You go be fine without one. You only need one if you want to manage that subdmain: add specific xml sitemaps links in robots.txt, cut access to specific folders for that subdomain.

if you don't need any of that - just move forward without one.

Hi Chase,

Removing dev via web master tools should do the trick for now. Then since google won't get to dev anymore you should be safe.

Adding both noindex and password protection is not needed. Since it's password protected Google won't get to see the noindex on the pages. So you should only do one of the two. No need to change now. The password protection is safe.

As expected 'dev.chiplab.com' was removed from the SERP.  Now, I'm a bit worried that the link equity was transferred for good to the subdomain from 'www.chiplab.com'.  That's not possible, right?

*** Yes, that's not possible so you are good.

Only 301 redirections are "mandatory" for Google to pass equity - so all good.

noindex would be the easiest way.

Seen some people having the same issue fixing it by adding rel canonical to dev pointing to the new site and so the main site got back step by step with no interruptions...

Cheers.

No, the Geo targeting in Web Master Tools is not for boosting the Geo keyword (in your case "India") so it's not going to boost : "SEO services India" for your site because you have the GEO setting to India.

The GEO setting in WMT is just to clearly state what is your target audience - and in this case is India -> so your site should do better for all searches from India.

It might actually decrease your chances to rank in US based on that - so you have to chose GEO location settings only if you are really targeting mainly a specific location...

Hope it make sense.

Are you sure eyepaq?

** Yes. I have the same format implemented across several projects - big and small. All is perfect. I have a few cases when some domains are helping eachouther out – so when a new country is deployed it gets a small boost  in that geo location due to the others. The approach was also confirmed by several trend analysis in Google in the google forum and at least one Google hangout and across the web in different articles.

If I had 5 domains so say .uk .fr .de .ie and .es and pasted the same 1000 words on each I would assume it would be duplicate content and wouldn't have equal rankings across all 5 domains, but I may be wrong?

** It won't be duplicate if you have the content in de in german and the content in uk in english. It will have the same message but it is not duplicate Of course you won't have the same rankings since it's different competition in Germany and UK for example and also the signals, mainly links are counted different for each country. One link from x.de will count towards the de domain in a different way then y.co.uk linking to the your uk domain.

I don't think Cole is talking about recreating the same article in different languages because then I would understand the use of the href-lang tag but I think he means the exact same article on separate domains, could be wrong here as well

*** if I understand correctly he is mainly concern about english content on different geo english based domains (uk, com, canada, co.nz, co au let's say) and for that - if it's the same content - he needs hreflang set for those and he is safe. Google will then rank co.uk domain and content in UK and not the canadian domain. He will also be safe with any "duplicate content issues" - although even without href lang there won’t be any.

Yes, that's it

The use of hreflang has a lot of benefits and overall is very straight forward - google will understand how the structure is setup and you are safe.

Cheers.

HI,

In this case the use of hreflang is needed:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

As summary each version will have rel alternate hreflang set with hreflang="en-ca" for Canada for example, hreflang="en-us" for US and so on. (first is language and second geo location). So even if the language is the same, it's for a particular region as in some cases you might have some small differences in UK vs Au or Ca etc.

Whne you have a domain with example.ch, the hreflang will be hreflang="de-ch" .

Hope it helps.

Hi,

URL format and length it's a ranking signal - that means shorter URLs are "more important" but only if there is a taxonomy in place. If all your URLs are directly on the root - then this doesn’t play any role. So if your domain has a lot of content and some or most is structured domain/folder/ and domain/folder/folder etc - then moving from /blog to the root will bring some signals that this content might be important.

But note that having short urls on the root directly it's not a roadmap to good rankings

On the user side - if the content is "blog related" - blogging, articles, opinions etc - then I would keep it on the /blog/ as it can influence the CTR in SERPs - that also depending on the queries of course and if it will match what users are expecting - a blog thing or some other resource ...

Hope it makes sense.

Cheers.