Welcome to the Q&A Forum

company.com (root)
USA - lang="en" | GSC target: USA (shows US site in SERPs for "companyname" search)
company.com/hungary
Hungary - lang="hu" | GSC target: Hungary (shows Hungarian site in SERPs for "companyname" search)
AWESOMENESS company.com/ireland
Ireland - lang="en" | GSC target: Ireland (shows US site (doh!) in SERPs "companyname" search)
NOT RIGHT! It is our theory [please weigh in!] that because we don't have a company.com/usa folder, the TLD targeting (EN) is overriding other English language sites in some manner.  In other words, the reason it's not overriding Hungary is because it's a different language. What must we do to get the Irish site ranked for "companyname" searches and to show by default in Ireland?

First, this is not a question about whether 301 redirects pass page rank. My question is that if your hreflang alternative page URL is a 301 redirect*, are there any downsides.  In all cases with our situation, the 301 redirect is single-hop and working. Tools, such as SEMRush seem to flag this as a non-canonical hreflang error, but I'm not able to find any cases where Google has suggested a redirecting hreflang is a problem. I'd appreciate any information on this issue before we invest extra time on a large international site. *In Drupal, there are scenarios where it's all but impossible to avoid having a 301 redirect in your hreflang alternate URL without significant custom work.

My client, in a large industrial sector, is trying to find or purchase good data for their industry as far as benchmarks for social engagement.  While the DIY tools have social trackers, many require you to connect to the account you want to measure - so competitive research is a non-starter. What would you use to build a spreadsheet of social engagement metrics from a set of, say, 10 competitors in a niche vertical (e.g.  industrial robotics?)

I have a potential client who doesn't seem to be using wildcard SSLs in a multi-site scenario (over 40 sites) - what I'm wondering is the scope of Google's inspection of a site's SSL in this case: https://www.domain.com (good to go) https://domain.com (certificate error) Will Googlebot/Google possibly consider the entire TLD insecure? Could the secured, www-version of the site end up with the "Site is not secure" message in the SERPs as well? Could this invisibly affect the client's rankings? PS:  Yes, I know that the right thing to do is go wildcard, but I need an answer to this before recommending a large purchase to them.

Working with a multi-location business with hundreds of locations, there is always a certain amount of churn (closures, new locations.)    In some cases, the business owners never claim listings, or claim them in only the major local business listings such as Yelp and Google Places. Does anyone know of a good post or discussion about how to do a "cascading mark as closed" which will make its way through the LBL ecosystem eventually?   In other words, is there a few upstream places to mark a business closed that will influence the consumers of their data feed? thanks!

We have a brand with a major website at ourbrand.com.   I'm using stand-ins for the actual brandname. The brand is a unique term, has 200 local offices with sites at ourbrand.com/locations/locationname, and is structured with best practices, and has a well built sitemap.xml.  The link profile is diverse and solid. There are very few crawl errors and no warnings in Google Webmaster central.  Each location has schema.org markup that has been checked with markup validation tools.  No matter what tool you use, and how you look at it t's obvious this is the brand site.  DA 51/100, PA 59/100. A rouge franchisee has broken their agreement and made their own site in a city on a different domain name, ourbrandseattle.com.  The site is clearly optimized for that city, and has a weak inbound link profile.  DA 18/100, PA 21/100.  The link profile has low diversity and generally weak.  They have no social media activity.  They have not linked to ourbrand.com <- my leading theory. **The problem is that this rogue site is OUT RANKING the brand site all over the USA on Bing.  **Even where it makes no sense at all.  We are using whitespark.ca to check our ranking remotely in other cities and try to remove the effects of local personalization. What should we do?   What have I missed?

This question is not about how to use SEOMOZ Link tools.  It's about the numbers themselves and how their fluctuations are causing confidence issues.... My client wants to track inbound followed links over time.  But as I understand it, this number will vary depending on the Linkscape crawling success (or even outages or partial crawls.)   In the past few reports, we've had wild fluctuations which have made them very nervous. If my client wants to track inbound followed links over time, what SEOMOZ metric should we use for the most reliable progress checks?

Hi all.. this is not a question about how this can be done but which is better for SEO. Franchises make up 8% of the USA small business market.  This is no small potatoes.  But everything about Google seems designed for the unique, stand-alone business (Places, Analytics, Adwords, Duplicate Content Rules, etc.)  ... I think about this issue a lot so wanted to put it to the community. Imagine a franchisor with 200 locations.  This company licenses its brand and business operations system - that's what a franchise is.  So each local franchisee starts out with a "content ready" website template which they are required to use for brand compliance. (Each local franchisee has a Google Place page and a Local Website in their territory.)Assuming each solution has the same number of local citations around 50% duplicate content on its services pages (e.g. branding text)... which of the following does Google like best? A single, customized CMS (e.g. Drupal) which places each franchisee site in a subfolder of the TLD.  Highly duplicated services pages are given canonical pointers to the main site's version.
domain.com/location A single, customized CMS (e.g. Drupal) which places each franchisee in a subdomain of the TLD.  Highly duplicated services pages are given canonical pointers to the main site's version. location.domain.com A multi-manager dashboard (e.g. ManageWP) which operates an individual Wordpress installs on a single server (dedicated self-install server, sites share IPs)
_localdomain.com _ A multi-manager dashboard which operates an individual Wordpress install on multiple, diverse servers (e.g. shared hosting on diverse hosts.)
localdomain.com I know that the best case would be for each franchisee individually to be so motivated to set up their own site and properly use brand elements, get links, etc. but this is impractical (trust me.)~~~~~~(*update 4/4/13 - I have written a blog post which describes what I think is the ideal franchise web marketing & SEO program and would welcome additional comments!)

This question is entirely in the whitehat realm... Let's say you've encountered a great blog - with a strong blogroll of 40 sites. The 40-site blogroll is interesting to you for any number of reasons, from link building targets to simply subscribing in your feedreader.  Right now, it's tedious to extract the URLs from the site.  There are some "save all links" tools, but they are also messy. Are there any good tools that will a) allow you to grab the blogroll (only) of any site into a list of URLs  (yeah, ok, it might not be perfect since some sites call it "sites I like" etc.) b) same, but export as OPML so you can subscribe. Thanks! Scott