Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi,

I highly advise you to acquire a Google Webmaster Tools and a connect that with your Analytics account to facilitate and monitor the change in your target audience. After you have set both up, here are the 2 main features that help to solve your problem:

1. Hreflang attributes. Google states at https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

Many websites serve users from around the world with content translated or targeted to users in a certain region. Google uses the rel="alternate" hreflang="x" attributes to serve the correct language or regional URL in Search results.

Hreflang offers website or subpage targeting per language (English not French), country (so Australia not the UK). But note that it requires manually changing your site's mark-up.

2. Also of use is Country Targeting https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/62399?hl=en

If your site has a generic top-level domain, such as .com or .org, and targets users in a particular geographic location, you can provide us with information to help us determine how your site appears in our search results. This improves Google Search results for geographic queries, and it won't impact your appearance in search results unless a user limits the scope of the search to a certain country. See a full list of domains Google treats as generic.

Yes, that's how I did it.

Hi, here's what Google officially has to say:

Webmaster Tools data and reporting work best on a site level. For example, if your site http://www.example.com has separate sections for different countries, we recommend adding each of those subsites or subfolders as a separate site. For example, if you have a travel site with specific subfolders covering Ireland, France, and Spain, you could add the following sites to your Webmaster Tools account:

• http://www.example.com
• _http://www.example.com/france_
• _http://www.example.com/ireland_
• _http://www.example.com/spain_

Following this I have solved the exactly the same problem you had for a client.  And it works perfectly.

• _The question is does this ["sitemap"] now need changing to make it specific for each country. _What I have done is add the sitemaps for each subdirectory as well as the main domain. It works (tracking and all that) and is easy to do.
• _Also in order to Geolocate this in WMT would this need to be done for each directory version instead of the main domain? _Yes, that is the way to go.
• _Currently the WMT account for the UK site is verified at www.domain.com, would this need reverifying at domain.com/en-gb? _Yes, it does. And so do every other subdirectory you add down the line. That allows precise international targeting per subdirectory via the hreflang and country targeting settings and setting the main GWT site for the root domain to be for global traffic.

To answer your question: No, it's not okay. Duplicate content is to be avoided. Ask your programmer to do a 301 redirect one of these pages to another, that automatically redirects users and the GoogleBot, or at least add an canonical url meta tag which defines which page is the "original" or "canonical" version for the content.

See more at Google Support.

As to why it is happening. Difficult to be precise but would venture that one of the URL-s might be a category "page" that gets created automatically, with an url thanks to your page's category structure and the other a real editable "page".

Hi, the field of User Experience is vast. There are many books and online courses that go directly at the topic or show how to solve tasks with specific tools such as the now popular Sketch app for Mac and so on. I am sure others will post those. Others will also mention HCI and more academic subjects.

But a thinking man's or woman's guide to UX combines a wider sense of the subject — allowing you to communicate with ad agencies, clients and colleagues alike:

• Modern graphic design. Exemplified as a book in Josef Müller-Brockmann's "Grids in Graphic Design"
• Statistics, testing and data analysis. The best book might be a more general introduction such as "How To Measure Anything".
• To be honest, classical advertising also plays a role so reading "Ogilvy on Advertising" might place UX in a wider context.

Still, the most important thing is good knowledge of javascript.

• You need not rely on an external developer to implement many of your designs,
• You can quickly and easily test the various ideas found in popular books and academic papers alike.
• You can develop your good taste for the aesthetics of your products with small details that go beyond ordinary. We call them delighters.

Google states on their support page:

_If we’ve detected that a particular result has [...] issues with its title, we may try to generate an improved title from anchors, on-page text, or other sources. However, sometimes even pages with well-formulated, concise, descriptive titles will end up with different titles in our search results to better indicate their relevance to the query. _

There’s a simple reason for this: the title tag as specified by a webmaster is limited to being static, fixed regardless of the query. Once we know the user’s query, we can often find alternative text from a page that better explains why that result is relevant. Using this alternative text as a title helps the user, and it also can help your site. Users are scanning for their query terms or other signs of relevance in the results, and a title that is tailored for the query can increase the chances that they will click through.

What to do? Here's the answer:

• make your title mean something as a sentence or a phrase. List of keywords is not descriptive of what is on the page. Therefore Google will not use that. There are exceptions for e-commerce or product sites but that is the rule.
• If you want to highlight a certain keyword — simply place that at the start of the said phrase in the title.
• try to think as an user searching for your page when composing the above mentioned phrase. What do they desire?

For more, please see my previous answer at http://moz.com/community/q/title-tag-issue-2

Hi,

please read my previous answer to a very similar question at http://moz.com/community/q/is-this-good-or-bad-strategy

Unique landing pages for different locales are fine if you have unique content for each one of hem. That means one-of-a-kind reviews, images of the locale (landmarks), case studies, a map of a real business location for each location etc..

It is reasonable to presume that in your case that is easier to do for counties rather than cities. So go with the first option.

As for the third question: I understand your desire to optimise everything. But now I have a tough time thinking through the benefits that creating very similar service pages for each location might have for your users or for Google. Rather, it is reasonable to expect that those pages might be seen as very close duplicates of each other. For does your service really differ that much county by county? Probably, no.

A wiser choice is to do the following:

• Local landing pages for each county with a short summary and links to your service pages
• A separate services page(s) with some geographic customisation and links to the county pages to highlight where you operate

Wondered about that as well. Officially they state they publish new data every 4-6 weeks so if they do not publish by next week, then it's time to raise some noise.

Meanwhile, the domain authority and so on are updated in the Moz's Open Site Explorer. Which is strange come to think of it — because many of the metrics tracked are quite similar in the two tools.

Hi, please clarify whether the 3 separate domains will be all new or will 2 of them that you handle be new and the other one be the old domain? That changes how you can do 301 redirects obviously (leading to more questions like if all 3 are new, what happens to the old domain? etc..)

Couple of steps to take:

1. Analyse your old site thoroughly with Open Site Explorer or with other Moz (or other provider's) tools. Specifically make a list of the top 200/500/.. pages with most external links, page authority and so on. It is going to be an hefty Excel file but a breeze to put together with the help of Moz professional. Takes a couple of days or so.
2. Keep the same URL structure when designing the old site, make it simpler to scan via breadcrumbs if possible.
3. Do specific canonical URLs for at least the  200/500/.. most important pages in the 1st page
4. Do the 301 redirects and verify them with the help of online tools.
5. Notify Google Webmaster Tools. Again It is hard to give specific instructions because I do not which domains will be new and what will happen to the old.

In theory and according to Google officially setting the canonical URL should pass the external links along to the new domain:

• Consolidating link signals for the duplicate or similar content. It helps search engines to be able to consolidate the information they have for the individual URLs (such as links to them) on a single, preferred URL. This means that links from other sites to http://example.com/dresses/cocktail?gclid=ABCD get consolidated with links to http://www.example.com/dresses/green/greendress.html.

On a first look I would propose that the following paragraph just before the reviews themselves is problematic:

_"Natural World Safaris tailor-make gorilla safari holidays to meet your requirements. This gives you complete flexibility and allows you to choose your preferred travel dates, areas you wish to visit and the standard of accommodation that suits your style and budget. Please see below reviews from clients who have returned from our gorilla tracking safari holidays." _

Try rewriting that or removing that. Your page is already über-optimised and the first sentence is just over-the-top keyword stuffing. Also rethink hiding your reviews behind a plus button. Because the reviews are hidden as secondary content the Google bot sees the above paragraph as the same review for all the different pages. Thus thinks this is review spam across your otherwise very beautiful and, again, extremely optimised pages.

It is reasonable to expect that Google will want to combat review spam since many people use review mark-up for nefariously ranking higher.

drWVAnY

Hi,

1 authoritative way is to use Google's own tool in Google Webmaster Tools, under "Crawl" you'll see "Fetch as Google". If the tool returns "redirected" as the page's status you may resubmit it to the index

See more at: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6066467?hl=en and https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6065812?hl=en

Edit: or you can use the Crawl Tool right here on Moz.com: https://moz.com/researchtools/crawl-test

Hi, here're the 3 steps that should work easily:

1. Add the canonical URL-s as you already know how. Wait for the new domain to rank. But don't stop there.
2. After you've seen new domain rising place robots.txt and no-index meta tags on the old site instructing Google not to index it.
3. Use Google Webmaster Tools to request Site Removal for the old site: under Google index -> Remove URL-s place the full domain of your old site. You should see that instead of a "page removal" you will be asked to confirm a "site removal". More instructions here from Google.

Hi Carly,

if you want to know more or need further help: Bryan Dean's On-Page SEO Anatomy infographic serves as a good start.

You may also provide a more concrete example by a private message via my profile page. I can help you.

Hi, Joost De Valk wrote a great article on this subject in 2011:

“You see, sites don’t rank: pages rank. If you want to rank for a keyword, you’ll need to determine which page is going to be the page ranking for that keyword....Adding that keyword to the title of every page is not going to help. Nor is writing 200 articles about it without one central article to link all those articles to. You need one single page that is the center of the content about that topic. One “hub” page, if you will.”

Now that you understand that you should probably create a page in an url http://www.domain.com/keyword rather than trying to rank http://www.domain.com — here’s the answer as best as I can give easily since Google is secretive.

3 Basic Factors:

1. relevancy signals
2. internal and outbound linking
3. content freshness

1. Relevancy Signals

Bryan Dean's article gives, among other ranking signals, a good overview of relevancy for a page (not a site), many of which you mentioned:

• Keyword density and latent semantic indexing
• Heading and meta tags. See: http://cbutterworth.com/do-h1-tags-still-help-seo/ and much more..
• Content length. See: http://blog.serpiq.com/how-important-is-content-length-why-data-driven-seo-trumps-guru-opinions/

It is reasonable to presume that when Google goes through your site (perhaps via an sitemap) it does make some minor conclusions about the general themes of your site and that may affect your homepage’s rank.

2. Internal and Outbound Linking

Now, this is the easiest way to affect the rank of your homepage with the help of the posts you are doing. Make sure to link to the latest news, categories and tag cloud on your homepage.

You may show posts from a specific category, where the category is the keyword for which you want to rank. Thus Google sees that your homepage displays keywords and links about that topic prominently.

Don’t go overboard obviously. 3 latest news items in the category defined by the keyword, a link to the keyword as category and as tag or two is plenty enough for the homepage.

3. Content Freshness

Cyrus Shepard’s 2011 post on the Moz Blog serves as a good introduction to how content freshness might impact your site:

“Websites that add new pages at a higher rate may earn a higher freshness score than sites that add content less frequently.Some SEOs insist you should add 20-30% new pages to your site every year. This provides the opportunity to create fresh, relevant content, although you shouldn’t neglect your old content if it needs attention.”

Google also measures how your users react to your content:

“As content becomes outdated, folks spend less time on your site. They press the back button to Google's results and choose another url. Google picks up on these user behavior metrics and scores your content accordingly.”

Hi Gareth,

that's a very beautiful website in terms of the SEO work your team has put in: breadcrumbs, semantic markup etc. Google understands tabular data very well (even inside PDFs or Excel files) and doesn't consider it spamming.

Accidentally I have had lengthy lists of items rank very well previously. You should be doubly safe since you already have the Education Event semantic markup wrapping every table row.

Looking forward, don't think keywords will be the issue. Google is aiming more and more towards understanding the usability of each page. Personally, I would test different versions shortening this list (pagination, tabs) for conversions.

Generally, there are just too many big corporate websites with duplicate content and repetitive keywords for Google to automatically degrade one's site for what SEO software finds problematic in these areas. Matt Cutts as said as much.

Hi Ram, here's the right solution in 3 easy steps:

1. Go to or setup your Google Webmaster Tools account.
2. Under "Search Traffic" click "International Targeting" and then "Country".
3. From there simply choose the country you want to target, India.

Your suspicion seem to be warranted since Moz reports that for the July 2013 Panda Update: "The implication was that this was algorithmic and may have "softened" some previous Panda penalties". But on the other hand they state there were ranking fluctuations weeks prior to that, which they called "massive".

So what happened the weeks prior? This article by Moz's own Dr. Peter J Meyers provides a glue but nothing substantial: http://moz.com/blog/googles-multi-week-algorithm-update — it suggests that you may have been of the PMD's (partial match domains) or EMD's (exact match domains) that did not recover from that update. Curiously he also mentions the possibility that these might have been directly targeted.

Possibilities:

1. You were directly targeted by Google. In which case your mission is to convince Google that you are now a good citizen. Better internal linking is a stronger sign of becoming non-spammy than going on an external link campaign.
2. You were caught in a wider net of EMD's and PMD's that Google calculated to be too spammy and got a temporarily hammered. But adding the 301-s then took away your chance to recover via good internal linking that otherwise may have happened naturally ("blue widget" suggests you may run an e-commerce site). These two have identical results.

What to do:

1. Remove 301, keep the canonical URL-s. As Thomas suggested.
2. Add or renew internal links thoughtfully (couple of in-context links and related products, top sellers per page) and overview your breadcrumbs (if not already there).
3. Add semantic SEO product (or whatever is relevant to you) mark-up, more unique images — everything you consider appropriate to signal to Google that you are not "spammy" anymore.

Just remember, you may no longer rely on your domain name to rank.

Hi, according to Google's official documentation canonical URLs are sufficient:

"In the world of content management and online shopping systems, it's common for the same content to be accessed through multiple URLs. With content syndication, it's also easy for content to be distributed to different URLs and domains entirely. For example:... Your server is configured to serve the same content for the www subdomain or the https protocol..."

Proposed Plan of Action:

1. Decide which of non-www or www should be your preferred domain. Set the canonical urls and the preferred domain in GWT accordingly.
2. Divide your site into dozen or so sections and every day for the next 2 weeks correct the duplicate titles and content of each section. At the end, leave a day to go over the work and at the start give yourself a day to get familiar with the work. So you will not be overwhelmed by the details, even if you don't finish everything in a day.
3. See how the work done affects your sitemap and overall SEO when you go forward. If possible, only implement changes to the CMS after this SEO work has been done. Why? Because by then you will be familiar enough with the CMS and with the goals you want to achieve to fruitfully communicate with the developers. I see you are running a CMS based on ASP.net — changing these boutique CMS-s can be quite expensive, as you stated

Not an authoritative answer and I know you are not doing link purchasing but this case seems to be pertinent to temporary links in general:

Google webspam team included a link from a page in Google cache, as the original resource no longer existed. This raised a concern with some that even links from Google cache need to be considered when managing disavow files. Some speculated this was simply a human error, but John Mueller stepped in and clarified the matter after consulting with the team at Google.

Now, why would Google's own team include a link from Google's cache for a link that is no-longer available, why worry about it at all? One answer may be that links that get cached by Google still carry on being ranking factors. So maybe making sure that the page where the link resides gets cached by Google will help to preserve some of it's ranking power.

Hi Brad, you are right according to Brian Dean's extensive list of 200 Google ranking factors:

Although Google prefers fresh content, an older page that’s regularly updated may outperform a newer page.

I am hesitant to recommend doing the 301 redirect, even though it is the right thing to do. Google Support does state at https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en#4

To address these issues, we recommend you define a canonical URL for content (or equivalent content) available through multiple URLs. You can do this for Google Search in a number of ways:

It goes ahead to recommend both setting a canonical URL and updating your sitemap and, after that, doing a 301 redirect. So it seems both work. It depends on whether you want to keep the older link accessible, in which case a canonical URL will do the trick or if not, then the 301.

Before doing the 301 redirect I would do a more extensive analysis of both of these pages. Perhaps with the tools that Moz Pro provides right here. There probably are unseen factors.

PS! The Google Support link above also answers your question of what is the best practice.