Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Tyler

You should go with the second option. It is by far the best for SEO. Have the main company information on the main site and then have the different locations as a first sub-directory as you have written it:

maindomain.com/norman

Make sure that the new city pages are rich with local information - drop in a photo of the city centre with an alt tag 'Norman' - talk about the main attractions of the town and flesh out the pages with contextually rich local information. Don't simply copy content from the main site as the duplicated content will drag the page down SERPS. If you do this correctly you will have a very good chance of ranking No.1 for your service + City in search.

Don't even think about setting up domains for each city - in fact, go and sell/delete them now!

I hope that helps - oh and don't forget to use Google my business to set up Googe local for all locales! and get plenty of local citations for each city. It should really rock if you do that!

Regards Nigel

Carousel Projects

Hi David

I honestly would do exactly as you suggest.

The problem with the structure as it is is that it contains the date. If you want to present evergreen content then having the date in the URL is probably a bad choice. Presumably, if they are being presented in PDF form it means they are a useful download which is not restricted to the year/month they were published in.

I hope that helps

Regards

Nigel

Hi Michael

The problem you have is the very low value content that exists on all of those pages and the complete impossibility of writing any unique Titles, Descriptions and content. There are just too many of them.

With a footwear client of mine I no indexed a huge slug of tags taking the page count down by about 25% - we saw an immediate 22% increase in organic traffic in the first month. (March 18th 2017 - April 17th 2017) the duplicates were all size and colour related. Since canonicalising (I'm English lol) more content and taking the site from 25,000 pages to around 15,000 the site is now 76% ahead of last year for organics.  This is real measurable change.

Now the arguments:

Canonicalisation

How are you going to canonicalise 10,000+ pages ? unless you have some kind of magic bullet you are not going to be able to but lets look at the logic.

Say we have a page of Widgets (brand) and they come in 7 sizes. When the range is fully in stock all of the brand/size pages will be identical to the brand page, apart from the title & description. So it would make sense to canonicalise back to the brand. Even when sizes started to run out, all of the sizes will be on the brand page. So size is a subset of the brand page.

Similar but not the same for colour. If colour is a tag then every colour sorted page will be on the brand page. So really they are the same page - just a slimmer selection. Now I accept that the brand page will contain all colours as it did all sizes but the similarity is so great - 95 % of the content being the same apart from the colour, that it makes sense to call them the same.

So for me Canonicalisation would be the way to go but it's just not possible as there are too many of them.

Noindex

The upside of noindex is that it is generally easier to put the noindex tag on the page as there is no URL to tag. The downside is that the page is then not indexed in Google so you lose a little  juice - I would argue by the way that the chances of being found in Google for a size page is extremely slim, less than 2% of visits came from size pages before we junked them and most of those were from a newsletter so reality is <1% not worth bothering about You could leave off the nofollow so that Google crawls through all of the links on the pages - the better option.

Considering your problem and having experience of a number of sites with the same problem Noindex is your solution.

I hope that helps

Kind Regards

Nigel - Carousel Projects.

Hi KSCaserta

Did you redirect just the home page or all of the URLs?

If you did it properly then depending on how deep the pages (how many clicks down from the main menu) are Google can take up to a month to discover all of the redirects. It can also rank both pages for a period as well depending on how well you did it. If you only redirected the home page then go and redirect all the others, quickly!

When it's ranking obviously having two pages can cause a problem so you can experience a temporary drop.

Do a site search in Google for the old domain and then do the same for the new one and see how many pages of each are indexed. That will give you an indication of how long it's taking

search: site:olddomainurl

it will tell you how many pages are still there. Then click the small down arrow to the right and it will show you when it was last cached. see image - click on it and check the date at the top.

If all is well then you just need to check some deeper pages and see what the date is. Also, fetch Google in search console for any stubborn directories.

Regards

Nigel

P6kXBec

Hi Thomas

I would be very proud of myself that I am number 1 for that term to be honest.

Simply that Google serves the most relevant result from what is listed in the search results. Clearly, for this term, your website is more relevant for the term façadier bastogne than the Yell equivalent beneath you.

Don't forget this, you are a plasterer based in Bastogne whilst Yell is a listings directory. Forget the DA this has little to do with that. It is because your website is more relevant and more useful for the searcher. A directory will just list professions and locations so their results are more diluted - you are a plasterer and you are in Bastogne, great result!

Don't forget also that your site is receiving some benefit from the Yell site because of the link from them to you - this is a 'follow' link which of course passes some link juice to you as a very relevant back link so their listing is helping you be number 1.

I would think very carefully about dropping your listing from them as you might just see someone else jump over you for that coveted top spot.

I hope that helps.

Regards

Nigel

Hi Arun

It's certainly best practice to move to a root directory. As you say visitors are then coming to one domain, not a subdomain. All you need to do is page by page redirect through a 301. When you say they are being 'redirected to 301 code' this is perfectly OK. The 301 code just tells Google that the page has moved permanently.

It takes Google a short while to recognise the new pages as replacing the old ones and for that period you can see old and new in Google, causing a short period of duplication which could affect the rankings.

You just need to sit it out - by all means, do a Fetch in Search Console to help speed up the process.

Search Console>Crawl>Fetch as Google.

Regards

Nigel

Hi Daniela

In the first instant I would take that link from the old penalised site to that new page down. I would then wait or use Search Console Fetch to have it re-indexed and see what happens.

It sounds like that is the problem but it's hard to say without knowing the URL.

If the otehr site is too similar to the new one with the same ownership, similar descriptive text, same IP then it maybe that Google considers them duplicates but less likely than the first point above.

Regards

Nigel - Carousel Projects.

Hi Marynau

I doubt very much that they will do you any harm. It's more to do with how spammy the site is and whether it has 1000's of outbound links. Install the MOZbar in chrome and check the spam score. If it's high ie 4-7 then consider this:

1. Ask them directly to remove any links to your website. Email them.
2. If you get no reply after a week or so upload a disavow file here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main. Download the template first so you know the format.

I use SEMrush and that gives me an indication of my clients (what SEMrush call) toxic links. MOZ has something similar but it's not as obvious which are the really bad ones.

It's simple to add them to a list of sites to contact and request removal. Old spammy directories are the worst but I have seen a lot of spammy links recently from Theglobe and similar mega directories. It's always good to keep an eye on your backlink profile.

Note that the disavow file should always contain ALL of the links you want to disavow - you don't add and add - they should all be on one csv. Also, it's simple to 'un-disavow' a particular URL, just remove it.

I hope that helps

Regards

Nigel

Hi Davey

Whilst you can change your version of Google to any country you can't do it by city.

Check out this nifty tool which seems to do the job really well:

https://www.isearchfrom.com/

Regards

Nigel

You seem to have fixed it,

You need to 301 redirect the old URLs to the new ones.

For what it's worth I can't see a link to your blog anywhere.

Regards

Hi Timmy 3

I think this might have something to do with it:

https://www.crowneplaza.com/hotels/gb/en/christchurch/chccs/hoteldetail and this
**https://www.ihg.com/crowneplaza/hotel**s/gb/en/christchurch/chccs/hoteldetail (which is the above page's canonical)

You have set up a sub-domain and built a website on it https://christchurch.crowneplaza.com

But there are already two main domains with directories for the hotel (note the gb/en part is because I am searching from the UK) So you have basically set up a duplicate website to the two that exist already which will affect the ranking of them both.

However - I have this https://christchurch.crowneplaza.com at position 16 in Google so not all is lost despite the duplication. Note that I am searching from the UK

Solution:

Put the canonical on the top two pages as: rel="canonical" href="https://christchurch.crowneplaza.com"/>

You also have these HTTP pages in search which must be 301'd to the https versions and the wp-admin URLs no indexed in robots.txt

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site:https://christchurch.crowneplaza.com+inurl:http&rlz=1C1GCEA_enGB760GB760&filter=0&biw=1920&bih=949

That should sort it

Regards

Nigel

Hi Marynau

It's considered bad practice to link to other sites through footers. It results in 100s and often 1000s of links coming to you from one site which could be considered spammy. You probably won't get a manual penalty but there may be an algorithmic one if it happens too frequently from a number of different sites.

Check the spam score of the site linking to you - use the MOZ bar - if they are a sponsor then they are likely to be OK. Then politely ask them to link to you once from an 'Our Sponsors' page or just one link from the home page (as it's likely to have a higher PA - page authority)

I hope that helps,

Regards

Nigel

Hi

This leads to a 404 https://tinyurl.com/ycwa4uvg

So you will need to 301 redirect thishttps://tinyurl.com/ycwa4uvg to thishttps://tinyurl.com/ydggqanv 1. I can't see a blog

2. I can't see the problem because it 404's

Regards

Nigel

Hi Becky

I have to agree with you there. The H1 should be a header for what is visible in the on-page content. These clearly are not. It won't confuse Google as it takes little notice of H2 but for me it's just a bad use of page elements.

Regards

Nigel

Hi

It is 100x better to add this to an existing site. If you start again it can take a year to properly establish a completely new site with no DA. Not to mention the upkeep and maintenance of a new website!

This is a no-brainer especially if the topics are related. Just make sure there are no other pages on your site which crossover with this keyword otherwise you may not achieve teh rankings you expect. If you do it properly it could be ranking within a week.

I hope this helps

Regards Nigel

Hi Ali

I can understand why because otherwise all of the images will have the same alt text which is confusing for Google. Best practice is to have different alts for each image The images are separate files so they should have different alts, regardless of the fact that they are the same image in different sizes.

Keep it simple: 'Blue casual shirt large' 'Blue casual shirt small' etc

If you are a branded site put the brand in. 'Lacoste Blue Casual Shirt Art 35789 - Small', 'Lacoste Blue Casual Shirt Art 35789 - Thumb' etc

The alt is your anchor text for links and image name, so be specific. The better you get at this the more you will feature in Google images - a good source of traffic.

Regards

Nigel

An SSL certificate is linked to a particular domain. You will need to arrange a new one for the new domain. You can often get them with 1 year free so it's not much hassle to do it correctly

Regards

Nigel

Hi Miles,

Yes - you need to completely remove it as you will kill the new site and the old site stone dead. they will both share the same content! Just write in the htaccess of the old site all of the 301 redirects and take the site down. Then if anyone visits it they will automatically go to the corresponding pages on the new website.

It's way easier than this page suggests: https://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection More:  https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93633?hl=en

If anyone is linking to the old domain they will come to the new one via the 301 redirect.

Just don't redirect every old page to the home page of your new site. Do it page by page. You will then start to see the backlinks appearing and the DA going up.

I hope that helps

Nigel

Hi Kibin

Firstly it's unlikely that their scraped content will affect your rankings - Google generally knows who originated it. However:

Do you have the hreflang tag on your website? specifying your language and location? If theirs has this as well then technically you are targetting a different country, so there should be no duplicate content if you added it.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

I would tell Google about the URL and add a sample 10 URLs first: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dmca-dashboard. Telling them is an absolute must even if it's only a few URLs.

Also email the hosting company informing them that they are hosting copied content and that the penalties are severe.

Finally, write to the company themselves and tell them/warn them that you are going legal and send them a cease and desist legal letter. I am sure you can knock one up for a few dollars from a friendly solicitor.

Watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGc_jc3Oznk It's a bit long but worth it.

Do all of these things.

Regards

Nigel

Stefan

This question is very simple to answer and completely outside of the normal way of doing SEO. It's the psychic ability and control coming from the Magic Oracle which is pushing the website to the top of Google!

Regards

Nigel