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We see scraped content all the time. Occasionally we see scraped HTML in full form but slightly edited.

In general I'd do the following:

• Disavow those domains in GSC. Also consider disavowing any domains pointing links at the mirror sites. It could be possible that they are building up junk links to a mirror site which canonicals your site. No idea why anyone would do that but worth covering your bases.
• Submit DMCA notices to Google, their webhost, etc.
• Take a look through server logs for anything screwy. If you see tons of weird traffic from countries that aren't relevant to your business, you might decide to block them with your .htaccess file.
• Certainly make sure nothing has been changed on your own site (canonicals, common Wordpress hacks, etc.), though nothing is suggesting to me that that has happened.

Other than that I would just keep an eye on it and keep an eye on Google Search Console.

Thanks John - as mentioned on Twitter I appreciate you sharing tested results. Haven't had time to test on my own sites and certainly don't want to be testing on a client's live production site.

I did notice that one of your posts (http://www.johnfdoherty.com/canonical-tag-delays-googlebot-web-vs-mobile-index/) does have the self-referencing hreflang but the Spanish version does not. Based on recreating your SERP screenshots myself, it looks like it's working fine.

Also, I think my opinion on the Au/En version where you're geotargeting with the same language is that is should be set up the way you indicated, so I'm glad to see more testing that has confirmed that.

Thanks for taking the time to answer - Thanks to Dave as well!

A few other questions for you first:

• Why on earth are you getting rid of everything?
• Are you going to replace that content with new content - either now or eventually?
• Is there any other content on your site that is relevant to the articles?

A few broad answers that I can say without hesitation:

• No, absolutely do not leave a bunch of 404s. IMO, everything should 301 somewhere. Sending people to relevant content is best, but sending them all to the homepage or a landing page that says "sorry but we deleted our blog" is better than a 404.
• No, "noindex/nofollow" is not worthwhile. If you want to keep the content and deindex it, choose "noindex/follow." At least then you keep some of the value of the pages (they can continue spreading some of their value to other pages on the site).

http://reverseinternet.com/analytics/5670334 is showing that GA code being used on 4 domains. 2 have apollo in the name and redirect to the main site. A random 4th one called deltapoint24.com doesn't appear to have the GA code on the homepage, and throws a 404 when you add /india/ to the url.

I would also check the hostname as Mike suggested.

#3 looks the nicest.

#2 is decent and has good keyword usage, and I think it would be fine.

#1 is too much in my opinion, and I don't think you'll get much benefit from using the keyword multiple times. This is the only option I would avoid.

The original URL is also fine, and wouldn't require any 301 redirects, which is an important consideration as well.

Regarding 'Sports Centre Services' vs 'Sports Centre Equipment Rental' - these should be targeted by two different pages (that may be what you meant but I want to mention it to be sure). Like this:

1. 'Sports Centre Services' should be the target keyword for frankssportscentres.com/services/
2. 'Sports Centre Equipment Rental' should be the target keyword for frankssportscentres.com/services/equipment-rental (or whatever your final URL ends up being)

One more thing that could be a long shot but is worth keeping an eye on: If someone had zero ethics and wanted to steal your links, one thing they could do is reach out to webmasters that link to you and pretend to be you, and claim that the mirror site is the new version of the website and ask them to change their links. Once complete, they'd redirect the mirror site to their own commercial site.

So, keep an eye on your own link profile and theirs, just to make sure none of those links are changing.

As a 2014 follow up to anyone reading this thread, Google later released a tag labeled "x-default" that should make the self-referencing canonical question moot.

Read more at http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/04/x-default-hreflang-for-international-pages.html

In that case, it doesn't sound like there are any blog posts that get frequent traffic from referrals? If that's the case, everything should get a broad 301 redirect to the new blog page. This can typically be done in one redirect depending on your URL structure, so you don't have to do each and every URL.

On the topic of subdomains, subfolders are typically a better choice for SEO purposes.

I would absolutely choose the brand name. Google has a history of penalizing folks who used location and other keywords excessively in their Google Local listings, and with the way they've conducted themselves on G+ thus far (as far as real names, slow release of vanity URLs, etc.) I have no doubt that you'll eventually have issues if you try and insert words that aren't actually in your  company or brand name.

Yes, these should be separate pages, since they are for different phrases. Search engines will understand that workshops and development are two separate concepts and by separating them you'll be able to target each keyword much more effectively.

Hope that helps!

Hey Mike,

Outside of Local SEO, one single site would be the clear winner because it’s easier to build the authority of that one domain.

Within Local SEO, having dedicated domains could make more sense. One could make the argument that it’s simpler for Google To understand a single location, but there are plenty of retail sites with single domains that refute that argument.

One could also make the argument that it might be easier to build homepage links to separate domains, but I don’t think it’s enough of a factor to change your web structure.

Option 2 is the standard in your industry, for certain. But it typically means higher web design costs to build and maintain them all, even if they’re somewhat cookie cutter. Frankly I think that’s as big of a factor in your decision.

I wouldn’t worry about the administrative relationship you described. It’s not going to be a major factor - you’re not deceiving Google by separating the sites, you’re changing how users experience the sites.

A couple of clarifying questions:

• Are any of the communities near each other, or are they in many cities across the country?
• Are you seeing subpages of corporate sites ranking in the local search results for any of your communities?
• Is there any administrative value to separating the websites? Outside of SEO considerations.

Hi Duncan,

Here's some initial thoughts on steps I would take:

• Since external links are fine, there shouldn't be a need to do anything disavow-related, but I would definitely do that if you see any external links pointed to those old pages, which is common with hacked sites.
• Sounds like you've covered your bases regarding preventing the site from getting hacked again at a CMS level, database level, plugin level, etc., so I'll assume that is good to go.
• If these spammy internal pages were all in a specific subfolder, you could block that subfolder via Robots.txt to send a stronger signal that the URLs should be ignored and de-indexed.
• The internal links should disappear as the pages are removed from the index, but that can take awhile, and it's not uncommon for Search Console to display pages/links/data that have since gone away.

And a couple of questions for you:

• Once those bases are covered, then you're still faced with the potential "penalty", or poor performance. I'm assuming that these pages not ranking in Google were performing well before the site hack?
• How long has it been since the site was initially hacked, and how long since full cleanup was completed?
• Are the spammy internal pages showing up as 404 crawl errors yet?

There's a company called FutureSimple that does a good job of this in my opinion. Take a look at their pages for these two keywords:

"Online CRM Software" - http://bit.ly/xK3KZQ

"Web Based CRM Software" - http://bit.ly/yZaAow

That is a good way to handle two slightly different keywords, that mean the same thing, but both have enough search traffic and competition that you have to target both of them individually.

You'll note that they use a very similar page structure, but the images are different, and all of the text is different. If you use that method and all text and images are completely custom, then yes, I would create separate pages with unique URLs for each of those keywords that are fairly difficult.

For keywords that are more similar, such as "send money to Cina from the US" and "send money to China from the United States", then no, I would not create multiple pages. Use the method above for synonym terms with lots of traffic going to each keyword.

"Foremost, shouldn't we get rid of that embed option on our page? I mean, isn't is stealing from our backlink potential? I can't imagine juice would somehow pass back to us through a Scribd-located doc or embed but I haven't found info affirming or contradicting that."

Yes, I absolutely agree that you should remove these. I'd also look for embeds of their Scribd documents and do a little bit of link reclamation and see if you can get a link added to the original content. Can't hurt, right?

"And secondly, isn't a Scribd collection a bit analogous to posting videos on YouTube and hoping your page will ultimately benefit from it via clickthroughs, etc? At this year's MozCon I heard a strong argument against that."

You could go a few ways on this - I don't think it's causing a huge issue. I might name the Scribd document something different from their own blog post, to try and rank for different variations on the titles.

Hi Juan,

Here are the resources I usually hand to beginning link builders to get them started:

I'd point you towards these three resources to get started:

• http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies
• http://www.linkbuildingbook.com/link-building-resources.html
• http://www.clockworkpirate.com/
• http://www.seomoz.org/blog/category/link-building

It should take you a year of full time link building to truly go after all of the strategies listed in the first 3 resources, and all of them contain tactics that you can use indefinitely. The important I'd focus on is keeping a steady pace of content creation and outreach efforts, diversification of your strategies, and avoiding anything that feels spammy (because that's a good sign that it's a low value tactic).

Feel free to ask any questions here, but that should get you started!

Knowing that all of your properties are in the same area, this seems like the biggest argument in favor of separate sites. Google may be more likely to rank other sites instead of subpages of the same site to avoid what is called domain crowding. However, it still happens in local. Just search for "office supply stores" and you're likely to see multiple listings for Staples or OfficeDepot, for example.

Honestly you could do both. Have a corporate site with pages for every property on it, and set up microsites with single properties on them. If the site is setup well with something like Wordpress Multisite then at least the same software can be running and updated simultaneously. In that case I'd probably use the microsites as the landing pages for Google local listings.

If you do go the route of multiple sites, I'd recommend having a clear button or call to action to "View Our Other Properties in the XYZ Area".

Hey Duncan, sounds like you've covered the basics. If this had happened a month ago I'd tell you to wait it out, but since it's been 5 months it seems like it should have cleared up by now if it was simply a matter of waiting for Google to deindex everything.

I've put a note out to other associates on Moz Q&A to see if they have any suggestions.

If your goal is to send most people to the page1.html content, then yes, adding rel="next" and rel="prev" would be a good solution. But, if you want people reaching different content on each page, then it might not be the effect that you're looking for. Typically I see it used for search results and archive/category/tag pages.

Is there a reason you're paginating all that content manually? Sometimes a longer page can be an asset...

Just to clarify, 70 characters is a good rule of thumb for title tags, however that limit is largely in place due to the number of characters that Google displays in search results.

I personally think 80-100 is a good rule of thumb for maximum length on a URL but it's not always feasible, and the best practice for URLs is not as clearly delineated as title tags.

I'd go with the umbrella brand pages. Your reservations all make perfect sense, and managing content for 10 pages sounds miserable, plus they'll all take a ton of traction to get started vs a single page.

Most users are tolerant of a brand that has products they may not care about. Unless they're seriously different (like a plastics company selling kid's toys, garden equipment, and medical devices) it makes more sense to keep them together.