Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Lots of wild goose chasing later...

Exactly how many sites are 301'd into bestathire.co.uk?

10? 20?

These have a couple thousand links and redirect 301 to your site:

bestathire.com
londononlinehire.co.uk
jetwashhire.co.uk
woodchipperhireuk.co.uk
chainsaw-hire.co.uk
platformhireuk.co.uk
nationalgeneratorhire.co.uk
scarifierhire.co.uk
carpetcleanerhireuk.co.uk
patioheater-hire.co.uk
rotavatorhireuk.co.uk

These are the most obvious link networks in the world:
motorhoming.eu
a272.co.uk
motorhoming.org
motorhoming.net
motorhoming.com
motorhoming.biz
motorhoming.co.uk
motorhoming.mobi
motorhoming.info
motorhoming.me.uk
motorhoming.org.uk

Then there's .info spam
iclanky.info
schoolpay.info
0b0b.info
2fashion.info
freestockphotography.info
toptravellingtips.com
vidysporta.info
kivis.info
schoolhide.info
weddingdesignideas.co
syerasale.com

And a local UK network
leedssearch.co.uk
nottinghamsearch.co.uk
plymouthsearch.co.uk
leicestersearch.co.uk
bristolsearch.co.uk
norwichsearch.co.uk
edinburghsearch.co.uk
derbysearch.co.uk
sheffieldsearch.co.uk
cardiffsearch.co.uk
london-search.co.uk

Nearly 60% of the rest of your backlinks come from multiple subdomains on either blogspot or opendi.com

I'm assuming everything listed above is in your disavow? You may need to rebuild some authority having given up 80% of your link juice. And if they're not in a disavow, the link profile isn't nearly clean.

If you also had a bunch of doorway pages as well, have you checked WMT for a manual penalty? If not, you're just on the harsh end of some algo issues. Did you also pass the 301s from those old doorway pages to another part of your site?

Um, yes?

I do a lot of content curation as well as some creation - mainly SEO blogging. I'd love to give it a go.

Haha I read this question earlier, saw the post come across feedly and knew what I needed to do with it. Just a matter of minutes. You're right though - I would've probably said remove earlier as well. It's a toss up but usually when they clarify, I try to follow. (Sometimes they talk nonsense of course, but you just have to filter that out.)

Do the two current sites (domainUS.com and domain.com.au) have a lot of authority?

The final location for these, in 2 subfolders, is ideal. I like where you're going with this. But the plan to jump to the .com.au/us and /au is ... well, sub-optimal. It's not ideal to have two sets of redirects essentially to solve a 2 month problem.

If the current sites aren't very authoritative, you'll probably be ok. If they have a decent amount of ranking power & current traffic, I would try to skip the middle step or at least use 302 instead of 301 redirects. Using the 302s mean the .com.au/us and .com.au/au sites won't get the value of the current sites for Nov/Dec/Jan but it does mean you're not going to chain 301s once January comes.  You'll just remove the 302s and create 301s to the new domain.com/us and domain.com/au websites.

Those 301s will then pick up the majority of the current ranking power and give you the best possible boost.

If you can't hold off until the company owns the .com, that's what I would do at least.

You definitely won't lose as much value with this strategy. It's a good stop-gap in a difficult situation.

The first time it happened to me was an accident. I checked the redirects about 10 times and thought I must be doing something wrong.

You can temporarily 301 out of a penalized site but given that you said you've been trying to recover for a couple years, your recovery isn't "temporary" and the 301 will only hurt you long-term.

I would have a disavow/recovery professional take a look for you and come at it with fresh eyes. Get rid of any negative affect, build some positive authority to the site and you won't need to 301. You will lose long-term with that strategy without fixing the root of the problem.

You should automatically redirect the www or non-www (check Google to see which one they prefer.)

If you're using a host that allows .htaccess files, you can use one of these (CHOOSE one and put the whole code in .htaccess)

---

#redirect non www to www
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www..+$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} (.+)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%1/$1 [R=301,L]

OR

#redirect www to non www
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.(.+)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://%1/$1 [R=301,L]

This is a duplicate question - you have about 4-5 of almost the same question on the forum. Please don't cross-post or re-post. Almost every post on the forum gets at least a couple answers to please hold on and let us work our way there.

Thanks!

Well ... I gave this as thorough a check as I possibly can. Guess what?

It's happening because your www.us.allsaints.com homepage is NOT INDEXED.

• site:fr.allsaints.com (1st result)
• site:es.allsaints.com (1st result)
• site:www.allsaints.com (1st result)

site:www.us.allsaints.com  - Nope. You have subpages indexed but not the homepage.

Now, whether that's duplicate content or the massive amount of IP-related spam links to the site is hard to say. But your homepage has been deindexed and because it's not indexed, doesn't show up in the cache.

If you have the site claimed in Search Console, check for penalties. Check that you haven't removed the URL through Google Index > Remove URLs. Check that you haven't done a site move on https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/change-address?hl=en&siteUrl=www.us.allsaints.com

Once the homepage gets indexed, you should be good to go.

If you want to post or PM me the link I'd like to take a deeper look at the specific domain in question. We're often shooting in the dark when we don't have the link as there could be 100 reasons it isn't working the way you want.

Thanks for the link via PM.

• You have 20,000 links from Chinese spam.
• Your main anchor text is like 56%.
• Your main homepage is a country selector page.
• Meta titles are almost all related to the same 3 keyphrases.

I'll PM you - but yes, I see more than a couple problems.

Private network - essentially if you own all those sites that are linking to you, all using the same template, etc. that's potentially very bad. Especially when done the way you've done it.

If you're using an SEO agency who is building links from sites like hottubgalaxy (dotcom) for you, they're doing a very poor job of hiding their intent. If you are doing this yourself, stop it.

You obviously know a little about SEO given your exact anchor text link to start your question ... but even that, here on Moz, is kind of suspect in most cases. You could just give us the URL.

A link can't be direct to your site, then refer back to shareasale, then redirect back to your site unless you've set it up that way somehow.

So if someone builds a shareasale link like:

Link to your product

This is going to shareasale. If you quit shareasale and they said it would still go directly to you, they're just not planting their tracking cookie on the intermediate step. Everything else would remain the same.

If the link is something like:

Link to product and somehow that goes from your site, to shareasale, back to your site - well that's definitely not helping you very much for SEO and if you quit, yes that would then go directly to your site - but only if you reconfigured how the links were working since this type of linking would require a lot of special work to make it happen. It's more likely it's the 1st example.

In any case, they both pass through Shareasale and, per Matt Cutts, Google is attempting to not give you credit for that link. Whether or not they do, I can't say - but they're attempting not to. I'm not sure which part of my previous answer may not be "completely true."

If your site is only in English you don't need to use hreflang tags at all.

Are you getting the message in Search Console that there were errors crawling your page?

This typically means that your host was temporarily down when Google landed on your page. These types of things happen all the time and are no big deal.

Your homepage cache shows a crawl date of today so I'm assuming things are working properly ... if you really want to find out, try doing a "Fetch" of your site in Search Console.

Crawl > Fetch as Google > Fetch (big red button)

You should get a status of "Complete." If you get anything else there should be an error message with it. If so, paste that here.

I have checked the site headers, cache, crawlability with Screaming Frog, and everything is fine. This seems like one of those temporary messages but if the problem persists definitely let us know!

If it were my site, I would move the UK site to .com/UK, then have .com/DE and .com/US.

Then I would 301 redirect all the UK links back to their counterparts on the new site, keeping as much authority as possible. Point the main homepage at .com/UK and all the inner links as they currently are.

Doing this now will definitely help your expansion in the future as well.

I would do all this after you've rebuilt the site, though, because you don't want to do 301s to 301s. Figure out what the new site will be, do the 301s to that one directly. No intermediate jumps ... it's a longer time to implement but you're better off in the long run.

You said you don't like the idea of redirecting the root domain to a sub dir - but why? It's passing the full value of the UK site to the new location of the UK site. Makes perfect sense in my head. I would definitely do so.

I would only recommend the /US version because of the hreflangs. You can do it the other way, it's just a bit more technical to build the hreflang tags. You can use this example I've used before, though:

" hreflang="x-default" />
" hreflang="en-uk" />
" hreflang="en-de" />

This will do the trick, I believe. Then will display that in the header of every page and the request URL will grab the URL you're on so you'll end up with hreflangs for the two URL structures.

You said you could migrate .co.uk to .com/UK asap - do it as soon as you can, as long as the URL structure won't change. If you're moving from say .co.uk/about.html to .com/UK/about-us/  then you can't do it until those URLs exist. I wouldn't move the existing site over now if the URLs are going to change. This is what I was saying above - you don't want to go from .co.uk/about.html to .com/UK/about.html (and then in August) to .com/UK/about-us/

Make sense?

There really isn't a typical amount of time as it depends on links to your site, crawl frequency of your current page, and how many resources they choose to use on you at that time.

There are, however, ways to speed up the process.

1. Claim your site in Search Console (Webmaster Tools)

2. Submit a sitemap

3. Use the "Fetch" tool in Search Console.

4. Build/earn some new links to the pages you care about.

All of those will help your pages be reindexed more quickly. Also, if you want the "very fast, slightly cheap" way of doing it, post the links on Google+, ping them with Indexkings and build internal links from new blog posts. All of those definitely help with index status.

I would definitely argue in favor of this. Cleaning up broken links, changing the copyright date on websites, adding new content - it all sends signals to Google that the site is maintained regularly and has active management. A site that is regularly updated is more valuable than one that is created and then left to rot.

While Matt Cutts said in 2013 (eons ago in SEO) that broken links weren't a ranking factor, the Google Search Quality Raters Handbook says they are a factor for manual review.

They actually say:

Webmasters need to make sure their websites function well for users as web browsers change. How can you tell that a website is being maintained and cared for? Poke around: Links should work, images should load, content should be added and updated over time, etc. Exercise caution relying on dates: Some webpages automatically display the current date. Rather than just looking for a recent date, search for evidence that effort is being made to keep the website up to date and running smoothly.

When the Raters Handbook says that, I fix broken links.