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Hello,

We do have a client with a site in multiple versions (one domain per country). French and Spanish versions work really fine, but the problem comes up with the .com and .co.uk versions.

This is my hreflang piece of code:

When I go to Google.co.uk and search the exact match domain keyword "how much cost an app", I only find the howmuchcostanapp.com domain (1st or 2nd page) instead of howmuchcostanapp.co.uk. The UK one is not appearing! This is very strange. I have spent a lot of time trying to solve this, but I don't know what else to do.

Thanks a lot in advance for your comments and help!

I analyzed the domain health and it seems ok!!

Guys, I finally decided to create a small site (free hosting, a couple of texts from wayback machine,...) for this domain in order to start increasing the DA again, and I will place a couple of nice links to my money site once this is set up. Will all those links, in a couple of weeks I expect some results

I will update you about my experience!

Luis

Hello guys,

I found an expired domain with inbound links from 41 different root domains, almost all of them from relevant sources. I have 2 ideas in my mind:

A) I am thinking about buying this expired domain and place a 301 redirect to a post in my blog who talks about a similar subject.Relevance: let's say the content of the expired domain is about "horses wallpapers" and the content of my site is about "horse transport". Not the same, but a post in my blog could talk about "top 10 horse wallpapers". Do you see what I mean?

B) Contact all the webmasters with broken links, alert them and expect they are nice and place a nice link to the post in my blog talking about "top 10 horse wallpapers".

What do you think? Should I take A or B? Any other idea?

I added a picture with the Domain Rank of the broken links

Thanks a lot !!!

Luis

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Donna,

Andy has been very specific about this: "WITHOUT it being a massive manual job" hehe thanks for supporting my answer.

Luis

Hello Andy,

1. Try this: http://webdesign.about.com/od/htaccess/ht/redirect-an-entire-site-using-htaccess.htm

2. Second/faster solution. You could add this line of code to your .htacess file (and all the current "404's users" will go to the homepage):

ErrorDocument 404 / 

But pay attention... 404's are perfectly normal if the page no longer exists, for user experience you should only ever use a 301 redirect if the page that no longer exists is going to a equal page.. i.e about cars to cars, about rabbits to rabbits. Maybe the only solution is creating a 404 specific landing page for this (with links to different sections of your site)

Hope this helps,

Luis

Hello Justin,

https://www.zenory.com.au It's OK

https://www.zenory.com Not OK

https://www.zenory.co.nz Not OK

Luis

Hello Happy SEO,

Two options (please, test only 1 at a time):

1. Stop the SEO Ultimate (don't delete it). Try this plugin https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-no-category-base/ and let us know if it works, and if there's no compatibility problem with Yoast plugin.
2. Stop the SEO Ultimate (don't delete it). Add this piece of code to the .htacess file of your wordpress to by-pass the category folder:

<code>RedirectMatch 301 ^/[^/]+/([^/]+)/?$ /$1</code> 

Hope this helps,

Luis

Hi Justin,

Nope, it's not implemented properly. For your three domains I see the 3 hreflang language specifications is the same "en-us".

You can see this by checking the source code of all of them.

Luis

Hi Gary, what's up?

I found this video from Matt Cutts from a year ago: https://youtu.be/zupIbMyMfBI but I don't know if it will answer all your questions.

Regards,

Luis

Hello John,

Ok, a little misunderstanding here! Remember first of all that I'm only trying to help/advice you but I don't know your domain, your site and what you may have in mind hehe.

If you read my first answer, I said "the best option". Both options were good, but in my case, I prefer to put a 404 page instead of sending the users to the homepage (with no explanation). Again, this is only a little improvement in terms of UX but in terms of SEO both options work fine.

It's all I can say!

Luis

Hello Happy SEO,

Two options (please, test only 1 at a time):

1. Stop the SEO Ultimate (don't delete it). Try this plugin https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-no-category-base/ and let us know if it works, and if there's no compatibility problem with Yoast plugin.
2. Stop the SEO Ultimate (don't delete it). Add this piece of code to the .htacess file of your wordpress to by-pass the category folder:

<code>RedirectMatch 301 ^/[^/]+/([^/]+)/?$ /$1</code> 

Hope this helps,

Luis

Hello Justin,

1. Could you replace your current hreflang declaration with this piece of code at your 3 different domains? (no more x-default setting)

SEE IMAGE 1

2. Could you update the language declaration on top of the source code at your 3 domains? Pay attention, only one per domain!

SEE IMAGE 2

Please, change this and let's wait for some results!

I hope this will solve the problem,

Luis

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Hello,

Here it goes:

• Google has stated that microformats don’t directly affect SEO, but they’ve also implied that removing ambiguity about the meaning of certain content could improve the propensity of search engines to find, index and rank content. So, here the answer is YES
• Dublin Core is a kind of a duplicate of standard HTML meta tags and may be considered by Google as keyword stuffing and scamming. So, the Dublin Core is a kind of abortive SEO work. If you have HTML meta tags, don't bother with DC meta data. So, here the answer is NO
• Geo meta tags are used when you are targeting specific region for Search engine optimization. Geo meta tags shows specific location for targeting. So, here the answer is YES, specially if you do local SEO

Hope this helps!

Luis

Donna,

Andy has been very specific about this: "WITHOUT it being a massive manual job" hehe thanks for supporting my answer.

Luis

Hello Happy SEO,

Mmmm sorry but I don't understand why you are using 2 plugins. Could you please be more specific?

Thank you

Luis

Hello Joshua,

Well, I think your Facebook Ads campaigns need probably a deep study to understand what is working or not (I mean, maybe what you think is not working is not the main issue).Some quick questions in the air:

• What's the goal of your Facebook Ads campaigns?
• How much is your monthly/daily budget for this?
• What's your product?

In London you have 37% of the population from out of the UK (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_in_London). To be honest, I guess a lot of people in London speak both English and a foreign language (and have set this in Facebook settings), so your segmentation is wide and is including all these people. If you really want to exclude these users try this solution:

1. Create an audience (Aud1) to target all the people you DON'T want: people who speak Polish, Romanian, Russian, etc.).
2. Create a second audience and exclude the previous audience (Aud2) from your Facebook Ads campaigns.

Good luck !

Hello Nechemia,

Please, do the following:

1. Login at your wordpress
2. Left menu > SEO > Titles & Metas > Taxonomies
3. Please check the status of the Meta Robots for categories.

Luis

Hello Jonathan,

Make sure that your pricing (or any other) page content is larger than the faq page content, and remember to use the rule of <70% of repeated content. Let's see this with 2 examples:

• Your pricing (or any other) page content is about 200 words and your faq content about 50 words (20% of the pricing page content would be the same than your faq pricing)
• Your pricing (or any other) page content is about 200 words and your faq content about 500 words (71% of the pricing page content would be the same than your faq pricing --> so, probably you get duplicate issues)

You can check if you have duplicate content issues at any time with Moz tools

Hope it helps!

Luis

Nechemia,

The problem was not a 404, but a technical issue coming from your plugins, css, etc. Now, after checking again things seem working much better. As Dirk said, you only have to wait for rankings coming back but its not necessary to go back to the old page.... Make sure you clean and optimize your code in order to have your rankings back sooner.

And please, remember to click on "I like this" if you are happy with all our answers and help, and please select an answer like the Good Answer to close this Q&A.

Regards,

Luis

Hello Marco,

I guess what you have seen is the SERP snippet of Google Hotels (https://www.google.com/hotelfinder).

Take a look at this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3Fjnp7fdZM

I hope my answer was helpful

Luis