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No matter what directives you (or your devs) insert on your pages and sitemaps, Google may still ignore them if it finds another resource it "thinks" is better targeted to a given user's region and language. With hreflang, you don't have to specify a region if you target numerous countries that all speak the same language. Keep in mind, however, that there are likely localized variants (different dialects, preferred spellings, cultural differences) that may require you to create customized content even if it's the same language. For instance, English speakers in the UK are likelier to write "prioritise" whereas English speakers in North America are likelier to write "prioritize." If you're targeting both of these regions with specialized services, then I'd recommend you tweak your spellings.

I have hundreds of books for sale on one of my websites and the product pages for these books get very few visitors per month.  However, each month we make about 75 sales from these pages (with some visitors buying several different books).  Think of it as 500 pages that each get 5 visitors per month with 3% of the visitors making a purchase.  These sales are really easy to service, just open the shopping cart page, print a label, slip a book or two into a mailer, slap on a label.  The inventory turns over about once a year and takes up very little space. We are not going to delete those pages. These are not thin content pages.  We have a few hundred words of unique content per page plus standard information that includes, author, publisher, date, ISBN, etc.

There should be any issue in using multiple methods as long as the data is consistent between them. Cheers, Jake Bohall

Hi Netkernz_ag, It is just good practice to have those types of pages available. While I wouldn't say it is an absolute requirement, it should be something you do for your users. The page you pointed to is a general checklist of things to do, and not to do for your users. Creating a Site Index maybe a bit dated, but I still tend to do them as they are fairly easy to create. (example). Hope this helps, Don

I never see 'Click here' in meta descriptions from the SERPs when I search, I would definitely avoid doing that. Meta descriptions always change with what you search but if you are using the same ones for your open graph data it needs to work well on Twitter, Facebook etc. I like to use descriptions which give enough information to capture your attention but not answer your question/search forcing you to find out more without saying 'find out more'.

Thanks - so I have to continue the search for where a tenfold increase in indexed pages (according to Search Console) might possibly come from. Sadly, the rest of your reply misses my problem; probably I have been unclear. The reason I was asking for a method to know what pages ARE indexed is: I seem to have no problem getting stuff indexed (crystal-clear sitemap with dates; clear link structure &c.) but google seems over-eager and indexes more than there really is. If it is some technical problem, I'd like to fix that - but Google does not show anywhere what pages are actually indexed. There are lots of methods around - but none that I found do work as of now. I have been well aware of JumpTo-Links, as I stated, and it works nicely. No problem at all with "not enough" indexed pages - really rather the opposite with no idea what causes it. Regards Nico

Hey Nico, Hate to say it, but this sounds like a serious mess. If there are multiple websites sharing partial or complete NAP and phone numbers being held hostage by third parties, I think: You need a formal audit from a heavy-hitting Local SEO agency to find all of the problems. Even with that, unless you have the authority and green light to launch a massive cleanup, involving all doctors and the practice, your hands may be tied here. This is one of those really difficult situations one sometimes wades into without realizing the depth of the pool. What you are describing sounds like a very large project, but a good agency can tackle large projects methodically, one step at a time. What is the real concern here is the mention of legal problems and phone numbers being held hostage. There's not going to be a simple solution for this, and it may be that the company needs to work out its internal matters before any SEO team can help them

The dating of content has gotten a lot of play of late, in large part because of a post that appeared on the Moz blog: https://moz.com/blog/case-study-can-you-fake-blog-post-freshness- Despite the dissenting opinions on all sides, this much appears to find consensus: Update your content and the content's date when you have new, valuable information available to provide, and only then. Otherwise the results are likely to be short-term and not very worthwhile. RS

Thanks for the input, Dmitrii and sorry for not replying sooner. My experience is a bit different - maybe because it mainly stems from well-structured pages that was daily reindexed. Breadcrumbs generally showed up "almost instantly" (i.e. next index round) or "not at all". Same with some other cases of schema - even being deindexed and reindexed (be it after a silly mistake or the realisation that google for some unclear reason dislikes some markup within some others) within the same week has happened to me and is far from extraordinary. My prior experience with (old) schema.org breadcrumb markup was frustrating to the point of avoiding it; but next time I shall give it a try again. Always better to not mix syntaxes.

Thanks for your thoughts! That surely is some stuff worth thinking about - and reminding me that many people are a lot less familiar with online vocabulary than us her. In the current case it does not really solve the problem due to it being a bit of a mixture of things like /motifs/ /themes/ /objects/ /characters/ /topoi/ etc. as they appear in a certain kind of literature.... but I really do not want to use multiple URLs for that. I might end up settling for /info/ as catch-all - and give it a more meaningful breadcrumb probably. Regards Nico

Thanks, guys, for confirming my thoughts on this! I shall surely change those links and make something more useful out of them. Regards Nico

Hehehe yes we do usually!

Hi CleverPhD, Thanks for your answer! The website is indeed a little dated and did not consider SEO - or so I have been informed. http://www.g1.de/projekte.aspx is the URL with the most clearest problems, although similar tiles also exist on other pages. As you can see by checking the code, the URL is changed, albeit in a non-ideal way (parameter) and the page basically stays the same with only a tiny fraction of its content changed. The USAtoday approach is interesting and I will look into it. I have a slight feeling, though, that the approach is quite a bit different(?).

this is simple. rather that test what the domain name is, test what it is not. use the logic, if not my-preferred-domainname then redirect to my-preferred-domainname.