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Just pointers... don’t rely on it... Google is changing fast and you never know when they might do that if they are not doing it at the moment...
If it matches your brand go for it but if not then prefer to go for a brand related URL instead of a keyword...
There can be a problem with the ranking history or something...if there is anything like that SEOmoz is awesome at updating their community people thought twitter... or you can email them at help@seomoz.org and i am sure they will be happy to assist you.
I don’t see any need of another website targeting another location... absolutely no need of it! You can go with the same website and handle the English version either in subdirectory or sub domain.
or
You can also set the IP tracking so if someone is coming to your website from other parts of the world then Mexico they will see the English version of it and if people are coming from Mexico they will see the Spanish version of it...
Hope this helps!
To be honest we all know that penguin is quite difficult to handle so maybe it can work but there are an equal chance that it is not going to work...
Well I like the idea of dumping some URLs that contain fishy links...and create entire new pages...but what if the penguin is on the domain level and not on the page level? I think in that way this tactic might not work...
I don’t think this will be a good approach… I don’t see these pages are completely irrelevant! But my recommendation is to engage it properly with product pages and if possible get some good links on them instead of including no-index on the pages…
Adam I think a lot about this even before you actually come up with this question and I thought best URL structure you can follow in this case is of about.me
But there is one thing that you cannot do!
How about shortening the URL?
For instance you have a BOB pizza in Ohio so instead of having a URL http://www.menue.com/pizza/OH/bob-pizza/ why not go for a smile and short URL that looks great with branding http://menu.com/bobpizza/
The URL is short so you can easily use in branding plus search engine will not exclude this in Google... when people will share this short version of URL the domain authority of the overall domain will automatically improved.
Hope this idea might work for you...
Adam I didn’t really find out any good resource to back my opinion but I have worked with multiple sites and I can say that when you 301 redirect multiple domains on different pages of your website it gives Google a suspicious clue about your authenticity and trust as most spammers use this tactic in order to grab traffic and rankings for many fat head key phrases…
As far as my knowledge goes canonical should not have a negative impact at all as this s a way of telling Google what is the original version of the content and there is a fair possibility that a great content can be reused at 100s of times….
no clue seriously! Google is in the teen age and doing all the smart things that a super awesome kid should do to prove himself the best among others (sometime it didn't went well...)
I must not say it is not possible but at the moment there is no such thing like this!
Adam at least from the 301 and canonical this approach will not work because canonical means that you are telling Google where original content is located so it is logical that Google will index the original content instead of the duplicate one...
I am not sure what will be the perfect way to do this but remember too many domain level re-directions to the different page of my main URL can be another major problem in the eye of Google.
The website looks decent and on-page in my opinion is way above than average websites in this industry... (Although your Google Maps and Yelp logo down the page contain the same URL #justnoticed but it has nothing to do with SEO and rankings...)
I can see a major mistake at the link building side and that is the improper use of anchor text that are pointing back t your site... Actually many links pointing back to your site contains the keyword but very few links contain the brand name which is absolutely unnatural.
My advice to you is to build some high quality links with the variation of brand name in the anchor text and you will see a change soon...
As this is not a manual SPAM action so no matter what you have to wait Google to refresh the changes and then only you will be able to rank again (IMHO) and this filing a reconsideration request in this scenario won’t work!
I think George’s question is still valid what kind of link building are you performing... i mean if you are up to forum profile links, directories, blog comments then it is fairly possible but if you are really up to quality link building then this is not a normal scenario and should be analyzed properly...
I am assuming that you are talking about design template of the EMDs (websites) so in that case from the SEO point of view there won’t be any problem but from the user point of view people might frustrates by going to different domains but finding the same kind of websites... but again every niche’s behavior towards website is kind of different.
from the technical website there is no problem in having the same template!
301 is a permanent URL redirection that means that page you are looking for is redirected to a new location and that location is (www.domain.co.au/new-url)
As far as my knowledge goes Google will not include this in index due to the fact that it is permanently redirecting to another URL so why not take USER to the original URL instead of the URL that redirects... (I think this is an efficient approach).
Not sure what to say because Facebook’s DA says 9 and my website DA says 60 so it’s funny in a way... I guess one of the members from the SEOmoz team can help and answer this question...
In my personal opinion language shouldn’t be a problem as English is considered to be the universal language amount the IT dudes in Asia (At least I think that way...)
How much time, effort and cash to do the link cleanup... I believe this is very much depends upon how you want to go with the cleanup process... I really like this post regarding that by Cyrus Shepard http://cyrusshepard.com/boom-1-email-60-bad-links-gone-4-tools-for-easy-link-cleanup/
This post will help you identify how much time, effort and cash will be required to complete the cleanup process.
Hope this helps!!
I guess there are many different free and paid ways of doing this you can do it manually or with the help of a tool as well... (lot of choices) but you have to take some pain to remove it no matter what and how much you spend...
Here is a post by Cyrus Shepard http://cyrusshepard.com/boom-1-email-60-bad-links-gone-4-tools-for-easy-link-cleanup/ that discuss different link cleanup tool. Please take a look!
Hope this helps!
My bad completely but as you said:
Seeing that this business (example.com) will be based here in the USA and theirs (example.nl) is in the Netherlands and they are both completely different models, is this ok?
I am not saying you will or plan to hijack traffic but some of the traffic will move to your domain (as many people do try .com instead of the country level tld).. But yes I got your point and from that angle my answer was of less or no help!
Sorry about that!
Shame to a brand that left the .com domain free J but to be honest it’s a bad idea in my opinion and I will not at all recommend doing that... why?
1. Different country
Usually people around the world when typing URL uses .com as most of the times and this will allow you to capture their traffic but there are two major reasons why that will increase your bounce rate without giving you any significant conversions...
For instance your brand website is something that is not catchy to their country then they will more likely to switch as they were not looking for your website anyways...
For instance you have a great product that is catchy and may be you are able to attract some of their traffic in to leads... what if you do not offer delivery services to that country or delivery charges makes thing expensive enough... either way they will more likely to switch instead of giving you any real sales
2. Different Business Model
For Instance the brand in a different country offer dental surgery and i have a .com website that is an animal food store online.
I might be able to attract lot of traffic but will it offer me any real conversions... i don’t think so!
Try and work for conversions instead of traffic hacking or you will end up watching at how much bandwidth has been used but you might not able to see good conversions out of it.
This can be different for everyone and by the way there is no real rule for it so i believe being random and grabbing the opportunities as soon as they come is the best way to start with it...
For directories I think I will go for BOTW if i have budget for directories but if not then i might drop both options as they give very little help in terms of getting higher in SERP result pages.