Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Manoj

Chances are that it's the delay between the spider bot crawling the website and the index being updated.

When (most) bots crawl a page, they take a cache (spiders' copy) of the page and process that copy at a later time. Thus there is a delay between when a spider crawls a page and the search results being updated.

You may find at times that the meta description isn't the same as the one you've written anyhows, Google does sometimes create it's own description to display in the search results, based upon some of the actual page content.

I'd suggest resubmitting your updated sitemap.xml and waiting a while longer, chances are all will be sorted shortly.

Regards

Simon

Thank you, you're most welcome.

You're welcome Joe.

Regarding those links that you mention;  they could potentially cause an issue such as link spamming, which can happen when two websites send each other a lot of reciprocal links.

(Simpler solution towards the end) ~ My advice would be to remove them and make it clear on the website that those on the UK site, in the US, can visit the US site and vice versa.

As some landing pages will no doubt be deep pages (i.e. not the homepage) perhaps a widget type of box in a prominent position would help to direct visitors to the other site if they are on the wrong site at the time.  EG. "If you're a visitor from the US then visit our site especially for our US customers" or such like.

With some clever coding (and use of nofollow for such links) you could get it to work that when clicked on, the visitor goes to the corresponding page on the other site.

Or alternatively, an easier solution, make sure that all those links are "nofollow" links so that search spiders don't follow them, reducing the risk of a penalty.

Regards

Simon

Sounds like a good plan, automation can certainly save a lot of time, will just need to keep an eye on the titles and descriptions that are generated as that human touch can go a long way.

Tip: make sure that the titles and descriptions tie in closely to the main page content. If they do then you've built a very handy tool there

Regards

Simon

Hi Aran

With Search, 'duplicate' can also mean 'very similair' as well as actually the same, hence why they've been flagged up as duplicate, which I think you already get from your addition of 'Almost'.

What I'd suggest is to make sure that the Page Content is noticeably different on every page. Still relevant to that page's product, just different enough from the other pages so that it's not classed as duplicate.

That way, the overall pages will most likely not be seen as duplicate pages, thus avoiding any duplicate content penalties.

Could also consider making use of the Canonical tag where pages are very similar with no real chance of them being made more unique.

If there is any way to distinguish some of the page titles and descriptions further then go for it, for some of them make use of the 65 to 70 available character space in the title.

Hope that helps.

Regards

Simon

You're welcome Gary.

If you'd like to provide your IT department with even more reassurance (via Rackspace US), check out the first paragraph of  http://www.rackspace.com/apps/support/portal/1164  which shows that in the US, you can have your domain(s) registered with one registrar and your website hosted with another.

Regards

Simon

Hi Gary

Yes you can, domain & nameserver settings are global, so you can have the same kind of configuration that you have in the UK in many different countries.

Some hosting providers may not like this though as they'd prefer everything to be hosted through and done with them.

Check out  http://www.godaddy.com/tlds/info.aspx?tld=info&ci=16860  and  http://help.godaddy.com/article/668?locale=en&app_hdr=0  which shows that with GoDaddy you can certainly do this.

Hope that helps,

Regards

Simon

You're welcome Josh. Asking these kind of questions on a forum such as this one is a great way to learn more about SEO, so well done there.

There is a beginners guide to SEO which you may find helpful, it can be found at http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo

The old saying that Content is King still rings true, so having a content plan would be a good step. It should be seen as an investment in the website and the business rather than an expense.

The SEOmoz tools are great, especially the Competitive Analysis tool.

Best of luck,

Simon

Hi Joshua

These 50 domains that are on redirect won't hold any SEO value as they are, except if any are new redirects that recently hosted a reputable website themselves. If any were to host a new unique website with their own SEO quality attributes such as inbound links and then linked into the main website, it may only provide some temporary benefit as that would be likely be flagged up as link farming and would be more costly and time consuming than the following suggestion, so I really don't recommend doing anything such as this. Thought I'd mention it as something to avoid.

My suggestion is to not do anything with these domains other than continue to redirect them if they are desired to be kept. Instead, focus on improving the on-page and off-page SEO of the main website through investing in unique relevant interesting valuable content which in turn can form the basis of obtaining more good quality links.

Also consider some online and offline PR, plus further distribution of your content through channels such as Social. Hope that helps.

Regards

Simon

Hi Urban Fox

That's a good answer from Alan.

There is a blog post at  http://www.seomoz.org/blog/geolocation-international-seo-faq  which is well worth a read. It's 2 1/2 years old however still very relevant.

Also, a Matt Cutts video worth a view can be found at  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ets7nHOV1Yo

Regards

Simon

There is a Feedback tab over on the far left of the screen when logged into SEOmoz, not easy to spot as it's in a strange location.

Agree with you that it would be a helpful feature to have, good luck with the request

Agree it would be good to see a historical record of these changes over time.

I believe the only way to do this at present is to save the pdf exports or manually record them each week (or month is usually fine, weekly is a little too often for most). A tedious manual process, though would get the job done

Hi Sebastian

SEOmoz's tool that can show you all of those plus more is named 'Competitive Domain Analysis'.

It also shows 'followed linking root domains' and linking c-blocks'.

Is a great tool to spend some time using and analyzing.

Regards

Simon

Thank you for saying so Stefano, much apperciated

Thank you for the kind comment, much appreciated. Some great advice there from yourself also, spot-on

That's right, without a trial and just a free account, you'll need those 500 Moz points to be able to fully participate in the Pro Q&A forum. It's a great forum

Hi there, your SEOmoz membership is showing as Pro. Do you have an active 30 day trial then? The benefit is being able to see the answers that people leave and to be able to fully contribute yourself Regards, Simon

That was a good test. Then chances are your default natural rankings have gone down. If it's not personal search causing it then, look at some some of my other suggestions above. It's likely to be a number of different factors which some research and corresponding changes to your site could do the trick

Hi Joe

A good question.  You'll find most of your answer in a video by Matt Cutts at Google  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ets7nHOV1Yo

As you are running different Top Level Domains (TLDs) then chances are that your websites and content won't be classed as duplicate, however saying that, if they are both hosted in the same country, e.g. the UK, then potentially they could be classed as duplicate, with only one of them showing up in search results.

Your best bet would be to Host the .co.uk in the UK and the .com in the US. That way, it's more likely that neither site would be classed as duplicate.

Regards

Simon

Hi there,

Nope, a duplicate website can be avoided. For the French version, you could have a totally separate website, with the content in French. No need to redirect the site, it could be hosted in France as a separate website. As the content would be in a different language and hosted in a different country, it wouldn't be duplicate so long as it's with a reputable hosting provider and truly is in French.

Alternatively, you could host the whole website on the one .com domain, providing different languages within the one website. Content Management Systems can certainly help, http://www.episerver.com/en/Products/Content/ can provide websites in different languages.

However if the content is to be different, not just a translation, then you're better off hosting a completely separate website in each country that you choose.

Regards

Simon