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Hey Hassan,
I can't see what you're seeing in GSC, but it looks like your logo is showing up on Google's actual search results. In my experience, GSC is still a little buggy, so if it's working fine in the wild, you're probably safe!
Best,
Kristina
What I've usually seen with canonicals is that Google either removes the noncanonical page from its index, or it ignores your canonical and treats them as two separate pages. I haven't seen an example where a canonical lets you get the best of both worlds.
I agree with Nozzle - you can tweak your existing content to target both phrases! Google understands synonyms, so if anything, you're just creating a more all around relevant page.
Good luck!
Kristina
Hey Unique Digital,
It's a good question, and I hear what you're saying. If Google is crawling everything as a mobile crawler only, desktop rankings should basically be the same, right?
It might get there eventually, but I can say that it's definitely not there now. For one, Google is crawling mobile first, but it's also keeping an eye on desktop versions of sites. At the very least, I'm pretty sure Google is separating mobile and desktop UX metrics.
Also, on queries for my company's site (international money transfers), I can tell you that 1) Google does not show the same rankings between desktop and mobile. Mobile has more answer boxes, and I've noticed that if a site has an answer box, they're less likely to also have the #1 organic result.
So, at least for now, yes, you should track both. 
Best,
Kristina
Wow, yeah, this is weird! For what it's worth, your hreflang tags seem fine, so I'd be surprised if there are canonical issues. And Google has indexed your home page.
Here's what I'd dig into: does Google think visitors want to land on your /search/ page before your homepage? I work on a site that uses a search page as a paid and organic search landing page, and it has the best conversion rate of any page on our site. Is it possible that Google thinks your homepage offers a bad user experience, and your /search/ page offers a better one, so it's picking what it thinks is best?
To see if that could be the case, I'd look into:
If this is the case, you may want to consider letting visitors search, then requiring a registration.
Good luck! And let us know what you find out!
Kristina
Hey Sebastian,
Checking in here - does a penalty still seem to be applied? What have you done so far?
Happy to help, once I've got an idea of where you're currently at.
Best,
Kristina
I would recommend setting up each country's subdirectory as separate properties in Google Search Console. Then, go to original Search Console, and click on Search Traffic > International Targeting, click the tab Country, and identify which country you're targeting users in.
That should give GSC enough information to not flag the content as duplicate.
Good luck!
It's for different regions as well. Check out the link I shared. Google lists the reasons for hreflang. The second reason is:
"If your content has small regional variations with similar content, in a single language. For example, you might have English-language content targeted to the US, GB, and Ireland."
Very weird! Have you looked at your log files to find the IP requesting those URLs?
For any duplicate content you have between countries, use hreflang to differentiate regions. Google lays out how to do that here.
Hope this helps!
You don't get that information by default. When users visit your site, you can see their browsing patterns as long as they stay within your site, but any web analytics platform is going to stop tracking them once they've moved on to another site.
You can find:
There are other third party tools that will give you more information, but still, you won't get the exact sites each of your visitors has visited, you'll get as much data as that tool has been able to collect.
Why do you want to learn about the other sites that your visitors are visiting? For ad targeting? Blog post ideas? I'd do some competitive research instead; look at the content your competitors have written, look through Quora questions, use Google Keyword Planner to see how many people search for your areas of interest.
Good luck!
Hi there,
I think this can be done a lot of ways, if you take the time to state your case well. Definitely don't pretend like you're a neutral party. Here are some examples:
Hope these examples helped! I'll bet some other Mozzers will jump on with examples.
Best,
Kristina
To second Ryan's point: Google definitely sees http://example.com as a separate page than http://www.example.com, but I'd be surprised if you can distance yourself from bad links pointing to http://example.com by focusing on http://www.example.com. Google's pretty smart, it knows that those two pages are usually one and the same.
To your 302 redirect point: Google's seem enough improperly used 302 redirects (both accidentally and for SEO reasons, like this) to start treating 302 redirects as 301s if they stay in place over time, according to a test Geoff Kenyon worked on. A 302 redirect may work for a little while, but it's not a long term solution.
To dig into this a bit deeper:
Hi Jon,
You should 301 redirect (you should rarely to never 302 redirect) all vanity URLs to the URL that you want to rank organically.
A 302 redirect is a temporary one, so it's telling search engines that the vanity URL is the real URL for the page, but it's under construction/temporarily broken/being revamped, so you have to send visitors to another page, just for now. A 301 redirect tells search engines that the vanity URL is just a vanity URL and that the search engine should index the URL that the vanity URL is leading to.
SEOmoz has a pretty good explanation of it all: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection.
Best,
Kristina
Hi Karl,
That's tough! Unfortunately, I've heard of a lot of weird stories like that, where Bing gets confused. Have you shared a sitemap with Bing, which only includes non "www" URLs?
Best,
Kristina
Kevin's right - Google doesn't want to do this, but they're not perfect and they'll often let a site with a stronger link profile win when there are two sites with the same piece of content. Google doesn't take complaints like this, but you can go after the site itself legally.
Due to the nature of the internet, you can never completely stop scraping like this, but I would recommend repeatedly referencing your brand in each article, and linking back to your site from within your article. Then, when they scrape your article, they'll bring over your brand name and links to your site. Then you get free links and another site going on about how much great content you have. 
If you want to have some fun, you may also want to try Ian Lurie's way of handling scrapers!
Hi Ash,
When Google stops indexing a page, it has to find it again and see that it's no longer "noindex"ed. Submitting it to GWT often works, but sometimes you just have to wait for the crawler to find your page again. I looked at the cache dates for other similarly deep pages on your site, and it looks like Google only crawled them a week ago. Deeper pages were crawled a week and a half ago. So, you should probably give yourself a couple of weeks to allow Google's crawler to find the page before worrying that it's a technical issue.
Good luck!
Kristina
No, Google likes unique anchor text, since it seems more organic, and supports tracking codes as well. My only hesitation is that adding those tracking codes is going to identify your links as marketing efforts rather than completely organic links. But I think you should be okay.
The problem with tagging is that mysite.com/seo-text?utm_campaign=guest-blogs could technically be indexed by Google and become a duplicate of mysite.com/seo-text. Make sure that Google knows that you only want it to index mysite.com/seo-text by:
Best,
Kristina
Hey Jesse,
There's a lot of debate about the ideal way to build a mobile website, but your initial question made me think that you don't have a lot of time and/or money to spend on this. Is that correct?
If it isn't, I would spend some time researching the pros and cons of responsive vs. a separate mobile site (I won't go into it too much more than that - I'm obviously biased: http://moz.com/blog/seo-of-responsive-web-design). Setting your company up with the right sort of site the first time around is going to save you a lot of time, effort and money in the future. I really like Aleyda's mobile site audit to help guide you: http://www.stateofsearch.com/mobile-seo-audit/
But, if you don't have the time/money/support to knock it out of the park quite yet, building a decent separate mobile site is a good option. (You can't really half-ass responsive or else you'll mess up your desktop site too.)
You originally said you're good with HTML, so have you thought about just building the site yourself, with inspiration from CMS templates? Building mobile sites isn't that different from building desktop sites, although you want to stick to HTML and CSS as much as possible (no Flash)! The bigger issue is figuring out the design with such a drastically smaller screen size.
Like I said, you can probably look at a great CMS's design and mimic it somewhat with your own HTML. You can also read our guide to mobile best practices, http://www.distilled.net/training/mobile-seo-guide/ (ahem not to over promote ourselves or anything), which has a section on design. The key issues I'd keep in mind are:
). Go to http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/ to test how fast your site is.Good luck!
Kristina
Hi there,
Like Mike and Eric have said, I'd recommend using a canonical tag on the men's and women's pages to the version of the page that shows both genders' shoes/clothing.
That said, I just want to make sure this is the best path for your site. If it makes more sense for your site to point people to shoes and clothing by gender, shouldn't that be what you show in Google's search results? I'm a woman, and generally search for "women's shoes" since otherwise I often end up on pages that show men's options.
Let us know if these solutions work!
Kristina
Hello Edward!
I work for a site that has a lot of physical locations, so Moz asked me to step in.
Let me start with this: you don't have to call out locations if Google can establish you as an online service. When I was working for Distilled I had multiple clients with online ecommerce sites, and they ranked well in most locations in the US without specifically calling out any city or state. The key, I think, was that Google saw the "buy now" and "shipping" buttons and understood that this was accessible to anyone in America.
Your site is similar. You have "get started" or "call now" buttons that show that the whole of the transaction can be done wherever you are in the US, Australia, or NZ. You have different CCTLDs, so Google knows which countries you're relevant in.
My question for you is - why do you want to optimize for local? Do you have clients who can't find you because they're searching for local terms? Did you find a lot of local keyword volume? Because my gut response is, you probably don't need to worry about this.
Best,
Kristina
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