Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

  1. Home
  2. SEO Tactics
  3. Local SEO
  4. Local Website Optimization
Log in to post

Category: Local Website Optimization

Considering local SEO and its impact on your website? Discuss website optimization for local SEO.

  • Discovered


    Our website is hosted on www.discovered.us. I have 2 questions: 1: we have had regular feedback a .us domain is negative in SEO and in conversion (customers don't like it). We are thinking of changing domain to: www.dscvrd.com.
    Any insights on the impact on our rankings (if any) if we do this? 2: we are focusing our SEO global / USA first but conversions in UK are better. We currently do not have multi-language SEO setup. What would the impact be of implementing www.discovered.co.uk on SEO in UK? Thanks! Gijsbert

    | Discovered
    0
  • InsigniaSEO


    I've seen a lot of online articles that are bit outdated when it comes to this question and I wanted to see if Authors on other sites knew of some great sites to post their articles on.

    | InsigniaSEO
    0
  • PGAUE


    I work for a global company which is in the process of launching their US & European websites, (just re-launched Australian site, migrated from an old domain) all with separate domains with the purpose of localising.   However, the US website content will essentially be the same as the Australian one with minor changes (z instead of s, slightly different service offerings etc) but the core information will be the same as the AU site.   Will this be seen as duplicate content and Is there a way we can structure this so that the content won’t be seen as duplicate but is still a separate localised website?  Thank you.

    | PGAUE
    0
  • Mutatio_Digital


    we are a local based business and we only have one physical property but we service a 15 mile radius (people within a 15 mile radius will use our services) when it comes to keyword tracking and monitoring should we just be looking at the 3 main local towns or should we go out to the villages around our area too? at what level shall we be micro tracking? do we go to such a micro level for tracking keywords for all the villages which creates a lot of keywords for the locations? what is the best approach?

    | Mutatio_Digital
    0
  • MissThumann


    I have just created 6 new location landing pages for my Dallas insurance agency. Each one is for a different city, but I have a feeling I did it wrong 😞 Because my site is rather large, I put two different lines of insurance on each page. Homeowners insurance and business insurance. Now I'm wondering if I should of done 12 different pages? i.e  **1 city + 1 product = 1 page ** Here's one of the new pages: http://thumannagency.com/personal-insurance/frisco-insurance I'm having a guess here, but would it be better if the Navigation was; thumannagency.com/personal-insurance/frisco thumannagency.com/business-insurance/frisco ??? Thank you so much in advance!!

    | MissThumann
    0
  • jrridley


    I work with a client who is about to launch a local landing page for one of their locations. They're worried that the new local landing page will cannibalize some of the keyword rankings for the homepage. Any advice on how to have a local presence but still drive people to the more valuable homepage?

    | jrridley
    0
  • a_toohill


    We are trying to rank this domain: https://citychurchbloomington.org/ for this phrase churches in bloomington in. We recently had updated our domain name from citychurchfamily.org to citychurchbloomington.org because 1) it made sense for the organization, the end-user searching, and to help our rankings. Currently we are at position #4 on page 1 but have three sites ahead of us: churchfinder - in the last year this site came out of nowhere and slowly made its way up to the top spot high rock - this church had held spot #1 for many years and we've struggled to challenge it's place on the search results and are somewhat unclear why sherwood oaks - this site had been in spot #2 for many years and at times we've been able to challenge it's position but its held fairly tightly at spot #2 in the past, #3 since churchfinder rose up in the last year We've done competitive research and made some changes to our meta title, description, and h1 tag on our site but we're looking to make our next move to try and break into this top tier of results. I'm asking the community here for any insight/suggestions into what kind of move we should be exploring or making at this stage to move up. Sincerely, Andrew

    | a_toohill
    0
  • SwanseaMedicine


    Hi all, Several of my pages have absolutely tanked in the past fortnight, and I've no idea why. One of them, according to Moz, has a Page Optimisation Score of 96, and it's dropped from 10th to 20th. Our DA is lower than our competitors, but still, that's a substantial drop. Sadly, this has been replicated across the site. Any suggestions? Cheers, Rhys

    | SwanseaMedicine
    0
  • donsilvernail


    Hello all, I am research some competitors of a client of mine. My client specializes in H.P. printer repair and over the last 8 years has lost market shares to the competition. I want to reclaim market share. As I was searching some of the service companies many have page that list multiple towns that they service. here is an example. http://printerrepairservice.com/locations-we-service/ Should I be recommending this to my client? To me it seems like a spam keyword process. I know an employee of this particular company and he say their online business is booming. I want my clients to boom too! What are your thoughts on these location type pages?

    | donsilvernail
    0
  • Ohmichael


    A physical therapy company has 8 locations in one city and 4 locations in another with plans to expand. I've seen two methods to approach this. The first I feel is sloppy and that is the individual url for each location that points to from the location pages on the main domain. The second is to use the silo technique incorporated with metro scale addition.  You have the main domain with the number of silos (individual stores) and each silo has its own content (what they do at each store is pretty much the same). My question is should the focus of each silo, besides making sure there is no duplicate copy, to increase their own hyperlocal outreach?  Focus on social, reviews, content curated for the specific location. How would you attack this problem?

    | Ohmichael
    1
  • a_toohill


    I performed a change of address for one of our sites to go to a new domain. In the process we left out the submission of the old site's sitemap at the new property in google webmaster console and realize now that we need to do this step.  The old site has all these domains still getting indexed:  https://www.google.com/#q=site:citychurchfamily.org .  I believe that I should be making a static xml sitemap file, upload it to the new domain's root directory, and then test/submit it to google on the new domain's GWM property.  Question, should the xml sitemap contain entries for all the old domain's links that are currently still being indexed and what is the fastest way to generate this sitemap?  Any insight is greatly appreciated.

    | a_toohill
    1
  • MarniFP


    Hello, I have one site that has 3 different "sites" sitting within. .com/us/shop - Serves the US and Mexico How do i point US and Mexico to  .com/us/shop .com/eu/shop - Serves all countries in Europe excluding the UK How do I point Spain, France, Italy, Germany to the .com/eu/shop .com/shop - Serves the UK and all other ROW countries. How do i point UK, China, Russia, Hong Kong to .com/shop Thanks

    | MarniFP
    0
  • krivec8


    One of my main pages is not ranking and does not seem to exist. I  have gone through every tool on webmaster and yoast. I cannot find an error, but  every metric I know of says my page should be on the first page of my target search term. Moz graded it as an A, but It is not ranked on any page. Can someone please help?? my target search is "Jekyll Island Wedding Photographer" my home page shows up on page 2 but this page http://saintsimonsphotography.com/jekyll-island-wedding-photographer/ is my page that does not seem to exist. I have never had this problem with any of my other businesses. Jekyll island is the next island over and I need this term to rank. Thank you for any help.

    | krivec8
    0
  • brettmandoes


    Got a local search question for you here. Google will automatically redirect most users to their country's google product of choice - google.ca if you're in Canada. However, I'm seeing a ton of organic traffic to our website that is ranking poorly in Google.ca, but ranking well on Google.com. This is a local HVAC business in Alberta. Is there a way to see the amount of traffic coming from Google.com as opposed to Google.ca in analytics?

    | brettmandoes
    0
  • Dreamgame2016


    Hi all, Im considering about building contents en blogs on a webshop, because a visitor will get see a lot of information about blogs, etc. The salefunnel will be chaotic, purchasing will be slower on a webshop. The webshop has more then 5000 products. Focus on gamers. For example Ikea or mahuranna shop, they have builded a website near their webshops. To get more traffic ofcourse, but its to hard to do both of them. Your focus will get lost and they way of communication on website/shop will be changing. Your brand and strategic will also change a lot, thats why im considering to find the right way. Who can give me an advice?

    | Dreamgame2016
    0
  • KseniaLL


    Hi everyone, I have a couple questions about expanding my website from US to another country. Which option would be better to use: Country-Coded Top Level Domains, Sub-Directories or Sub-Domains? If I use a new domain, but I want to keep all the content, would canonicalization affect SEO of my new website? I want the new website (or another option) look just like the one I have, except for changing contact information, pictures and adding another language. Thank you!

    | KseniaLL
    0
  • Annapurna-Digital


    I have a client that got penalized back in April, 2015, after doing a lot of research around what it might be, we finally narrowed it down to bad link building. It looks like the site started getting attacked by some sort of automated spam link building attack back in 2013. Examples of the bad links are listed below. Thousands of links coming from Pinterest - all different boards. The links come from pinterest.se and pinterest.com. Thousands from footer links from a website template. Some of the links make it looks like this client build the website (which they did not) and some of the links are in black lettering on a black background (hidden from the naked eye). New links come in every day and range from 10 - 150 new spam links, and the majority of the pages the links are on are foreign. I know I can disvow some of the links (like the ones in the footer of the website template), but I wouldn't want to disvow Pinterest, right? With all of this info, does anyone have any ideas on what action we should take next? Thanks ahead of time!

    | Annapurna-Digital
    0
  • Kingalan1


    Since 2006 www.nyc-officespace-leader.com has promoted my commercial real estate brokerage business. I have been the sole broker listed on the site. As a result, the same phone number has appeared consistently throughout the site. Now I will be adding a colleague to the site (in addition to me) and I am struggling with how to best display my colleague's phone number. The 2nd broker will be adding property listings and blog posts. It was agreed that  my phone number would be replaced by my colleagues phone number on his listings and blog posts. Pages that existed before would remain with my phone number. The idea being that leads generated by the 2nd broker's new content get directed to him rather than me. My concern is that having a new phone number listed will introduce an inconsistent phone number and harm our local SEO. I have read that it is absolutely critical that NAP (name, address, phone number) must be 100% consistent otherwise it can cause harm search engine ranking. What are best practices for displaying different phone numbers for different personnel on the same website without harming local SEO efforts? This situation is certainly common, so I would think there must be some work arounds. I have seen "Contact" icons that when clicked show phone numbers. Is there any standard solution for this issue that keeps NAP data consistent? Also, what if we keep the same number in the header but use different numbers in other locations? Is the header a location where we should be extra careful to display the same phone number? Thanks, 
    Alan Rosinsky
    Metro Manhattan Office Space, Inc. An example of inconsistent listing pages are: -http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/listings/386-w-38th-street-office-lease-2370sf
    (Broker "#2) -http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/listings/329-545-eighth-ave-office-lease-525sf
    (myself) An example of inconsistent blog pages are: -http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/blog/the-tech-explosion-impact-on-chelsea-2
    (Broker "#2) -http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/blog/office-space-build-out-cost
    (myself)

    | Kingalan1
    0
  • a_toohill


    Looking to the community for any insights on our situation.  We moved a decently ranked domain name that was ranking between 3rd-6th in organic search results to a new domain that we thought would serve us higher position in the long term.  We went through Google's change of address tool and over a period of 2 to 3 weeks we went from being off the map with our new domain to showing up again around page 2 - 14-18th position.  It seemed that our climb back corresponded to Google indexing our new urls.  Each time a large batch was indexed we seemed to jump back up.  But, in our last report we noticed that we didn't budge any higher and some of our non-branded keywords actually dropped a little. The old domain was "citychurchfamily.org" and the new domain is "citychurchbloomington.org".  We were thinking that the latter would be a stronger domain in the long term. Any insights on why we haven't fully retained our former ranking value at this point or anything I should be focusing on? We are trying to rank for this phrase "churches in bloomington, in".   Thanks!

    | a_toohill
    1
  • KempRugeLawGroup


    One of the sections of our blog is "Community Involvement." In this section, we post pictures of the event, what it was for, and what we did to help. We want our clients, and potential clients, to see that we do give back to our local community. However, thee are all very short posts (maybe a few hundred words). I'm worried this might look like spam, or at the very least, thin content to google, so should I no index no follow the posts or just leave them as is? Thanks, Ruben

    | KempRugeLawGroup
    0
  • stephenfishman


    I am getting alot of hits from blexhn30.webmeup.com.   My web host says it could be a web service. Is this part of moz local activity?  Otherwise I want to block it. Have you seen this before??

    | stephenfishman
    0
  • PelicanStateCU


    Hi everyone! I previously have worked with single-location companies, and am now working for a company that is continuously growing and adding new locations. We are a financial institution that currently has 12 locations, and we should have 15+ locations by year-end 2017. Seeing as we have all of these locations, I thought the following approach would be the best for increasing our presence in local search. Our primary keyword is "credit union in location". Our search traffic has increased heavily over last year, but is down from the beginning of the year. I've gone through and done the following: Freshened up the content on the main website Created pages for each of our locations around April-end Attributed these location page URLs to our Google My Business locations Verified each location Wrote unique content for each page Our primary keyword rankings seem to fluctuate weekly. My next steps are to get our web design company to add the following: Structured Data on all location pages The ability to change SEO title and meta descriptions on location pages Sitemap (there is none currently, and I've been fighting them to get one added because it isn't needed.) I also plan on utilizing Moz Local to manage our local listings. After this is done I plan on finding ways for us to build links for each location, like the chambers of commerce in each city and local partnerships. Is this the best approach for our overall goal, and should I continue? Is there anything I should change about our current approach? I appreciate the help!

    | PelicanStateCU
    0
  • carhub


    I need an answer how google sees this page. if somebody searches in carhub.com , normally goes to http://www.carhub.com/Results.aspx?CarState=Used&MakeName=BMW&MakeId=ENKWD0M8TR7W&Location=Los_Angeles but pushes the webpage http://www.carhub.com/Results.aspx  , User sees the webpage like these.. but not seen any title, description and h1

    | carhub
    0
  • GrouchyKids


    Hello. Whats the best way to approach the use of location phrases within the page content itself? Say your based in a large city but also work in smaller surrounding areas, would you target the main location i.e. "London" on the home page and the main product/service pages directly.  Or would you leave this all to deeper pages where you can more easily add value? I can imagine that the inclusion of the location i.e. "London" might compromise the quality of the writing.  And put off the users from other locations. For example on the Home Page if your targeting:
    Keyword: Widgets
    Location: London Widgets in London and Beyond For the best Widgets in London come to... And for a key product or service page if your targeting: 
    Keyword: Car Widgets
    Location: London Car Widgets London and Beyond For the best Car Widgets in London come to... On deeper pages its going to be easier to make this work, but how would you approach it on the main pages and homepage? Hope that all makes sense?

    | GrouchyKids
    0
  • June0127


    Really need help , our website when search in google(US) will provide global page (keyword:asus/asus zenfone3). and search console also return "no return tags"another wear thing is when use googlebot crawl sitemap.xml googlebot cannot finish the file less than a quarterCan you please advise on what needs to be edited or changed to make sure my implementation is correct and not returning errors?

    | June0127
    0
  • bulletproofsearch


    Could someone please elaborate on the SEO effect of schema subtype deprecation?  Does it even matter? The Local business properties section of developers.google.com says to: Define each local business location as a LocalBusiness type. Use the most specific LocalBusiness sub-type possible; for example, Restaurant, DaySpa, HealthClub, and so on. Unfortunately, the ProfessionalService page of schema.org states that ProfessionalService has been deprecated and many of my clients don't fit anywhere else (or if they do it's not a LocalBusiness subtype). I find it inconvenient to have to modify my different clients' JSON-LD from LocalBusiness to ProfessionalService back to LocalBusiness.  I'm not saying this happens every day but how does one keep up with it all? I'm really trying to take advantage of the numerous types, attributes, etc., in structured data but I feel the more I implement, the harder it will be to update later (true of many things, of course). I do feel this is important and that a better workflow could be the answer. If you have something that works for you, please let us know.  If you think it's not important tell us why not?  (Why Google is wrong)  I understand there is always a better use of our time, but I'd like to limit the discussion to solving this Google/Schema.org deprecation issue specifically.

    | bulletproofsearch
    0
  • OliverNeely


    Google has stated that businesses should spend time creating location pages for the various service areas that businesses operate in.  What I want to know is, it is equally about boosting the relevance of the site as a whole, as well as ranking that individual page in the local area.  Does Google take into account the fact that you have the location page and reward the homepage by favoring it more in that local area, or is it simply about ranking an individual page in each town/city?

    | OliverNeely
    2
  • CougarChemMike


    I am trying to optimize my website for multiple locations. I have setup a landing page for each location. Now I want to optimize services we offer at those locations such as floor scrubber rentals. I'm confused on the best approach for this for ranking locally. I offer the same equipment for rent at each location. So... should I have a link on the location landing page that takes you to an individual floor scrubber rental page for each location optimized for that locations city or should I have just one floor scrubber rental page and would I optimize it for both cities or just optimize it for floor scrubber rentals in general? I have many different categories like this that are offered @ both locations. If I do individual pages all the products and rates will be duplicate but I could change the areas we deliver to and description to be more geared towards that city.

    | CougarChemMike
    0
  • IrinaIoana


    For example if the website is example.ro and the hosting would be on Amazon Web Services. Thanks for your help!

    | IrinaIoana
    0
  • Sundance_Kidd


    I realize that I am building essentially 2 different sites even though they are connected, but on some local town pages i have 2-3 results on Page #1. Nice problem to have eh? But i am worried as for a lot of my surrounding towns my competitor has the top listing or definitely ahead of me, so i am wondering if i combine or convert my blog into the same domain as my site, then all of that content + links should hopefully propel my site to #1. Anyone have an experience like this? thanks, Chris

    | Sundance_Kidd
    0
  • cbizzle


    I am working with a real estate agency who serves a very small geographical area in Dallas, TX. Many areas with Dallas addresses have proper names (e.g. Uptown, Highland Park, Lake Highlands, etc.), but the area my client wants to target is nameless, so we had the idea of trying to target searches for particular street names instead (e.g. homes for sale on easy street). I have looked around quite a bit, but have not found a website that takes that approach. Any thoughts on whether it's possible?

    | cbizzle
    0
  • BrianJGomez


    I have a business i'm working with right now who wants to improve their rankings in a very competitive legal niche. Are there any Local SEO gurus out there that would be willing to explain in a paragraph or two what's going wrong? Let me know if you'd like to help and I'll PM you the domain.

    | BrianJGomez
    0
  • PavelGro92


    Hello, This is my first post in here 🙂 I just wondered what is the correct way to move a subdomain to subfolder? I've moved it, re-done sitemap, so that main website would include a subfolder, as they are part of one big website now (it was something like a blog on a subdomain). Subdomain now does correct 301 redirects. Submitted new sitemap to google, asked google to re-fetch the whole domain (thus subfolder should be re-fetched too, as it's part of main nav). The areas i'm in doubt: I can tell google that the domain got moved, however it is moved to the one that is already approved in the same account, but is in a subfolder, so should i do this? Or should i simply somehow erase it on webmaster? The blog was launched about a month ago, and it isn't perfectly optimized yet, it wasn't on google SERPs pretty much at all, excluding googling it straightly, and there are pretty much 0 traffic from google, almost all of it is either direct either referral, mostly social, Thanks, Pavel

    | PavelGro92
    0
  • Smart_Start


    We are currently blogging at a high volume to hit keywords for our 1,500 locations across the country. We are trying to make sure we rank well near each location and we have been using our blog to create content for that reason. With recent changes on Google, I am seeing that it is more about content topics than hitting all variations of your keywords and including state and city specific terms. We are now asking ourselves if the blog channel portion of our content strategy is incorrect. Below are some of the main questions we have and any input that is backed by experience would be helpful. 1. Can it hurt us to blog at a high volume (4 blogs per day) in an effort to include all of our keywords and attach them to state and city specific keywords (ie. "keyword one" with "keyword one city" and "keyword one different city")? 2. Is it more valuable to blog only a couple of times per month with deeper content, or more times per month with thinner connect but more keyword involvement? 3. Our customers are forced to use our type of product by the government. We are one of the vendors that provide this service. Because of this our customers may not care at all about anything we would blog about. Do we blog for them, or do we blog for the keyword and try and reach partners and others who would read the content and hope that it also ranks us high when our potential customers search? 4. Is there an advantage/disadvantage or does it matter if we have multiple blog authors? Big questions for sure, but if you have insight on any one of them, please provide and maybe we can answer them all with a group effort. Thanks to all of you who are taking the time to read this and contribute.

    | Smart_Start
    0
  • mtishman


    Curious. And my apologies for the naiive question. Is Yandex just focused for/on Russia? What if my clients don't have any Russian prospects or customers? Should Yandex still be included in a U.S. based business's website overall seo strategy? Thanks!
    Michael

    | mtishman
    0
  • Cocoonfxmedia


    Hi Guys Just wanting to get some feedback on best practices for international website. The main website is a .co.uk there looking to target France & Belgium. The web hosting is UK based. Do we replicate the UK site and translate to local language but use a .fr domain and have 3 versions of the websites on 3 separate domains? or do just use the co.uk with french & Belgium translation have pages related to those countries? Any assistance will be appreciated

    | Cocoonfxmedia
    0
  • zacgarrison_70


    Hey Moz! We have a situation with a dentist firm with multiple doctors at the same address. They have two locations for their dental offices, and each of the dentists operate at both offices. The issue: Each doctor insists on having their own by business page for each location and i'm afraid this is hurting their local SEO. We've been tracking keywords by week and we've seen some big fluctuations in ratings and i'm looking into why this is happening. The office in location 1 has it's own Google My Business page and the three dentists have their own my business page set up at the exact same address. The office in location 2 has it's own Google My Business page as well and the three dentists have their own my business page there also. This leads the two addresses of the main offices having multiple My Business pages at the same address competing against eachother since they are all are registered with similar names and specialties. Could this be hurting our local SEO? Thanks! -Z

    | zacgarrison_70
    0
  • Dissident_SLC


    I recently have moved a number of websites top a new server and have made the use of CNAME / URL flattening (I believe these are the same?). A network admin had said this is an unrecommended practice. From what I have read it seems flattening can be beneficial for site speed and SEO even if very little.

    | Dissident_SLC
    0
  • David1986


    Hi all,
    We have a 301 redirect problem. Google seems to continue indexing a 301 redirect to our old home page. Even after months. We have a multiple language domain, with subfolders: www.example.com (ex page, now with a redirect to the right locale in the right country) www.example.com/it/home (canonical) www.example.com/en/home (canonical) www.example.com/es/home (canonical) www.example.com/fr/home (canonical) www.example.com/de/home (canonical) We still see the old page (www.example.com) in Google results, with old metadata in English and, just in some countries (i.e.: France), we see the correct result, the "new" homepage, www.example.com/fr/home in first position.
    The real problem is that Google is still indexing and showing www.example.com as the "real" and "trusted" URL, even if we set: a 301 redirect the right language for every locale in Google Search Console a canonical tag to the locale url an hreflang tag inside the code a specific sitemap with hreflang tag specified for the new homepages Now our redirect process is the following (Italy example).
    www.example.com -->301
    www.example.com/en/home --> default version --->301
    www.example.com/it/home --> 200 Every online tool, from Moz to Bot simulators see that there is a 301. So Correct. Google Search Console says that: on www.example.com there is a 301 (correct) in the internal link section of Google Search Console the www.example.com is still in first position with 34k links. Many of these links are cominig from property subdomains. Should we change those links inside those third level domain? From www.example.com to www.example.com/LOCALE/home? the www.example.com/LOCALE/home are the real home page, they give 200 code Do you know if there's a way to delete the old home page from Google results since this is 301? Do you think that, even after a 301 redirect, if Google sees too many internal links decides to ignore the 301? Thanks for your help! Davide

    | David1986
    0
  • DustChasersToronto


    Howdy MOZ community, I hope you are enjoying the last days of summer as much as we are here in Toronto-Canada.I own an Air Duct Cleaning business, I have done the web design as well as SEO, My website is currently ranking for quite a few keywords (some of them on the top of the SERPS) special thanks to MOZ for their awesome tools and blog posts.I am starting a Mobile Car Detailing business, Despite the fact that my Duct Cleaning domain is 5 years old with a DA of 42 and PA of 40 (main page).Would it be better for me to just add pages to my existing website (despite the fact that both businesses are in a cleaning niche) or would it be better for me to start another website from scratch? Would it be a bonus for me in terms of my current DA to add pages to my existing website.like for example: www.mywebsite.ca/Mobile-Auto-Detailing or would I get penalized for it? I thank you all for answering my question. Alex

    | DustChasersToronto
    0
  • SEO_Matt


    Over the last couple of months I've been working through some issues with a client.  One of my starting points was doing a site Audit.  I'm following a post written by Geoff Kenyon https://moz.com/blog/technical-site-audit-for-2015 . One of the main issues of the site audit seems to be that when I run a "site:domain.com" query in Google my homepage isn't the first page listed in fact it isn't listed in this search when I go through all of the listings.  I understand that it isn't required to have your homepage listed first when running this type of query, but I would prefer it. Here are some things I've done I ran another query "info:homepage.com" and the home page is indexed by Google. When I run a branded search for the company name the home page does come up first. The current page that is showing up first in the "site:domain.com" listing is my blog index page. Several months back I redirected the index.php page to the root of the domain.  Not sure if this is helping or hurting. In the sitemap I removed the index.php and left only the root domain as the page to index. Also all interior links are sent to the root, index.php has been eliminated from all internal links everything links to root The main site navigation does not refer to the "Home" page, but instead my logo is the link to the Home page. Should I noindex my blog/index.php page?  This page is only a compilation of posts and does not have any original content instead it actually throws up duplicate content warnings. Any help would be much appreciated.  I apologize if this is a silly question, but I'm getting frustrated/ annoyed at the whole situation.

    | SEO_Matt
    0
  • Smart_Start


    We have locations across the US and are trying to develop content so that we rank well for specific keywords on a local level. For instance, "long tail keyword search in state" or "long tail keyword search near 76244", etc. The goal is to develop those content pages via blogs to rank for those keywords. We are using Yoast and will be optimizing each post using that tool. My questions are: 1. Are there any benefits to adding a long list of tags to each post?
    2. If yes, do I need to limit the number of tags?
    3. Do we need to block the indexing of yoast to those tags and categories for duplicate content issues? Any insight on the best way to optimize these blog posts with the use of tags or other avenues would be greatly appreciated.

    | Smart_Start
    0
  • RosemaryB


    I am helping a client with Local SEO efforts who has hundreds of blog posts (they have been doing 5 a week for the last 3 years) that contain full length articles about their industry.  The client's website itself has been very well optimized for all regards (CRO, Mobile, download speed, citations).  However they have very weak domain authority compared to their competitors. I am looking for a bona fide content distribution network I could use to promote my client's blog posts/articles.  I have used Linkvana in the past but I have become wary of them after the penguin update.  I also had functionality problems using their interface. Are their any bona fide content/article distribution networks out there? Thanks

    | RosemaryB
    0
  • Rachel_J


    Hi All! I'm an experienced SEO freelancer trying to help a company achieve great SEO results 🙂 I optimized a lot of pages which helped the site start ranking, but now some keywords are flying up and down seemingly at random. For example, one keyword went from #11 to under #50! Is it a bad sign when there is instability in the keywords? Should I be seeing some "settling down'' on my dear keywords? If there is no settling, any suggestions?

    | Rachel_J
    0
  • UmairGadit


    We are planning to localize our website by launching CCTLD. But there is a little confusion about some aspects, which are: Should we track location and take our visitors to their native domain? Or do we need to take our visitors to .com domain and show a Popup, if they want to visit the native region website? What is the best case study for localization?

    | UmairGadit
    0
  • SeoSheikh


    Hi MOZ, I have a site that is aimed at the English speaking market of the United Arab Emirates. The language tag is currently set to lang="en-GB" and the og:locale also set to en_GB. The domain is a .com and aimed at the whole world. Should I be trying to target en-AE and en_AE for these tags instead of GB?

    | SeoSheikh
    0
  • Health-by-Science


    Hi for the past few years I have been running a personal training company from the following domain name www.smpt.me. This has done well in the past and so has some authority in google as it was ranking well on page 1. Over the last 6 months I have set up a new website with some new business partners using the domain name www.healthbyscience.co.uk. This new website, whilst still a personal training website, has different content to the original. We want to use the new website rather than the old one and therefore my question is how I can use the old website to assist with the new website. Thanks

    | Health-by-Science
    0
  • OrendaLtd


    Hi, I have a customer which opens additional branches in cities where he had until now only one branch. My question is: Once we open new store pages, what is the best strategy for the local store pages in terms of URL and title?
    So far I've seen some different strategies for URL structure:
    Some use [URL]/locations/cityname-1/2/3 etc.
    while others use [URL]/locations/cityname-zip code/
    I've even seen [URL]/locations/street address-cityname (that's what Starbucks do) There are also different strategies for the title of the branch page.
    Some use [city name] [state] [zip code] | [Company name]
    Other use [Full address] | [Company name] 
    Or [City name] [US state] [1/2/3] | [Company name]
    Or [City name] [District / Neighborhood] [Zip Code] | [Company name] What is the preferred strategy for getting the best results? On the one hand, I wish differentiate the store pages from one another and gain as much local coverage as possible; on the other hand, I wish to create consistency and establish a long term strategy, taking into consideration that many more branches will be opened in the near future.

    | OrendaLtd
    1
  • Virginia-Girtz


    Hi Mozers, I have a bit of a tricky question I need some help answering. My agency are building a brand new website for a client of ours which means changing the domain name (yay...). So! I have my 301's all ready to go for the UK locale, however, the issue I have is that the site will also eventually have French, German and Spanish locales - but these won't be ready to go until later this year. We will be launching in just English for September. The current site already has the French and German locales on it as well. Just to make sure I'm being clear, the site will be www.example.com for launch, but by lets say November, we will also have a www.example.com/fr/ and www.example.com/de/ site launched too. So what do I do with the locale URLs? As I said above, the exisitng site already has the French and German locales on it, so I don't particularly want to redirect the /fr/ and /de/ URLs to the English homepage, as I will want to redirect them to the new URLs in November, and redirecting more than once is bad for SEO right? Any ideas? Would 302s maybe be the best suggestion? Thanks! Virginia

    | Virginia-Girtz
    1
  • strokesinteriors


    We have observed Google is shuffling our ranking on daily basis for our website: www.strokesexhibits.com, which is annoying. Almost on daily basis, in evening hours we are in ranking against almost every keyword for few hours (roughly 6-12 hours) but in the morning hours we are back to 50+ to 100+ positions. This is not happening with our domain only but facing same issue with the Google plus pages and few articles which we have on some high authority sites are behaving in same way. For better understanding, please have a look on following stats (Evening Screenshots were recorded yesterday after 8:00 PM, Morning screenshots were recorded after 9.30 AM - GMT +4 Time Zone). all following results are related with google.ae Keyword: Exhibition Stand Evening: 2 Google plus posts are in ranking + One main website page is ranking. Position 2: http://screencast.com/t/Yf2SLQNRJEm Position 4, 6: http://screencast.com/t/sDs2nShaAGr2 Morning: Google Plus pages disappeared + Different main website page is in ranking in back pages. Position 87: http://screencast.com/t/XT8hCEmOY Keyword: Exhibition stands Evening: 2 Google Plus posts are in ranking + One main website page Position 2,3,6: http://screencast.com/t/kF3PaVtwWe Morning: All above pages disappeared from ranking & new pages appeared in back pages. Position 75: http://screencast.com/t/nMTEWJlT Keyword: Exhibition stand design Evening: 2 Google Plus & one main website page is in ranking Position 4,5: http://screencast.com/t/ENUg4Do4i Position 78: http://screencast.com/t/xf8NeMzH Morning: Above pages disappeared and 2 new pages got ranking in back pages. Position 72, 73: http://screencast.com/t/1VidK4cx Keyword: Exhibition companies in dubai Evening: 2 Google Plus pages are on first page + Home page of website on back pages. Position 4: http://screencast.com/t/F3ljdakI3bU Position 8: http://screencast.com/t/evuDLuuL Position 70: http://screencast.com/t/xQ24Mdm9DV Morning: Home page dropped 11 positions + google plus disappeared Position 81: http://screencast.com/t/FD1IxnqL Keyword: Exhibition stand fabrication: Evening: 2 main website + 2 google plus + 1 second brand site + 1 third party website + 1 youtube link – all related to us are in ranking Position 1,2: http://screencast.com/t/kZACVnUS1yG Position: 4,5,7: http://screencast.com/t/JyAKX2bv66t Position 11,12: http://screencast.com/t/2CdJMMHB8 Morning: One page lost by position 1 + One page disappeared and new page appeared in ranking + google plus disappeared + youtube gained ranking of 2 positions + 3rd party link also gained ranking by 3 positions. Position 2, 4: http://screencast.com/t/JwJfa0Je Position 8, 10: http://screencast.com/t/wHup3X6Isu Keyword: Exhibition stand contractor Evening: 2 Google plus links + One main website link on back pages. Position 4,6: http://screencast.com/t/bMJlI7cco Position 100: http://screencast.com/t/twBOwFbR Morning: Google plus disappeared + main website page still on back pages & gained 2 positions. Position 98: http://screencast.com/t/tMXHmkiQWFE Keyword: Exhibition stand installation Evening: 2 main website + one Google plus is in ranking Position 2,4,5: http://screencast.com/t/GfyXZn19 Morning: All 3 pages disappeared & new single page is in ranking Position 3: http://screencast.com/t/i0fdgZvVZwUk Any Suggestion???

    | strokesinteriors
    0

Got a burning SEO question?

Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


Start my free trial


Browse Questions

Explore more categories

  • Moz Tools

    Chat with the community about the Moz tools.

  • SEO Tactics

    Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers

  • Community

    Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!

  • Support

    Connect on product support and feature requests.

Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.