Thanks for the response! And thanks for the advice – I'll definitely look into all those steps.

The redirects from the hacked pages are occurring automatically somehow. I guess that must've been set up by the agency that redesigned the client's website last year. They must've specified 301s for certain key pages and had all other old URLs redirect to the home page.

To answer your question, I'm using Moz for backlink analysis. Could their update be the reason I'm seeing such a drop?

BTW – Search Console shows no notifications that would relate to this issue, and no manual penalties...

In August, my client's site (I work at a marketing agency) had about 15,000 backlinks. Now they suddenly have about 10,000 backlinks. And their Domain Authority has dropped from 48 to 40!

Can someone please help me understand what could've happened?

At first I assumed this had something to do with the latest Penguin update, since I knew my client's site had some extremely spammy backlinks they hadn't cleaned up yet. (The site was hacked at some point and hidden pages were created as part of some kind of link-building scheme, and there were lots of links from sketchy sites to those pages. The hidden pages have been taken down and the URLs now redirect to my client's home page.) But that would only explain a sudden drop in Domain Authority, right? How could Penguin suddenly cause my client to lose 5,000 backlinks? And if it's not Penguin, what could it be?

Thanks in advance for any insight that anyone can share!

Hi Gianluca.

Thanks so much for the detailed explanation! I appreciate your taking the time to provide all that great info.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure what to do here. I understand the client made a mistake in launching one site for all of Europe, but I know they'll never pay to build out separate sites for each target country (at least not right now).

At the risk of sounding like an annoying client, what if I was to use the "en-us" hreflang tag on the U.S. site and just "en" on the English version of the European site as a temporary fix? (Then once we launch the translated versions of the European site – in Spanish, French, and Italian – we'd tag them as "es," "fr," and "it.")

Would that help at all with my issue of having the European site outrank the U.S. site in the U.S. SERPs?

Thanks again for taking the time to try to steer me in the right direction. From your answers, I feel like I have a pretty good handle on what we should do in an ideal world. Unfortunately, this situation is not ideal, so I'm looking for a relatively quick band-aid fix... but I'm getting the sinking feeling that there's no such thing.

Thanks, Alan! That's great info. Yes, we do have only one set of content for all of Europe at this point – but we'll be pushing out translated versions in several different languages soon so we will definitely take your advice on the hreflang tags. I wish we had set up separate domains for the U.S. and European sites, but I wasn't involved in that decision unfortunately. Still good to hear your insight on that topic though.

I've got a site with two versions – a U.S. version and a European version. Users are directed to the appropriate version through a landing page that asks where they're located; both sites are on the same domain, except one is .com/us and the other is .com/eu.

My issue is that for some keywords, the European version is outranking the U.S. version in Google's U.S. SERPs. Not only that, but when Google displays sitelinks in the U.S. SERPs, it's a combination of pages on the European site and the U.S. site.

Does anyone know how I can stop the European site from outranking the U.S. site in the U.S.? Or how I can get Google to only display sitelinks for pages on the U.S. site in the U.S. SERPs? Thanks in advance for any light you can shed on this topic!

Thanks, Kyle. I was pretty sure there was no way to do it, but I appreciate your work-around suggestion. My boss wanted to see if searches for a certain company spiked in the days after they issued a press release, but it was for business development purposes (long story) and not an SEO campaogn. I thought this would be a good forum for putting the question out there though, since it theoretically involves the keyword research we all do.

My boss has asked me to track the number of searches for a keyword (a particular company's name) on a daily basis this week to see how the volume fluctuates from day to day.

Is this even possible?

I should note that his request does not involve an active SEO or AdWords campaign. In fact, the company my boss is interested in doesn't even have a website at the moment.

Thanks in advance – either for helping me confirm that it's impossible to track keyword search volume on a day-to-day basis, or for showing me the magical way to actually do this.

Someone told me that having a URL that ends in .net (instead of .com) will hurt my site's SEO. Is that true?