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Hi Joseph,

I found Moz's Hreflang attribute guide to be very helpful when I first set up international targeting and multi-language tagging. I would recommend checking that out. You are close but you need to also include a self-referencing hreflang tag on each page so it should look like this:

I will note that hreflang tags do not consolidate link authority, they are meant to ensures that the correct pages will be shown to the correct users based on their language and/or location. You can see Twitter screenshots here where this same topic was discussed.

Hope this helps!

Hi Justin!

Yes, I have seen this with multiple clients before. One of my older clients (about 4 years ago now) actually received a manual action as a result. We were working with product reviewers at the time that would include a disclaimer and occasionally leave a link dofollow but we decided to focus on the low quality spam links first. Let the Web Spam team know that these were not our work and that we had no way to contact the webmasters to have them removed. The manual action was lifted a few days later.

I have a client now that also gets links such as these, someone is building thousands of spam links to their site using generic prescription 'pill' anchor text ("buy hydrocodone online", "generic viagra" etc). I have no idea who is doing it. I don't think it is having an impact and frankly shouldn't according to Google's claims with Penguin 4.0 being able to devalue such links. I do still add them to the disavow file to cover all bases though.

Do you feel this is impacting your organic performance?

Apologies on the delayed reply and thank you for providing this information!

Has there been any change in this trend over the last week? I do know that subfolder mobile sites are generally not recommended by search engines. That being said, I do not feel the mobile best practice would change as a result. Does the site automatically redirect the user based on their device? If so, be sure Google is redirecting appropriately as well.

"When a website is configured to serve desktop and mobile browsers using different URLs, webmasters may want to automatically redirect users to the URL that best serves them. If your website uses automatic redirection, be sure to treat all Googlebots just like any other user-agent and redirect them appropriately."

Here is Google's documentation on best practices for mobile sites with separate URLs. I do believe the canonical and alternate tags should be left in place. It may be worth experimenting with the removal of these mobile URLs from the sitemap though I feel this is more of a redundancy issue than anything.

I would also review Google's documentation on 'Common Mobile Mistakes', perhaps there is an issue that is restricting search engines from crawling the mobile site efficiently.

Hope that helps!

Hi there,

Apologies on the delayed reply! It's hard for me to say it is keyword stuffing without seeing the content of the page.

In all honesty, I feel you will be better off building out an internal page with targeted SEO content. I don't think the homepage is the best place to present this sort of information, I feel that should be more about your brand and an overview of the services you provide. Even if you take a look at the first page of search results for "SEO", you don't see homepages ranking. You see content-heavy, internal pages being returned (see Moz and Search Engine Land results).

My suggestion, move that copy to a new 'SEO' targeted internal page. Make sure the page title, header tags, copy, internal linking, alt= tags, meta description etc. are all optimized for SEO terms. Expand on the copy that you currently have to be more valuable and/or informative (not to say it is not already valuable). To do so, look at queries that are returning instant answer results and look at the 'People Also Ask' recommended questions provided by Google. Include answers to these questions within your copy under header tags that essentially mimic the question. Remember, long-form content tends to perform better in organic. From there, work on promoting this content and pushing natural links to this page from authoritative, relevant resources.

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!

Did traffic to the homepage drop or the rankings you are tracking? If rankings, is this just for a single head term or a grouping of related keywords? Also, how long ago did this change happen?

Ranking fluctuation for a page that was recently updated is not uncommon. I would review impression and click data in Google Search Console to see how this has changed. Your ranking for the head term "SEO" dropped but you very well could be picking up more 'SEO' related long-tail queries.

I assume you did not keyword stuff this content or add it in the footer which could potentially cause this issue. If you are seeing ranking, click and impression decreases for a grouping of keywords for an extended period of time, I'd take the recommended actions in Moz's SEO Rankings Drop Guide

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!

Just to confirm (it was implied by the Google.es comment but international targeting was never specified) - are you looking to target Spanish speakers in Spain only? Or are you attempting to target Spanish speakers worldwide?

If you are looking to target Spanish speaks in Spain only, then yes, this would be correct.

If you are looking to target Spanish speakers globally, you would want the tag to be:

You are welcome!

I suggest trying the anchor text report in Open Site Explorer - this should help you group spam links by anchor text.

https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/

You're welcome!

I can confirm that Andy is correct here, implementing that 301 redirect is best practice for this scenario.

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,

IMO, no, I don't think this will hurt their local SEO. The NAP information has been structured under dedicated header tags and marked up with localBusiness schema. Google should be able to differentiate the information for Haverhill and Bury St. Edmunds based on this page structure.

Homepage Screenshot - Structured under dedicated H3 tags

Contact Us Screenshot - Structured under dedicated H2 tags

Hope this helps!

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?

Hello,

Did you review the Security Issues Report in Google Search Console? If you have a security issue/have been hacked, this is where you will submit a review once the issue has been cleaned up. This Google Webmasters post on hacked sites/requesting a review should help.

Malware or Spam

1. Open the Security Issues report in Search Console. The report will probably still show the warnings and sample infected URLs you saw before.
2. If you believe that the sample URLs listed are all clean, select Request a review. In order to submit a review, we ask that you provide more information that the site is cleaned of the hacker's damage. For example, for each category within Security Issues, you can write a sentence explaining how the site was cleaned (for example, "For Content injection hacked URLs, I removed the spammy content and corrected the vulnerability: updating an out-of-date plugin.").

Hi Steven,

This does sound like it could be a negative SEO campaign, are you seeing spammy anchor text with these links?

Google is effective at eliminating any negative impact caused by such campaigns but they are not always perfect. Are you seeing evidence that this is effectively harming your SEO? If you believe it is being effective, Google suggest you report it in the webmaster forums or by contacting John Mueller (https://plus.google.com/+JohnMueller/posts) and they will look into the situation. Check out this Moz blog post 'preparing for negative SEO' for more information and tips for how to address this situation.

As a precaution, I recommend submitting these spammy links to Google's disavow tool.

Hi There!

The best practice here would be to implement those 301 redirects to prevent the possibility of duplicate content. It does not appear that any https://www. pages are in Google's index now (screenshot) but the potential is there with both http://www. and https://www. URLs being able to resolve and the fact that they both contain self-referencing canonical tags.

I would recommend making the switch to https:// given Google's recent announcement regarding the 'Not Secure' warning in Chrome 62 starting October (All http:// pages with forms will be marked as 'not secure' - more on that here).  This warning will be triggered on every page due to the 'request a quote' form in the right-hand sidebar. If you are interested in looking into this further, I recommend checking out this 'Secure your site with HTTPS' Search Console Help article.

Hope this helps!

You're welcome. You do not want to include hreflang="x-default" tags for the specific language pages (whether in the sitemap or the code). You only want to include the x-default tag on non-language specific 'default' pages (for example, a default page that prompts the user to select a language or country).

Here is a description from Google on their use of this particular tag: "The new x-default hreflang attribute value signals to our algorithms that this page doesn’t target any specific language or locale and is the default page when no other page is better suited." [Source]

You are welcome!

If you are only targeting different languages (not targeting a specific region) you should not use the international targeting feature in Google Search Console. You also should not include country codes in the hreflang tags, you will want to remove those.

Also, it is best practice to only use hreflang tags OR an hreflang sitemap, it is not recommended that you use both due to redundancy [source].

"There is no need to use multiple methods for hreflang implementation. Google recommends against it, since it would be redundant. You certainly can use both methods, and there is no clear advantage of one method over the other. Here are some considerations for when you are deciding whether to use the xml sitemaps or page tagging methods:

• Hreflang xml sitemaps can be difficult to create and update. You can use online tools or create it in Excel, but it is difficult to automate the process. If you have xml sitemaps that your CMS updates for you automatically, it would be better to continue to use those rather than create separate, static hreflang xml sitemaps.
• Page tagging leads to code bloat, especially when you are targeting several countries/languages. That can mean an additional 10+ lines of code to each geo-targeted page.
• Some content management systems, such as WordPress and Drupal, offer automatic hreflang page tagging solutions."

https://www.semrush.com/blog/7-common-hreflang-mistakes-and-how-to-fix-them/