Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks.We believe in our case language versions in subdirectry over country specific TLDs is the better choice. My doubt is really just about how to best deal with international visits to www.domain.com.

We have chosen the one domain approach with our international site having different language versions in subdirectory of main domain:
www.domain.com/es
www.domain.com/it
etc.

What is SEO-wise best practice for implementing international index pages. I see following options:

1. entering  www.domain.com will display without redirection the index page in language of user (e.g based on IP or browser) in www.domain.com
   Example: www.booking.com
2. entering www.domain.com will always show English index page.
   Additionally one may display a message in the header if IP from other country with link to other language version.
   Example: www.apple.com
3. entering www.domain.com will always redirect automatically to country specific subdirectory based on IP
   Example: www.samsung.com

Any thoughts/suggestions on what may be best solution from a SEO perspective? For a user I believe options 1) & 3) are preferable.

Marie, thanks a lot for clarifying.

To clarify, our link profile is very clean, but naturally people used the keyword from the domain name and the domain name to link to us.

It really comes down to the question:
How will google penguin value anchor text to the old domain and will 301 to new domain increase the risk of a penguin penalty.

Anybody with experience of migrating an EMD? Anybody experiencing Penguin shortly afterwards?

Certainly would be useful to consult with someone specialized in penguin recoveries who has dealt with a very large volume of penguin cases and learn about their impression of this risk.

Thanks Bradley.

Yes we plan page level 301 redirects from old to new domain and will follow best practices for domain migration.

I am afraid changing anchor text clean up of EMD may have only limited success in our case since many links are very old and some sites may not be maintained anymore. However targeting especially the 5% links with keyword as anchor text may be good idea to try.

Having to disassociate the old domain  and losing 10 years effort of clean link building would probably mean that we would need to close down the company as our segment is too competitive to get a new domain quickly up in the rankings. So therefore I really want to understand the associated penguin risk as well as possible.

We would like to migrate from an EMD to a brand name domain, since our service offer has become much broader than indicated by the current EMD. The current domain name is a money keyword.

Do you believe there is a big risk of suffering a penguin penalty if we go ahead with the domain migration, due to large share of anchor texts containing keyword of old domain name?

Quick facts about our site:
-about 500.000 pages indexed by google

• PR6

• 10 years old

• 1200 linking root domains
• 30% of linking root domains contain our domain name with domain ending as anchor text
• 5% of linking root domains have just the domain keyword as anchor text

Any thoughts? 
Thanks

Also another program would be ok! It's just important to perform a comparison first. Any suggestions?

Many thanks!

Is it possible to filter the follower list after comparing the followers of 2 twitter accounts? E.g comparing Twitter acc. A and B, select followers of both, receive follower list --> no language/country filter available.

Any chance?

I have several ecommerce sites in the same niche and there are a high number of products shared among these sites. I understand that having unique product descriptions for each site may be ideal, but for several reasons this is not an option for the short term. Sales-wise it would be useful to continue products on several sites at the same time. Also it would not be a problem if only the product pages of our main store would show up in the google index.

I thought about adding noindex xrobots tag to avoid that product pages are indexed in more than one store to avoid issues with duplicated or thin content or would you implement canonical tag here?

What would you suggest?

thanks for the feedback. Will stick to few dynamic footer category links and test it.

What would you recommend regarding links to "Top Products" and "Top Categories" in footer?

1. Would you add them to give extra link juice to top categories?
2. would you try to avoid category links in footer that are already in the header navigationor in the main content area to avoid linking twice from all pages?
3. would you vary these top category links in footer according to main category

We write our own unique product descriptions and have a unique product video for each color variation and multiple unique product images and display seperate user reviews per color variation.

We prefer to have seperate product pages for each color variation for several reasons (targeting color searches and user experience seeing all color variations when browsing category pages).

Product descriptions of color variations are quite similar.
I was thinking about spinning dynamically order how bullet points of product descriptions are presented to add some more uniqueness.

I am not expecting a massive impact, but do you think this increases a bit googles perception of page uniqueness?

I plan to hire a copywriter to write high quality unique product descriptions for luxury products in one of our ecommerce sites.

Apart from being well written and unique, any suggestions on what specifications to give to copywriter? 
E.g. length of text per product, obviously no keyword stuffing, but any instructions regarding keywords? Any good posts or specifications you can refer me to on the topic?

thanks

Lets take the example of a hotel reservation site offering 500 hotels.

Any suggestions on how to present the 500 hotels within their facebook page so that they generate maximum traffic and interaction? No intention to offer checkout on facebook.

E.g. adding image of each hotel in the photo album with link to website and some information about hotel.

Any ideas? Any good posts or articles on the topic?

Thanks a lot everybody for your input.

In order to make the decision it would be great to learn more on how google determines the topic of an ecommerce site. Many of these potential factors should be relatively easy to test, by watching ranking changes after additions of new product segments to a site. Did you ever see any article/post on the topic or did you notice yourself drops of rankings after adding a limited number of new product segments to a site?

Main factors could be:

• related keywords on index page/title
• percentage of products with related keywords
• percentage of links from external topical related sites
  Anything else?
  By considering these, I could increase likelyhood that google considers my site relevant for all 3 segments.

So maybe by offering just a limited number of 3 different product segments, disadvantage for ranking on keywords may not be so significant compared to single topic site.

I am currently struggling with the decision whether to create individual ecommerce sites for each of 3 consumer product segments or rather to integrate them all under one umbrella  domain.

Obviously integration under 1 domain makes link building easier, but I am not sure how far google will favor in rankings websites focussed on one topic=product segment.

Product segments are medium competitive.Product segments are not directly related but there may be some overlap in customer demographics-

Any thoughts ?

we have a couple of pages displaying a dot in the URL path like

domain.com/mr.smith/widget-mr.smith

It displays fine in chrome, firefox and IE and for the user it may actually look better than replacing it by _ or -.

Did this ever cause problems to anybody?
Any statement from google about it?
Should I change existing URLs?

If so, which other characters can I use in the URL instead of underscore and dash, since in our system dash and underscore are already used for rewriting other characters.

Thanks

Gianluca,
thanks again.
yes I meant  rel="alternate" hreflang.

regarding canonical so if I understood well what you are suggesting is that canonicals should point to same page on same domain and should not point to pages on other domains

domain.com/pt should have canonical to domain.com/pt

domain.com.br should have canonical to domain.com.br

thanks: I tried it. Buzzstream identified about 25% contact emails of the list.

In the end I did not find a way to export the email adresses out of buzzstream. I contacted support but now after 1 week no repsonse.

Mark,

thanks. I tried seogadget.co.uk, good for lower numbers of websites.
It identified contact emails for about 20% of the sites I tested. You can test a max. of 200 websites at a time.
on the upside it is free.

Still will be searching for other tools (even if paid).