Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Like I have mentioned in my response, that is one case.

But I must agree with Monica, you should place the value to the searchers&User Experience.

Hi there,

I do not know if it is only me, but I feel like I do not really understand your question.

quoting you: "What surprised us today that we created a page 2-3 days ago for a client who is participating in Arab Health (a very prestigious healthcare event) and suddenly our page comes on top 3 on google.ae as well as google.com"

Basically you are saying you have created a page, and that page is ranking top 3 in a few days (is that bad?).

If you provide a little bit more information I am glad to help you out.

Gr., Keszi

Oh, that 8th of December... now that is something I didn't want to see.

We also have seen a drop on this period on both dutch and belgian market.

If you want, I can take a look in the evening, I will PM you.

Gr., Keszi

Hi Danne,

I remember reading a post about this from Barry Schwartz on seroundtable.com: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-panda-ser-hurt-comments-19652.html

Read it through, it quite describes the effect of user generated content (specially comments).

This is one specific case, I am sure that it is not a general rule for this.

Gr., Keszi

Hi Jacob,

As I was reading through your question, the first thing that jumped in: HREFLANG markup.

Then I jumped over your URL and I see the following:

<link rel="<a class="attribute-value">alternate</a>" href="http://www.flowtracksurf.be" hreflang="<a class="attribute-value">nl-be</a>" /> (on Belgium version)

<link rel="<a class="attribute-value">alternate</a>" href="http://www.flowtracksurf.nl" hreflang="<a class="attribute-value">nl-nl</a>" /> (on Netherlands version)

You are not using cross annotation. That might cause an issue for you.

There is a nice article about Hreflang implementations from Dave Sottimano: http://moz.com/blog/hreflang-behaviour-insights

Read it trough, I think with correct implementation of Hreflang, you should be able to resolve this issue.

I hope it was helpful.
Gr., Keszi

I'd rather not use images that are not licensed or owned by my company.

That's just my personal opinion.

Gr., Keszi

Hi Remko,

Sorry for the late response. Currently you have fietstassen.nl and loodgieter.nl as duplicate content. (as far as I see, you do not have a cross domain canonical, nor a 301 redirect telling Googlebot which version they should index). So it might be a good idea to implement one of them. (301 is usually easier )

Gr., Keszi

Hi Lincoln,

First of all, I would try to investigate what happened, why you have dropped out of top 5 to position ~#45. If you take a look at the Moz's Google Algo update page: http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change and you compare it with your Google Analytics/Google Webmasters Tools data, do you see any specific update that might have hurt your rankings?

If you want to be quick with this, there is a great tool Panguin.

Before I would jump into troubleshooting the other questions, I would try to figure out what went wrong in the first place. Sometimes resolving old issues on the site can help the success of future efforts. So it might be worth a try.

I hope it has helped, Gr. Keszi

Hi Remko,

First of all I would check for the domains that I want to buy and redirect for relevancy and their backlink profile.

The example you gave:

Fietstassen.eu - > Loodgieter.nl for me it was a little strange. (Correct me, if I am wrong, but Fietstassen is bicycle bags? and Loodgieter is repair/handy man?).

I did not check in details what kind of link profile Fietstassen has, but if my dutch isn't cheating on me, I might have a feeling that it has collected non-relevant links to your target website.

As for your first example: Glaspunt.nl -> Glas.nl if I get it right, these two seem to be in the same industry, so buying glaspunt.nl could be an idea.

As in general:

If you buy a domain, just to redirect and gather their link juice:

1. look for relevancy first.
2. check that domains backlink profile (just to be safe. if it only has a spammy link profile, I do not know if it would be a good idea to point it towards your project)
3. if the domain that you are buying would be more relevant to a category of your website, I'd redirect it towards there instead of homepage.

I hope this helped.

Gr., Keszi

Hi Niners52,

I personally do not know DakWak, so I went and checked it out. But first impression: Machine Translation is never good. "The quality of machine translation is around 60-70%" This is what they have said in their live chat.

I personally work for a company where we target 9 different languages, and I know how frustrating it can be, when you do not have the correct translation for a specific text. But I would strongly advise you NOT to use machine translation.

Somewhere in the past (2011-2012?) we have used some machine translation on a website and it was strongly hurting our user experience.

Since then even if it goes slower and the costs are higher, but we go for human translations.

I hope this was helpful.

Gr., Keszi

Hi Niners,

I wouldn't use subdomains for international website. Instead I'd use subfolders. Subdomains can be considered as totally separate websites, while using subfolders you "gather" the link juice in a more efficient way. But that is a personal opinion.

Regarding your question:

• I'd create a profile in Google Webmasters Tools for each of the subdomains/subfolders
• Do not forget the international targeting for each of the profiles
• I would submit to each of these profiles it's own language based sitemap
• if you are talking about an international website, I'd consider using Hreflang markup.

I hope this has helped.

Gr., Keszi

'Neatza Andrei,

First of all, try to monitor new backlinks for the website, where are they coming from, what type of links are coming in to your website. Are all of these links low quality?

I'd use Majestic for this problem (they identify new links way faster than Moz), so you can export raw data, analyize and create a disavow file for the low quality links.

Gr., Keszi

Hi,

I would write an email to the help team. They will help you diagnose what the issue is. It is quite hard to answer such a question without the details behind the scenes.

You can email them at: help@moz.com

Gr.,Keszi

Hi Darren,

And welcome back to the community!

You can start at the help hub, they have quite some information for you: http://moz.com/help

I am quite sure you will find most of your answers there. And when you do struggle, do not hesitate to ask

Gr., Keszi

I did stick to this, because the situation that you have described matches the pigeon update.

And, as Linda Buquet has mentioned in her response to this question, with this update some 7 packs are reduced to 3 packs, but there are industries where it has completely disappeared.

The only thing which would stop me from dropping Google+, is that you may never know when it will come back (it could be only a large scale test for South Africa at this moment), and if you stop totally working on it, then you are loosing there.

Like I usually mention in my answers, this is a personal opinion.

Then it could be, that you are experiencing the Pigeon update.

I was asking for that info, because maybe you are in an area which was affected by this update. Although this update was meant for UK, Canada and Australia, I could believe that it has also affected other English search queries (especially that English is considered as an official language in South Africa - right?).

In my belief:

You shouldn't drop any inbound marketing channel, just because there has been a Google update, which currently doesn't work as you wished.

Maybe I would reduce the number of hours that I spend on this task, but for sure, I wouldn't drop it.

But that is me, I like to have more than one channel working around me.

In general, they should have different texts for all of their targeted regions. But without having a closer look on this specific example, it is quite hard to tell what they are doing.

If you want, send me a private message (if you do not want to share it here) and we can take a look at the specific case. Ok?

Gr., Keszi