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Great. Thanks Sean. I wasn't sure. Will send an email to help@moz.com

In the old version of Moz, it was possible to export a historical link report for entire duration of the campaign. Now it only shows 3 months worth of data.

Is it possible to export the data for more than 3 months and if so, how is that done?

Yes, we've had it set up since March 2013. We do have Google UK data and competitor data for the whole period. Just not Google US for some reason.

Hi. I've pulled a historical ranking report but there is missing data for my site for Google US pre 22nd April 2013. Google UK ranking data is available and so is competitor data.

Any ideas?

Hi David,

Thanks for your response. That makes perfect sense.

I assumed that to be the case but thought it was worth checking before making any changes.

I suppose by adding appropriate hreflang="x" mark-up combined with the geo-targeting of root domain and subfolders - that should be enough to inform search engines of our intended geographical targets.

Strangely there wasn't a lot of information out there about this specific question - so thanks again.

Yusuf

I understand that it's possible to target both domains/subdomains and subfolders to different geographical regions in GWT.

However, I was wondering about the effect of targeting the domain to a single country, say the UK. Then targeting subfolders to other regions (say the US and France).

e.g.

www.domain.com -> UK
www.domain.com/us -> US
www.domain.com/fr -> France

etc

Would it be better to leave the main domain without a geographical target but set geo-targeting for the subfolders? Or would it be best to set geo-targeting for both the domain and subfolders.

Hi Everett,

Thanks for your response.

I also believed that the rel=canonical merge the link profiles but so far all the evidence I've seen suggests that it doesn't.

Firstly - Jon Mueller from Google stated that the rel=canonical tag doesn't merge the link profile. That's talked about here.

http://moz.com/community/q/quick-rel-canonical-link-juice-question

Secondly, if I look at some examples, you'd expect pages with rel=canonical tags to have zero authority etc. reported for page alternatives in Open Site Explorer.

e.g. on the ASOS website there is a link to the men's section which uses a query string parameter.

http://www.asos.com/men/?via=top

The canonical url is

http://www.asos.com/men/

Both report different levels of authority. If the link profiles were merged, would you not expect either the same levels of authority reported or the non-canonical version to report no authority?

I understand that Moz tools don't work like Google so I'd like to hear from someone who can explain this.

Thanks,

Yusuf

Hi

I've often wondered about this - whether to use a 301 or leave pages as they are and use the rel=canonical tag.

I would think that a 301 from the duplicate to preferred page would be best. This would mean that any inbound links will pass juice to the preferred page (i.e. site.com/category2/subcategory1/product1). The rel=canonical tag, as far as I know, does not merge the link profile of the duplicate pages.

However, depending on the skill of your developers, other rewrite/redirect rules on your site and your CMS - the rel=canonical might be the only feasible method.

This page explains it very nicely.

http://moz.com/blog/301-redirect-or-relcanonical-which-one-should-you-use

I agree with Jane. Unless there are reasons why the whole site needs to be secure, it makes more sense for just the areas where sensitive information is being submitted to be SSL encrypted.

http: requests are processed more quickly than https: ones due to the SSL handshake required to produce the cryptographic parameters for the user's session - so your site would be a little quicker if you weren't using SSL.

However, if you do decide to use http: rather than https: for the product & category pages like Jane has suggested - you'd need to ensure that the https: versions of these pages redirect to http:... again to avoid duplicate content.

Hi Jason,

It's fine to 301 redirect from http: to https: and it's quite common for sites that use SSL. It's exactly the same principle as redirecting from a non-www to www (e.g. http://example.com to http://www.example.com) - which is considered to be good practice. But there should only be a single redirect. So you should ensure that http://example.com redirects to https://www.example.com without first redirecting to http://www.example.com.

I would also make sure that all pages (not just the homepage) redirect from http: to https: too to ensure there are no duplicate content issues on the rest of the site.

Hi Rajesh

A rewrite is not a redirect. So whether it's a 301 etc is irrelevant.

Rewrites work without redirecting the user elsewhere and simply convert one URL structure to another.

Might be a good idea to talk to a developer about it because rewrites can cause issues with other pages or other rewrite rules if not implemented correctly.

Hi Jenny

jStrong is correct. Subscript (_{) and superscript (^{) tags are not going to have any effect (positive or negative) on SEO.}}

My company has various offices around the world and we're in local search for most of them. This was done by submitting the site to Google Places for each location, including pages on the site for each office with a map, telephone number etc - all using structured data (http://schema.org/PostalAddress).

Google Places verifies your physical address by sending a postcard in the mail with a PIN which allows you to verify the existence of your business at that address so it's difficult to abuse.

Karl is right. It would be over-optimised. But most likely is that the homepage has much greater page authority than this other page which is why Google has decided to rank it instead.

It always amazes me when clients ask for stuff when they don't even know why they would need it. I'm not sure it's even possible to link them, and even if it was....I don't see what value it could possibly provide without all the systems that the tags are intended allowing for integration between them.

The value of linking Webmaster Tools and Analytics is obvious. There's stuff happening off-site that you might want to know about (inbound links, impressions on search, etc) and have integrated into your analytics report...fair enough.

The same is not true of Google Tag Manager, which simply allows you to manage the various tags easily. These tags are normally related to allowing other systems to do stuff (such as collect data). It is these systems that need to be integrated, if possible (e.g. Analytics and Adwords).

I don't think you need to be overly concerned about this if you're already using rel="canonical".

We regularly receive inbound links with these parameters included in them.

The reason why this happens is that we included these parameters to track some of our email and social campaigns and sometimes people find these links and link to them. These are perfectly natural, just that the people that link to them might not know about these parameters and may think they are part of the URL and the links may not work without them.

Hi Susan,

I'm not aware of being able to "link" Tag Manager and Webmaster Tools, but am also not sure why you would need to.

What were you hoping to achieve?

Hi  Vakantiehuizen,

If you're referring to an inbound link or page being indexed containing query string parameters e.g. example.com?utm_source=x, then yes...these may cause issues with duplicate content and SEO. If you have pages with these parameters on your site then you should use the rel="canonical" tag to specify the canonical URL that you'd like Google to rank. Also, you should never include these parameters for internal links on your site.

Although I don't know what you mean when you say "UTM tag link is not a natural link". Could you explain?

Hi Raj

Chris is right. You'll be fine as long as you show the same content to both users and search engines. Presenting different content to users and search engines is what is commonly referred to as cloaking.

What you're referring to here is essentially a rewrite of the URL to make it search friendly. This is a common technique on sites using, for example, Apache's mod rewrite extension (http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_rewrite.html).

The only issue is if search engines index both the search friendly and non-search-friendly URLs so I'd recommend placing a rel="canonical" tag on that page referencing the search friendly URL.

Thanks for your comments Gianluca.

I think Google's guidelines are somewhat ambiguous. Here it does state that "if you're providing the same content to the same users on different URLs (for instance, if both example.de/ and example.com/de/ show German language content for users in Germany), you should pick a preferred version and redirect (or use the rel=canonical link element) appropriately."

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en

I think you've explained it nicely though.