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You only really need to use hreflang in either the XML sitemaps OR on the page: not both. Google's pretty smart!

For more detailed info about how to optimize for international SEO, I like to use Kate's tool: https://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/choose-your-international-strategy-tool/ 

Best,

Kristina

It's best practice to redirect, but if that's not an option, the canonical route should help the problem a lot! You'll probably lose some link equity with this route, but it should clear up duplicate content issues from Google's side.

Hi Tina,

Are you thinking of creating a subdomain because you want to be able to tell Google Webmaster Tools which country to target, or because you don't have the flexibility with your primary site to create pages targeted at each country?

If it's the former, you can geotarget in Google Webmaster Tools by subfolder by verifying by subfolder.

If it's the latter, I'd recommend making only one subdomain with all of the country landing pages, because you don't want to create a whole bunch of weak subdomains. New pages on your primary domain will start with more Page Authority (and therefore higher rankings) than new subdomains.

But, taking a step back, you don't really need to formally geotarget these pages through Google Webmaster Tools. Geotargeting is for when it's not apparent which country a page is targeted at, like when you're selling shoes in the UK but not in America. The page needs to be about shoes, not the UK, but still needs to tell Google that its content is only for the UK. In your situation, the page can be about the country it's targeting.

If you create a page that has the page title Liquid Text Available in Australia in May 2014 and the URL liquidtext.net/australia, Google and visitors will understand who your page is for. No need for any extra work!

Hope this helps,

Kristina

There really isn't a problem with having 100,000 404 "errors." Google's telling you that it thinks 100,000 pages exist, but when it tries to find them, it's getting a 404 code. That's fine: 404s tell Google that a page doesn't exist and to remove the page from Google's index. That's what we want.

The real problem is with your site migration, as FCBM pointed out. If you properly 301 redirect old pages to new, Google will be redirected to the new page, it won't just hit a 404. If you fix the problems with the site migration (not focusing on Google too much), the 404 errors will naturally subside.

The other option is to just take the hit from the migration, and Google will eventually remove all of these pages from its index and stop reporting on them, as long as there aren't live links pointing to the removed pages.

Good luck!

Hi Matt,

How long ago was "recently?" I've often seen Quality Scores get reset when I change the destination URL, but then time will get them back to what they were before.

Best,

Kristina

Hi Ydop,

You might be able to get away with a modal pop up without AdWords noticing, but I think that it does violate Google's policy in spirit, since Google says "Google does not allow pop ups of any kind when entering or leaving your landing page." (Bolding for emphasis) Even though they're talking about separate windows, the experience is the same for the user. In fact, sometimes it's more frustrating, since modal pop ups are often harder to close.

That said, your intent is fine, I just think that you need to use a different solution to introduce your company on your inventory page. You said that you want to use a pop up to tell AdWords visitors that your inventory page is full of hand-crafted furniture, but why can't you include that message at the top of the page? Especially if it's a core value of your business, visitors who started on the homepage won't mind being reminded about the quality of your work. And it will help visitors who land on that inventory page through search or referral links as well as AdWords visitors.

As a consultant, I push my clients to make every page include enough information that it can be a landing page. With Google trying to place visitors on the most specifically relevant page possible, and referring links out of your control, you never know where visitors will start on your website. Don't assume that visitors will start on your homepage, or that will begin their journey through your site understanding your business.

Good luck!

Kristina

You were fairly brief, which makes it difficult to give definitive answers, but here are mine. For the first question:

• Are any of these new pages going to compete with currently ranking pages? If so, they could limit the traffic to existing pages. Use Google Analytics to identify your top organic keywords and check them against your new pages. Compare any new pages that might compete with existing pages; which ones do you think will win?
• If the new pages WON'T compete with existing pages, they will only have an effect on the Domain Authority, which should really only be a net gain. You'll have more pages, and more links overall.
• Last, is there any chance that this new content will trigger a penalty? I only ask this because AndieF is right, search engines don't see much value in directories, and if your site goes from 50% directory pages to 75% directory pages, the entire site may be hurt as a result.

And, for your second question, about the effect of existing traffic on the new pages

• If the new pages are really brand new, they should be indexed faster since they're a part of an established site. To estimate the traffic they'll bring it, identify the keywords they're targeting, get the monthly traffic from Google AdWords Keyword Tool (download the list of keywords for actual previous months' traffic), and find the opportunity traffic based on how well you can reasonably expect to rank: http://geoffkenyon.com/google-serps-click-through-rates/
• You mentioned in a comment that these pages are currently living on different domains, and you're moving them over. If you use 301 redirects, you'll only carry over 90 - 95% of Page Authority, but not all of it. If those links are more valuable than the new links you're providing through your site, they won't do as well. If you have some really good links to those old URLs, you may want to contact the webmasters who are sending traffic to your site and ask them to update their links.
• Also note that pages will take a dip in rankings whenever they get new URLs, so if you get significantly less traffic for the first couple of weeks, just wait it out.

TL;DR Check:

• That the new pages won't compete with old pages
• That the new pages won't trigger a penalty from Google
• **The estimated searches/month (from Google AdWords Keyword Tool) for the new keywords you'll be targeting, and the proportion you can reasonably expect to get to your site (based on CTR research for Google) **
• The number of links that were pointed to the pages on the old URL that you'll only get a portion of the Authority from

Hope this helps!

Kristina

This is a pretty thorough outline of what you need to do: http://moz.com/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos

My steps are usually:

1. Identify pages that get significant organic traffic by pulling the Organic Traffic report in Google Analytics for the past year or so.
2. Identify pages that have a significant number of links (or, have links from high traffic sources) in Open Site Explorer.
3. Map where that content should be now, and 301 redirect to new pages.
4. Completely remove all old pages from the index by 404ing them and making sure that no links on new pages point to old pages.

Sounds quick and simple, but this definitely takes time. Good luck!

Hi there,

Unfortunately, this isn't something that anyone can tell you without at least a few hours of research - Google has a pretty complicated algorithm!

I can tell you some more things to take into account, in addition to Bob's list:

• **Keyword relevance: **For the search queries that you want to rank for, does Sea Dwellers look the most relevant? Do you use the phrase that you want to rank for in your page title, the h1 of the page, and on the page itself? Be careful not to sound like you're writing for robots rather than humans, but using the exact same phrase as you want to rank for definitely helps with rankings.
• **Inbound link relevance: **Where did you get the links to your site? More links from relevant sites (for example, unsponsored posts about the best company to dive with) are going to help with local queries like "dive Key Largo."
• **Potential spam / paid links: **If you've paid for links or have spammy links coming to your site, Moz may have an inflated version of your PA or DA metrics, since it isn't as good at recognizing that as Google is (though they're working on it with their spam score).

Good luck! If you're feeling especially frustrated about this, I'd recommend hiring an SEO to give you some definite answers.

Best,

Kristina

Hi Whittie,

Just to confirm: by "the website itself is on a 303", do you mean that the URLs you're using in Google AdWords 303 redirect to the rest of your site? If so, that can definitely be the issue. Google AdWords tracks with URL parameters, so if those aren't being transferred to the URL that Google Analytics is tracking, things won't track correctly.

Like Louis said, if this is the issue, you'll probably have other issues in GA. Is all of your traffic showing up as direct?

Best,
Kristina

Hi Varun,

You're in a weird space here, because you're competing for very long tail keywords that have a lot of answers via forums. If you have a well-written page that is a part of your website and a decent Domain Authority, you should be able to beat them. However, your site looks very young and doesn't have many backlinks or social shares.

Like Wiqas said, part of this is getting links to pages and social attention. However, reviewing your site, I'm worried that Google won't see your pages as very high quality because:

• You have the header of the page, but not any of the text, above the fold. The majority of the top of the page is either blank space or an ad. This looks like low quality content and will be devalued from Panda.
• You're bolding the keyword that you want to get noticed. This can help if it happens naturally, but when you consistently use a long tail keyword in the page title, the header, the URL, and bolded on the page, it will look spammy.
• You're creating a lot of content that is very similar. When I searched on your site, I found "What Color Shoes to Wear With Gold Dress" and "What Color Shoes To Wear With Gold Sequin Dress." Although the articles are not identical, I wouldn't publish content in such an obviously patterned way.
• You're targeting search terms that are not common grammar. A person would be more likely to search for "what color shoes to wear with a gold dress" or "what color shoes to wear with gold dresses." When Google matches keywords, they'll often ignore grammar words, but I guarantee you, the algorithm will notice that you're not using standard English.

You seem to be churning out a lot of content. It's going to be tough to get all that content to rank if you don't give yourself time to make sure that it's well written and useful, plus, you're setting yourself up to get hit by Google's quality control. I'd advise that you slow down a bit, write each article in a unique and compelling way, and spend some time sharing your site. It may seem like a slower process, but it will pay off in the end!

Good luck!

Hi Denise,

A couple of points here. First, it's not that you necessarily need the same number of pages on your mobile site as your non-mobile site, it's that any content that you have on your non-mobile site should be represented somewhere on your mobile site. It's possible that your competitors are ranking with their desktop sites because they're targeting content that you are missing with your mobile site, and maybe on your desktop site as well.

Second, yes and no. Your mobile site is a separate site, but if you connect your mobile pages to their corresponding desktop pages with rel=alternate and canonical tags, Google should transfer some of that link equity for you. Google breaks it down here: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/details

Good luck!

Kristina

Hey Shawn,

1. If GWT is showing a 404 without a "Linked from," I wouldn't worry about it too much. Sometimes Google tries to recrawl URLs it crawled once in the past, but that doesn't mean it's causing a problem. I would double check that you don't have any internal or external links to "blog/blog," then just "mark as fixed." There's no point to disallow Google from crawling a page that isn't there in the first place.

2. Nope. The only danger of having a long robots.txt is that you may get lost while checking your rules and accidentally disallow a page you want in the index. Whenever you add a rule to robots.txt, make sure you go to Google Search Console and use the robots.txt Tester to check if you've disallowed any important pages.

Good luck!

Kristina

There are too many sites out there for Google to define quality by how well the domain matches the search term, so Google also looks at the quality and number of external links a site is getting. (Yes, this is somewhat circular: you want to get links from sites that get a lot of links themselves.) Google refers to this sort of quality as PageRank.

Since no external websites are linking to clearstackingbins.com, it looks like a low quality site to Google. Plus, it only has one page, and that page only has external links, which will make it pretty clear to Google that it's a page set up as a portal to plasticstorage.com, with no value of its own. Google will see that as a low quality site.

I'm not sure that I totally understand your question: are you building a site and wondering if you should make it beautiful with AJAX or readable for search engines with a clear category structure? Or do you already have a site with AJAX and now you've taken the time to come up with a category page structure, but you're hesitating to implement it?

If it's the first, I don't think that you should think that your choices are 1) be usable/beautiful, or 2) be search-engine friendly. There are a lot of ways to make an HTML site beautiful. You can use new enhancements in HTML5, or build a standard HTML site and then use JavaScript to make elements more interactive.

If it's the second, I'd go with Thomas's suggestion and test your AJAX site to see how readable it is for Google. AJAX isn't readable by Google, but the underlying HTML is, so there may be enough HTML links that Google can still get around your site.

Once you've tested how readable your site is, then you have to decide if this interface is worth pages being missed or ranked lower by Google. My guess is that you can probably keep your site the way it is primarily, but you'll have to make some tweaks. It's hard to give specifics without knowing specifics, though.

Good luck!

Hi Dov,

You can definitely create separate sitemaps and GWT accounts for your two subdirectories if you prefer, but I don't think that it'll solve your problem. It sounds like the problem is, pages on the original subdirectory probably have a higher Page Authority and are outranking your new pages.

When there are two pages on the same site that are both relevant for a search term, Google tries to only display one. So, your best bet is to make sure that there aren't any pages on the old subdirectory that are relevant to the keywords that you want the new subdirectory to rank for. You have two options here:

1. Remove pages from the old subdirectory that are ranking for terms that you want the new subdirectory to rank for. 301 redirect their URLs to the new subdirectory.
2. For pages that you would like to stay on the site, change the wording so it doesn't compete with the new subdirectory.

I realize this is really general guidance, but it's tough to give more specific feedback unless I can see the site.

Hope this helps,

Kristina

Gotcha - I'd actually start with Google Search Console, then.

Good luck!

Inline scripts aren't bad per se, search engines just can't always understand them. Worst case scenario: you have extra code that Google has to crawl but doesn't understand, which takes up bandwidth and doesn't add value. But, it won't lower your rankings.

So, do whatever you need to do to deliver the best user experience you can on your site with this map and related route, and figure that Google will ignore it (Google is trying to understand it, though, so it may be helpful in the long run). Then, for search engines, include some text content describing the map and the route so that search engines can send the right searchers to your page.

Good luck!

Kristina