Welcome to the Q&A Forum

My search visibility dropped from around 13% a few weeks ago to 8.29%. I know that Google launched a bunch of updates in this past few weeks to ignore spam links, and I'm pretty sure that was the reason for the drop - some of the links to my site date back over 10 years and those links were garbage.

Confusingly, at the same time, my Domain Authority went up by 1 to 32, then back down a week later.

How can I restore my previous rank in the short term?

We're designing a new site at the moment with vastly improved page speed, but I'm not sure what effect that will have yet (thespacecollective.com).

Thank you for your help! I thought it was correct, just the Moz team not making it clear that it is a "them" problem, as opposed to a Google problem.

This is what I thought, but the Moz team provided conflicting information because a lot of my URLs are showing as duplicates in MozPro.

This was their response:

After looking into your Campaign, it seems that this issue is happening because of the way some of your canonical tags are pointing. These pages are considered duplicates because their canonical tags point to themselves as canonicals, which basically negates the canonicals themselves. For example, 'https://www.thespacecollective.com/archive' is considered a duplicate of 'https://www.thespacecollective.com/us/archive' because the canonical tags for each page just points back to itself.

​

This means that each page is being considered as the most important page with that content, but the content is so similar that they continue to compete against each other for rankings.

Here is how our system interprets duplicate content vs. rel canonical: 
Assuming A, B, C, and D are all duplicates,
If A references B as the canonical, then they are not considered duplicates
If A and B both reference C as canonical, A and B are not considered duplicates of each other
If A references C as a canonical, A and B are considered duplicated
If A references C as canonical, B references D, then A and B are considered duplicates
If A references A as canonical and B references B, then A and B are considered duplicates

The examples you've provided actually fall into the fifth example I've listed above.

Hello all,

I need to make sure I am doing this correctly; I have one website and with two stores (content is mostly identical) with the following canonical tags;

UK/EU Store: thespacecollective.com

USA/ROW Store: thespacecollective.com/us/

Am I right in thinking that this is incorrect and that only one site should be referencing with the canonical tag?

ie;

UK/EU Store: thespacecollective.com

USA/ROW Store: thespacecollective.com/us/

(please note the removed /us/ from the end of the URL)

Thank you! Hopefully this resolves my issue

I think I understand, this is going to generate a lot of tags - this could be a problem for website speed.

UK/EU Site:

USA Site:

I'll see how the above goes, I can always add an English version as you suggest, but I think I have targetted the main languages here and hopefully the x-default will resolve the rest.

Okay, I think I have it down correctly now:

UK/EU Site:

USA Site:

How does that look?

Yes, I was just using my home page as an example. Each page references its own URL, as opposed to every page referencing the home page URL - but thank you for pointing that out as it could have been easily overlooked!

This is just getting overly complicated, Google need a more elegant solution.

I will try to add each of the EU countries to the EU site and ROW to the USA site. Is this how it should look?

UK/EU Site:

USA Site:

No, that's not a correct x-default implementation. It should point to the same URL on both sites. Wherever the non-specified locales should go (pick one).

The issue here is that Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc. are redirected to the US site, while EU countries are redirected to the UK site. If I select one of the two, then won't all countries listed above be directed to the UK site?

I have now added x-default to both sites, this is how they look:

The Space Collective UK/EU

The Space Collective USA

Does this look correct?

On the EU tags, there's not a "penalty". There's just no "Europe" locale. Since you need to specify valid locales, the only way I know of to scope "Europe" is to include all the locales (or at least the most popular ones. I generally add the primary language for each country, a few languages for countries such as Belgium, and sometime I add en-[country] for all of them if my EU site is in English only.

Also on the EU tags, you should not remove the EU tags and only tag the US site. Tags will all be ignored unless they are reciprocal.

I'm sorry, I don't completely understand what you mean here.

What are your thoughts on simply changing the UK/EU site from "gb-en" to "en"?

I will look at either finding a way to exclude Googlebot from my redirect or offering a popup to customers on which site they prefer to visit. Thank you for the advice here.

Ditto here too. From 12.5% right down to 6.5%. No new keywords added.

I run Magento 2 and have two stores, one intended for the EU and one for the US. 99% of the products available appear on both stores, there is an automatic redirect in place to either store depending on your location. But I think Google is seeing these as duplicate products/stores.

Should I add the Index,NoFollow tag to one of the two stores?

My issue is that I want both stores to rank in their geographical locations and I am concerned that by adding the NoFollow tag is will stop that dead in its tracks for one location.

Any advice would be helpful.

Hi Kate,

Thanks for the reply.

We have a warehouse in the UK and USA and the products sold on each site vary, so we need to keep them seperate. We want our efforts to be pushed towards SEO best practice, that is to say that the hosting we want regionally and also to merge the brands together (they're currently under two different brand/domain names).

The site we have operating in the US currently isn't doing great and is taking a lot of effort in terms of SEO, effort we could be putting towards the .com. If we bring the US site under the flag of the .com our hope is that it will benefit from the .com's authority and receive a boost (we would also 301 redirect all traffic from the previous domain as not to lose any juice).

I was under the impression that pagination resolved duplicate page title issues with Google, but Moz is flagging them up as duplicates. Is this just a case of Moz not being able to understand pagination or am I missing something?

i.e. correctly formatted pagination: http://thespacecollective.com/space-memorabilia/page/4

Ah yes, found it - thank you. I use Opencart, which isn't great. But your advice helped me find the file in 30 seconds instead of 30 minutes so thank you. That is the keyword space fixed!

Everett, you've been incredibly helpful - thank you!

Okay, so I have read through the following link in respect to International SEO (https://moz.com/learn/seo/international-seo), and I believe that the way forward it a ccTLD.

My thought was to have .com, .co.uk and .eu.

Currently my site is .com, but receives most of its traffic from UK sources. I'm concerned that when I switch over to ccTLDs, the .co.uk in particular, that my UK traffic could dry up. Switching from .com to .co.uk and then using the .com to target the US market makes sense, but I would like to know others opinions on the potential dangers of doing this.

Also, are ccTLDs kept on the same hosting or would they require individual hosting? The link doesn't cover this question.

Hello Tawny,

The pages in question are correctly canonicalised, so why would it appear on your tools?

As you can see below, both have the correct canonicalised url (referring to their page number) as well as pagination. I can see no reason for them to be flagged up as duplicates?

http://thespacecollective.com/space-memorabilia/page/3

http://thespacecollective.com/space-memorabilia/page/4

Thanks again for replying, Jewel!

My site structure changed, yes, but I redirected all of the previously structured pages to the newly structured pages, like for like, ie:

(old structure) - thespacecollective.com/product/t-shirts

(new structure) - thespacecollective.com/t-shirts

This isn't the issue.

My issue is that the newly structured website wasn't built on a subdomain of thespacecollective.com, it was built on a completely different domain; thespacebazaar.com (and the latter website was, for some unknown reason, indexed by Google). My question was regarding thespacebazaar.com general redirect to thespacecollective.com.

I was worried that because Google indexed thespacebazaar.com (and subsequently all of its content) before it was transferred over to thespacecollective.com, would Google think thespacebazaar.com was the original author of the content and see thespacecollective.com as copying.

Also, thank you for looking at both websites and taking the time to see the differences.

The two sites are very similar (this was by design), and share around 50% of the same products. I am currently writing different descriptions and product titles for both sites so there are no content copying issues. So I don't think there would be any issues there (but again, thanks for checking).

As for performing an SEO audit...

I'm currently teaching myself SEO because everybody I have hired in the past has been terrible (and super expensive for the amount of work they have done). Essentially I am reading a lot, comparing my website to what I have read, and then making changes where necessary (sometimes asking for advise first). But I'll take a look at GTMetrix and SEOQuake, thank you!

I'll also take a look at your website, thank you!

Thank you! Hopefully this resolves my issue