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Hi

Mozs crawler aka the RogerBot does obeys the robots.txt and Moz states that under the help section here.
Looks like the problem you are having is connected to your robots.txt statements/directives.
In order to block a directory **and its content,**you need to use the category name following with a forward slash (even if you have a redirect from xxx.com/search to xxx.com/search/)
(Check out Google robots.txt guidelines)

if you want to block the directory "search" and its content, use Disallow : /search/ (no need for asterisk at the end)
if you use "Disallow: /hc/en-us/search/" (again, no need for asterisk) you will block all the content under xxx.com/hc/en-us/search/
So, for example if you have content that you want to block under xxx.com/hc/fr-FR/search/ it will not be blocked because your statement/directive limits it to a very specific "search" directory which is located under "en-US".

What is it that you want to block exactly?

Recently i a had related issue with a top ranking website for very competitive queries.
Unfortunately the product department made some changes to the content (UI only) without consulting SEO department. The only worth to mention change they made was to move the first two paragraphs into a collapsible DIV showing only the first 3 lines + a "read more" button. The text in collapsible div was crawlable and visible to SE's. (also it's worth to mention that these paragrap
But the site lost its major keywords positions 2-3 days later.

Of-course we reverted the changes back but still two months later, the keywords are very slowly moving back to their "original" positions.

For years i believed in what Google stated, that you can use collapsible content if you are not trying to inject keywords or trying to inflate the amount of content etc. Not anymore.

I believe that placing the content under a collapsible div element, we are actually signaling google that this piece of content is not that important (that's why it is hidden, right? Otherwise it should be in plain sight). So why we should expect from google to take this content as a major part of our contents ranking factor weight.

Hi Jacek,

I think that i have only partially understood your question.. 
And for the part that i did: Its a question covered many times by Google officials including  Matt couple of years a go.
"GA is not used as a ranking signal/factor in any capacity" so it will not directly effect your SEO score. (however many SEOs including me do not completely agree with this)

Your hreflang annotation looks correct, however just make sure that:
1. do not forget self referencing (make sure that in domain.fr you do include the hreflang-FR code.)
2. do not forget confirmation linking (if the "fr" domain includes "de" hreflang, "de" domain must include "fr" hreflang)

Google takes hreflang annotation seriously and it also lets you know by sending you a Google Search Console message if there is a problem with the paramaeters (for example no self referencing). What you ask does make a lot of sense, if your content between these domains is completely identical but translated, you do want to signal this to google. Serving the content in the right language to the user within the search results before the user enters your site is "the" user-friendly approach. And that's what makes it valuable for SEO.

been there done that
but you should not have problems finding references for that all over the web..
Although i must admit, most of my knowledge on GTM is from Simo's blog.and this one can help you out too.
As i have mentioned earlier, as long as your user is coming form a browser newer than ie7 you should e fine.

cheers

Jacob, as Logan wrote it looks like the canonicals are good to go.. (i just did a small sampling though..)
Not sure how your URLs are set but if the "sku=XXX" parameters are used only for color variations of a specific product, then you can use the URL paramater setting in Google Search Console.

This will make your life easier, and it will ensure that no duplicate content is crawled by Google. But URL parameters must be used with caution

good luck
Yossi

Actually it is perfectly fine to add the GTM code snippet within the element.
Also this is what majority of WP users do since you do not really have a convenient way to add hooks at the beginning of a body tag in WordPress themes.
The only problem that you might have is with ie7 or older browsers (which is probably around %0.01 visitors anyway)

good luck

I think it will be hard to discuss this with a paragraph or two.
I would suggest watching Rand's whiteboard Friday video.
Even-though he is not specifically talking about "how to target local terms on different pages" he makes very good suggestions on how to "optimize" a page to rank for local-terms, which should be your start point.

Definitely Google is smart enough, but if you leave this in Google's hands you will be out ranked by other optimized local results.

Best
Yossi

Hi Rebekkah,

Sounds like you already understand the pros&cons of using GWT country targeting.
Obviously it is hard to make any recommendations without first knowing your niche and auditing the off-page SEO metrics of your competitors, since the big G acts in its own way per niche. There might be some indicators which will make your life harder or easier to rank well for a variety of keywords in US and India at the same time.
I would suggest making an off-page audit to understand where your well ranking competitors are getting their links from (where are they hosted, what is their targeted audiance, what kind of social signals they are getting, what language is their anchor keywords?  etc..)

Hi!

Not sure if i understood how you implemented the canonical element on your pages, but it sounds like you have only put the canonical code to what you call "good page"

The scenario should be like this:
1. You have 3 pages with similar/exact content.
2. Obviously you want to index only one of them and in your case it is the one without the parameters ("good page")
3. You need to go ahead and implement the canonical elements in the following way:

• page-1:  http://example.examples.com/brand/brand1  (you do not have to, but if it makes it ieasier for you you can use self canonical.)
• page-2:  http://example.examples.com/brand/brand1?show=false  (canonical to page-1)
• page-3:  http://example.examples.com/brand/brand1?show=true (canonical page-1)

PS. Google best practice suggests that you should never use robots.txt to de-index a page from the search results. In case you decide to remove certain pages completely from the search results, the best practice is to 404 them and use Google Search console to signal google that these pages are no longer available. But if you implement the canonical element as described above, you will have no problems.

Best

Yossi

Hi Jay

Actually ScreamingFrog does that perfectly. It depends how you have configured the tool.
I can successfully see all external images within the report. (see attached screenshot)

Have you checked your spider configuration?

DfBkDti.jpg?1

I have been using the SEO PowerSuite for several years now and i can only say good things about it.
Looks like you are not really using it to its full potential or maybe haven't figured out yet how to use it correctly?

I use MOZ and PowerSuite daily for years and i use them both for different tasks. 
Every tool does something better than the other..

For example i find that RankTracker is the best way (painlessly) to identify what URLs are ranking for which keywords that you find through Google Search Console.