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You're welcome. Hreflang is the tag you should use. There are plenty of tutorials and articles about it. I'm on the phone now, as soon as I get a PC I'll update with some links. ----UPDATE--- Resources that I've promised: The hreflang Tags Generator Tool - Aleyda Solis (Moz's associate) Use hreflang for language and regional URLs - Search Console Help Hreflang Attribute - Moz Hope it helps. GR.

If you dont have access to the logs that could be an issue - not really any automated tools out there as it would need to crawl every website and find 404 errors. I haven't tried this - so its just an idea. Go into GSC download all the links pointing to your site (and from places like Moz, Ahrefs, Majestic) and then chuck that list of urls into Screaming Frog or URL Profiler and look at external links and see if any are returning a 404. Not sure if this would work - its just an idea. Thanks Andy

Hi David! Did Dan's answer help? Let us know if there's anything else we can do to help you work this out.

Hey David, Sorry for the delayed response on this. Before we get started, I should point out that htaccess's syntax is very particular and you should be extremely careful when messing with it. even a single space out of place can cause massive errors. If you're planning changes, please consult with a developer or three on your team! I think the best way to explain this is to go through exactly what the htaccess Rewrite calls are doing. RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/(En|Es)$ [NC] RewriteCond - The condition of which a rewrite will take place %{REQUEST_URI} - The URI that is requested from the server (everything after the domain and TLD i.e. moz.com/community 's URI would be /community) ^ - Denotes the beginning of a regular expression (regex) / - literally just / (En|Es) - the '()' are simply a grouping and the '|' means OR. So this is saying En OR Es $ - Denotes the end of a regex [NC] - Means no case, so everything in this is not case sensitive So literally this is saying execute this rewrite when the requested URI (after the .com or whatever TLD you use) is either /En OR /Es then whatever, with no attention to case RewriteRule ^(En|Es)/(.*)$ $2?lang=$1 [L,R=301] RewriteRule - The executed rule when the aforementioned RewriteCond is met. ^ - Denotes the beginning of a regular expression (regex) (En|Es) - the '()' are simply a grouping and the '|' means OR. So this is saying En OR Es / - literally just / (.) - This is a wildcard. Once again the () is a grouping, but here the . means zero or more arbitrary characters $ - Denotes the end of a regex $2 - this is the second captured grouping in this line. Meaning whatever is defined within (.*), which is everything after En/ or Es/ ?lang= - this is literally writing '?lang=' without the 's. $1 - this is the first captured grouping from this line. Meaning whichever En OR Es was captured will be written here. [L] - Tells the server to stop rewriting after the preceding directive (rule) is processed [R] - Instructs Apache to issue a redirect, causing the browser to request the rewritten URL [301] - Corresponds to a Moved Permanetly Header Code [L,R=301] - Combines all 3 of these into one. For this I think it's easiest to just use an example. moz.com/En/htaccess-is-fun will be our example Since this url passes the RewriteCond, it goes on to the RewriteRule where it finds En OR Es and stores that value as $1 (En) then takes whatever is left and stores it as $2 (htaccess-is-fun). It then writes htaccess-is-fun?lang=En and replaces the original selection (which is En/htaccess-is-fun) with the new rewrite making the result moz.com/htaccess-is-fun?lang=En . The new URL is served as a 301-ed redirect. RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.[a-zA-Z0-9]{1,5}|/)$ RewriteCond - The condition of which a rewrite will take place %{REQUEST_URI} - The URI that is requested from the server (everything after the domain and TLD i.e. moz.com/community 's URI would be /community) ! - declares negation. i.e. "!cheese" matches everything except "cheese" () - is again a grouping \ - escapes a special character. So "." means a literal dot. a-zA-Z0-9 - matches all lowercase letters, all uppcase letters, and all numbers {1,5} - matches one to five of the previous designation. Meaning that there can be any combination of a-z, A-Z, or 0-9 in a sequence of one to five. i.e. A2ps OR 12345 OR AbC etc. | - Means OR / - literally just / $ - Denotes the end of a regex RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1/ [L,R=301] ^ - Denotes the beginning of a regular expression (regex) (.) - This is a wildcard. Once again the () is a grouping, but here the . means zero or more arbitrary characters $ - Denotes the end of a regex $1 - this is the first captured grouping from this line. / - literally just / [L] - Tells the server to stop rewriting after the preceding directive (rule) is processed [R] - Instructs Apache to issue a redirect, causing the browser to request the rewritten URL [301] - Corresponds to a Moved Permanetly Header Code [L,R=301] - Combines all 3 of these into one. So whenever the RewriteCond is met, this rule will select everything and then rewrite it as a 301 with a / trailing it. Hope this helps! Let me know if you have any other questions. Regards, Trenton

Hi David, If you're confident enough that there is no duplicate related issues on your website, I wouldn't worry about implementing the canonical tag. You can use the tag on an individual page basis, should you feel that you need to tell Google which is the original page.

What you're showing is not the results of a Google Algorithm update. When there's an update, the traffic goes down suddenly--not slowly over time. It looks more like there was some new links or new traffic to the site for another reason--which Dmitrii is referring to, it doesn't appear to be an algorithm update.

Ahh yes! I've found it now, forgot I could click on the links to get more info, thought it would just take me to the site. Turns out most of them are coming from Google Plus which kinda makes sense now. Thanks

There's a couple of questions to answer here. The first is the difference between asking "Will our Domain Authority Decrease?" versus "Will our Traffic & Rankings Decrease?". The second question is more important so I'll cover that first. The official answer from Google is that, no, your traffic and rankings will not decrease. In practice, however, a number of people have seen 5-15% traffic drops for weeks or months after the transfer - even when completed correctly. The general assumption is that this is due to creating redirects for http -> https, which traditionally reduces the value of your inbound link profile. With that said, it's small enough that you can recover quickly with some link reclamation - basically you should update the links you have control over and also email friendly webmasters and say "we changed our site to be HTTPS secure and were wondering if you could update your link on domain.com/xyzpage/". Deacyde's notes on updating internal links are also correct. You should also reference popular "ssl migration" guides like this one from Yoast: https://yoast.com/dev-blog/move-website-https-ssl/ In regards to your exact question - "Will our Domain Authority Decrease?" - this could reference the literal Domain Authority that is measured by Moz, or you could be referencing the broader concept of domain authority in terms of how Google views your website. I don't have an exact answer for how Moz handles normal 301 redirects and if they treat https redirects different. I would assume that Domain Authority might drop slightly, but that's a guess and not an official answer. As noted above Google says that your website will be treated the same, and I think that is the case within a few months, but there can be initial traffic drops, and worse if you handle the migration incorrectly.

We do it all the time (and it's i'd say recommended way to do it). If we have a page which has two keywords, but it's really targeting keyword A and we dont have another page for keyword B, and we want keyword B to rank good, we just create page for keyword B. It's just about assessment of how much benefit you'd get out of creating new page.

I am having this very problem but it is probably a fundamental misunderstanding of search engines so bear with me. I have used Yoast SEO to turn on "noindex, follow" for archives and categories but not for www.cpresearch.net/blog.  The reason is that I am presuming that indexing the blog is necessary to find posts besides the current ones.  If that is not the case, what link is Google following to find the cannonicalized posts after they scroll from the one I list on the homepage.  And do I need to be indexed by Google daily to make sure my cannonicalized URLs are indexed?  I fear they will be orphaned... Thanks for any insight.

Great, as we thought! Thanks for the explanation, makes even more sense now!

Not that I know of! I think our customer is just a bit cautious that they aren't getting relevant traffic to their site. I can't see why Google would think our website is relevant to anyone outside of the UK but I am finding it hard to see what search terms international visitors would be using. Any tips on this?

Thanks for the responses! We only submit to decent niche or local directories but have found a few of the smaller directories have this problem. The site is set to redirect to the https version so it sounds like it is just the directories using the old scripts to validate the URL. Cheers for the help though, it has cleared it up