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Hi all,

I have searched in vain for a concrete answer to this question.

If you're dealing with the hreflang tags yourself (i.e. don't use automation plugins etc.), is it okay if the URLs (e.g. in Japanese) remain unencrypted?

Example (not encoded):
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="ja" href="https://domain. com/エグザイルリンク/" />

The same encoded:
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="ja" href="https://domain. com/%e3%82%a8%e3%82%b0%e3%82%b6%e3%82%a4%e3%83%ab%e3%83%aa%e3%83%b3%e3%82%af" />

When checking the unencoded tags in hreflang checkers, they don't seem to have a problem with this (they don't flag any issues).

Also on other websites I see both approaches with unencoded and encoded hreflang variants.

What is your opinion on this, could there be conflicts and/or is there a best practice?

Thanks all

Hello there,

Thanks for your suggestions and sorry for the late response. In fact, I also left an inquiry with the Bing Webmaster Tools mail support (I did not even realise they offered this service), and they answered within one day.

They confirmed that the site runs without any errors and that the sitemap has now been submitted successfully. Upon checking I can confirm this (the sitemaps URLs have finally been submitted). Therefore, all is in order now.

I still do not understand why prior to this the JA sitemap URLs were not being submitted (for weeks), even though I tried to make Bing Webmaster Tools re-crawl it by re-submitting the sitemap.

In any case, I guess this is one of these episodes where the problem simply fixed itself. Kudos to their support though...

Thanks everyone

Hello everyone,

I am facing an issue with the sitemap submission feature in Bing Webmaster Tools for a Japanese language subdirectory domain project. Just to outline the key points:

• The website is based on a subdirectory URL ( example.com/ja/ )

• The Japanese URLs (when pages are published in WordPress) are not being encoded. They are entered in pure Kanji.

• Google Webmaster Tools, for instance, has no issues reading and indexing the page's URLs in its sitemap submission area (all pages are being indexed).

When it comes to Bing Webmaster Tools it's a different story, though. Basically, after the sitemap has been submitted ( example.com/ja/sitemap.xml ), it does report an error that it failed to download this part of the sitemap: "page-sitemap.xml" (basically the sitemap featuring all the sites pages). That means that no URLs have been submitted to Bing either.

My apprehension is that Bing Webmaster Tools does not understand the Japanese URLs (or the Kanji for that matter). Therefore, I generally wonder what the correct way is to go on about this.

When viewing the sitemap ( example.com/ja/page-sitemap.xml ) in a web browser, though, the Japanese URL's characters are already displayed as encoded.

I am not sure if submitting the Kanji style URLs separately is a solution. In Bing Webmaster Tools this can only be done on the root domain level ( example.com ). However, surely there must be a way to make Bing's sitemap submission understand Japanese style sitemaps?

Many thanks everyone for any advice!

Hi James

Many thanks for your answer/opinion.

Yes, I am considering disavowing the links for the domain, which had a manual penalty before. Although, if anyone from the search engine spam team was to check the link profile, he/she should see for him/herself, that these links could never be built on purpose. Then again, of course there are the algorithms too, that can mess with the rankings...

I just wonder, if it's such a good idea to also upload a disavowal file for the website that has been clean from the start. The tool is always mentioned as a last resort, IF you have been building many links (good or bad) on a certain domain.

If you don't mind me asking: Have your rankings been impacted by the negative SEO you are facing? If so, has updating the disavowal file (which must be getting massive) made any changes for the better?

Thanks again and all the best!

Hello all

I am trying to get some insights/advice on a recent as well as drastic increase in link spam within my Webmaster Tools' Link Profile.

Before I get into more detail, I would like to point out, that I did find some relevant MOZ community posts addressing this type of issue. However, my link spam situation may have to be approached from a different angle, as it concerns two sites at the same time and somewhat in the same way.

Basically, starting in July 2017, from one day to the other, a multitude of domains (50+) is generating link spam (at least 200 links a month and counting) and to cut a long story short, I believe the sites are hacked. This is because most of the domain names sound legit and load the homepage, but all the sub-pages linking to my site contain "adult" gibberish.

In addition, it is interesting to see, that each sub-page follows the same pattern, scraping content from my homepage including the on-page links - that generate the spammy backlinks to my sites - while inserting the adult gibberish in between (basically it's all just text and looks like as if a bot is at work).

Therefore, it's not like my link is being inserted "specifically" into pages or to spam me with the same anchor text over and over. So, I am not sure what kind of link spam this really is (or the purpose of it).

Some more background information:

As mentioned above, this link spam (attack?) is affecting two of my sites and it started off pretty much simultaneously (in addition, the sites focus on a competitive niche). The interesting detail is, that one site suffered a manual penalty years ago, which has been lifted (a disavowal file exists and no further link building campaigns have been undertaken after the cleanup), while the other site has never seen any link building efforts - it is clean, yet the same type of spam is flooding that websites' link profile too.

In the webmaster forums the overall opinion is, that Google ignores web spam. All well. However, I am still concerned, that the dozens of spammy links pointing to the website "with a history" may pose a risk (more spam on a daily basis on both sites though). At the same time I wonder, why the other "clean" site is facing the same issue.

The clean sites' rankings do not appear to be impacted, while the other website has seen some drops, but I am still observing the situation. Therefore, should I be concerned for both sites or even start an endless disavowal campaign on the site with a history?

PS: This MOZ article appears to advice so: https://moz.com/blog/do-we-still-need-to-disavow-penguin

"In most cases, sites that have a history of collecting unnatural links tend to continue to collect them. If this is the case for you, then it’s best to disavow those on a regular basis (either monthly or quarterly) so that you can avoid getting another manual action."

What is your opinion?

Sorry for the long post and many thanks in advance for any help/insight.

Hi everyone

My question concerns moving from an old to a new domain name without losing all previous SEO efforts. I am aware that a properly executed 301 redirect is the answer and way to go as well as telling Google about it in Webmaster Tools. However, what is the situation, if you do not own the old domain name anymore?

If you have no means of getting back the old domain name and wanting to basically mask/switch the already existing website to the new domain name, will search engines penalise the "new site" as a duplicate, since the "old site" is still in the search engine rankings? I know that not being able to execute a proper 301 redirect and starting out with a new domain means a fresh start, but what is the best way to minimise the negative impact (if any)? Basically dropping the sites' current content and starting out new in favour of the new domain name is not really an option. Even if you were to take the content from the old site and place it on another site, this would surely be seen as duplicate too.

• Anyone thinks that Webmaster Tools/Google is savvy enough to spot the difference when the "old site" gets removed and the "new one" added instead (in Webmaster Tools).

• I read something along the lines about having your host point the DNS from the old site to the new one. Could something like be helpful?

Thanks all in advance for your help and input!

Hello all

What is your evaluation in regards to a number of links (different anchors) targeting the same destination URL from within one and the same menu (on the same website)?

Keeping it brief: Think of a top menu drop down entry, that needs to feature the alphabet (each letter has it's own sub-entries). However, the actual letter itself is not represented by a page (it has no URL either). So far so good. However, when testing the menu on a mobile device, the letter entries are still treated, as if they were non-existent pages - thus throwing a 404 when clicked.

In order to avoid people getting a 404 when clicking on any letter, it would be ideal, if they were directed to any main page (the same destination URL though). However, that would mean 26 times the same destination URL from within that menu. Is this approach potentially bad for SEO, hence there would be numerous duplicate destination URLs in place?

Please mind, I am not inquiring for help on how to arrange the actual menu. I am concerned about the impact, identical destination URLs could have on the on-page SEO.

Many thanks in advance for your help and input!

Hello everyone

I just spotted the following 'abnormality' while doing a little link analysis with Open Search Explorer.

I checked out a site that has a domain authority score of 35, when the only domain linking back to them is ''the site itself'. They happen to have a domain authority of 35 themselves, but no other links pointing back to them apart from their own and yet they have the same authority as other sites with twice the amount of content and an actual backlink profile.

How is that possible? Links and authority scores, stills baffles me...

Hi Chris

Thanks for your answer. Well, that's good to hear. I looked around for more threads related to the subject and as you hinted, even if the number of on page links is above 100 (not in the 1000s of course), it should be ok, if they are relevant and add to the user experience.

Oh yeah, I am not trying to hide links or menus I am perfectly fine with the content offered on the site and where it takes the visitors, but I guess there's not much you can do about the links count, if the ones within menus are tracked as well. Unless your site consists of only a few pages... Then you may be able to make it under a 100 links, but it doesn't sound feasible.

Thanks again!

Hi everyone

I don't seem to be able to keep big G off my back, even though I do not engage in any black hat or excessive optimization practices. Due to another unpleasant heavy SERP "fluctuation" I am in investigation mode yet again and want to take a closer look at one of the warnings within the SEOmoz dashboard, which is "Too many on page links". Looking at my statistics this is clearly the case.

I wonder how you can even avoid that at times. I have a lot of information on my homepage that links out to subpages. I get the feeling that even the links within the roll-over menus (or dropdown) are counted. Of course, in that case then you will end up with a crazy amount of on page links. What about blog-like news entries on your homepage that link to other pages as well? And not to forget the links that result from the tags underneath a post?

What am I trying to get at? Well, do you feel that a bad website template may cause this issue i.e. are the links from roll-over menus counted as links on the homepage even though they are not directly visible? I am not sure how to cut down on the issue as the sidebar modules are present on every page and thus up the links count wherever you are on the site.

On another note, I've seen plenty of homepages with excessive information and links going out, would they be suffering from the search engines' hammer too? How do you manage the too many on page links issue?

Many thanks for your input!