Welcome to the Q&A Forum

The store we are currently working on are actually two seperate sites ... .co.uk and .ie , actually they aren't even on the same server , I am of the believe if you are trying to rank in the .co.uk, use a server based in the UK and vice verse (I must add this is more opinion that substantiated evidence )

Lots of stores do though use subdomains, actually I would suggest that this is more  common than the approach we are talking about, for client reasons we actually created two separate domains.

We have though found it a lot easier targeting two local search results using two separate domains than we have in the past using subdomains ...

If you do go down the root of using www.domain.com/fr, you will in theory, have one website trying to target two different languages, and to be honest, I have never ever worked in that situation ,so hopefully someone with experience there can offer you some advise, thankfully we have only ever worked with English.

3 months ago I would have probably thought going with the subdomin would be the best fit, but from our recent experiences of creating two separate domains of late, I might think that would be a better fit (but once again ,its merely an opinion, there may not be no right of wrong answer here)

Hopefully someone who has worked with two international languages might advise, I mean without stating the obvious, anyone worth their salt in coding can create a  script that will translate your current website into a number of languages, Google has one built in as you probably know.

But the problem there might be if you have optimised your website already to rank within google.es, and then have to adjust your website to target google.fr

I appreciate a lot of the advise here is subjective, buit its hard to offer definitive advice when I have not actually been in your position, or not sue how you are set up at the moment, but at worse it will get your brain working

Regards

John

Yes, it helps them get crawled quicker.

Its like telling them, please go here and find this URL ,as opposed to sitting around doing nothing about it and crying weeks later wondering why your website has not been found yet

I see you edited your post after my response

See Brads answer now

Ask for the site to remove links, if they don't ,you have to use the Disavow tool and ask Google to remove them

Firstly the rich snippets do not help your website rank better !!! Although they should help immensely  with CTR assuming you are using them correctly and effectively. A rich snippet is a way of informing people searching for relevant content some extra details ... more than say Google will display within the SERP, so if you have this as detailed as possible, people are more inclined to click through to your page / video

So, you will still need to work on getting the video ranked within the SERP

Have you submitted a video sitemap, if not I would advise you to do that, that will help with Google finding your video for a start. If not I would also advise your create relevant content within the page in your website you display your video, this will help once again with the ranking of the Video or that page that contains it.

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=80472&topic=10079&ctx=topic

As for the markup for the actual video, looks fine from here

Hope that helps

John

Hi Kevin

No, I would not worry about that at all.

For your own clarity, here is Google's official stance on duplicate content

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.ie/2008/09/demystifying-duplicate-content-penalty.html

Its quite common for e-Commerce stores to have varying duplicate content snippets, like shipping details, address details. We have e-Commerce stores with similar content on each page without any effects to ranking.

Actually, you have good unique content on each product page, considering its an E-Commerce website, which will hopefully benefit your website going forward

BTW, nice website, really clean and contemporary.

Regards

John

Are we allowed to hate it ...

Hi Andy

Yes, hear you loud and clear. I think actually treating everything on the two websites as different entities is the way to go, different url extensions  subtle changes to headings etc,  and try our best to mix content up, even if we need to add to it (although I will be braking my Golden rule of not creating content for clients websites, my real pet hate at web development stage.)

Thanks again for your help and advice, really appreciated, and your kind offer of help, I may take you up, so expect PM soon offering copious amounts of Guinness in return for advise

Kind Regards

John

Heather,

The ranking is based on a keyword against a page.

So while in your control panel - Keyphrase "Apples" may have a grade of A against page www.yourwebsite.com/apples, against a different page not optimised for the phrase Apple it will get a Grade of F...

Your key phrase is obviously ranking against two different pages ,you can change this in the backend. As in select the appropriate word you want to rank against on any page

Hope that makes sense

John

Wow, that's great news ....Congrats

You shouldn't really have both your www.yoursite.com and yoursite.com domains accessible in the public domain, especially for SEO practices. Search engines may view it as duplicate content.

You should use your .htaccess file to redirect all your www to non www or vica versa (assuming your server is Apache enables)

#Redirect no-www to wwwRewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !www.yoursite.com$ [NC]RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.-yoursite.com/$1 [L,R=301]

I might add .... I aint no SEO experts, but I am pretty sure that you should follow the advice above

I'd also insure its not something to do with your .htacess file.

Hi Lee,

Have you had any warnings from Google over bad links ? Do you use GWT, can you check to see if you have any messages relating to your website ?

You seem to have a lot of links coming into your website from not so good directories. You could have been penalized as Google would not see them as relevant, or dare I suggest paid links

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/domains?site=www.passlee.com

Similar to www.drivinglessonsworcester.com, has links coming from what look like link farms, websites with high DA located in Russia !!! ... I imagine his one of the reasons why it plummeted.

Further review on ahrefs.com shows lin ks coming in from all sorts of cr*p ...A lot of these first seen from early this year right up to last month ,did you use some sort of tool to creat backlinks ?

My advice to you is this links  / directories are more damage these days than benefit, especially if you are paying for them. These directories that pop up everywhere, offering links are something to stay clear off

Also, the content on the page http://www.passlee.com/driving-lessons-worcester.html is replicated all over the internet, I just ran it through Copyscape and found at least 47 replications of the text above varying from 14% up to 63%

A few links below

http://www.surreydrivingforce.co.uk/

http://www.surreydrivingforce.com/driving-lessons-surrey/driving-lessons-a-m/driving-lessons-addlestone/

http://www.aditrainingashford.co.uk/driving-lessons-middlesex.html

The list goes on, as I said Copyscape throws back 47 websites above. I am not suggesting you copy and pasted the content, but it sure looks like you did.

You have to make the content unique and relevant ... more importantly try and make it unique, it seems every driving school is using the same content.

Your DA is better than any of the competitors ranking above you, your page you are ranking for is not though ... i suggest you clean up the links coming into your website, sort out the content on the page and you should recover, the term is not a high competitive term, your competition don't seem to have invested in any serious SEO work, so you should get back up there

BUT you need to clean up those links !!!!!!!

Hope this helps a little, maybe some of our more esteemed experts may throw up in advice

Regards

John

Iain

You robots.xt file can be found within your root directory

Where ever your website is hosted, log in there (if you have cpanel which is more than likely) and navigate to your public folder. the robots.text file should reside there, download it and edit in any software really, wordpad etc.

If you don't have cpanel, you can add your FTP credential using an FTP client and navigate the same way

When you edit it, upload it back to your server.

Regards

J

A lot of people, especially WP users use modules that may block certain spiders crawling your site, but in your case, you don't seem to have any.

Hi Lee

You could try to manually have them removed, contacting the webmaster, and lastly you could use the disavow tool

Great article here explaining the whole process.

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2237534/Unnatural-Links-Recovery-Emerging-from-a-Manual-Penalty ,now you have no notification that you were penalized, but none the less, you would need to remove the links that aren't good

If you have no quality warning from Google Lee in your GWT, that's good.

If I was you I would get rid of all those links into your website immediately, obviously the bad ones, you have some good relevant ones also (like the driving school authority and similar).

I have never ever used Remov'em but read other people talking about them and have not heard much negative ... Maybe someone else could qualify them.

You could of course pay some agency to carry out this work, but you aren't in a critical position in terms of penalties, your webpage is still ranking ... albeit slipping down the ranks ... but still number 10 (front page). As for the cost, each and every agency will charge accordingly as they see ... there is no one definitive price !

Work on cleaning the links, get relevant fresh content within your website, start utilizing your social media presence ... Just to clarify before I put the fear off God into you Lee, you aren't in a detrimental position here .. a little work on your side should see you hopefully improve / recover ..

Hope this helps a little more and clarifies for you

Regards

John

Iain

Just to be sure, its actually just called a robot.txt (not .text)

I just checked, you do have one in your root file

http://www.iainmoran.com/robots.txt

Bizarrely, its blocking Google indexing your includes, which is a problem cause most of your links will be included in some sort of nav include, not to mention most of your website content.

Its defiantly there, maybe check your public folder and www folder

Let me know how you get on

John

I assume they find it here

http://www.appointeddhq.com/?escaped_fragment

I don't have any experience of Wix, or indeed ranking Ajax websites, maybe someone else can offer advice on ranking Ajax websites

Regards

J

Iain

I dont use WP, but just Googled this

"I believe WordPress itself creates the robots.txt file and it is a virtual file, meaning there won't be a hard copy on your server for you to edit. You could create one yourself and upload it to your server and I think search engines will use that one instead, or you can use a plugin like this one, that will let you edit your robots.txt file from the WordPress admin."

Explains why you cant find it !

Basically that suggest creating one yourself and uploading it to the server.

Create a note pad file, add your content, name file robot.txt (must change extension to .txt), and that should work

Reading up on it, Wix are adamant that the way they present content would not effect SEO performance ...

Then again, I am assuming it would make it quite difficult to optimise the content, include Rich Snippets, but I am not realyl sure as I never ever used Wix template ... and wont !

Though doing a search did present this

http://www.wix.com/support/forum/flash/other/other/navigation-link-in-escaped-fragment-version-of

Example site - www.wixexample.com1. Home Page - place ?escaped_fragment= at the end of your URLwww.wixexample.com/?escaped_fragment=

Example site - www.wixexample.com#!AboutUs/c24142. Individual pages - ?escaped_fragment= in place of the #!www.wixexample.com/?escaped_fragment=AboutUs/c2414

Example site - www.wixexample.com#!portfolio/vstc3=lifestyle 3. Individual pages with an = in the URL - ?escaped_fragment= in place of the #! AND change the = in the mini page URL to%3Dwww.wixexample.com/?escaped_fragment=portfolio/vstc3%3Dlifestyle

We can assure you that your individual pages are seen by Google.

Hope that helps

Regards

John

Actually, on further investigation, blocking the includes folder does not effect ranking, as the content is loaded server side (PHP)

I don't imagine that the robot.txt file is your issue, as its just stopping people accessing your include and admin folder, which you want