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It would be good if the original poster could return and confirm (or otherwise) that the site runs on WordPress. I am not sure that you can easily edit the archives pages headers to show the NOINDEX tag other than to edit the WordPress header.php file. The latter could get replaced when WordPress is updated. Certain themes make it easy to add your own custom tags through a configuration menu.
I had a situation at a different site that required me to connect my GA account.
My business website's GA profile used to be linked from my personal Google Account. After incorporating as a company, I created a new Google Account and created a fresh GA profile. So I had two tags. When using that other tool, I accidentally connected my personal GA account whose tag was no longer on my business site and it didn't seem to do anything.
It was just something to consider if you were in such a situation.
Sounds like a WordPress site. If so, a plugin such as WordPress SEO by Yoast would have the setting to be unchecked (Taxonomies and XML Sitemaps).
Do you possibly have more than one GA account and the site has tags of the second account, i.e. other than the one you are trying to connect?
Directories are fine, if they are terribly relevant to the niche and real people use them. They should be added slowly, no more than one per week. This particular offer, therefore, is a waste of money and a possible risk.
I cannot replicate it, but I have used only two of my five available slots. Do you have spare slots?
URLs would help.
Your articles are a major suspect and links another - Panda and Penguin. Yes, algorithmic ranking drops rather than a manual penalty.
This is a friend's tool that has some more options.
http://incredibill.me/htaccess-rewrite-wizard
My preference is for the ccTLD if there will be a commitment to optimise that domain - usually the smaller countries are sales offices without a proper marketing complement, so they assume that "head office" will look after the website. Head Office usually doesn't have any budget to cater to the subsidiaries, so the ccTLD will be left to its fate.
Hence your choice of company.com/Country will do.
While Bing is not too important, note that its Webmaster tools has an option to mark off such country folders as being different countries. My suspicion is that Google automatically picks up such cues.
Being in Australia I tend to get a good share of multi-national SEO challenges.
Larger, established brands can break all the rules concerning TLDs because they get local authority through their local links and citations. A current client is a major bank with a presence in 31 countries. They just happen to be my bank, so I have observed them over 20 years. They started as a .com with an Australian emphasis and were multi-national for a while. Then they shut down some of the foreign offices. They then decided to populate their .com.au domain and left a complete, parallel copy on the original .com. Then they resumed their global focus and did NOT use their TLDs in those countries because a handful were not in their possession. These are the obscure countries that haven't signed up to the international copyright conventions. Branding is paramount for them, so no amount of SEO advice could budge them.
So their international locations take the format example.com/countryname. Does that work for them? Of course it does. I was in Singapore where I tested for myself from a local PC, so as to remove any hint of my personal history. They do very well. Despite having the duplicate content in Australia, they do very well among their peers.
A former client who has offices in over 60 countries also started as a .com and when they got more serious in the US they realised that they did not rank at all in that country. They had the usual IT-centric excuse not to make many sites, so I left that for them to resolve internally. Is sales more important than some technician's convenience? I hope they got that point. I did recommend a local micro site for the US that would display US-centric customer stories and local news events.
The takeaways here are that local content and local links can overcome any advantages/disadvantages of a gTLD for a multi-national site.
You have to remove the images via Google Webmaster Tools. This support document has the instructions: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/181721?hl=en
My preference is for the ccTLD if there will be a commitment to optimise that domain - usually the smaller countries are sales offices without a proper marketing complement, so they assume that "head office" will look after the website. Head Office usually doesn't have any budget to cater to the subsidiaries, so the ccTLD will be left to its fate.
Hence your choice of company.com/Country will do.
While Bing is not too important, note that its Webmaster tools has an option to mark off such country folders as being different countries. My suspicion is that Google automatically picks up such cues.
Being in Australia I tend to get a good share of multi-national SEO challenges.
Larger, established brands can break all the rules concerning TLDs because they get local authority through their local links and citations. A current client is a major bank with a presence in 31 countries. They just happen to be my bank, so I have observed them over 20 years. They started as a .com with an Australian emphasis and were multi-national for a while. Then they shut down some of the foreign offices. They then decided to populate their .com.au domain and left a complete, parallel copy on the original .com. Then they resumed their global focus and did NOT use their TLDs in those countries because a handful were not in their possession. These are the obscure countries that haven't signed up to the international copyright conventions. Branding is paramount for them, so no amount of SEO advice could budge them.
So their international locations take the format example.com/countryname. Does that work for them? Of course it does. I was in Singapore where I tested for myself from a local PC, so as to remove any hint of my personal history. They do very well. Despite having the duplicate content in Australia, they do very well among their peers.
A former client who has offices in over 60 countries also started as a .com and when they got more serious in the US they realised that they did not rank at all in that country. They had the usual IT-centric excuse not to make many sites, so I left that for them to resolve internally. Is sales more important than some technician's convenience? I hope they got that point. I did recommend a local micro site for the US that would display US-centric customer stories and local news events.
The takeaways here are that local content and local links can overcome any advantages/disadvantages of a gTLD for a multi-national site.
This linking isn't black-hat -- it is simply old-school SEO with the use of a Links page, which has long been noted as a red flag. Note that the links page shows a grey bar for the Toolbar PR, suggesting that Google has noted it as a links page. Most of those sites are off-topic for this hair salon, so the link juice is wasted and the page has become irrelevant for its ostensible purpose.
I cannot see 6611111.com ranking for "stop smoking" in the first 400 results, You might be seeing personalised results, so use an incognito browser and clear your cookies and cache. Log out of all Google services before running the search.
Yes, doing a 301 redirect from your .nl to the .com site will be fine, but why are you doing that?
Are you going to advertise in Holland and show the .nl URL? If so, users might be unsettled if they end up at the .com site. If it is just 301'd and that's all you do, then hardly anyone other than a person guessing your URL will even use it. You might not even rank in Holland.
There are no bad SEO points for the .com site, but you could be losing the chance to rank on Google.nl. I don't think Google.nl will note the 301 and therefore show the .com as well as a well-SEO'd .nl site.
You could put English content on the .nl site, preferably a rewritten version of the .com site. The key is to get .nl links to the .nl domain (if not 301'd). Make it a Dutch site as much as you can - get listed in Dutch directories, get Dutch citations, etc.
I recommend getting to know in advance other people who will be going to the conference. You can ask in the community forum, on Twitter or Facebook some months in advance. This will enable you to seek them out in person and will avoid the common "hazard" of meeting someone with different professional interests.
I had a situation at a different site that required me to connect my GA account.
My business website's GA profile used to be linked from my personal Google Account. After incorporating as a company, I created a new Google Account and created a fresh GA profile. So I had two tags. When using that other tool, I accidentally connected my personal GA account whose tag was no longer on my business site and it didn't seem to do anything.
It was just something to consider if you were in such a situation.
URLs would help.
Your articles are a major suspect and links another - Panda and Penguin. Yes, algorithmic ranking drops rather than a manual penalty.
8/29/2008 Working as an in-house SEO for a large corporate site can be fun. However, if you happen to land such a job I encourage you to focus on the fun, as the non-fun bits could wear you down. I had previously worked on nearly 2000 small-to-medium websites each of which was probably small enough to fit on a portable hard drive. Most SEOs would have worked on a similar mix of sites.Large compani...