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Yes. Simply put, all else being equal, if you are targeting an multiple country international audience in which your offerings do not change, you should have a general TLD rather than a ccTLD. I can't say that you will start ranking better for sure, but it'll help in the long run.

Cody has some good resources. I'll follow that up with asking for specific instances of pages that are autocreated. It sounds like the way they are made doesn't add anything to the site, so rather than using a canonical, I'd go the noindex route first, but I'd need to see these pages to be sure.

I don't think they mean removing the duplicates, but make them unique instead. What CMS are you on? Who makes these pages? And again (sorry), can we have some examples?

The OP would like to keep the URLs and queries in confidence, but here is what I found upon investigation for those that might have the same issue in the future:

The main issue looks to be a recent URL change from [second most linked to URL on the domain] to the URL in question. There is a 301 redirect in place (as you mentioned), and the new URL is indexed, but it might be some time before it takes the place of the old URL. For the time being, Google for some reason thinks the other URL is the most relevant page, which is odd as there are more topical pages on the site, but I'm not a robot.

Good thing is that I feel a change coming. If you do a site: search for your domain with "term in question", Google is seeing the right URL as the most relevant page after the homepage. The homepage being first makes sense since it has the term on the page and it's the strongest page on your site.

A few things you might try in the mean time:

• Resumbit a sitemap of your old URLs that have 301 redirects.
• Resubmit a sitemap of the new URLs
• Get the three external links to the old page URL mentioned above changed to the new URL (three external links according to Moz Open Site Explorer)
• Your title tag and H1s are a little overstuffed with keywords right now. Try to dial that back a little and you only should have 1 H1 that is visible on the page. The H1 should be what people see as the title on the page right now rather than hidden in an extra header and in the body copy.

Try those items and give it a little more time.

Interesting. Can we have the domain, page URLs and phrases?

If it is just a few pages and they are only translating, you can create the pages in spanish and use hreflang to markup the English page as being in English as the Spanish in Spanish.

Instructions here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

I don't blame you, this could be a large undertaking. Things i would recommend:

1. Make sure you know what the top pages are all on all current sites in regards to external links. You need a list of all pages that have external links and where those are from. You need to get as many external links changed as possible.
2. Redirects are paramount of course. 301 redirects across the board. The content should match or be very similar.
3. In a week or two after launch, check to see how many internal links are linking to old URLs. Do this by crawling your site and fixing any internal 301 redirects.
4. Once you've confirmed the redirects are in place, submit the old sitemaps and the one new sitemap. It forces the SEs to visit the old URLs to find the redirects and also find the new URLs. In a week, remove the old sitemaps.

Those are the first things that come to mind. This is a good resource as well https://www.branded3.com/blog/website-migration-guide-building-an-seo-checklist-for-moving-your-site/

Can you share actual instances? Feel free to PM me those. I need to look at the actual setup. The above looks okay, but there might be something else going on.

Also, remember that a canonical is a suggestion. If the SEs deem the page valid enough, different enough, or just plain don't know what to do with them yet, they can still index them.

Let me know the real URLs and I'll take a look.

The fact that the links are all related to what you do doesn't change that they would all be coming into the same structure in about the same way from every site. Editorial links are those placed once on a site by the owners without provocation to inform their readers about something they find interesting or useful outside of a planned relationship. Editorial links are chaotic in nature, meaning there is no pattern to them. Google has been working to find and count these links higher than crafted links which typically have a pattern.

I'm not saying this is definitely going to be the case for you, but the more links are designed to appear, the more they have a pattern. You're trying to negate that, but lets just say there has a tendency to still be a pattern. That's why I mentioned not to count on these links. They might do you some good, they might not. I hope that answers your question!

It sounds like you intend on using this scheme for link development purposes, but I'd warn not to rely on any links created this way. They would not be editorial in nature and therefore you can't count on them in the long term.

That being said, there are two ways to look at this: from your perspective and your client's perspective. The best route in each case in my opinion is:

Yours: #3 by far

Theirs: #1 to keep things on their domain. If I were them, I'd want people staying on my domain.

If you are looking at this from just an SEO perspective, do #3, but if it were me, I'd ask your first set of clients what they prefer and work with them from there.

It sounds like you have a few options. Since you need to geo-target since the content is different and NEEDS to be different in each country, except for the standard About Us, etc, you are on the right track. Using ccTLDs automatically tells Google and Bing that you are geo-targeting. All good there.

You should not need hreflang. Each site's main content is different. It's not just translated. You're fine not marking that up.

For the general content, I would recommend a canonical to the original content. That content won't be useful in the SERPs much for you, mostly branded content, so you shouldn't worry about them appearing for each country. You could just have each page on each ccTLD, but they won't perform well. Again, these are not real important pages, so don't fret too much.

Hi Sarah,

I can only see three pages in the index now.

Google tries to find any and all content people might want to find using their index. They have a number of ways to identify anything that might be of use.

Now you said that you put a noindex in the sitemap. That is new to me, sitemaps are used to index files, not to command a noindex. Typically, a noindex is placed within the page's code.

Can you clarify what you have already attempted? A noindex is best (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93710?hl=en), teh page will still be crawled but cannot be put into the index.

With canonicals, I would not worry about the incoming pages. If the new content is useful and relevant, plus linked to internally, they should do fine in terms of indexation. Use the canonical for now, and once you launch the new pages, well a month after launch, if there are key pages not getting indexed, then you can reassess. The canonical is the right thing to do in this case.

As for link equity, you are right, that is a simplistic view of it. It is actually much more intricate than that, but that's a good basic understanding. However, the canonical is not going to hurt your internal link equity. Those links to the different sorting are navigational in nature and the structure will be repeated throughout the site. Google's algo is good at determining internal, editorial links versus those that are navigational in nature. The navigational links don't impact the strength nearly as much as an editorial link.

My personal belief is that you are worrying about something that isn't going to make an impact on your organic traffic. Ensure the correct canonicals are in place and launch the new content. If that new content has the same issue with sorting, use canonicals there as well and let Google figure it out. "They" have gotten pretty good at identifying what to keep and what not.

If you don't want the sorting pages in there at all, you'll need to do one of the following:

• Noindex, disallow in robots.txt - Rhea Drysdale showed me a few years back that you can do a disallow and noindex in robots. If you do both, Google gets the command to not only noindex the URLs, but also cannot crawl the content.
• Noindex, nofollow using meta robots - This would stop all link equity flow from these pages. If you want to attempt to stop flow to these pages, you'll need to nofollow any links to them. The pages can still be crawled however.
• Noindex, follow - Same as above but internal link equity would still flow. Again, if you want to attempt to cut off link equity to these sorting pages, any links to them would need to be nofollowed.
• Disallow in robots - This would stop them from crawling the content, but the URLs could technically still be indexed.

Personally, I believe trying to manage link equity using nofollow is a waste of time. You more than likely have other things that could be making larger impacts. The choice is yours however and I always recommend testing anything to see if it makes an impact.

Is your issue with crawling or indexing? Those are two separate issues. Why don't you want Google having the canonicals in the index? If you can give me some more insight, I can try to recommend the best option.

And I'm not following your last question. Can you try to ask it another way?

This one would need a canonical. For one category page with 5 different sort options, you'd need one canonical URL (one without any sorting or the default sorting) and point all others to that URL using a canonical tag.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en

Would that work for your setup? If I understand your situation correctly, this should work. It consolidates link equity and allows Google to choose what needs to be indexed and served.

Hi Chris,

With ccTLDs, you have your geo-targeting setup for the UK. You do need to set up the .com for the US if that is what the content is targeted to as Logan mentioned.

As to why the .com is showing higher, is the content identical between the two sites? If not, how are they different?

In the mean time, you can detect their location using IP and ask anyone on the wrong site using a JavaScript prompt if they would like to be on the other version. Give them the option, never redirect based on IP. You'll need a developer to do this.

First off, you're talking about two things here. It sounds like you have two sites that are geo-targeted to two different countries. There might be some translation in there, but if you have a .co.uk and a .com, those need to be treated like different sites as they are targeted at two different markets.

Second, please never use an automated IP redirect. Google only crawls from the US, it's asking to not get your .co.uk crawled. In addition to that, it's a poor user experience for some people. As the other commenter mentioned, there is a big chance someone is traveling and needs to see the .com, wants to, and gets redirected to the .co.uk because they are traveling.

If you want to attempt to put people in the right place, detect their IP and use javascript to pop up a message if they are going to the other site that asks them if they'd prefer to be on the one associated with their IP.

Flags in the header is the best way to go about this in conjunction with the IP detect and javascript prompt. You can even set a cookie after the prompt that will always put them on that country site when they come back.

You shouldn't need to duplicate the content to get into Google News across countries. In fact, you should only have to submit once. Google News uses their algorithm to present articles on a topic based on a number of factors. For example, you can see BBC articles in the US if that's the most reputable resource for that topic. But if there are US based publishers writing on the same topic and the user is closer or prefers that publication, that one will show.

The location in your submission is your physical location of your publishing company, not that of who you are targeting. This is what I've seen in checking the forums and with clients. News is more specific to the language of the article, not the location. Relevance, popularity, and language are the strongest factors.

Other similar questions on Google News Forum: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topicsearchin/news/category$3Agoogle-news-publishers$20country

You have a lot of questions in here. We are going to need to limit this thread to your main question of the https URLs being indexed.

Can you share the domain?

Have you claimed the https domain in Search Console yet to see if these indexed URLs are being shown in search results?

If the https is resolving, I would go ahead and use an htaccess command to have any https redirected to the same URL that is http. I don't see why it would be happening, but it is and that's the best way to take care of any traffic issues.

I've seen this with clients in the past. Many of them won't respond to removal requests, but that's the best place to start.

1. Look up WHOIS info and email asking to remove links to your site.
2. Follow up in one week.
3. Document these attempts.
4. Any that do not respond, disavow them.

I doubt they are hurting you, but the above will ensure they aren't hurting you in any way.