Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Actually, sorry guys, I am not sure HREFLANG is the right thing here. It might be, but it depends.

Christopher, can you check out the tool at this URL and answer the questions? Once you've done that, let me know what result you get and I can recommend some actions from there.

I am not sure there are titles that will ensure anything. Just like any direct mail or email marketing tactic, people get used to overused ones quickly and easily. My advice is not to use the same title every time, but craft each on to each person you are reaching out to. Trying to do guest posting en masse is not going to be worthwhile for you.

If you have an online store dedicated to selling shoes in France, I would focus less on how to optimize and more on getting someone that is fluent in French and native to France. You are going to have to give that person the time to really translate your site from a French person's (someone that lives in France) perspective. All the site content.

Once you have accomplished that and used the correct implementation of HREFLANG and the meta language content tag (for Bing), let it sit for the time being. See how much traffic it garners. Get user input, check internal search patterns. If you aren't already tracking internal site search, please do that. If you don't allow internal site search, add that and track it in analytics.

Only then do you optimize for specific text.

First, you're thinking about this all wrong. Stop thinking in terms of PR juice. PR (pagerank) hasn't been updated in a while and is a horrible metric. Also, don't think of links in relation to each other. They are independent unless you are part of a link farm. Those are identifiable, always.

If you want to say thank you, say thank you. If someone linked to you and it provided business, def say thank you. But don't think about it in terms of link equity. If they linked to you and it's bringing business, that is all that should matter. Thank in any way you deem respectful.

There used to be a platform for this called Sponge, but their site is down so I assume it's gone now.

Q&A can be very useful, but you will need to focus attention less on length and more on the capability to search the questions. More importantly if your market wants this and if it's not available elsewhere. If this is something that has been identified as necessary and useful, go for it. Don't worry too much about the headings and length. Just don't make this a factory of questions and 300 word answers. Allow the people writing the answers to answer well, no matter how long.

Hope that helps!

Whether a subdomain carries all the weight of the main domain has yet to be proven, but I think in this case it does. But link equity flows from the page not the domain.

A better test is: does the site look spammy? Do I want my brand on there? If yes, awesome. Then: Did I pay for this placement? (If yes, please rethink that unless it's advertising and nofollowed)

If it's natural and good for your brand, no matter what site, just keep it there.

Hi Michael,

First, I need to clarify something. If you have .es, .it. de, those are not language domains, they are ccTLDs, targeted at different countries. .es is for Spain based sites, not Spanish language sites. If your translations are on ccTLDs, you are sending the wrong signals to Google and Bing. A ccTLD is always geo-targeted to that country and for some of these domains, the language you mean to target is actually much larger than that country. For instance, only half of the world's French speakers live in France.

If you are just meaning to translate your content, I'd suggest moving that to your main domain and putting them in subfolders, so www.domain.com/es www.domain.com/it (for italian, not Italy).

Once that is all settled, linking to the others in the footer is not hurting your link equity, but it isn't necessary either. For translated content, you should be utilizing HREFLANG and the Meta Content Language tag (for Bing) to note to the search engines what pages are translations. Then you simply need to give users a way to change the language either at the top of the page (preferred) or the footer.

If you mean to geo-target (developing different sites to target different countries), then my answers change completely, let me know if that's what you are trying to do here rather than just translate. If you're not sure what to do, check out this tool I made to help you pick the best international strategy. http://www.katemorris.com/issg

I would not recommend IP based redirects. You can detect and do an initial redirect (with a javascript overlay telling people that you think they are in a specific area), but you'd have to give all users (including Googlebot) the ability to go to the other URLs as well.

HREFLANG is not meant for geo-targeting and IP addresses only tell you location. You only need HREFLANG if there are language changes within a country targeted site or universal (not geotargeted) site.

Even ignoring that, the HREFLANG would not help if people were always redirected based on IP, so I don't suggest that.

Hope this helps, let me know if you have any more questions.

Both answers so far get to one of the points that I was going to make, always update redirects so that there is not a chain, but I wanted to add something else. You only need redirects as long as someone is linking to those pages. You should be taking time to fix any internal references to changed URLs and contacting websites that link to the old URLs and asking them to change the URLs. That should be a part of any site URL change.

If you have only revised your URLs once, you only need redirects for 3-6 months while the search engines reindex everything. In that time, you should have changed all links to the old URLs.

In your case, I'd drop all old redirects except for the last one and see what 404s you get. Find the referring site, and contact them to change the link to your site. Once that is all done, then you can work on this latest revision to change those links.

Hope that helps!

I would worry less about what your communication to them says and more about identifying the market. To get a 20-40% return on who you contact, you're going to have to put in some major work into who these site owners are and if they want or need help. This isn't a numbers game, it's a market identification game.

If it were me, I'd spend time on a few web design and website development forums looking for people who are asking questions about their site or have concerns, and then develop conversations with them. Step away from this being about you and make it about them.

Hope that helps!

I love that you made the tweet joke yourself.

If you create this as your site (your site is the Pinterest looking site), you are hoping to maximize others linking to your site? I think it might drive good interest socially, but I am not sure that type of site lends itself well to links. If you do go with this type of site, I would focus your efforts on collections of pins and do promotions around those. I think that would be the best way to get link attention. Focus less on the pins and more on the boards.

It's early Monday, so does that make sense?

How have you gotten your links so far? The strongest ones I see are very exact match looking, on homepages, and therefore I am wondering if they are paid links or other business deals.

Are you the only one with permission to publish the content? If not, and there are others, you will need to canonical to where the publisher/owner of the content has the content up. If you are the only approved publisher on the web, you can make others canonical to you, but it'll be a battle.

For reference, here is the question:

Thank you for helping me in this. I now have the clarity in making the right recommendation to my client.  However we are now left with 2 options:

• Create unique design/Content for the new **brandnamebianalytics.com **and work on optimization from scratch.
• Redirect **brandnamebianalytics.com to brandname.co.in or vice versa. **The reason we've considered this option is because brandname.co.in is rich in content and drawing around 3000 visitors traffic per month and we cannot afford to lose the reputation the (co.in) site has earned till date.

I appreciate the time you've taken in replying to my query and I look forward to your thoughts/recommendations in the above mentioned issue.

Redirecting to .co.in will keep the domain focused to the Indian market, and if I read right, you want to focus on the US market as well. So I'd recommend designing and developing new content for brandnamebianalytics.com and optimize from scratch.

Hope that helps!

Why are you publishing the whole book if it's not yours? If you are going to do that, I'd noindex the content since it's not yours and you don't have permission to publish it from the owner. Or I assume you don't.

What plugins have you added recently? What settings have you changed in Wordpress?

Something is causing a ton more URLs. I would worry less about the rel canonicals and more about the duplicate content. I am with Rohit and his advice, you need to noindex a ton of content including archives, tags and maybe categories. I would worry less about categories though.

There is no reason I know of to delete the pages. Just rewrite the content and make sure you have a valid sitemap. Things should be just fine.

While I get your point, all stories cannot get picked up and put on Google News for a day or more, there is literally not enough space for that.

My point is that you should not try to optimize for Google as the end all, be all. Google News might be "easier to optimize" but if you say that now, it will not be true in 2 years. That is the way of the web.

We don't disagree here, writing a good press release is the starting point, but I disagree on the target when it comes to answering for everyone. Knowing who your target market is and where they get their news is more important than getting your story in Google News. If that is where your target market is, awesome, then optimizing for that market is best, but that is not going to be the answer for everyone.

From what I am hearing, nothing much will change across countries, so why geo-target at all? Are you going to be developing any content that is different per country?

Assuming you should geo-target, I'd recommend subfolders (domain.com/uk, domain.com/us, etc.) as you can then use some of the equity from the main domain. Then use WMT in Bing and Google to geotarget those folders to the countries in question.

I'm not sure I get what you are asking. You mention products but also mention hotels. Can you share exactly the issue you are facing?

Facebook is not meant for just loading products or hotel locations. It's more about sharing things they are doing over time or having a facebook page for each hotel location.

But if you are talking products, take a look at what ModCloth does. They mention their products in really interesting ways that drives traffic to those pages.