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Hi Bernadette, I completely agree with that translation being human. Your are correct it wasn't google translate messing with the crawl, but it was a great argument to get removed Where in screaming frog are you able to crawl slower? I have dug around the program and can't find the option.

Hi, I don't personally have any case studies of sites experiencing a drop in organic traffic on mobile which can be traced to a pop-up interstitial (maybe in part because my clients don't tend to use pop-ups in that way). When it comes to user-triggered content, I think it depends on a couple things, including how the user arrives at the pop-up and how the pop-up is implemented technically. Google's view of a site's mobile-friendliness is based on the result of a crawl, and so for instance if it's an event that isn't possible to trigger as a crawler, it shouldn't be a problem. I see it being similar to the use of JS navigation for country selection - it becomes an issue when (for instance) Googlebot can't get past a JS popup or drop-down because it can't click on a link to select a country option or to close the window. This type of situation is often the case for the sorts of popup that occur when the page loads, giving an annoying user experience, rather than because a user has chosen to click on a link to provide an email address (for example). Google have also made clear that the primary concern is around it being a poor user experience, rather than a technical issue. So I would see it as: Interstitial ad or other pop-up that appears on page load = bad. Some sort of non-disruptive data entry box like an email form that only appears when a user chooses to open it and which can be bypassed by a crawler = ok. However! That's just my theory, I don't have data at the moment to prove or disprove that hypothesis. I would love to hear from other people who have other theories or any practical examples of this. Also, if you're not sure how Google perceives a given page, run it through the Mobile-friendly testing tool and they'll tell you.

Hi Sean, Thank you! I'll keep an eye out for their response.

Hi Sean again, Thank you, and I can appreciate putting requests like this through the help@ email. I'll note that for the future. I'll keep an eye out for the response to the ticket.

Chad, Chris makes a good point re the leaders in ranking and what are they doing. I would also look for chinks in armor. But, first I would stop what you are doing and back up: Do you have a sales funnel? Do you have a serious KWA? Do you have a sitemap predicated on KWA and UI/UX (Factoring in user habits? Likely user habits if the company is new?). To me url structure comes to a degree as a result of these items. Once you have those, typically on a site of any size (we have particular expertise in the tourist industries on our dev team) you will have certain issues that you will need to make decisions on based on the clients needs, ui/ux, best seo that really are business decisions and you will likely get right - if you take it in order IMO. But that said, the structure I follow is based on some basic SEO rules - four clicks max, four clicks max, keep it simple for the bot (they all can't be Roger), then: What are the important business KWs I must rank for (destination first or event first or mode first, etc.) I would follow that down the line. Personally, I have never searched on Tour company (ies) nor have I searched on "destinations" or "Sights" so I would not have that in my architecture unless the KWA showed I should. So, instead of destinations for example what are they looking for specifically and can I get that in a menu/ sub-directory etc. Then follow your brain. Sorry that I cannot give you a do it like this: A/B/C but from the fact you are looking I think you will get this and make it happen. My opinion is that after domain what is the first thing they are looking for that is a category then what specifically within that and then other data for a decision. To me you tell the search engine that you are at my domain...this is the most important keyword here, this is next, and this is the final destination that is rock solid. Hope this helps, Robert

I submitted my site map to Bing Webmaster tools yesterday and it's still flagged as 'pending'. Does it normally take that long?

It's not the end of the world, but definitely more expensive. As you probably know, the folder microsite gets most of the root domain's authority, while a sub-domain doesn't get anything at all, or just a fraction of the authority; therefore, you'll need to invest more in content, links, social factors, etc.

That would be having it twice, I would not recommend that. However that's debateable. IMO one mention per keyword in the URL is plenty. For regional links focus on building links locally (by area/regional physical location) to each page.

Maybe Google crawled your site just while you were fiddling with it? With my sites I have seen test pages get indexed & wonky pages show up for a short while until the next indexing.

I sometimes find that a subdomain (e.g. theme.regionalsite.com) doesn't index as well well either. I haven't tried that approach for quite some time though.