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I think you asked a similar question a few months ago, but the only update I know about is the one mentioned in that question from the other responder. Sorry to not be of more help, but it could be an iteration of that update.

I'm going to endorse Andy's answer as well as adding one here. His link to Matt's video is what I would add, but I wanted to address the redirect affecting ranking. The redirect is basically ensuring that you won't show in results for mobile users. You need a page to rank to even attempt to rank. You are sending the signal now that itunes is the right page for users, so that page will rank. The redirect is most certainly impacting your performance mobile and desktop. iTunes has desktop accessible pages as well and you are pointing your authority to them.

Beyond that, there haven't been studies that I know of proving this just because it's a bad user experience on top of a bad search decision.

From a not local perspective, redirecting based on IP is generally not the best idea. Early on at Distilled in Seattle, our I{ address was in Washington DC! IP Addresses are not reliable in the United States.

There is that problem, plus the fact that Google only crawls from California. Therefore, depending on how the redirect was set up, they might just see the San Jose area content.

Therefore, I am glad you decided against the redirect. I think your idea of letting people define where they are and find a new provider is perfect. The people in your area get the right content and others that happen on that page get to find a preferred vendor.

I wouldn't freak out too much over the crawl rate immediately. Wait a few weeks and see how things go. It sounds like you did the right thing and should see the benefits over the next few weeks.

Hi Rob,

Great question and I am glad you are looking into how your site responds to mobile users. It sounds like you are having some issues with smartphone users.

To be clear, it's best if you approach this problem from a screen size rather than a specific phone type. Your website works fine on tablets, but it's smart phones you have a problem with. You can do a responsive design that changes based on the user screen size rather than phone type which can get really hard to develop for really quickly.

Here is a guide we have developed for all things mobile design and SEO. We highly recommend making your site responsive (no need for m.domain.com or domain.com/mobile), which will take care of any issues with linking in the future, shares, and all other forms of user confusion as well as search engine confusion.

Also here are mobile recommendations straight from Google.

Hope that helps!

That is most likely the issue then. If the site is 2 months old, then there isn't enough trust in the site yet. Google, because the site is so new, is showing the user the most relevant and most trusted pages for the phrase "Series Digital". If the site was older, or had ranked for that term for some time and then dropped, I would be worried, but this is all very natural.

You are going to need to do some basic SEO to the site to help this process out. The homepage doesn't have a meta description. The homepage page title is a little over optimized. Try approaching the titles from a user standpoint and having a unique meta description for every page.

Have you submitted an XML sitemap to Google as well? If the company just launched, are there any plans for press coverage?

Are you seeing drops in natural search traffic for other pages on your site other than the homepage?

And is this term a competitive term for your market? I know it's your name, but I am curious if there is something else at play here.

Without any more data points, this looks like a penalty of some kind. Have you logged into Google Webmaster Tools recently to see if you have any messages?

Did Andy get the answer you needed? It sounds like everything has been taken care of but I wanted to be sure.

Language and country targeting are two different things. There are tons of people across multiple countries that speak English. People in Turkey speak a few languages as well I would assume.

It seems like you want to take the content on your site focused to users in Turkey, but offer it in English. If you put the English content on your Turkey ccTLD, it can still rank for people searching across the world for those English terms, but it's harder depending on the topic especially if there are sites/companies in their own country targeting the same topic.

Check out this tool I made to determine what international expansion strategy is best for your company. http://www.katemorris.com/issg

Does the client have a PR team or anyone that reaches out to writers when there is a story like a new product or brand? If not, that needs to happen first. Hire or contract PR help, best with someone that already has contacts that you can benefit from.

When you have that, then yes, press releases are helpful to get the word out about a new product or brand. But don't rely on the press release itself to bring recognition, stories, or anything else. Press releases like any other piece of content needs to be promoted to the wider audience.

On the technical side, press releases should not be used for link building. A well executed press release along with the right promotion will bring links, but not from the release itself.

HI!

There are a number of things I want to address in your situation, so please bear with me.

First, I can't see the site, so I can't verify the content on your site as 100% unique, relevant, and design with the user experience in mind. You need more than just reviews and images to have a great page, so if that isn't already the case, that is the first place to start. For any user search, ask what the best page is and beat that in terms of content. If you aren't sure how to be better than the best, find users that are looking for that via surveys and ask them.

Second, I am assuming a number of things. It sounds like your site just launched late 2013. This is based on your timeline and relatively low DA. If that is true and your timeline is accurate, you should be going through some major fluctuations. Your site is new, which means Google is actively testing it's content. Your rankings will change heavily in the first few months. You then noticed a number of onpage issues, and those were just changed as of last week. It's going to take some time for that information to be updated.

Third, based on the above and what I've seen in the past, it's very normal for your rankings to fluctuate. If you're checking by a rank checker tool, it'll fluctuate as none of them are accurate right now. If you're checking yourself, then the same IP is looking it up repeatedly, acting like a rank checker. Normal users can see ranking fluctuations per day based on the tons of factors that go into ranking.

I would highly suggest not tracking ranking, but rather watching the organic search traffic going to the page you are targeting here. That's the only way to show real success.

Fourth, tracking domain authority over time is not valid. Domain Authority change numbers based on the Moz data set. You could "lose" domain authority in one time period and still get more traffic. DA is only to be used in comparison to other sites related to you.

In the end, be patient, focus on your content and track organic traffic to important URLs to see how things are performing.

Perfect.

Note the #2 item on this list. The key to having international content is treating each country subsite as it's own site. Make sure you have someone from that country consulting you on each country focused site. So if UK, have someone native to the UK review the site. Same for Germany, France, etc.

As for structure, my personal favorite is subfolders. So your UK site would be www.domain.com/uk. www.domain.com if you get to the point that you have so many and really need a US one as well, make www.domain.com the "universal" version, and www.domain.com/us as targeted to the US, but it might not be necessary at this point.

The content is the big part, if you want to do well internationally, really focus on getting the content right. There will be some overlap, don't worry about that. Focus more on the user experience for people in each area.

The only technical thing that needs to be done is for you to geo-target in the respective WMT areas.

Does that help?

So glad to help! Good luck with everything!!

What you're doing would cause that many links to the US subdomain. In fact, it'll happen to any domain with that location changer up top. I wouldn't worry about the number of internal links due to this, I'd worry more that you're doing something that isn't great for your user. I'd recommend not doing an IP based automatic redirect. Rather, detect the IP, set a cookie, tell people you think they are in that location with a JS prompt that allows them to change the location and then always let them change the location regardless of IP.

Does that make sense?

No. A canonical would not be helpful here. There are major issues with canonicals and international content.

Hi Mike!

Moosa has the best behind the scenes answer, but everyone here is dead on. Both structures work really well when it comes to search because they are both descriptive and short. That's really what you need to focus on. If I had to pick though based on your examples:

www.mysite.com/marketing/digital/research/...

www.mysite.com/digital-marketing/research/..

I'd go with marketing/digital/research .. that way as you content changes, you can change the types of marketing research and if digital is just understood later as marketing overall, then at that time the research can just be put under marketing, but I think you'll always want to distinguish the types of marketing. This will just account for all possibilities.

Also, having all marketing focused content under /marketing/ allows you do be able to do some quick calculations inside of analytics on multiple scales. You can filter to see traffic, sources and more data for all marketing (all with /marketing/), just research (anything with /research/), and so on.

Hope this helps!

There are two ways to go about this project.

1. Send out a press release and do no further work. This, I assume, means you just want the press release duplicated, syndicated, and just basically reproduced as you wrote it for the purpose of getting links only. That's all sending out a press release will do without a good person with good contacts to follow up with key journalists. There are no more "major" PR news wires that are not having their link equity stripped, due to the fact that they are paid services. Any others that might be free would be smaller scale. I am sorry to say I know of no such places. But once Google/Bing find them, I am sure their ability to pass link equity will diminish as well. That update was not about the newswire services, but about press release syndication. If you just want your press release published, it will do nothing for the company. Press releases are not read, stories are read. There will be no link equity, Google is removing it from any syndicated press releases.

If this is really the route you want to go down, just avoid press release sites altogether like you mentioned before.

2. Now, if you mean to get coverage for the company on this story, which is what you should be hoping for, a story, not the publication of the press release, then yes, you will need a PR person. You might not need someone who identifies themselves as that, but you need someone that can talk with journalists, pick out people who might be interested in the story, and talk to them about covering the story, This is the right way to do it and what will produce the most benefit. The only benefit of a press release at this moment in time.

I hope that clears up what I mean.

What are your goals in finding a "PR site"? To get a press release written? Released to a wider market?

I am assuming your goal is more centered around getting coverage over this new partnership. If that's it, I am sorry to say that doing that will not be free, and will not come from posting a press release to a site.

You need to find and hire a good PR person or company that specializes in your industry.

You need to title the images what they are, not focused to SEO. So if the dress is called the Summer Green in Fields Dress, the file name should be summer-green-fields-dress.jpg (or something like it) and then the alt text be Summer Green in Fields Dress.