be all set here.

To review organic performance, I suggest monitoring:

• Organic traffic (GA)

• Organic Visibility Trends/Rankings (SEMRush, Moz rank tracker)

• Google Search Console clicks and impressions (particularly for non-branded queries)

Hope this all helps!

Hi there,

There are a lot of things to consider here. For instance, do you want to be available to customers worldwide or do you only care to operate within Spain? A .es TLD will be a strong international targeting signal for Google and non-Spain rankings are likely to drop.

Secondly, moving domains can resolve link based penalties, however, many people speculate that Fred was a quality update that targeted excessive ads and low-value/quality content sites that put revenue before their users (Search Engine Land article). If that is what caused your site to get penalized, popping the same site up on a different domain will not change anything. Your best bet would be to resolve the onpage/content issues on the current domain in order to maintain that link equity that would be lost by moving domains (302 redirects do not pass link value).

Do you have reason to believe you are being penalized for links? Have you engaged in link building practices that could cause a penalty? Have you reviewed the back link profile? If there is a link-based penalty, 301 redirecting to the new domain could pass that penalty along. At the same time, providing a single link or using a 302 redirect will not pass your SEO authority.

I recommend taking action based on the recommendations in QuickSprout's 'Actions for those affected by Google Fred Update' article. Hopefully this will help you find a solution that will not involve moving domains.

Hope this helps!

I have to agree with James Wolff, canonical tags look like the best course of action given the examples above. It does not seem like the 301 redirects are going to be necessary.

Hi there,

Sounds frustrating, when did this migration occur?

I'm sure you've double checked but you implemented a 301 redirect from http://www. -----> https://www. correct? And URLs were 1 to 1 mapped out, no bulk redirect to the homepage or anything like that?

The site's internal navigation was updated to link directly to https://www. URLs, correct? If you are forcing each link in the site's navigation to redirect, you may be diluting homepage link equity and slow site performance. This could potentially be part of the issue.

This article discusses some potential reasons that rankings can drop after migrating from http ----> https, I would recommend reviewing these.

Hope this helps!

Hi Alison,

While this is a bit late, I would recommend moving to a responsive site when/if possible. Much easier to manage, fewer issues with search engines.

My recommendation is to remove the XML sitemap and rely on the rel=alternate/canonical tags to get the mobile pages indexed. Google's John Mueller has stated that you do not need a mobile XML sitemap file.

Also, do you have Google Search Console set up for both the m. mobile site and the desktop version? It does not seem so with all sitemaps listed in the one property in your screenshot. If not, I recommend setting this up as you may receive some valuable insights into how Google is crawling the mobile site.

I'd also review Google's Common Mobile Mistakes guide to see if any of these issues could be impacting your situation. Hope this helps!

Hi there,

Really any pages that you would not want returned to a user in the SERPs. Does the site contain sensitive personal information in some sort of customer profile? If so, you would want to index these pages.

I would not noindex contact form pages (valuable for users to be able to find) but internal search pages would be a good candidate as well as 'thank you' pages. If you have an ecommerce website, noindexing the shopping cart would be another smart idea.

As for archive pages, I tend to handle these with a canonical tag.

Hope this helps!