EGOL was right asking more information also for one precise reason: in some website a "thin page" maybe the best thing the same website can offer to a visitor because that page answers exactly to what the user needs from it.

That is why so often the Googlers say that thin content per se it's not a problem.

It's a problem if it is due to some technical issue or because of bad on-page SEO (i.e.: a page with a photo and no caption and written description of the photo).

So, to better answer your question, we need to know more about the nature of those thin pages you are talking about.

p.d.: using "noindex, follow" is not anymore suggested by Googlers. In fact, few months ago, John Mueller declared that if Google sees a page with a noindex,follow for a long time, then it will start considering the "follow" as a nofollow", so the original reason of its use won't be satisfied.

Hi... I'm sorry to tell you that the answer offered by Gaston is not totally correct.

So, in your Spanish page you have these hreflang and canonical annotations:

This is not correct because you are not adding also the self-referential hreflang annotation

Google is very precise about this, and it states its need in the help pages as well in many Googlers tweets and webmaster office hangouts.

The rel="canonical" is correct. Remember that the self-referential and the alternative href URLs must always be canonicals.

Finally, regarding the subfolders blocked via robots.txt, yes! that's totally incorrect:

if you're blocking Googlebot from accessing the Spanish, French and Italian subfolders, then Googlebot won't be able to parse the code of their pages, hence it won't be able to see also the hreflang annotations... with obvious erroneous consequences.

Your question is quite convoluted, so I hope to answer it correctly :-).

My first thought when reading your question was: "Why do they want to associate two so different set of products?".

I mean, I fully understand that you are moved by SEO consideration, but - honestly - SEO should not enslave business considerations and logic.

Widget and Gears are two totally different kinds of products and, especially, they have very different kind of buyer personas. In other words: the buyer personas targeted by the widgets website not necessarily are interested in gears.

Plus, also on an entity level, there's no connection between widgets and gears, hence also for Google would be hard to start understanding for what entity set is relevant the website if it is not presenting itself as a broader ecommerce store.

So, strategically, I would not start with SEO (bear with me...) as the main channel for the new gear website, but on branding, creating a dedicated website in a dedicated unique domain name.

Hence, I'd create campaigns to support the launching of the new website and line of products, so to create a solid backlink profile from the start, which will obviously help in rankings.

Said that, I would take advantage of the visibility of the Widget website for announcing the new Gear one (I suppose the widget site has a news section and an About Us section, under which you can create a landing page explaining what other "companies/websites" are part of the "Businesses company owning the Widget website".

Your question is not very clear, sincerely.

if the product pages that marketing only the USA users iare the only ones existing of those products (aka: there aren’t Uk product pages for those same products), then you must not implement the hreflang.

The hreflang is a rel=“alternate”, which means that it must always show an alternative URL to the current one. In the ISA product page it should signal as alternative UK users the UK ones, and viceversa.

so, if no UK product page exists, then the hreflang does not have an meaning to exist.

regarding your second question, if the USA market is very important for you and you want to market it differently thean you are marketing the UK one, then it may be a good idea to create an USa version of your site.

Despite the efforts, this answer do not respond to the question

I see a lot of confusion in all the answers :-).

The .ie domain is never treated as a generic domain name by Google. It's the country code domain for Ireland. Stop.

A country code domain name is geo-targeted by default on its corresponding regional version of Google, but Google doesn't "block" its visibility also in others Google (i.e.: Google.com or Google.co.uk), however, a ccTLD will have more difficulties in ranking higher in another Google than its own.

In other words:

1. domain.ie is targeting by default Google.ie;
2. but, it can be shown in Google.co.uk too;
3. however, for ranking in Google.co.uk - because of its geo-targeted nature - it must have stronger signals like mentions and backlinks to justify its visibility than a domain.co.uk or domain.com.

I suspect you didn't understood the question.

MTBE was asking if schema.org structured data items must be in the language used in the subfolder.

For instance, in www.domain.com/en/, will be the items written in English and in www.domain.com/es/ in Spanish?

The answer is yes.

Beware with LSI, which is mostly a myth.

As Bill Slawski wrote in Inbound.org back in 2014:

_Latent Semantic indexing was invented and patented in 1990 before there was the web. _

_It was developed to help index small (less than 10,000 documents) databases of documents that didn't change much (like the Web does). _

_There have been a number of companies that started selling LSI Keyword generation tools that promised that they could help identify synonyms and words with the same or similar meaning. _

Where those fail is that the LSI process requires access to the database (of documents) in question to calculate which words are synonyms - and the only people with access to Google's database to do that kind of analysis (which isn't possible anyway since Google's index is much too big and changes much too frequently) is Google.

A much better metric is TF-IDF, albeit always being conscient that it is still a metric... not the bibie.

Keyword Density is a myth as it has been demonstrated for several years !!! Please, don't spread myth in the Moz Q&A.

Some sources:

• https://moz.com/ugc/seo-myths-that-persist-keyword-density;
• https://moz.com/blog/keyword-targeting-density-and-cannibalization-whiteboard-friday
• http://www.alessiomadeyski.com/seo-myth-keyword-density/
• https://plus.google.com/+BillSlawski/posts/F9h4pVSXapT
• https://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/how-search-really-works-the-keyword-density-myth.html
• http://resources.spyfu.com/4-seo-keyword-myths-you-shouldnt-buy-into/
• https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/seo-myth-busting-01-keyword-density.961827/ (I mean, even black hats say it's a myth!)
• ....

This answer is good, because of the tools that are shared.

However... creating unique content doesn't mean your site will start earning links like crazy.

Umberto Eco once said that there are thousands of exceptional books that nobody ever read. The same can be told about all the "great content" published on the Internet. If you don't

If you don't put the same effort you put in creating your "quality content" into promoting it, then you're not going to obtain any backlink at all.

Therefore, more than thinking about what tool to use for creating content (please, don't confuse content with formats), I think it's better to suggest checking out the posts here on Moz under the Link Building category.

Social signals are not a ranking factor.

Moreover, it has been demonstrated by Buzzsumo that the theory of social media amplification = more backlinks is false, because, as that study says:

1. only a small percentage of all the blog posts published daily are able to obtain a minimum number of social share and
2. in order to obtain at least one backlink, thousands of social shares are needed.

This same question has more answers at this URL: https://moz.com/community/q/international-url-paths. so I close this thread for not having split them.

Before answering, it is me having a question for you:

why the hell do you need to put spanish content under a french subdomain if you already have it in the spanish version of the website? Is this nothing but complicating everything :-)?

Said that, as Steve said, the hreflang itself solves any potential duplicate issue, so you don't need to cross canonicalized any url. Simply remember to use the correct combo of hreflang ISO codes.

In the case of the spanish version of the french subdomain, the hreflang should reference the fr.sudomain.com/es/... and have as pair these: "es-FR", so to target only the spanish speaking people in France.

This way you are not going to messed up with the same kind of URL in targeting spanish speaking users in Spain ("es-ES") or in Great Britain ("es-GB") and so on.

However, it would have been more logical to have only one spanish URL for the videos, and have their hreflang set up as "es" only, so to target all users speaking spanish in every country.

In general that kind of implementation is correct.

I do something similar for a client, who has a similar problem but more on the logistic side (different warehouse depending on the continent).

Said that, considering that some products are only for the European market, I don't see useful to use an hreflang like the "de", which would target all the German speaking users no matter from the where they are... I mean, if they are in the USA, I believe that they are not allowed to buy products that are meant only for the EU geography even if they are German or Austrian.

Regarding IP redirection, it's not an alternative... moreover, it's not an alternative obliging people to be sticked to one country/website because that it not allowed by legislation now.

For instance, if someone from the USA want to see the EU site, he should be allowed to do it (this is also valid - obviously for Googlebot, as it is a user at the end).

What you can do is working on the basket process, and there using the IP recognition for allowing or not a bought depending from the country someone is trying to buy a product or not.

Doing so, you will also avoid the frequent dumping issue (e.g.: European buying in the USA because it is cheaper).